Doru Nițescu's book aims to introduce into the sphere of Romanian filmology a contested audiovisual product, the music video, which is situated outside both the sphere of canonical works and of marginal outputs, those so-called "orphan films" which have begun to be increasingly valued for their documentary and sociological importance. On the contrary, the music video is often caricatured as the quintessence of the audiovisual medium's unfortunate penchant for gratuitous spectacularity, superficiality and commercialism, and denounced for its almost total lack of engagement with reality. In his book, Nițescu tries to position the music video as a valid object of study for a detailed grammatical analysis of cinematic language. This analysis mainly focuses on the specific mode of interaction between shots introduced by the music video and especially by the "MTV school", which disrupts the classical rules of narrative film editing, despite their being polished by a century-long practice. At the second stage of his analysis, Nițescu touches on both the micro level, that of the composition of individual shots, and the macro level, with broader meditations on the impact of the music video’s popularity on the general public’s aesthetic expectations in the face of any audiovisual (and even merely narrative) work.
Actually, even if the declared subject of the book is the music video, the real protagonist is in fact cinema, whose issue underlies all discussions launched by Nițescu. Even the structure of the book reveals this barely veiled central concern: only two chapters, chapters three and four, are actually devoted to the analysis of the general features of the genre, respectively to examples that Nițescu considers particularly eloquent for a specific typology of music videos. The first two parts of the book rather take on the task of making a very broad historicization of the music video, especially emphasizing its relationship with the other mass audiovisual media that ruled the 20th century, namely cinema and television. And the last chapter examines how the aesthetic paradigm of the video has found its way into various films, without the influence being entirely one-sided.
Since the publication of The Birth of the Modern Music Video, there have been many upheavals in the audiovisual field, not least due to the increasingly concrete possibility of artificial intelligence creating both the images and sound of future music videos - so Nițescu's pioneering work certainly deserves to be continued.