Abstract
Through an examination of the theoretical debates inspired by the biopic, a genre whose popularity discouraged serious critical endeavors, this article retraces the hagiographic trend of the genre to “Jesus movies” whose symbolical use of Christic light has been appropriated to dignify secular figures. Referring to the adaptation of cinemagician Georges Méliès’s adaptation of Joan of Arc (1900), the essay also posits that key events in the lives of the medieval religious icon resonate with a fairy tale figure like Cinderella. It thereby demonstrates that the hagiographic patterns beneath the coming into being of “extraordinary individuals” date back to the origins of cinema itself.
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Notes
- 1.
The expression “warts-and-all” is a popular summary of the English military and political leader Oliver Cromwell’s (1599–1658) request to the court portrait painter Sir Peter Lely whom he asked to avoid all visual flattery when painting his portrait: “Mr. Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will not pay you a farthing for it.” (Walpole 1763: Chap. 1).
- 2.
As examples of feminist biopics, Bingham mentions Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table (1990), Center Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1992), Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000), The Notorious Betty Page (Mary Harron, 2006), and Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006).
- 3.
In The Postfeminist Biopic : Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen, Bronwyn Polaschek explores cinematic representations of three woman artists, and proposes a further conceptualization of the biopic genre by introducing a third category alongside Bingham’s paradigmatic female biopic and the overtly feminist biopic : “the postfeminist biopic .” What’s more, Polaschek sees artist biopics as a particularly interesting subgenre as they highlight creative and visionary, yet misunderstood individuals (Polaschek 2013).
- 4.
According to Bingham, only a few “feminist biopics” have managed to reverse the conventional strategies of the classical form of the biopic genre, thus proving how difficult it is to reinvent the female biopic (Bingham 2010: 10–11).
- 5.
As a sign of the biopic ’s ongoing definitions, Cheshire uses a hyphen between the prefix “bio” and the abbreviation “pic,” which endows both parts of the term with a seemingly equal autonomy. In the epigraph of her book, Bio-Pics: A Life in Pictures, Cheshire provides, by way of definition, the following explanation: “This book is dedicated to all my friends and family who have to hear me say ‘It’s Bio-Pics as in Biographical Pictures (films about real people), not Bi-opics, which sounds like some kind of a sight problem’” (Cheshire 2015: vii).
- 6.
As evidenced by Sacha Gervasi’s recent film Hitchcock (2012), a biopic can be as much about a celebrity as about somebody left in the shadow of the star figure; in Hitchcock, the famous filmmaker’s wife Alma Reville (Helen Mirren).
- 7.
Interestingly, Altman’s chapter on “The biopic ” begins by highlighting the word “game” when evoking the way film genres tend to be named either retrospectively (by critics) or prospectively (by producers) (Altman 1999: 38).
- 8.
For instance, An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990), Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes , 1998), I’m Not There (Todd Haynes , 2007), and Howl (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman , 2010).
- 9.
This is the case, for instance, in Ellen Cheshire’s Bio-Pics: A Life in Pictures which examines American and British biographical films since the 1990s through professional categories.
- 10.
Strikingly, the biopic often tends to be a life story of a lawbreaker; not necessarily of a gangster, but a politician, a singer, a musician, a writer, a painter, or another type of artist or innovator, such as the computer wizard Steve Jobs , who creates rules of his (more often than her) own. Since the idea of transgression and defiance so clearly impact the biopic typologies, one might wish to ask to what extent this characteristic might even constitute a prerequisite for any biopic persona who is, in one way or another, to challenge the rules and codes of society in order to acquire the label “larger-than-life.”
- 11.
Custen insists on “the biopic credo of the person who has personal visions where others merely wear blinkers” (Custen 1992: 191).
- 12.
The concept of metanarratives or “master narratives” (“grands récits”/“big stories”) was introduced by Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979 essay The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge where he defined postmodernism as a form of incredulity towards metanarratives. This incredulity or disbelief is particularly notable in some recent biopics, such as Todd Haynes ’ I’m Not There , where the biographical subject remains beyond the reach of the generic biopic structure, both as an absence and a movable, multiple presence.
- 13.
Despite this essay’s focus on Bible-inspired, Christian redemption and salvation narratives, this is, of course, not the only metanarrative impacting biographical films. In these films where collective and individual stories constantly crisscross, other frequent metanarratives include Freudianism, Marxist utopianism, bourgeois capitalism, Enlightenment, democracy, as well as feminism , insofar as it is possible to consider feminism as a homogenizing, ideological script.
- 14.
See, for instance, Her Country’s Call (Lloyd Ingraham, 1917), The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln (Phil Rosen, 1924), Abraham Lincoln (D.W. Griffith, 1930), Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939), and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (John Cromwell, 1940).
- 15.
Called “The Penny Profile,” the photograph taken by Mathew Brady in 1864 has served as a model for the Lincoln cent from 1909 onward.
- 16.
As a number of critics have claimed, contemporary biopics often foreground the personal problems of the subject, focusing on his/her sexual relations, drinking and/or drug abuse, family violence, etc. This seems to apply, more particularly, to biopics that follow a clear “rise-and-fall” pattern, functioning as formulaic “warning tales” that offer the spectator instances of warts-and-all voyeurism.
- 17.
The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (Alfred Clark, 1895), Cleopatra (Méliès, 1899), Joan of Arc (1900).
- 18.
During this period over 300 biographical movies were made in Hollywood alone.
- 19.
Since Méliès, the life story of Joan of Arc (embodied by Jeanne Calvière) has been readapted by several famous filmmakers, among them Cecil B. DeMille (with Géraldine Farrar, 1916), Carl Dreyer (with Renée Falconetti, 1927), Marco de Gastyne (with Simone Genevoix, 1929), and Victor Fleming (with Ingrid Bergman, 1948), to name some of the most notable examples.
- 20.
Charles Musser offered the following corrective: “attractions and narrative are efficiently combined because the theatrical turns that Méliès favored are also an integral part of the narration.” See Charles Musser’s 1995 article “Pour une nouvelle approche du cinéma des premiers temps: le cinéma d’attractions et la narrativité” (cited in E. Ezra 2000: 4).
- 21.
George Méliès appears in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo Cabret (2011), a “partial biopic ” in the sense that Méliès is not actually the main character of the film (that focuses on the life of a fictitious young orphan), but which nevertheless reads as a glowing tribute to the early French filmmaker.
- 22.
During an interview, Méliès admitted that he had been drawn to the elements of fantasy and spectacle present in Joan of Arc ’s life story (Musser 2011).
- 23.
The Story of Louis Pasteur (William Dieterle, 1936); Graham Bell (Irving Cummings, 1939); Edison, the Man (Clarence Brown, 1940).
- 24.
“Less than full-blown portraits, [biofilms] should be seen and understood as slices of lives, interventions into particular discourses, extended metaphors meant to suggest more than their limited timeframes can convey” (Rosenstone 2012: 122).
- 25.
Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman.
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Tuhkunen, T. (2018). Biographical Motion Pictures and the Resuscitation of “Real Lives”. In: Letort, D., Lebdai, B. (eds) Women Activists and Civil Rights Leaders in Auto/Biographical Literature and Films. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77081-9_10
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