David Fincher Evaluation

David Fincher is an American film/music video director and has worked with many renowned artists. He has won two Grammy awards for Best Music Video and three MTV Music Videos for Best Direction.

Here is some of his work;

3 characteristics;




The first characteristic is that in 3 of David Fincher's most well known music videos that he has directed, all of the music videos are black and white. The black and white editing is because David Fincher was influenced by Hollywood glamour at the time, which is accompanied by what each artists wears in their music video. This is a style that David Fincher keeps consistent throughout all three of the music videos.




The second characteristic is that David Fincher tends to keep the music videos in the 'performance' genre, which is dominant in all his videos. As we can see in still of the Justin Timberlake 'Suit and Tie' music video, he is singing in a microphone. The close up on his face throughout the video focuses on his image as well, which is the same case in the Madonna 'Vogue' video.




The third characteristic is that he has sexualised Madonna, which is one of his only female artists he has directed for. Examples of this are shown in the music video 'Vogue' and 'Express Yourself'. Madonna is portrayed as somebody who is sexy by the use of close ups and focusing on the body, as well as wearing costumes which give impressions to the audience.


I think the use of black & white editing throughout all videos is effective. Firstly it shows that David Fincher is trying to portray a certain image across, such as in the Madonna video, Madonna is very focused on and is the 'pop queen', and the combination of both having performance and image is effective as it shows how well she can perform and as an image she is an idol to many people.


What is not effective is that all of the music videos are dominantly performance. Although this is beneficial in some cases, it sometimes may not be effective in some music videos. For example, in the Rolling Stones music video it shows a performance throughout the whole music video with the artists all out of proportion in size, as if to show some kind of narrative. This may confuse the audience in some cases as they will not be sure what is happening in the music video.