Don't you want me, baby?

May 23, 2005 10:37 AM

Whose style did The Human League's "Don't You Want Me" video clip bite?

I went to see Rupert Holmes' "Accomplice" the other night and it got me thinking about the concept of play-within-a-play-within-a-play (within-a-play). It brought back my memory of the video for "Don't You Want Me" from The Human League's "Dare" album. My friends (for some God-awful reason unbeknownst to me) do not remember the video and are no help. That is where I'm hoping, for sheer curiosity's sake, AskMe can fill in... A three parter!

1. Can anyone find me a link to the video? Yahoo doesn't have it and I can't find it on VH1/MTV or other like sites.

2. What movie was the first to have the film-within-a-film-within-a-film thing that the video for "DYWM" copied? I remember being told once, but have since forgotten. All googling has failed me.

3. In the "DYWM" video, there's the scene where the members of the band are sitting in the screening room and the camera is focused on one person, and then changes focus to show the person behind him/her (I'm doing this all from memory and can't promise good details). How is this done? It is done simply by altering the regular focus or the focal length or ? Is there a name for this technique? I am not a cinematographer or photo whiz, but am simply curious about this.

posted by kuperman to media & arts (7 comments total)

1. my google skills are lacking.

2. Dunno about a movie, but Hamlet did it long before there WERE movies.

3. That's called a Rack Focus. It's performed by manually focussing the lens.
posted by dersins at 11:20 AM on May 23, 2005

and midsummer night's dream
posted by andrew cooke at 11:32 AM on May 23, 2005

Rack focus, by the way, is usually performed by a guy called the focus puller, not by the actual camera operator.
posted by kindall at 12:30 PM on May 23, 2005

"Hamlet" as well. Plays-within-plans are pretty common, as are stories-within-stories (The Canterbury Tales, for example).
posted by occhiblu at 12:39 PM on May 23, 2005

I'm really stupid. Just saw "Hamlet" was already mentioned. Sorry!
posted by occhiblu at 12:41 PM on May 23, 2005

“Day for Night” by François Truffaut.
posted by Marky at 12:53 PM on May 23, 2005

This doesn't directly answer any of your questions, but I think Bjork/Gondry's Bachelorette video was one of the best of this sort of thing I've ever seen. If the style interests you I recommend it; it's mind-blowing, if you aren't inured to that sort of thing through pretention allergy.
posted by fleacircus at 4:48 PM on May 23, 2005