Photo by REED SAXON, Associated Press
Michael Jackson is seen backstage at the Grammy Awards on Feb. 28, 1984.
Photo by REED SAXON
Michael Jackson is seen backstage at the Grammy Awards on Feb. 28, 1984.
WASHINGTON - The music video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller" made history again Wednesday when it was named as one of 25 motion pictures to be included in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry.
"Thriller," a 14-minute video promoting the song of the same name, represented a revolutionary moment in film and popular culture when it was first released on Dec. 2, 1983. Directed by the established Hollywood filmmaker John Landis ("The Blues Brothers," "Animal House"), the video merged such formal cinematic elements as a script, elaborate sets and cinematography with the relatively nascent medium of short-form music videos.
"Thriller" joins such esteemed films as "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Jezebel" in this year's National Film Registry roster. The Library of Congress established the registry in 1989 as part of the National Film Preservation Act, to spotlight films that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant and deserve to be preserved for all time, according to Librarian of Congress James Billington. As of this year, 525 films have been selected for the registry.
The "Thriller" video, a movie-within-a-movie starring Jackson as a werewolf and a chorus of fanged, cadaverous zombies, was the first video to be released, not just on MTV, but in movie theaters. Legendary Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein, best known for his collaboration with horror master Alfred Hitchcock, wrote incidental music and the actor Vincent Price voiced a spooky narration. The precise dance moves of Jackson and his back-up dancers were immediately imitated by fans, and have been paid homage in films from "13 Going on 30" to a Bollywood parody on YouTube.
The result was an ambitious, formally sophisticated leap forward for a form previously known mostly as an extension of TV advertising. It presaged a crossover between music videos and film that would define the careers of such directors as Spike Jonze ("Where the Wild Things Are"), David Fincher ("Zodiac") and Michael Bay ("Transformers"), all of whom got their start in music videos.
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