No Time, Make, or Reason: The Affective Forms of Portishead’s Only You Music Video
No Time, Make, or Reason: The Affective Forms of Portishead’s Only You Music Video

Summary/Abstract: Sigmund Freud famously distinguished normal mourning and pathological melancholy by the affects’ duration and persistence. This temporal perspective paves the way forreading affect beyond its expressivity and considering ita question of form. In the article, this radical formalistapproach is used to examine the way depressive affectmanifests itself in the structure of the music video to Por-tishead’s Only You (dir. Chris Cunningham, 1998), in parti-cular concerning tempo and rhythm. Eugenie Brinkema’s remarks on grief as an affective form marked by heavinessand 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 under-standing 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.

• Details
• Contents