Grace and mystery in the commercial "L'Eau par Kenzo", Introduction

In the first paragraph of his article On Reading a Video Text, Robert Scholes reveals: “Filters and other devices cause us to see the world through jaundiced or rose-colored optics, coloring events with emotion more effectively than verbal pathetic fallacy and less obtrusively.” To support this idea I will use the example of the commercial “L’eau par Kenzo”, representing a powerful sequence of images focusing on a young couple, which in my prospective may raise deep questions in our minds about the sense of relationship between men and women.

Without paying attention to details of a video, and especially to its visual aspect, many of passive viewers might not understand the main idea of a video and pass by something, that can be important for them and even change their lives.

That is why, in this paper I will try to show that even though our cultural backgrounds and our own personalities make us often resist the new ideas that a video tries to tell us, a powerful video should inspire us to think differently through its visual aspect because it is a piece of art and each video is first of all what we see.