Music Video Textual Analyis - The Age of the Understatement by The Last Shadow Puppets

The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age of The Understatement 

This is the music video for Alex Turner and Miles Kane's side project The Last Shadow Puppet's single 'The Age of the Understatement'. It's directed by Romain Gavras and is 3 minutes 14 seconds long. I chose to analyse this video as I planned on making my video of similar length and also wanted to use a song within the same genre. The video is quite hybrid, it features a narrative, the artist themselves and it's performance based too.

The music video opens with an establishing shop of an ice rink. This creates an enigma as the audience would want to find out what happens next. When related to Todorov's Theory for example, this shot also sets up a state of equilibrium of the narrative within the video. Next, the audience begins to feel quite tense as the build-up of sound is met with the close-up of a young girl putting on her ice skates. Shots of her worried and concerned facial expressions leave the audience as ease. The young girl then begins to skate on the ice rink to he pace of the music which has quite a strong rhythm whilst the cuts in the video also correspond to the beat of the song. This helps build tension and adds to the enigma created by the opening shot. It is important that this is done fairly early on in the video in order to keep the audience interested and intrigued for the rest of the video. 

Unsuspectingly, the camera then cuts to another long establishing shot of two men standing by soviet army tanks. It is at this point that the two main artists of the band are introduced. Slowly, the camera steadily zooms towards them again in beat of the music. They are framed in the centre of the frame portraying their importance and status. The video shows a medium shot of both them in front of two tanks just as the lyrics in the song begin to start. The band member's clothes are fairly stereotypical of the “indie/alternative” style as they sport long trench coats and Beatle-esque haircuts. Many people watching this video especially fans of music within this genre will be able to relate to the band members through the use of iconography and other elements of mise-en-scene. Again, the camera changes to a medium shot Miles and Alex walking with the rhythm of the music. The mise-en-scene of the soviet tanks in the background can still be seen which makes the audience consider whether something quite serious is to happen next. As well as this, the general setting is quite desolate with snow which perhaps connotes the isolation and loneliness of both characters.

The mise-en-scene in the video also implies connotations of age and create quite a dated kind of feel towards the video. For example, the lighting is quite dark throughout and appears to have a sepia tint.  Many other indie videos tend to be quite similar as many bands inside the genre tend to get their musical influences from older generations including band's from the 60's such as The Beatles, The Kinks and The Animals, so in general this video sums up the type of music they produce.

There is then a setting change when the camera cuts to the band members driving through a brightly lit Russian city, this is quite a contrast in comparison to the previous empty setting. Again, the importance of the two band members is highlighted through a low angle shot which looks up to the characters. This relates to the audience of the band as many of them are young and look up to them as idols. Throughout the music video, Alex Turner and Miles Kane tend to dominate each frame even when stood in front of the large menacing army tanks in the snow. The setting then changes again to a church. Again, this contrasts with the original settings of the tanks and also creates a binary opposition between religion and war. 

As the pace of the music picks up towards the end of the song, the amount of cuts increase too. This helps create a pace between the visuals and which both the eyes and ears can follow. The girl ice skating is also re-introduced towards the end too. Like at the start of the song,  her movement fits the pace and rhythm of the song and she slows down as the beat changes. Finally, the video shows a high angle long shot of the Russian army standing in formation. This shot could be showing the new equilibrium, as towards the beginning they were out in a so called 'wilderness' with the tanks yet now they're back at what appears to be important government buildings after overcoming their problem/task.