Stromae's video on his quand c'est ? (Cancer) song will not leave you indifferent. Today we will dive into the iconography and form of the video clip.
Starting from my teenage time song,"Alors on Danse", I have been thoroghly following Stromae's art. Even though most of his songs are in French (the language I do not speak), the rythm and tone of his songs, and relatable iconography in his videos makes his art universal for understanding.
Today we will decipher his "quand c'est?" (Cancer) video clip in terms of iconography and form. Iconography is the study of visual images and symbols interpretation used in art works to convey certain message. Through the various kinds of form (visual and audial form) author tries to evoke certain emotion in the audience. To analyze the video clip, we use Panofsky method of analysis, which includes three stages of analysis: primary, secondary and tertiary. The deeper we go with our analysis the more of outside knowledge and literacies we use.
Primary Stage
According to Panofsky, the primary analysis is also called natural analysis, where we simply describe what is shown and what atmosphere the subject matter tells in the multimodal text. The book "Visual Culture" by Richard Howells and Joaquim Negreiros states that "to understand the meaning at this primary level , we do not need to bring our 'practical experience' of daily life into play."
The clip starts off with a tall skinny man in all black standing in profile after a white background. The video itself is black and white. The action in the video begins with the horrifying sound that we are familiar with from horror movies. Besides the man, there is huge black seemingly living structures assimilating the spider-like legs of a monster. The man dances throughout the video, but his movements look sickly. At some point, while dancing the man tries to fight the monster. As the video progresses, man’s limbs look more like the spider-legs of the monster.
When camera moves farther from the man, we notice that the man is dancing on the scene. Due to the poor lightning, we cannot really see and describe the scene much but tell that it is a small theater scene. There are also the audiences, which are… the spider -like legs of the monster. We can notice the all-encompassing fast pace growth of the monster in the audience, which certainly horrifies the actual audience of the video clip. So, the spider-like mesh of the monster is watching the spectacle of how the man’s trying to fight the monster.
The spectacle ends with the monster easily fighting the man and taking white body-shaped light structure from the man, which we can interpret as a soul. The taken soul and white background turning off symbolizes the death of the man and end of spectacle for monster. Then the location changes to an endless black space all covered with the monster’s spider-like mesh and many white faceless souls stuck in it. Finally, we can see the monster’s eye and the nucleus from where all the spider-like mesh protrudes. In the final scene of the clip, we can see that the audience left the theater by the broken side tiles.
Secondary Stage
The secondary, conventional, analysis stage includes the incorporation of certain literacies (= prior knowledge in different fields) to understand the icons, signs and meanings of what we described in the primary stage (R.Howells and J.Negreiros).
From the body characteristics of the man in the main role, we can know the man is Stromae himself. He wrote the song to display his vision of this disease as a person both of whose parents passed away from cancer. Preliminary knowing that the song is about cancer, it is clearly seen that cancer, the disease, takes the form of the spider-like mesh. The author of this video humanizes the cancer, it moves, it has the eyes, it acts as an audience watching a spectacle… However, cancer does not have compassion pertaining to humans, since in the last scene it just disappeared leaving the dead man’s body in the theatre. We could assume that it went to see next “spectacle”. Cancer is watching a play in the theatre and making a play of a human life, which essentially undermines the value of human life in the face of the monster, cancer.
Having biological literacy about cancer, we can see that the author of this video very precisely describes the characteristics of cancer progression. According to Professor of cancer biology Douglas Hanahan, cancer cells appear to originate from own initially healthy cells of a person, that because of mutation acquire abnormally high rates of cell growth and replication. The man’s sickly dance starts with spider-like movements of his hands coming out of his chest. These movements could represent his own body’s internal processes in the initial stages of cancer, where human’s own cells gain of abnormal physiology. Additionally, the ability of cancer cells for pathologically high replication can be seen from the fast-growing and all-encompassing spider-like mesh in the audience.
Tertiary Stage
As the book Visual Culture states, the final tertiary analysis stage, in other words intrinsic stage, enables us to "reveal basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuassion - unconsciously qualified by one personality and condensed into one work".
As the view tunnels into an endless black space, which is probably niche of cancer, we can see numerous faceless white souls stuck in it: some desperately trying to escape. The depiction of the faceless souls conveys the message that cancer can catch anyone: children, mothers, fathers… and whole video clip reflects the experience of person suffering from cancer.
Interestingly, the man does not even try to run away from the monster… seems like he believes that he cannot escape. This behavior makes the actual audience perceive cancer as non-escapable condition and feel helplessness of the people with cancer. Moreover, we can see no other people around and only one man facing the creature in the video. This is the representation of one to one fight between the disease and person.
At the time when the man in the video fights with monster’s leg from one side but suddenly killed by the other one from the other side. It seems to correspond and reflect the actual experience of a cancer patient when treated against pathology in one part of the body but dies from the unexpected spread of pathology in the other part of the body.
In sum
We have analysed Stromae's quand c'est ideo clip using the methods of Panofsky. At the final stage of analysis we can conclude that the video represents the one to one fight between the disease and person suffering from cancer, the personal experiences that the person may experience and attitude of the person to his disease.
See you in the next blog :)
References:
Book: "Visual Culture" by Richard Howells and Joaquim Negreiros , Chapters Iconology & Form (p.12 - 59)
Website: Hallmarks of cancer: the next generation.- Douglas Hanahan
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21376230
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