The video for 'Handwritten' shows how one record can pass through many different pairs of hands, with each person that previously owned the record having their own individual story as to how they got their hands on the record. This is shown throughout the video via elipsis, as we see around fifty years pass in the space of four minutes.
The title of the song is shown implicitly throughout the video with the use of close ups on handwriting and the messages within the writing; this relates to the lyric "... I'm in love with the way you're in love with the night. It travels from heart, to limb, to pen"- as the theorist Andrew Goodwin would state, this is a way of engaging the audience with not only the video, but the song being played.
The shift in time is also shown through the change in mise-en-scene throughout the music video. The video starts in what appears to be the late 50s/early 60s in an American garage, with a musician playing on a Fender Stratocaster that would have been particularly popular at the time. The musician is dressed in typical 1950s/60s wear, with Levi jeans and a denim shirt. The audience in the venue are all dressed similarly too, which highlights how music in the 50s/60s influenced a lot of young people. The audience (watching the music video) would be able to relate this to today's music industry.
The music video uses performance shots to directly associate the band with what is occurring in the main narrative. The lead singer, Brian Fallon, shows a lot of emotion when he is singing along in the video - which draws the two parts of the video together. The mise-en-scene in these scenes furthers this as they are in an old house, but dressed fashionably in today's clothing. This implies that there is a link between the characters in the main narrative and the band itself within the context of the music video.
There is a patriarchal element to the early parts of the music video, whereby the men are dominant in the narrative, i.e. the musician, the boy-come-man who goes to war, the Father who gives the record away and the band itself (all of whom are male) - this however, does change towards the end of the video as the boy who receives the video grows up to be nothing much at all and ends up selling his records to a woman behind a counter in a record-store. This is a comment on how society has changed from the days of the 1950s, whereby a man would buy a girl a pretty dress and take her dancing (as seen in the music video by the audience) to the society today whereby women are very much liberated and can act of their own accord, not necessarily you're typical housewife or prim and proper girlfriend as shown in the music video.
This is a heartwarming video, which has a deep narrative. In my music video for "Hide and Seek" I would love to recreate the emotion generated from this music video.
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