When I featured The Buggles three weeks back, what made me realize I’d omitted them was seeing a list of the first 50 music videos played when MTV debuted.

Many of the songs and videos on that list are familiar to me, but not all of them. So I wanted to explore them. “You Better Run” played seond. It was a song I was unfamiliar with, it was not amongst Benatar’s biggest songs but it’s certainly good and bears her signature.

It’s a performance-piece video, which is generally not that interesting, but there are some lap-dissolves hiding what would be jump cuts throughout; all such instances are on a head-and-shoulders shot of Pat, one right at the beginning. It’s the clearest evidence I’ve seen of tidbit I picked up in film school that la nouvelle vague influenced music video making’s first wave at the very least, giving those directors and editors a new way to shoot and cut. Enjoy!