Director Jon Glazer’s music video of The Dead Weather’s “Treat Me Like Your Mother” was refused play by MTV due to its violent content: Jack White of The White Stripes and Alison Mosshart of The Kills (both also of The Dead Weather) face off in a duel in a dusty field adjacent to a desolate suburban housing tract and gun each other down with automatic weapons.

Despite the censorship, it may prove to be one of the most popular music videos of the year, and perhaps also one of the most elegant.

Trouble seeing the video above? Click here.

The video was a deliberate exercise in simplicity, up to the choice of shots and camera, and a concerted effort was made not to manipulate the image. DP Max Malkin shot it with an SI-2K from Silicon Imaging.

Says Malkin, “We ended up embracing the presentational format of digital. The SI-2K is a smaller-chip digital camera, so it’s basically analogous to using 16mm. We wanted something rawer, less polished, less clean.”

Simplicity was the order of the day even down to the lighting—or lack of it. “I lit nothing,” says Malkin, “I didn’t use one show card.”

Achieving simplicity often requires a great deal of extra work and planning. Glazer and Malkin wanted the camera to glide along with the two raging principals as they stride through the long grass. The easy option for these long takes would have been Steadicam, but instead everything was shot from a camera dolly. For White and Mosshart’s relentless, Terminator-style marches—400 feet in opposite directions, then 400 feet back again, shooting at each other all the while—more than 800 feet of dolly track was laid.

The video has a distinctive bleak, bleached look that most technically-minded viewers will assume comes about via postproduction grading and coloring.

In fact, no secondary coloring was done at all.

“If I show you dailies, you’ll see they look exactly like the end product. We really wanted to just leave the image alone.”

Post house Smoke & Mirrors did minor digital grading, but the bulk of their work was enhancing the video’s special effects: the muzzle flashes of the relentless automatic weapons fire and the countless bullet hits on bodies and on the ground.

• Smoke & Mirrors Crafts Color and Effects for Dead Weather, Videography.com, July 30, 2009

Director Glazer insisted the visual effects adhere to the same minimalist plan. The original storyboards had called for Jack White to walk away from the duel riddled with holes. The final version is very restrained, with a single brief flare of light shining through a bullet hole in White’s body as he walks away in the setting sun.

Malkin encapsulates the experience with appropriate simplicity: “Jonathan Glazer’s taste is impeccable. Working with Jon, you know you’re going to do something unique.”