CASE STUDY: AMY WINEHOUSE DOCUMENTARY

We went to Sheffield to watch the Amy Winehouse Documentary that was showing. As we watched it, I felt moved and felt sympathy for Amy as it helped me to understand her situation more. The flashing lights effect that was used during the scenes where she was bombarded with reporters and photographers was effective because it included the audience, let the audience know what it was like to have the light flashing in their eyes every so often and it hurt my eyes. It also gave me that feeling of being surrounded myself by those people – it was definitely a documentary that made me understand the feelings of the singer.The use of archived footage allowed us to have an insight, to understand better what Amy was like before she became famous – so we could try to understand how fame had changed who she was or what changed her into who she became.Overall, I felt like her life had much more potential but I also feel sympathy, once more, for the singer. She was pushed over the edge again and again, always pressured by newspaper companies who would follow her when she went to rehab, who would always question her about what she’d be doing next.

The lyrics to Winehouse’s songs now do have a lot of meaning to them in my opinion, more than I knew as now I know that she based a lot of her songs off of her life experiences. Such as “Rehab” being based off of how all of her friends would tell her that she needed to go to rehab but she refused, especially because her father also said she didn’t need it and she would believe him. The lyrics became more meaningful as we knew more about her as we could understand the meaning of the lyrics, we could understand what she was thinking at the time of writing her songs.The media didn’t help when covering her issue

either as they were everywhere whenever she was trying to recover. They booked out rooms in a hotel that was the same one Amy was residing in at the time of recovering.

As she recovered, they often pestered her to hear out for news from her – finding and pointing out all negative things about her. From what is recall from the documentary, they often asked her about her drug issues as though it was norm which had led her to thinking that doing drugs became the norm.

I looked at the site mediaknowall.com at the “Dead Pop Stars” page and read through it.In summary, stars whom are dead are seen as the ones who bring in more money, their “star power still remains” even if they have passed away. A quote I found on that website perfectly summarized it all up in my opinion."Dead rock stars appeal to people because their death allows something nebulous to become a story with a beginning, a middle and an end," says Pat Gilbert, editor of the music magazine Mojo.This works well in my opinion as pop stars give us that semi-mythological role models as they are who we aspire to be. “They are too busy living out the dreams of the masses to work out who they really want to be.”

Applying Richard Dyer’s “star theory” to the idea presented before, that dead pop stars still live on in the eyes of fans – we can look at his idea of “the audience seeks to complete the image of the star”.

This idea of his can help us talk about how dead pop stars do complete this image. The audience need not seek to try and complete it as their life story has been told completely as their end has already been drawn near.

Though this can be the alternate as well as the audience may not be able to complete this “image of the star” due to them not living a full life. This means that the completed image of the star, Amy Winehouse, will continue to elude fans which has led to her ever-growing fame ever since what had happened to her.

It can also be noted that Amy gained her fame and kept it because of the “common values” held by all those in the music industry, the stereotypes of them all as she was the type to fall into the category of “conspicuous consumption” as she did consume drugs which brought her end.

Thinking about Rich Welch’s 6 things a good documentary should have, I think this is a good documentary, even when basing it off of these tips as well.

The documenter must have enjoyed Amy’s music as to find out more about her as well as liked Amy as a person in order to find more about her.

The music used in this documentary was tasteful, all, or at least most, were songs sung by the singer and lyrics were overlaid on the images/videos when her song played. This was done in a tasteful manner, as there were brief periods of silence, or moments where the audio from the footage was played and that alone was, there was definitely those few golden silences in that documentary.

I believe that music videos, album covers and websites can create an image of the artist that we didn’t know of. Especially when it comes to looking at the lyrics in more detail – these forms can show us a version of the truth we don’t recognize at first glance. If we look at Amy’s album covers, we notice how she’s often alone in them, this can show her loneliness when she was going through her addiction – but this can be seen as looking too indepth.

It was seen as typical for Amy to appear alone in heralbum covers, not just because she was a solo artist thoughas many argue that Amy could have been feeling lonelythrough these times in her life.

I hope to create some sort of representation in my albumcover like few would say Amy has done. I also like theamount of colour she had used in her music video, oftenmaking the text colour the same as a certain part of herclothing such as in the “Frank” album, “Frank” is in the samepink colour as the top she’s wearing in said album.