The Merits of Biopics

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Steven H
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#1 Post by Steven H » Tue Aug 14, 2007 3:50 pm

Barmy wrote:biopix suck
Except for 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, Pialet's Van Gogh, Watkins' Edvard Munch, Dieterle's Life of Emile Zola, Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (and arguably, Escape From Shark Island), Mamoulian's Queen Christina, The Private Life of Henry VIII, Huston's Moulin Rouge, Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, Scorsese's The Aviator, and Hathaway's The Desert Fox I would agree with you.

edit: I forgot to mention all the Joan of Arc films (Dreyer, Bresson, and Rivette).

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tavernier
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#2 Post by tavernier » Tue Aug 14, 2007 3:55 pm

All those films are the exceptions that prove Barmy's Rule.

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Luke M
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#3 Post by Luke M » Tue Aug 14, 2007 6:03 pm

I liked Raging Bull.

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zedz
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#4 Post by zedz » Tue Aug 14, 2007 6:09 pm

Andrei Rublyov, The Colour of Pomegranates, Le Ciel est a vous, Il vangelo secondo Matteo, Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Malcolm X . . . (yawn)

Sure there have been a lot of bad bio-pics, but there have been a lot of bad detective movies and musicals as well. It's no reason to write off an example of any of those genres unseen.

And "exceptions prove the rule" does not mean "exceptions confirm generalisations" (as a moment's thought would tell you), it means "exceptions test generalisations and call into question their validity." (See above)
Last edited by zedz on Wed Aug 15, 2007 12:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

Greathinker

#5 Post by Greathinker » Tue Aug 14, 2007 9:02 pm

Biopics can be good films in their own right, but it can't be so hard to see that they're undesirable in that the filmmakers have to deal with constrictive factual restraints while taking artistic liberties at every other turn-- I dislike the ethics of presuming you can package a life in 2 hours, or even if you do a beautiful job, chances are you chose to focus on one area. This doesn't apply to fiction because no one presumes there is more to the characters beyond what's allowed within the screen time; that's what I fear happens to historical persons when the movie made has their name as the title. Ideally biopics would use their subject to explore the kind of person they were, and the territory they were a part of, instead throwing another layer of personality onto them, only made more recognizable. I can hardly see Andrei Rublev as a biopic because the film doesn't presume to be a detailing of a life; it instead does what I just mentioned.

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zedz
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#6 Post by zedz » Tue Aug 14, 2007 10:14 pm

Greathinker wrote:Biopics can be good films in their own right, but it can't be so hard to see that they're undesirable in that the filmmakers have to deal with constrictive factual restraints while taking artistic liberties at every other turn-- I dislike the ethics of presuming you can package a life in 2 hours, or even if you do a beautiful job, chances are you chose to focus on one area. This doesn't apply to fiction because no one presumes there is more to the characters beyond what's allowed within the screen time; that's what I fear happens to historical persons when the movie made has their name as the title. Ideally biopics would use their subject to explore the kind of person they were, and the territory they were a part of, instead throwing another layer of personality onto them, only made more recognizable. I can hardly see Andrei Rublev as a biopic because the film doesn't presume to be a detailing of a life; it instead does what I just mentioned.
I guess it depends how you define 'bio-pic', and if you define it so as to exclude the most ambitious, unusual and original instances (Colour of Pomegranates is another prime example - it's really like no other film ever made, but it still concerns the life of an artist), then of course the genre is going to look impoverished. If we define the genre as "films that attempt to depict the entire life story of a well-known and well-documented historical figure in linear fashion in 120 minutes or less" then, sure, that's going to be hellishly problematic, but if we open up the genre to embrace all the eccentric and inspired variations that have been created in the past hundred years, I don't really see that this kind of film is any more constrained or limited than the 'literary adaptation', say, or 'films based on actual events'.

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Via_Chicago
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#7 Post by Via_Chicago » Tue Aug 14, 2007 11:28 pm

Um...Utamaro and His Five Women anyone?

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domino harvey
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#8 Post by domino harvey » Wed Aug 15, 2007 2:53 am

but Hickenlooper added ten minutes to Factory Girl, the entire genre has been saved!

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Person
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#9 Post by Person » Wed Aug 15, 2007 11:51 am

Biopics aren't that good at telling the story of a historical figure. But they can often be damn good stories of interesting characters. They are highly effective at mythologizing. The opinions that people hold of many historical figures were and still are, shaped by cinematic presentations of those figures. Thoroughly researched biographies my present an abundance of facts about a person: where they were born; what their upbringing was like; their formal education; where they worked; their sexual conquests; their illnesses; their death. But a man or woman is not the totality of the 'facts' we know about them. We are then left to assume. To truly know a person, we'd have to experience what they experienced in exactitude. We would need to see the world through their eyes. I have always wanted to see an experimental biopic of a major historical figure that was shot entirely in the POV style, with real-time internal monologue (not voice over) and dream sequences. Goethe would be a good choice for this.

Other good biopics:

Becket (1964)
A Man for All Seasons (1966)
Patton (1970)
Ludwig (1972)
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)
My Brilliant Career (1979)
The Elephant Man (1980)
The Patience of Rosa Luxemburg (1986, Margarethe Von Trotta)
My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown (1989)
Ed Wood (1994)

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MichaelB
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#10 Post by MichaelB » Wed Aug 15, 2007 3:50 pm

I see no-one's mentioned Ken Russell yet, so I will.

(Mind you, his best biopics were generally made for the BBC in the 1960s - The Debussy Film arguably being the most interesting because it's as much about the difficulties of making an accurate biographical study on film as it is a portrait of the composer)

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Belmondo
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#11 Post by Belmondo » Wed Aug 15, 2007 4:49 pm

Many of the notoriously inaccurate musical biopics from the 1940's turn out to be highly enjoyable since the story is merely an excuse for great songs and production numbers.
"Night and Day", "Words and Music" and others are saved by the quality of timeless music contained therein; and a search for coded gay references is always fun, although neither of these two really goes near it with Cole or Lorenz.
May as well enjoy these classic but censored versions since Hollywood didn't do much better in the recent "De-Lovely".
Why bother complaining about Cary Grant as Cole when Kevin Kline proves equally unlikely.
Anyway, who cares; I'm here for the music and I already read the biographies.

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Michael Kerpan
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#12 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed Aug 15, 2007 5:07 pm

I believe Utamaro is better described as a fictional film involving a real character.

I'd say Naruse's adaptation of Fumiko Hayashi's "Wanderer's Notebook" (an autobiography of her younger years) is about as good as biopics get....

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zedz
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#13 Post by zedz » Wed Aug 15, 2007 5:19 pm

MichaelB wrote:I see no-one's mentioned Ken Russell yet, so I will.

(Mind you, his best biopics were generally made for the BBC in the 1960s - The Debussy Film arguably being the most interesting because it's as much about the difficulties of making an accurate biographical study on film as it is a portrait of the composer)
Duh! What an oversight! Russell's early work is a fine example of using the presumed familiarity of the biography, and the biopic format, to explore different kinds of narrative structures and storytelling techniques.

Another example that springs to mind, from slightly later, is the Dennis Potter-scripted Casanova series from the 1970s, which involves a fiendishly clever and beautifully orchestrated structure of flashbacks and flashforwards (it actually makes you realise that the flashforward is a technique that is almost never used in its genuine sense, or particularly effectively even when it is). It's a much more formally interesting work than Fellini's contemporaneous Casanova (which is probably my favourite late Fellini, and a film that also tackles the challenges of the biopic with originality and gusto).

While we're sniffing around Great Britain, Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein is also worth a look as a bold grappling with the form, and, if it counts (a crypto-auto-bio-pic?), there's the magnificent Bill Douglas Trilogy.

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MichaelB
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#14 Post by MichaelB » Wed Aug 15, 2007 5:51 pm

zedz wrote:Duh! What an oversight! Russell's early work is a fine example of using the presumed familiarity of the biography, and the biopic format, to explore different kinds of narrative structures and storytelling techniques.
The Debussy Film is as much an autobiopic as a biopic, if not more so, as Russell was clearly using it as a vehicle to express his own creative frustration - it was the first of his BBC films where he had relative freedom, and it's peppered with unsubtle digs at Huw Wheldon, his boss on the Monitor arts strand, who kept reining him in on earlier work like Elgar.

(Mind you, Wheldon's stipulation that the actors be filmed in long shot and never speak actually worked overwhelmingly to that film's benefit, as it meant Russell could fill the soundtrack with wall-to-wall Elgar and let the music make an eloquent case for itself)

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zedz
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#15 Post by zedz » Wed Aug 15, 2007 6:32 pm

MichaelB wrote:(Mind you, Wheldon's stipulation that the actors be filmed in long shot and never speak actually worked overwhelmingly to that film's benefit, as it meant Russell could fill the soundtrack with wall-to-wall Elgar and let the music make an eloquent case for itself)
Now that's an interesting little auteurist conundrum. That distance / reticence in the visual treatment, and the way it works alongside the emotion of the soundtrack, is one of my favourite things about the Elgar film.

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Mr Sheldrake
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#16 Post by Mr Sheldrake » Wed Aug 15, 2007 11:33 pm

Rossellini did a whole slew of bio pix, but aside from Saint Francis, they are largely unknown or unavailable (in US at least). I have a good recollection of the Louis XIV movie, I always wanted to see his Garabaldi movie.

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LionelHutz
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#17 Post by LionelHutz » Wed Aug 22, 2007 11:21 am

I don't know if it counts,but I've always considered The Naked Lunch a biopic.

David Ehrenstein
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#18 Post by David Ehrenstein » Wed Aug 22, 2007 12:39 pm

Ken Russell's Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World beats the far-from-sub-par Karel Reiz all to hell.

Song of Summer (Delieus) and Dante's Inferno (Rossetti) are also excellent. Brian Boitano's going to do a Triple-Lutz in the 9th Circle when we get to see Dance of the Seven Veils again (along with Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story one of the few TRULY banned films.)

Ken Russell's Film of Tchaikovsky and the Music Lovers (it's full and proper title) is a masterpiece. And Mahler and Savage Messiah ain't bad neither.

High time Warner Bros. issued DVDs!

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MichaelB
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#19 Post by MichaelB » Wed Aug 22, 2007 12:45 pm

David Ehrenstein wrote:High time Warner Bros. issued DVDs!
Not to mention the BBC.

<shamelessplug>But if anyone's in the Chichester area on Saturday afternoon, I'm repeating my heavily illustrated talk on Russell's Sixties career, which includes three clips from Dance of the Seven Veils - albeit shown silent for legal reasons - as well as clips from 14 other pre-1970 titles. </shamelessplug>

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#20 Post by David Ehrenstein » Wed Aug 22, 2007 1:19 pm

I trust you'll get into to why all the UK loves Elgar so much -- which naturally resulted in its turning on Russell with the full flowring of his talents.

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MichaelB
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#21 Post by MichaelB » Wed Aug 22, 2007 1:28 pm

I certainly do cover the reaction to Elgar and his other films, but I deliberately throw the audience into the deep end from the start by picking The Debussy Film as my first clip (the visit to Maeterlinck that degenerates into a wild orgy of duelling and dodgems), to make it clear from the outset that Russell's BBC work was often radically different from (and much more challenging than) Elgar and Song of Summer - which have always been by far the easiest of his early films to actually see, so give the hugely misleading impression that his BBC work was far more restrained and tasteful than what came later.

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