L’effet-clip au cinéma

Abstract

“Music video effect”, at least in France where it is called “effet-clip”, is a label used by film critics to stigmatize some movies supposedly “tainted” by the so-called MTV aesthetic. Most of the time, this resort to music video is a pejorative mean of characterization. In the same time, this “effect” belongs to this kind of notions which operate in the same way as the family resemblance pattern described by Wittgenstein. This paper therefore tries to understand what it is. Of possible definitions, imported shape from musical television, figure appropriated by MTV’s era music videos, aesthetic idea, musical suspension of the narrative, historic and cultural configuration, set of technical gestures, none is sufficient to explain the whole phenomenon. Because the effet-clip points out the limits of the textual approach, may it be structural, technical or generical. The “same thing” can be, depending on the context, the most “pure” artistic gesture or the most mundane and commercial triviality. For this, the authors propose a pragmatic approach of the effet-clip, as a particular kind of production of meaning and feeling. This change of point of view leads to the ethical question that the effet-clip can raise, and the ambiguity, even the contradiction which can result.