Abstract
Sigmund Freud famously distinguished normal mourning and pathological melancholy by the affects’ duration and persistence. This temporal perspective paves the way for reading affect beyond its expressivity and considering it a question of form. In the article, this radical formalist approach is used to examine the way depressive affect manifests itself in the structure of the music video to Portishead’s Only You (dir. Chris Cunningham, 1998), in particular concerning tempo and rhythm. Eugenie Brinkema’s remarks on grief as an affective form marked by heaviness and 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 understanding 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.
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