Henry Keazor

Rewind, play, fast forward : the past, present and future of the music video

Due to shifts in the contexts of the production and presentation of the music video, more and more people start to talk about a possible end of this genre. At the same time disciplines such as visual-, film- and media-studies, art- and music-history begin to realize that despite the fact that the music video obviously has come of age, they still lack a well defined and matching methodical approach for analyzing and discussing videoclips. For the first time this volume brings together different disciplines as well as journalists, museum curators and gallery owners in order to take a discussion of the past and present of the music video as an opportunity to reflect upon suited methodological approaches to this genre and to allow a glimpse into its future.

A Stumble in the Dark: Contextualizing Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Space: 1999

‘Space: 1999 occupies a unique and not altogether happy position in the Valhalla of televised space adventures. It is the program thatStar Trek fans love to hate, even 20 years after its debut. When it is not being ridiculed or attacked, 1999 is often forgotten or overlooked by science fiction historians and television critics, probably because it was a British-made product that never aired on the major American television networks. Perhaps Space: 1999’s biggest problem is simply that it appeared at the wrong time. It stands sandwiched between Star Trek (1966–69) andStar Wars (1977), two milestones of the genre,’ John Kenneth Muir writes in the introduction to his book Exploring ‘Space: 1999,’ published in 1997.1