Foo Fighters - The Pretender (Sharoze's Analysis)

After watching the music video there are two words that come to mind “big” and “passionate”. Right from the off they have constructed their mise-en-scene to convey the feeling of “big” to the audience, while we are accustomed to seeing bands play on a stage, the fact that they are playing inside a massive hall represents the type of music that is being played, rock, which is known to be big and brash, which in fact relates to one of Goodwin’s views of the music video actually demonstrating the genre. The lighting is done very well, inside this video there is a clear binary opposition, you have the band and you have the police that appear later on. The band stand upon a white floor obviously signifying good, while the police appear from the darkness signifying them as the antagonists which is a role reversal from what is seen usually in real life. Then there is the big attraction of the video, the big red wall behind them, when the police burst into action and the wall explodes making the whole screen red this obviously signifies the power, passion and anger expressed within the song, once again this coincides with tone of Goodwin’s views, in this case the relationship of the music/lyrics to the visual, as the song goes quite the band stop, the calm before the storm and then the very loud part of the song begins and just as it does the red wall explodes coinciding the visuals with the music . Everything in this video is made to make the band look very powerful compared to everything else.


This also carries over and is supported in the camerawork. Throughout they constantly use low angle shots to make the band members look very powerful. Keeping with the fast paced nature of the song they also use very quick camerawork with lots of quick pans across the stage once more to show the audience how big the hall, the video and the band, basically using objective camerawork showing the audience everything from a safe angle. However they also like the audience feel uncomfortable with the intensity of the song, which is why they use subjective camerawork in which they shove the camera right into the face of the band members, while they are shouting and straight into their eyes, making the audience feel uncomfortable because nobody likes being shouted at right in their face and thus switching the audience from the safety of the objective view, to the intensity of the subjective ground level view.

What this music video does is amplify the powerful nature of the songs with a good use of visuals to support the feelings represented in the song.