Today we're continuing our Christmas music video run with a video that definitely doesn't have any Christmas trees or jingle bells - Dustin Kensrue's 2009 video for "This Is War", directed by Kevin Adamson.
First of all, you might be wondering why we're including this in our series on Christmas music videos at all. It turns out this song is on Dustin Kensrue's Christmas album called The Good Night Is Still Everywhere. It has the usual tracks like "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing", but it also has "This Is War" on there.
When thinking about what a video about a song about war could consist of, my mind doesn't realistically go to World War II era imagery. It's nice, but it seems pretty expensive and logistically challenging. Amazingly, this video went full WWII with a short narrative set in WWII-era wartime, complete with uniforms, guns, explosions, and even tanks. Tanks!
The result is pretty impressive. From what I can put together, members of the 6 Kompanie of 116 Panzer Division Living History Group in North Carolina and Virginia helped out, which is where the vehicles (among many of things) most likely came from. It was filmed in Allison Woods in Statesville, North Carolina, where historical reenactments of all kinds are staged. As you might expect with a WWII reenactment crew, filming is pretty intense since these guys know what they are doing:
The narrative starts off with a couple walking in a forest when they witness a civilian man shot by a German army officer. They run, and spend most of the video being protected and moved by the allies (who find them shortly after they flee). It soon becomes clear the woman is pregnant, and she has a baby right there in a shed while a firefight goes on around her. At the end of the video, the Germans make it to her and her newborn son, but after some sort of realization, they turn around and leave.
Things start to become a little clearer when you realize that this is a version of the story of the birth of Jesus, especially why the male character hanging around our WWII-era Virgin Mary is barely shown at all (sorry Joseph, but Mary is the star of the show here). Dustin Kensrue's video where we explains the reasoning behind the song has been taken down, but from blog snippets you can put together that the song itself is about Jesus' birth, making this video a pretty clever visual interpretation of the dual meanings of the song, of which one of the points is that Jesus' birth was anything but peaceful. The video reflects this lack of peace by not shying away from violence at all. There's plenty of gunfire and although we don't encounter much blood, there is a scene where one solider smashes in another's head with a helmet.
While definitely not what comes to mind when you think about Christmas music videos, this video somehow fits into the genre pretty cleanly when you unravel some of the meaning of it. It's a ridiculously ambitious in its scope, so hats off to Kevin Adamson and the Ransom.tv crew for pulling this one off.
