This work was originally submitted as a doctoral dissertation at the Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität in Munich in 2021. I undertook this research project within the Junior Research Group ‘Creativity and Genius,’ supported by the Elite Network of Bavaria with funding from the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts.
It was in the context of this research group that I first started thinking about how the concept of genius is still at work in contemporary culture. Biographical films about famous artists, scientists, political figures, entertainers, and even entrepreneurs seemed ubiquitous and their popularity was difficult to ignore: in the three years before I first dedicated myself to the subject in 2017, no fewer than nine biographical films had been nominated for the Best Picture Academy Awards; two had won in the Best Actor category. While I was writing my thesis, six biopics were nominated for Best Picture and four won Best Actor or Best Actress. I was struck by how many of these films tended to revolve around an emphatic idea of creative genius – as innate, inexplicable, and exceptional – that seemed anachronistic and out of step with the messages about creativity that dominate our culture at large: that everybody is at least potentially creative and that creativity can be learned and cultivated. (A notion of creativity that is particularly evident in the abundance of self-help books promising to unleash your creativity.) What was one to make of the disconnect between these successful films about singular, exceptional figures, whose gift is portrayed as unique (and sometimes pathological) and the insistence on creativity as a universal, trainable skill? In my reflections, I followed the research group’s central hypothesis, formulated by Jan Niklas Howe, of a continuity between the 18th-century aesthetics of poetic genius and the contemporary creativity discourse. Howe observes that although genius can be juxtaposed to creativity – an unattainable exception versus a commonly available resource – both concepts contain an unresolved tension between universality and exceptionality.1
As I immersed myself in studying the biopic, I realised how little research exists about a popular film genre that exerts such a profound cultural influence. At the same time, I became increasingly curious about questions of gender, both in terms of the biopic’s traditional disparity in the representation of men and women, and concerning the notions of genius and creativity in general. Exclusion of women seems to be one of the few historical constants in the discourse on genius, yet this, too, is a scandalously under-researched topic. The gendered representation of creative subjectivity thus became one of the main focuses of my study. However, since my considerations are largely limited to the context of the biopic, much more work remains to be done on the subject.
Inevitably, I had to limit my corpus to a handful of films. In doing so, I decided to focus on biopics of painters and writers. This choice served both a functional purpose (to develop a sharper focus and increase the coherence of this work) as well as a practical one: it would have been impossible for me to have kept up with the pace of new biopic productions. With this limited yet significant sample, I hope to provide some insight into the workings of the genius and gender in the contemporary biopic.
During the process of research, selection, and writing, I have been supported by many people and institutions around me. In particular, I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Jan Niklas Howe for believing in my project and helping me find focus while also encouraging me to explore new ideas and directions. I am grateful to the International Doctoral Program MIMESIS for the academic network it provided and for the opportunity to present and discuss my research with its fellows. In particular, my thanks go to Prof. Dr. Christopher Balme and PD Dr. Jörg von Brincken for their support and advice. Informal conversations can be just as fruitful as official presentations. For both, I thank the members of the Junior Research Group ‘Creativity and Genius’ and all the doctoral candidates I was lucky to meet through MIMESIS. I am particularly grateful to my friends and colleagues Antonia Stichnoth, Babylonia Constantinides, Christian Steinau, Johanna Spangenberg, and Franziska Link for their encouragement and feedback. I would also like to thank Stefanie Kemmerer from Wilhelm Fink Verlag for her help and reliable assistance, and Prof. Dr. Thomas Wortmann, Prof. Dr. Schamma Schahadat, and Prof. Dr. Cornelia Ruhe for accepting my work into the series ‘Medienkulturwissenschaft.’ Finally, a very special thanks goes to Adam for the many evenings spent watching and discussing movies, for his emotional support, for listening to my soliloquies on the biopic genre, and for the steady flow of strong coffee that kept me going through the tougher months of writing.
See Howe’s forthcoming ‘Einmüthige Antwort. Genie im 18. Jahrhundert,’ in Wie kommt das Neue in die Welt? Kreativität und Innovation interdisziplinär, ed. Friedrich Jaeger and Sabine Voßkamp (Berlin, Heidelberg: Metzler, 2023).