Amy (2015) - Analysis of two scenes

The film I am going to be analysing is the 2015 British documentary film, Amy, which is about the life and death of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse and is directed by Asif Kapadia. I am going to be analysing two key scenes from the film, one of the scenes is of Amy when she was around 14 at one of her friends birthday parties, and the other scene i am going to be analysing is when she was performing at a festival in Serbia and it is at this point in the film where the public can tell that something is wrong.

In the first scene, Amy is around fourteen and is at the birthday party of one of her best friends and they are all having a joke together. This scene shows a different light to Amy and shows that she wasn't always what the media made her out to be towards the end of her life. Later in the scene, Kapadia has overlayed what seems to be an interview with Amy saying how she got into singing the way she did and how she didn't think that she would be a singer as a career, whilst in the background it is the footage of the party with Amy playing around and joking with her friends. Throughout the film, there is not a lot of Kapadia's original footage (except for drone footage that establishes the shot) so almost all of the footage in the film is archive footage from Amy's family and friends mostly. The whole scene at the party shows the innocence of Amy. Throughout the documentary, whenever Amy sings the lyrics come up onto the screen so you can really understand the meanings of the songs in correlation with what Amy was dealing with in her life.

The next scene I am going to be analysing is a scene in which Amy is at a festival in Serbia in 2011where Amy is very drunk on stage and is refusing to sing which shows her mental state at that time and is showing that her career is not giving her joy anymore. Kapadia shows this event by using footage that was taken at the time by people in the crowd who use their phones to record the performance and he uses a professional recording of the performance aswell. Also, during this clip Kapadia slows down parts of it to give more tone and so you can see exactly what happens.

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