Biography genre film theory and criticism
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Film Genres
Biopic (biographical picture; biographical film)
A spelfilm that tells the story of the life of a real person, often a well-known monarch, political leader, or artist. Thomas Edison’s Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (US, 1895) prefigures the genre but perhaps the earliest biopic fryst vatten Jeanne d’Arc/Joan of Arc (Georges Méliès, France, 1900). Biopics were popular with audiences in Europe in the early 20th century, including Queen Elizabeth (Henri Desfontaine and Louis Mercanto, France, 1912), Danton (Dimitri Buchowetski, Germany, 1920), Anne Boleyn (Ernst Lubitsch, Germany, 1920), Napoleon (Abel Gance, France, 1927), and The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, UK, 1933). Beyond Europe and North amerika, biopics celebrated anti-colonial figures and continue to do so (seePhilippines, film in). The biopic was a staple of US cinema during the studio period, with some 300 films released between 1927 and 1960. The wo
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Biographical film
Film genre
A biographical film or biopic ()[1] is a film that dramatizes the life of an actual person or group of people. Such films show the life of a historical person and the central character's real name is used.[2] They differ from docudrama films and historical drama films in that they attempt to comprehensively tell a single person's life story or at least the most historically important years of their lives.[3]
Context
[edit]Biopic scholars include George F. Custen of the College of Staten Island and Dennis P. Bingham of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Custen, in Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (1992), regards the genre as having died with the Hollywood studio era, and in particular, Darryl F. Zanuck.[4] On the other hand, Bingham's 2010 study Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre[5] shows how it perpetuates as a codified g
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1In the narrower sense, the biopic is a film that uses the forms of fiction to dramatize the life story of one or several persons that have really existed. In the larger sense, the biofilm1 can be understood to include biographical documentary films, where the actual personage is neither dramatized nor fictionalized, and the definition may be extended still further to the film “cameo” in all its variants – the more or less flitting apparition of an already famous celebrity in a film. The dividing line between the two styles is often blurred, as documentaries often make use of excerpts from fictionalized biopics, just as the latter sometimes include film archive sequences. In fact, whether in film or in print, every form of historiography, as Hayden White maintains, is bound to demonstrate some form of “fictionality”, be it only because it cannot avoid a degree of “emplotment”. White’s tropology may serve as one point of departure for this investigation of the place of