More about Pros vids

[justacat]

After my post yesterday, and in response to a comment thereto, I was thinking about the Pros vids at the Escapade vid show, and I decided I wanted to write a little more about both of them...

• I'll start with przed's Love's Not a Competition. I find this an extremely interesting vid, because to me, at least, there's more to it than meets the eye.
  
  In the vid show at the con (I was in the "quiet" room), it seemed clear to me that the song wasn't familiar to most of the people in the room. The song begins kind of slow, acoustic-y, and the vid begins with a number of familiar "slash" clips (e.g., the "hug" in Mixed Doubles); and on first viewing, sitting in that room, it gave a feeling of...I don't know how to articulate it. Like it was going to be a mildly angsty love song, and a mildly angsty slash vid, and that what we'd heard and seen so far was going to be it - that was going to be the song, and the vid. At that point, it (the song) is not very interesting, at least if you've never heard it before.
  
  So we're watching, and the line "Love's not a competition" comes up, as expected, since that's the song title - but then, wait! Instead of more of the same, the next line is...the totally unexpected (if you don't know the song) "But I'm winning," and it's accompanied by an absolutely fantastic, amazing, spot-on, dead-on perfect clip (of Bodie in Stakeout, gloating over Ray's poor bowling) - I mean, it doesn't get any better than that.
  
  The room just erupted in laughter, because that scene is funny, especially when paired with that lyric, and for those who know Pros (which not everyone in the audience did, but probably a sizable portion), it's just so, so, so very Bodie. And it was kind of a relief of tension - look, this song - and this vid - are a lot more than we thought they were going to be; this is cool, this is interesting. Maybe I'm projecting, but it felt like we all sat up in our seats and started really paying attention. And smiles everywhere. It was really quite wonderful. I don't think the audience was entirely sure at that point whether the song (and thus the vid) was going to turn "lighter" or not, but at that moment, the vid sort of came alive (again, keeping in mind that I'm talking about watching on the large screen in a vid show setting, a dark room surrounded by a substantial audience - very different from watching on your screen at home).
  
  And as it turned out, the vid isn't really "light" or funny - after the lightness of a few "I'm winning"s, there's the back-down-to-earth of "At least I thought I was." And the mood does get more sober again. But like I said, that first moment just brought the vid to life. Now, having watched it a few more times, I "read" the beginning section differently, in context, and I see how it all works together, and the beginning is just part of it - it fits perfectly. But in that very first viewing, in that setting, that first "But I'm winning" line/clip had an enormous impact, enormous importance - it's what drew me in to the entire rest of the vid; it was an "oh oh oh, this isn't exactly what I was sitting here blithely assuming it was, how cool" moment - which is what I meant when I wrote yesterday that the vid was "just the right amount of funny." Not that the vid itself is a funny vid.
  
  I really like the vid, and I really like the song. I find it peculiarly addictive; I keep being drawn back to it, and I like it differently, and more, now than the first time I saw it - it makes a difference to me to know the whole song, to be able to appreciate the beginning. It's a great song choice - I love the fact that it's a bit more emotionally complex, that it has an angsty edge to it, often not the case in relationship vids. And while PR Zed's vids always feature really solid editing, cutting, flow, etc., those things stood out for me in this vid, especially in the second half of it - I particularly love the first clip after the instrumental bridge, of Bodie's gun; unusual, and a great segue into the DIAG bits. (And I have to say that I absolutely love the title (title card?) - totally cool, and perfect with the intro to the song.)
  
  The only thing I'm not entirely sure about is the inclusion of dialogue from the show at the beginning and end. I see this often in vids now, but I can't quite get used to it, even though in this case the lines were definitely appropriate, and they didn't interfere with the song. Hmm. I'll have to ponder it more. But overall a very minor point; it has no effect on my enjoyment of the vid.

• And now for gwyn_r's Broken English. I realized only after I posted yesterday that there was more I wanted to say about this vid. The song - which is by Marianne Faithfull - is not a "pretty" one, and I wondered about it, about what it meant and why Gwyn chose it. So I asked her, and I learned something fascinating. The song was apparently inspired by the German terrorist Ulrike Meinhof of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, a West German terrorist group from the 1970s (and quite possibly the inspiration for Pros bad-guys like the Myer-Helmut group of Close Quarters and Ulrike Herzl of No Stone). Marianne Faithfull said in an interview that she was in Germany when Meinhoff was arrested and was watching the television reports, and "this mysterious subtitle: 'broken English . . . spoken English. . . .'" flashed across the screen. She said, "I don't know what it was in reference to, but I wrote it down in my notebook." (One source I found said it was a quote from Baader-Meinhof member Astrid Poll: "the only language you need is broken English" - but I found absolutely nothing to substantiate this.)
  
  The Baader-Meinhof group were kind of the first "celebrity terrorists" - they started a wave of political terrorism, and while their stated purpose was to overthrow the capitalists etc. etc., in the end (according to many commentators at least) it was mostly just...celebrity terrorism. Violence. Terror. Which is reflected in the lyrics:
  
  Cold lonely Puritan [which Faithfull says referred to Ulrike Meinhoff]
  What are you fighting for
  It’s not my security
  ...
  Lose your father,your husband
  Your mother, your children
  What are you dying for
  It’s not my reality
  It's just an old war
  Not even a cold war
  ...
  What are you fighting for
  ...
  In any event, the song has a kind of Pros relevance even before you get to the vid, which is cool. But the vid itself... I think it's interpreting the song two ways, sort of at the same time. First in the sense of the song's original context: looking at the bad guys, e.g., the Myer-Helmut gang, and asking, What are you fighting for? The "Cold lonely puritan" line, for example, gets clips first of whats-her-name - is it Inge? - the Myer-Helmut woman, and then of Ulrike from No Stone. The whole vid is full of illustrations of the violence of the CI5 bad guys.
  
  At the same time, I think the vid is also using the song to ask of Bodie and Doyle and the CI5 guys: what are you fighting for? Not in a challenging way (as I see it); the song's not trying to take a stand, not trying to say: what you are doing is wrong, what you are fighting for isn't worth it; but rather in a sort of...musing way: why do you do this? You lose people you love, the bad guys keep coming back - what makes you keep doing it? What are you fighting for? The answer might be different for each of them, and I don't think the vid purports to give answers - it just shows that the questions are there.
  
  I may simply be too slow or dense to see it - my vid analysis skills are poor at best - but I don't think this is one of those vids that's amenable to really close analytical reading, an effort to parse every line and scene, to find a "story" or even a linear message that can be read like a book. I don't think - though I could be wrong - that it's useful to try to clearly demarcate which parts of the vid are intended to interpret the song as speaking to the bad guys and which parts are interpreting it as speaking to B&D and CI5. Not that there wasn't purpose and intent behind each clip choice - just that Gwyn wasn't trying to draw such clear distinctions; many of the clips can be read either way, or both. Nor, I think, was she trying to convey a single strong, clear message with the vid, or to present definite answers to questions that the song poses.
  
  Since I'm someone who tends to be very literal (a weakness in vid analysis, not to mention vidding!), it's hard for me not to attempt to do this, to find the meaning behind every element of the vid. But I find that when I let go of that urge and just let myself watch the vid, keeping at the back of my mind the history and the context of the song, and the two interpretations of the song I see, the vid works for me. It conveys a strong feeling, a sense of the constant fight, the struggles that CI5 agents face: external struggles against a sort of endless, pointless violence; and internal struggles against things like feelings of futility, the risk of losing sight of their reasons for doing this, wondering whether it's worth it, and again, the impact of the endless, senseless violence. And the questions are always there: why are there always more bad guys, fighting and killing and killing and fighting; why do we keep fighting and killing and fighting.
  
  As I said yesterday, I just love watching this vid, love the rhythm and flow and movement of it... The clip choices work, even though I can't always ascribe a single precise purpose or meaning to each one individually (vis a vis the song, or the vid's message(s)) - taken together, they work. And truly, it's kind of a relief to stop trying to find The Answer, The Meaning - I'm always doing that, and I often end up lost in the trees, so telling myself it's okay not to lets me watch, and enjoy, the vid in a very different way.
  
  And it's one that I enjoy more with each watching.

Overall: two really interesting, very different vids, and I just love the fact that both were in the same vid show. It's so cool how the two vids together span the entirety of Pros' appeal for me: the B/D relationship, with its affection and humor and angst and complexity; and the backdrop against which it's set - the gritty, violent world of CI5. It's these elements together that define and create (and perpetuate *g*) my passion - obsession - and it was amazingly wonderful to see them both celebrated by great vidders.