Say what you will about Miss Taylor Swift, she has produced some pretty amazing ballads in her short career so far. It's all part of a balance: for every quasi-novelty single like "I Knew You Were Trouble", there's a ballad like "Begin Again". She keeps them short, and she knows how to walk the line of ambiguity between high school crushes and grown up relationships, allowing them to appeal to people with experience in one or both.

I think one of her best ballads so far is "Back to December" (2010), so let's check out the video for it, which was directed by Yoann Lemoine.

First of all, it's important to note that "Back to December" is a long song. It's almost five minutes long, so Yoann Lemoine made a pretty bold move when he created a music video for this song where almost nothing happens. Almost the entire video is Taylor Swift in her house and her assumed former love interest (played by Guntars Asmanis) walking around outside. So, we have to look at things other than the narrative to figure this one out.

We can pick out a few things of note: one is that the video takes place in the winter time in a small town that looks to be in the midwest or some other comparable area (the outdoor scenes were filmed in Binghamton, New York). Around halfway through the video, it starts snowing inside of Taylor Swift's house as well - and even before that, her house is portrayed as very cold and empty.

The very little bit of narrative in this video comes from a note that Swift writes that is ostensibly an apology letter. She slips it into his jacket which is at the bottom of some stairs, and he finds it and reads it later on the bleachers. Why his jacket is in her house is not entirely clear to me - I suppose it means that they just broke up in this video, which is an interesting direction to go in since "Back to December" is about a romance that ended a while ago. What is in that note? We really can't tell - the dude who reads it has very little reaction, and goes on walking like he has the whole video.

This isn't a video about a narrative, though, it's a video about how the atmosphere of a place reflects the atmosphere of an emotion. Everything in this video is painfully bleak - from the setting to the colors to the expressions on both our characters faces, and it's truly effective. It's one of the most depressing videos I've ever seen and nothing happens in it.

To pull this off, this had to be a nice video to look at, and it is visually beautiful (the inside snow helps a lot). Swift is dressed down with a rougher hair styling, and the dude they picked to play her love interest is just a normal looking guy in skinny jeans. It's an interesting mix of a heavy emphasis on visuals, and a disregard for making Swift look like a pop star.

A more recent ballad, "Begin Again" (2012), has the same visual beauty to it, but adds a stronger narrative element. I think that works as well, but I've always thought that this video stood out as one of Swift's best in its refusal to be anything but a mood piece despite the fact that is stars one of the biggest pop stars in the world.

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