By Beth Nugent, Third Year, Film and Television
Imagine, you’ve paid the atrocious £13 for your cinema ticket and traveled to the theatres on release day ready to watch an elusive 90 minute documentary about the life of a showgirl, and instead it’s 11 lyric videos and one music video (played twice for good measure), and 30 seconds before each track Swift gives a surface level overview about the inspiration of the songs.
The film begins with a video of Taylor Swift introducing the event. She talks about her love for her fans, how much she loves this album and that she’s grateful that we’re in the cinema to watch it. The video fades to black, and ‘The Fate of Ophelia' music video begins…
The music video presents different ‘showgirls’ throughout history, as Swift explains, you could be posing for a pre-Raphaelite painting, a Vegas showgirl or a burlesque dancer, to be considered a type of showgirl and all of these eras are shown. It’s no surprise that the production value of this video was extreme, but it was put to good use. Swift uses real sets, including a pirate ship, a theatre dressing room, and a large MGM-style soundstage, and it only reinforces the fact that building sets will always look more impressive than blue and green screens. The video was truly dazzling, and it being paired with the best track on the album made it an extremely pleasant viewing experience, but it didn’t need to be played again in full at the end of the film; it felt strange to end the film with the same video that began it.
Over the years, Swift has refined her craft as a director and with the snippets of behind-the-scenes footage for this video, we really get to see this in action. It’s clear she knows what she wants, and the team around her makes it happen. Mandy Moore, the choreographer, who also choreographed La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2017), can translate Swift’s emotion and vision directly into satisfying choreography that hits every beat and lyric. Rodrigo Prieto, as the cinematographer, is phenomenal. While some shots are generic with Taylor Swift tracking through rooms on a steadicam, there are moments where the nostalgia of old Hollywood seeps through with the lighting and frame of the action. It’s clear that while Swift is steering the ship, the success and beauty of the video is derived from a deeply collaborative process, and it deserves its credit as one of her best music videos to date.
Yasmin Attwood
Unfortunately, the rest of the film fell flat. What ensued was a short segment of Swift explaining the tracks in front of a ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ inspired backdrop, and then the lyric video for the song. The visuals for the lyric videos were intriguing for the first 10 seconds, but then they looped throughout the duration of the song, and the moving parts began to give me a headache. Adding to that was the fact that the visuals, while stunning, didn’t match the aesthetic of the songs in the slightest. Without creeping into music criticism territory, the marketing for this album leaned heavily into old Hollywood glam, with Vegas showgirl headsets and bejewelled costumes galore. Swift claimed this was because the album was reflective of her life behind the scenes of the Eras Tour, but I struggled to find that in the songs; the title track touches on it briefly, but the rest of the album is just a mismatched collection of events from her life. ‘Ruin the friendship’, a song all about regretting not taking a risk when you had the chance, isn’t reflected in 1920s bobs in a theatre dressing room. The disconnect was jarring when it was projected onto the big screen.
As I sat in the theatre, listening to the people around me sing along to the songs, while the glow of the bright colours in the lyric video reflected on their faces, I struggled to find a reason as to why I was there. To me, it doesn’t make any sense to fill a theatre full of people to let them watch the lyrics of a song over a repeated three-second video for an hour and a half. A part of me is grateful that events like these keep the cinema alive, but the reality is, soon enough, all of this content will be on YouTube and that £13 will have been wasted on nothing.
Featured Image: IMDB / Taylor Swift, The Official Release Party of a Showgirl
What did you think of Taylor Swift: Life of a Showgirl?
