Cher: Believe - Analysis of Narrative in Music Video
Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p0chD8U8fA
One of the most prominent features of this video’s narrative is how the artist - Cher - is represented; during the montage of panning close-ups at the start of the video, she is shown in a glass box, surrounded by brightly-coloured laser lighting. The use of visual effects here is initially puzzling; her eyes light up in the dark, and an exaggerated, saturated bloom effect fills the shot. When the dancers enter the club, they surround her glass box like an audience watching a performance - but when the autotune vocal effect engages (such as on lines like “it’s so sad” and “it takes time”), there’s clear use of dramatic motion blur and colour filters; these effects serve to give the video an almost ethereal, dream-like quality, and there’s an implication that the events in the video aren’t entirely real. Cher is shown, in this sense, to be some sort of omniscient, goddess-like figure - and the cross-cutting between shots of her performance and a certain blonde girl throughout the video imply that she’s singing a story of sorts.
Mid-shots of the blonde girl in cramped dancing scenes show us that she’s unhappy; she’s never the entire focus of the image, nor does her facial expression reflect enjoyment. A shot-reverse-shot sequence shows her making eye contact with a boy - who later appears in the video with another girl (their hands are shown joined in a close-up). At this point, Cher is shown in the place of the blonde girl for a brief moment, before transforming into a small mote of light and flying to a stage outside of the glass box. The next scene shows the blonde girl in a crowd, who are dancing to Cher’s now stage-based performance; panning shots of varying angles and cross-cutting between the performance and the narrative show that the blonde girl is looking for the boy she saw with another girl - before following him upstairs and watching him from a vantage point on the roof.
It’s at this point that the storyline of the video is revealed; the girl watches the boy drive away with the girl, as Cher fades in in the background of the shot - before they trade places. The entire video is a surreal flashback sequence, and Cher and the blonde girl are revealed to be the same person in different time periods; the cross-cutting, unrealistically intensive lighting effects, place-swapping and atypical performance styles all serve to represent the club at two different points in time - but shows them both concurrently. This also creates a link to the lyrics; “life after love”.
