I'm not a guy that can handle watching people perform in nerve-racking situations well, so when Lana Del Rey appeared on Saturday Night Live in January 2012, I had a hard time watching it. She was making her national TV debut on one of the biggest TV stages there is, and the best evidence of how it went is that the only way to see it now is a clip on YouTube of someone filming their TV.

That was part of the fun, though, with Lana Del Rey's early career. She was so new and so inexperienced that pushing onto the national stage was exciting. Fall 2011 to Spring 2012 saw endless blog posts about Lana Del Rey - calling her a sham or defending her. People percieved her as in authentic in some way, like she didn't belong. One thing Lana Del Rey really did have going for her, however, is a really fantastic group of songs in her arsenal, not least of which was "Video Games".

So today we're watching the found footage music video for 2011's "Video Games", directed and edited by Lana Del Rey herself.

"Video Games" is largely composed of footage edited together with clips of Del Rey singing in unassuming locations. What makes it such a compelling video is that it sort of acts as a Rosetta Stone for Lana del Rey's image and what made her such a controversial artist. It has it all - the grainy Americana, the retro Lana Del Rey styling, and the idolized tributes to a certain attitude towards lifestyle, fashion, and money. In some ways, these are all themes that Lana Del Rey has been exploring ever since, but they are all here in concentrate.

Thinking about it this way, there really isn't any way this video could have been made without found footage. The things that Lana Del Rey had picked out for her image were not things that she could really show us taking part in. They weren't realities, they were ideals that she had pulled down in the form of images and placed herself into. A glossy video with her by a poolside, treated to look old, would never have had the same impact. It makes even more sense then, that the official word from the Lana Del Rey camp is that this video came from her - directed and edited.

After Lana Del Rey became more established, she began working with some pretty amazing directors like Yoann Lemoine, Anthony Mandler, and Anthony Shurmer. These are, as you might expect, some bigger budget affairs with lots of attention paid to Lana del Rey's styling and image, so it's interesting that unlike "Blue Jeans" (which had a video in a similar style), "Video Games" never got a music video remake. In fact, it was added to the official Lana Del Rey Vevo YouTube account to sit alongside videos like "Born to Die" and "National Anthem".

It looks like there was an attempt to remedy this in late 2011 with a live version of "Video Games" that was awkwardly treated to look like grainy old 1960s footage. Seeing at that video has 13m views and "Video Games" is pushing 100m (when both sources are combined), it's safe to say that Lana Del Rey got it right the first time.

Adam Fairholm is the co-founder and lead developer of IMVDb. You can find him on twitter at @adamfairholm.