Abstract

[Extract] reportage in the mid-2000s for many reasons: her self-destructive and sometimes bizarre
behaviour, her failure to conform to normative post-feminist femininity (Berkers and
Eeckelaer 2014), her controversial relationships, and her popularity as a somewhat
unlikely mainstream pop artist. Paparazzi intrusions on her privacy produced a constant
stream of images, the interpretation of which was frequently used for unsolicited
analysis of her physical and mental health. These images also provided material for a
series of quickly produced media obituaries to Winehouse after her death in July 2011,
such as Amy Winehouse: A Tribute (2011). In subsequent years, such fascination with
Winehouse continues, and audiovisual explorations of her life and death range from the
intimate, as in The Amy Winehouse Story (2013), to the ghoulish in Autopsy: Amy
Winehouse (2015). Hearsum and Inglis (2010, p. 240) argue that ‘obituary writing is
not … value-free, but acutely reveals public expressions of taste and value’. If so, what
do such audiovisual post-mortems of Winehouse tell us about the nature and framing of
contemporary fame? This article analyses Asif Kapadia’s cinematic biography Amy (2015)
in the light of this question.