Music Video
The promotional music video for "Violet" was filmed in late 1994 and was directed by Mark Seliger and Fred Woodward. The video is filmed largely in sepia tones and features a 1920s-era strip club with burlesque dancers, juxtaposed with footage of several young ballerinas and young girls dancing on a theatre stage. Courtney Love pole dances in the music video in the period fashion, and is also featured in a tutu on the ballet stage with the girls. These scenes are integrated with footage of the band performing the song. The juxtaposition of the young ballerinas onstage illustrates the dynamic between dancing as an art form and dancing for the sake of others' visual and sexual gratification. The ballerinas featured in the video are also possibly referential to Love herself, who took ballet classes for a great portion of her childhood, and later ended up working as a stripper in her teenage and early adult years.
The video follows themes discussed in the song, particularly sexual exploitation of women. According to Love, the content of the video was inspired by "acid flashbacks" and "old film stock". "I love old pornography," Love said, "But I wanted to at the same time, you know... all of the videos for years that have put stripping or half-naked women on a pedestal, I wanted to sort of show the degrading experience that it is."
Many of the scenes in the video aesthetically mimic early-20th century silent films and talkies, with faux-aged cinematography and lapses in audio and visual synchronization. A child seen in the video is also an analogy to the single's cover artwork which features an anonymous memorial photograph, most likely either a daguerreotype, or a tintype post-mortem photograph of a deceased girl in a coffin with her doll.
The music video was the first video to feature newly-recruited bassist Melissa Auf der Maur after the death of Kristen Pfaff in June 1994. In a 1995 interview during the KROQ Weenie Roast, Auf der Maur commented on the music video's themes, citing "pornography versus ballet, strippers, and beautiful out-of-synch artwork". According to drummer Patty Schemel, the dancers featured in the music video were actual strippers handpicked by Courtney Love from Jumbo's Clown Room, a Los Angeles dance bar where Love had worked in the 1980s.
Read more about this topic: Violet (song)
Famous quotes containing the words music and/or video:
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