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Student: Kevin Mulder Date Student: Kevin Mulder Date: 28 June 2019 Student number: 10173668 Email: [email protected] Supervisor: Charles Forceville Second Reader: Gerwin van der Pol MA Film Studies, University of Amsterdam Word count: 19.943 The Metaphorical Representation of Depression in Music Documentaries Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................. 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 4 Chapter 1. How Can We Define Music Documentaries? ........................................................................ 6 1.1 The Basics: The Documentary and Genre ..................................................................................... 6 1.2 The Music Documentary ............................................................................................................... 9 1.3 How Events Shape the Music Documentary ............................................................................... 11 1.4 The Music Video and its Relation to the Music Documentary ................................................... 12 1.5 The Impact of Reality and Social Media in the Music Documentary ......................................... 13 1.6 Taboos and the Rise of the Modern Music Documentary ........................................................... 15 1.7 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 17 Chapter 2. How Can We Define Depression and its Representation? ................................................... 19 2.1 Defining Depression .................................................................................................................... 19 2.2 Metaphors Concerning Depression ............................................................................................. 23 2.3 The Multimodal Metaphor .......................................................................................................... 25 2.4 Multimodal Metaphor as a Tool for Analysis ............................................................................. 27 2.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 29 Chapter 3. How is Depression Represented in Music Documentaries? ................................................ 30 3.1 Amy Winehouse .......................................................................................................................... 30 3.2 Kurt Cobain ................................................................................................................................. 34 3.3 Jim Morrison ............................................................................................................................... 38 3.4 The Club 27 ................................................................................................................................. 42 3.5 Avicii ........................................................................................................................................... 44 3.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 48 Chapter 4. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 51 Appendix I ............................................................................................................................................. 54 Appendix II ........................................................................................................................................... 55 Appendix III .......................................................................................................................................... 56 Appendix IV .......................................................................................................................................... 57 Appendix V ........................................................................................................................................... 58 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................... 59 Media list ............................................................................................................................................... 61 Articles Artists ....................................................................................................................................... 61 Music Videos ......................................................................................................................................... 62 Images ................................................................................................................................................... 62 1 Abstract The research in this thesis will focus on music documentaries and the depression that the musicians in it suffer from. Firstly I have analyzed the genre of the music documentary and examined its ability to discuss two distinct subjects at the same time: in my case this is the music of the artists in question and the mental affliction depression. Because depression is such an abstract but also a subject of taboo, I focused on metaphor. Metaphors can more clearly describe abstract mental illnesses, as depression is. Therefore I analyzed the metaphorical representation of depression in the music documentaries, mainly about the infamous ‘club 27,’ pop musicians who committed suicide when they were 27 years old. Keywords: depression, documentary, music documentary, metaphor, multimodal metaphor, CMT (conceptual metaphor theory). 2 Acknowledgements For me it was unsurprising to write about music documentaries, because music was the initial reason I started doing Media Studies. For my Bachelor thesis I wrote about the music video and whether some of them could be seen as music films – in terms of story and length. Because of my affection for music I started watching more documentaries about music, and I realized that this was in fact a different subgenre of the documentary, but what I also recognized by watching the documentary Roger Waters: The Wall (Sean Evans and Roger Waters, 2014) is that these documentaries do not only focus on music. In The Wall it was apparent that the focus was on capitalism and socialism, mainly because Pink Floyd’s music bears messages about society in them. For me, right then and there, I saw a connection. Depression and the ‘club 27’, then, became my subject after seeing the documentary Avicii: True Stories (Levan Tsikurishvili, 2017), and the fact that while writing this, I am 27 years old. First I want to thank my parents, for proofreading and for hearing my explanations for examining such a heavy subject, my dad in particular. I also want to thank my sister Melanie for critically looking at the words I put on paper, and I want to thank my supervisor Charles Forceville who steered me in the right direction. 3 Introduction In the last decade awareness campaigns concerning depression, which is identified as a mental illness, appear to be more common in contemporary society. Because discussing mental afflictions is mostly seen as taboo, and because it is an abstract problem to understand, I recognized that in discussing this topic, speech and other forms of communication, tend to use metaphors. I believe this is the case because depression is such a difficult concept to understand. Therefore I will examine the representation of depression in all of the (music) documentaries that I have chosen. My focus will be on documentaries known as music documentaries, wherein artists are portrayed that are currently no longer among us. All of the artists discussed in this thesis died young, and the notion of pressure and depression is connected with them in one way or another. Documentary is a genre that has existed from the moment that the medium of film was created. It is also a genre that inclines to ask questions about problems that tend to be swept under the rug. In this thesis the focus will be on a documentary subgenre that has not been extensively researched, namely the music documentary. However, I am eager to take this a step further, as in this subgenre of the music documentary I will focus on the representation of depression. The main focus is on the documentaries concerning the ‘club 27’, a group of artists that died at the age of 27. In the first chapter I will concentrate on the documentary genre and explain what the music documentary is, and how I define it specifically. I will do this through the readings of Bill Nichols, who has written extensively about the documentary. Another work that is important in my research is the book The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop edited by Benjamin Halligan, Robert Edgar and Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs (2013). To this date, this book is the first and only one to be researching the music documentary. Therefore I will also analyze the notion of genre, for the music documentary is a subgenre within the documentary genre. The second
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