Amy - documentries
Opening scene :
- 1998
- Digital equipment became more prominent
- Dina Washington, Sarah Vaughn, and Tony Bennet
- Imperceptible cut, in the beginning, to kickstart a narrative from the first extract.
No diegetic sound in eternal, floating images display.
The Guardian interview
A 43-year-old Londoner, Kapadia is the man behind Amy, a documentary that chronicles Winehouse’s tragic decline from bright-eyed prodigy to doomed tabloid obsession. Assembled from 100 interviews and incorporating 20 months of editing in a process that took three years in total, the film presents what feels like a true version of events. It is also incredibly moving.
The film claims, like the song, that Amy didn’t go to rehab only on the say-so of her father. Mitch says he only thought Amy shouldn’t go to rehab “at that time”. He claims that those three words were edited from his interview.
Constructed almost entirely from archive footage, the story was told without any guiding voiceover, a weirdly unheard-of break with convention in the documentary format. Senna was also edited to feel like a drama, every moment put in service to the story. As it unfolded, the film grew from a chronicle of a sporting life into a study in ambition, bravery and – again – obsession. It went on to become a touchstone for other film-makers and a driver of the boom in the cinematic documentary.
By 2012, Kapadia had been approached by Universal, Winehouse’s label, and invited to make a “warts and all” documentary, with full access to her back catalogue. Getting people to open up about her life, however, was to prove a different challenge. “There was no go-to person who knew Amy’s story, that’s what I found very early on,” he says. “There’s no definitive book. She just seemed to have a lot of people in different compartments. That’s what I started to find with the people I spoke to. And no one liked each other, they were all arguing, there was a lot of tension around her, always.” The first door that opened was with Nick. “When I called him, he said it was too soon, to leave her alone, let her rest in peace. But he told me the story [about Senna]. He said: ‘I’ll meet you, but I’m not interested.’”
The pair eventually met in a Soho editing suite. On the wall, Kapadia and his editor Chris King had assembled a collage that resembled something from CSI or Homeland; a massive, interlocking mural telling the story of Amy’s life as they knew it. It struck Nick as being more effort than anyone had previously made in understanding what had happened to her. And so he began to talk.
“I had no idea what this film was...” says Kapadia. “I had no thesis, I had no plan. I had the idea of doing a documentary but it’s all controlled because I know what the beginning and the middle and the end is but if it changes I’m going to go with it and find a way to rewrite it. This was my research. But Nick just started to talk and talk.
Kim Longinotto
- 1998
- Digital equipment became more prominent
- Dina Washington, Sarah Vaughn, and Tony Bennet
- Imperceptible cut, in the beginning, to kickstart a narrative from the first extract.
No diegetic sound in eternal, floating images display.
The Guardian interview
A 43-year-old Londoner, Kapadia is the man behind Amy, a documentary that chronicles Winehouse’s tragic decline from bright-eyed prodigy to doomed tabloid obsession. Assembled from 100 interviews and incorporating 20 months of editing in a process that took three years in total, the film presents what feels like a true version of events. It is also incredibly moving.
The film claims, like the song, that Amy didn’t go to rehab only on the say-so of her father. Mitch says he only thought Amy shouldn’t go to rehab “at that time”. He claims that those three words were edited from his interview.
Constructed almost entirely from archive footage, the story was told without any guiding voiceover, a weirdly unheard-of break with convention in the documentary format. Senna was also edited to feel like a drama, every moment put in service to the story. As it unfolded, the film grew from a chronicle of a sporting life into a study in ambition, bravery and – again – obsession. It went on to become a touchstone for other film-makers and a driver of the boom in the cinematic documentary.
By 2012, Kapadia had been approached by Universal, Winehouse’s label, and invited to make a “warts and all” documentary, with full access to her back catalogue. Getting people to open up about her life, however, was to prove a different challenge. “There was no go-to person who knew Amy’s story, that’s what I found very early on,” he says. “There’s no definitive book. She just seemed to have a lot of people in different compartments. That’s what I started to find with the people I spoke to. And no one liked each other, they were all arguing, there was a lot of tension around her, always.” The first door that opened was with Nick. “When I called him, he said it was too soon, to leave her alone, let her rest in peace. But he told me the story [about Senna]. He said: ‘I’ll meet you, but I’m not interested.’”
The pair eventually met in a Soho editing suite. On the wall, Kapadia and his editor Chris King had assembled a collage that resembled something from CSI or Homeland; a massive, interlocking mural telling the story of Amy’s life as they knew it. It struck Nick as being more effort than anyone had previously made in understanding what had happened to her. And so he began to talk.
“I had no idea what this film was...” says Kapadia. “I had no thesis, I had no plan. I had the idea of doing a documentary but it’s all controlled because I know what the beginning and the middle and the end is but if it changes I’m going to go with it and find a way to rewrite it. This was my research. But Nick just started to talk and talk.
Kim Longinotto
Kim Longinotto (born 1952) is a British Documentary
filmmaker, well known for making films that highlight the plight of female
victims of oppression or discrimination. Longinotto studied camera and
directing at the national film and Television schooSchooleaconsfield, England,
where she now tutors occasionally.
Longinotto was born to an Italian father and a Welsh mother;
her father was a photographer who later went bankrupt. At the age of 10, she was sent to a draconian all-girls boarding school, where she found it hard to make friends due to the mistress forbidding anyone to talk to her for a term after she became lost during a school trip.
Longinotto went on to Essex University to study English and European literature and later followed friend and future filmmaker, Nick Broomfield to the National Film and television school.
Longinotto is an observational filmmaker. Observational cinema, also known as direct cinema, free cinema or cinema verite, usually excludes certain documentary tec
www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/27/asif-Kapadia-amy-winehouse-doc
Observational filmmaking
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