“No Time, Make, or Reason”: The Affective Forms of Portishead’s “Only You” Music Video
Klaudia Rachubińska
klaudia.rachubinska@ispan.plInstitute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8240-0643
Abstract
Sigmund Freud famously distinguished normal mourning and pathological melancholy by the affects’ duration and persistence. This temporal perspective paves the way for reading affect beyond its expressivity and considering it a question of form. In the article, this radical formalist approach is used to examine the way depressive affect manifests itself in the structure of the music video to Portishead’s Only You (dir. Chris Cunningham, 1998), in particular concerning tempo and rhythm. Eugenie Brinkema’s remarks on grief as an affective form marked by heaviness and inertia serve as the basis for analysing tempo. The exploration of rhythm is rooted in Peter Kivy’s assertion that reading musical expression is mediated by understanding the affective properties of the human voice. This makes way for applying Julia Kristeva’s concept of the depressive discourse, understood as a set of particular speech patterns and qualities indicative of depression/melancholy.
Keywords:
grief, melancholy, affect, temporal structures, radical formalismReferences
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Authors
Klaudia Rachubińskaklaudia.rachubinska@ispan.pl
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8240-0643
Film and visual culture scholar, graduate of the Faculty of Psychology and the Faculty of Polish Studies, University of Warsaw. Affiliated with the Department of Film Studies, Audiovisual Arts and Anthropology of Culture at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Editor of the academic film journal Kwartalnik Filmowy (2022-), former editor of the Polish film quarterly Pleograf. Kwartalnik Akademii Polskiego Filmu (2018-2021), member of the Polish Society for Film and Media Studies. Winner of the Grand Prix of the XXIII Krzysztof Mętrak Competition for young film critics. She currently works on her PhD thesis on the images of women in popular music.
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