Subtitles

Subtitles are another device the promo clip has borrowed from film, originally used to facilitate the acceptance of international cinema in Britain and America (and of English-language films in Europe and beyond), and also as a source of dialogue in early silent film. In the 1990, subtitles are often considered "artistic", or offer the viewer additional information that is not available through the visual, musical or lyrical narratives. Two videos that use subtitles to great effect, though treat them differently, are REM's "Everybody Hurts" (1993) and Radiohead's Just (1995). The main advantage of subtitles is that they allow the visual narrative to continue independently of the musical narrative. This means that the visuals can work regardless of the choice of soundtrack, as was the case with silent film, but the technique has been adapted to suit pop video. Radiohead's "Just" was directed by an art student, his first commercial film project.

The promo video makes use of subtitles as a narrative tool, and tells the story of a middle-aged man who decides to lie down in the middle of the street. Another man trips over him, and after shouting at him, asks why he is lying on the pavement. He refuses to say, and, gradually, a crowd gathers around him, culminating in a police officer ordering the man to get up. As things come to a head, the music builds up to a climax and the man tells the crowd why he is actually lying on the pavement. At this point the subtitles disappear and the camera moves to show the faces of the crowd, so the viewer never learns why he is lying on the pavement. The video ends with an aerial shot of the entire crowd lying on the pavement next to the man.

Though this film could work on its own merits, it has been adopted for use as a promo video. From the opening few scenes the main story is interspersed with footage of Radiohead "performing" the song in a room in an apartment block, with lead singer Thom Yorke looking out of the window onto the incident down below. Though the band have little to do with the visual narrative, they seem to be included in the video both to remind the viewer that it is a pop video we are watching, and that the main function of the video is to promote Radiohead, their single and the accompanying album.

Analysis: REM, Everybody Hurts

The use of subtitles in R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" is a little more sophisticated, and is almost a parody of the idea of lip-synching/visualisation of lyrics. The video begins with the band sitting in a car, which pulls up to a traffic jam. The words at the beginning of the first verse,

When the day is long,
And the night,
The night is yours alone

appear at the bottom of the screen as Michael Stipe sings them. The visual narrative then switches to the passengers of other cars who are stuck in the jam, and the subtitles no longer imitate the lyrics, but rather voice the thoughts of these other people, all of who are hurting in some way. All of these people are alone in some way, and each case is different. The viewer has to guess why the passengers are hurting from a single line of subtitles at the bottom of the screen.

As the music moves into the middle section, Michael Stipe gets out of the car and walks around the stranded traffic, as do the rest of the band. The subtitles continue to voice people's thoughts as we hear the final verse, occasionally imitating the lyrics of the final verse and following chorus, before the song shifts into the coda section. The coda section is the section most clearly defined in the song in terms of instrumentation, which previously consisted of organ, acoustic guitar, bass, strings and quiet percussive clicks. This final section sees the first appearance of a full drum kit and electric guitar and is the obvious climax of the song. Even Michael Stipe's lyrical phrases are shorter in length, more repetitive, and the song seems to lose some of its hopelessness and becomes more assertive, more hopeful.

The final coda section is also the turning point in the visual narrative. Whereas we had previously seen individual shots of people sitting in cars, worrying and hurting, we now see everyone climb out of their cars as the camera slowly zooms out, some of whom we recognise from earlier shots in the promo clip. Just as the music asserts that things may not be as bad as they seem, the visuals seem to show all these individual people, united in their effort to walk away from their cars and their feelings of entrapment (the cars are probably a symbol for entrapment in a life these people are unhappy in).

It may be interesting to note that Michael Stipe doesn"t start lip-synching the lyrics until the beginning of the coda section. There may be many ways of interpreting this - though the subtitles relay intense personal feelings, there may be some amount of distancing between the characters and the viewer, which dissipates when Stipe actually starts to lip-synching the words. The lip-synching may also be interpreted as a call to the passengers to break out, to leave their old lives behind and walk away. There is also an idealistic nature to the end of the promo clip - in an ideal world people could just walk away and start a new life. It is possibly this idealism, combined with the grain of Stipe's almost "anguished" voice and the gentle instrumentation, which makes the song so poignant and so emotional. If everybody hurts, then surely we can all relate to the song's lyrics(and perhaps even the visuals), and it is probably this universality, which helped make the song an international hit.

Watch the video for REM's Everybody Hurts