Biopics
“Biopic” (sometimes spelled “bio-pic”) is the most common term used to refer to films representing any aspect of the lives of famous people from the past or the present. Of unclear origins, the term seems to have originated in the trade papers and then penetrated the consciousness of producers and critics. Its widespread use has replaced the more formal “biographical picture.” Originally associated with the prestige pictures produced by the Hollywood studios during the classic era, the term has also become naturalized in the domain of British cinema (particularly with the consolidation of studies on heritage cinema). “Biopic” has also entered (not without certain resistance) the vocabulary of the study of other national cinemas, such as the French cinema. While George Custen’s 1992 study of the studio biopic established the foundations for its study as a Hollywood genre, the debates about the biopic have pursued several lines of inquiry from the start. On the one hand, the genre was perceived as a belated offspring of popular biographical formats at a time (the early 20th century) when literary biography was moving to new and experimental forms of life writing. On the other, the biopic began to be studied as a form of historical cinema, and as such it could become the target of historians’ concerns about fidelity and (mis-)representation, agency, and the ideological subtexts underpinning the retelling of history as well as the reconstruction of national narratives. The genre’s unabated popularity throughout the history of cinema has spawned attempts to classify and analyze its recurrent iconography in terms of types of biographical subjects and social worlds represented in the biopic. Likewise, the biopic’s showcase of film performance and its star-making capabilities have proved particularly fertile field of debate. So too has its biased fetishization of the great white man as the agent of history been much discussed from gender-informed perspectives. In our era of media convergence and the explosion of celebrity culture, the biopic is at the center of a new wave of scholarly interest in transmedia formats (such as the biopic/docudrama hybrids) and the possibilities opened up by a new digital culture obsessed with the self.