Screenwriting by remote control

Filmmaking is about putting images on the screen. It is also, if not always, about telling a story. Hollywood has long subordinated images to story, the classic ideal being the "seamless" style in which cuts and camera movements are all but invisible to the audience.

In the world of the music video, however, the images often are the story, with the filmmaker playing the role, not of the unobtrusive craftsman, but of the pop star with a camera. Like the artists whose songs he is promoting, he is free to push all the limits, as long as he can persuade channel-surfing teenagers to lift their thumbs off the remote. In other words, he has to hold his audience not just from scene to scene, but from second to second.

Since MTV first went on the air two decades ago, makers of video clips have addressed this task with all the technological toys at their command, sampling, mixing and morphing to their heart's content, while influencing everything from TV commercials to mainstream films. Far from being invisible, Hollywood style is today more and more in the audience's face, in ways ranging from the darkly humorous surrealism of David O. Russell's "Three Kings" to the frantic busyness of Michael Bey's "Armageddon," a film that panders to the lowest common attention span.