Biography genre film criticism definition

Of unclear origins, the term seems to have originated in the trade papers and then penetrated the consciousness of producers and critics. On the one hand, the genre was perceived as a belated offspring of popular biographical formats at a time the early twentieth century when literary biography was moving to new and experimental forms of life writing.

So too its biased fetishization of the great white man as the agent of history has been much discussed from critical perspective on gender and race. In our era of media convergence, digital streaming, and the explosion of celebrity culture, the biopic persists in new transmedia formats as part of a digital culture obsessed with the self. As a quintessentially middlebrow genre, film studies and cinephile criticism long neglected the biopic.

Early journalistic overviews, such as Thomson — , pessimistically saw the form as increasingly a part of an impoverished culture of commodified celebrity in contrast, perhaps, to the mystique of the studio era but Elsaesser had a much greater influence on the field with a complex ideological historicization of the key s Warner Bros.

Anderson usefully brings together a large number of films and summarizes the key dynamics of the field, but it was in that George Custen published the seminal work on the genre at least in its studio-era formulation in the form of Custen Custen is an updated version of this work with a particular emphasis on post-studio era television production, but it was not until Bingham that another major monograph on the biopic would be published.

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The survey Cartmell and Polasek presents a compilation of historiographical and theoretical methods, whereas Hollinger challenges some of the key assumptions formulated in Bingham , taking the female biopic as the new focus for perspectives on genre and representation. Anderson, Carolyn. Edited by Wes D.