The ekphrastic sublime of music videos: a literary travelling starting from the lyrics

Abstract

Adopting the music video for Björk’s Bachelorette as a frame, we examine the extent to which the form of “art of the moving image” considered here – that of the music video – emerged from an idiosyncratic yet multifaceted status of the verbal arts. In other words, what is the literary specificity and diversity of music videos, starting from the passage of the lyrics to the videographed song and from the identification of different kinds of literary inscription in them? Thus diversity leads to cases such as lyric videos, videos that represent writing technologies or interactive videos in which the written word plays a role, then the attempt at specificity is built around a metaphor. A metaphor that compares the idea of travelling in motorized vehicles to a kind of ekphrasis characteristic of the lyrics-video transition in song clips, to an “ekphrastic sublime” serving as a conceptual hook.