Intertextuality in the Movie Music Video

This dissertation addresses the phenomenon of the movie music video (MMV, henceforth). An MMV is a music video for a song from a film soundtrack displaying relationships between the music video and the film. Although Carol Vernallis relegates MMVs as advertisements rather than music videos, nevertheless all music videos are commercial products and MMVs are more effective because they sell the texts of the artist and song as well as other entities such as the film and its actors. The primary goal in this dissertation is to demonstrate a methodology for the analysis of this genre of music videos, focusing particularly on rhythm, form, and intertextuality. To do this, this dissertation has analytical videos utilizing textual annotations on MMVs in real time. With these annotations, the video examples highlight specific types of intertextuality organized by the form of the song. This dissertation also utilizes an audiovisual transcription method showing visual elements such as cuts, camera movement, and transitions occurring as a rhythmic instrument. Just as Marc Lafrance and Lori Burns (2017) emphasize that the analysis of any music video should include visual, lyrical, and musical domains, the examples in this dissertation are broken down into three categories based on whether the MMV references the corresponding film and other media through visual, lyrical, or aural domains, or some combination of the three. Using annotated videos, audiovisual transcriptions, and form graphs of MMVs, this dissertation emphasizes the rich interplay between texts in the MMV’s mise-en-scene executed precisely through music via rhythmic and formal alignment