The appeal of biographical films about artists and writers rests on a central paradox. Implicitly, these films promise to explain exceptional creativity through the exploration of a person’s life; at the same time, the mystery of creative genius needs to remain unresolved to retain its fascination. Not only is the creative process itself essentially unfilmable; the notions of creativity and genius derive their power precisely from their ineffability.1
In this study, I analyse how representations of creative subjectivity and the creative process in biopics about artist couples intersect with notions of gender and gender difference. I centre my discussion on three films made in the first decade of the new millennium: Pollock (2000, directed by Ed Harris), about the American abstract expressionist artist, Jackson Pollock; Frida (2002, directed by Julie Taymor), which centres on the life of the Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo; and Bright Star (2009, directed by Jane Campion), about the English Romantic poet, John Keats. All three films revolve around heterosexual romantic relationships: Pollock’s marriage with fellow painter Lee Krasner, Kahlo’s tumultuous relationship with muralist Diego Rivera, and Keats’ romance with Fanny Browne. Using these films as case studies allows me to examine the specific points of contradiction, tension, and ambiguity present in the biopics’ portrayals of their protagonists, the artistic process, and gendered concepts of creativity. How do these films relate to the biopic’s genre conventions in depicting gender and creative subjectivity? How do they construct and represent its protagonist as exceptional? What cinematic means do the filmmakers use to portray the ‘unfilmable’ processes of artistic inspiration? And what can we infer from these representations about the notions of creativity and gender that inform each film?
Pollock, Frida, and Bright Star offer particularly fertile ground for exploring these questions. I argue that each of them is representative of different trends in commercial English-language biopic productions since 2000, both in terms of their representation of creativity and their gender politics. For all their differences, all three films also represent a general tendency of the 21st-century biopic to adhere to some genre conventions while breaking with others. In particular, they view the naïve celebration of creative genius of the classic Hollywood biopic with scepticism and bristle against its conventions, either through postmodern self-reflexivity and other distancing devices or by proposing alternative models of creativity. Despite these strategies, however, their representations of artists and writers ultimately remain within the paradigm of creative genius. What emerges from the film analyses is that, while in the past decades there has been a renewal of the genre under certain aspects (including a marked increase in female protagonists), the notion of the artist as a singular genius has gone largely unchallenged and still dominates mainstream biopic production. The biopic’s continued reliance on the paradigm of creative genius distinguishes it from other contemporary media and discourses in which the idea of singular, inborn genius has largely been replaced by the concept of creativity as a universal and trainable skill. In light of this, I suggest a structural affinity between the concept of genius and the film genre of the biopic, since both posit, at their centre, an individual’s exceptionality.2
At the same time, however, biopics need to make the main character relatable for film audiences.3 The tension that arises from this dual need to present figures both as exceptional and ‘like you and me’ can provide insights into the workings of the concept of creativity and the inherent tension between singularity and universality present in it.4 If the main challenge for a biopic’s reception and viewer response consists in portraying a person as both extraordinary and relatable, the central (technical) cinematic problem regards the representation of the creative process itself. Unlike many other examples in the biopic genre, Pollock, Frida, and Bright Star focus on the workings of the creative mind rather than just the life story of their protagonists. All three films attempt to translate the art of their subject into cinematic language. Henry Taylor has observed what he calls the ‘overflow effect,’ a transfer effect of elements from the film’s story to the film’s own (narrative) style.5 I expand Taylor’s argument by discussing how, in Pollock, Frida, and Bright Star, the overflow effect is more than a simple mimetic approximation of the protagonists’ visual style. Instead, the overflow effect is used to convey a specific thesis about the film’s subjects and their work. All three film analyses show how the filmmakers’ interpretation of an artist’s life and work is reflected in the narrative and visual devices used to depict them. These devices include the long takes and fluid camera movements that characterise Pollock and that not only mirror the protagonist’s drip painting technique but, crucially, represent Harris’ attempt to approach the state of mind of ‘creative flow.’ In Frida, the tableaux vivants emphasise the complete overlap between Kahlo’s life and her work as depicted by Taymor. Finally, Campion’s use of light dissolves the physical contours of her subjects and evokes the idea of a creative collaboration between the two lovers. In this, the three films exemplify the metafictional aspect that is present, perhaps inherently, in biopics about writers and artists: by exploring the work and the creative process of their subjects through cinematic means, these films also implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) deal with the relation of cinema to other media and art forms.
In addition to these two issues that confront biopic productions – portraying an exceptional yet relatable figure and finding a cinematic language for the representation of the creative process – I identify a third, (gender) political challenge. It concerns the relation of contemporary artist biopics to the history of the genre, which has traditionally been ideologically conservative, not only in its view of history but also in its portrayal of gender relations. Today’s biopics need to come to terms not only with the genre’s tradition of demeaning portrayals of women but also with the historical misogyny of the genius discourse and the subsequent exclusion of female artists and writers from the canon which, in turn, have influenced film productions and evaluations about who might and who might not deserve a biopic.
Biopics about heterosexual artist couples, such as the three chosen here, reveal the gendered lines along which representations of creativity operate with special force and clarity. The couple-structure is often used to highlight the exceptionality of one character through juxtaposition with the other; whether the ‘other’ is a romantic partner or a mediocre, conservative colleague. This has a wide range of implications for the gendered portrayal of creativity in films about artist couples. In the following analyses, I argue that 21st century biopics complicate and sometimes subvert some of the genre’s conventions in the gendered representations of artists and writers – which typically have reproduced the traditional confinement of women to a subordinate position in the art historical and literary discourses – while uncritically reproducing others. The two main strategies employed by recent biopics in this respect are, on one hand, the appropriation of the conventions of a genre traditionally focused on male genius and, on the other, the search for alternative models of gender and creativity, such as collective creative work.
In the past years, issues of gender have become more and more prominent in biographical films. In a particularly interesting development, recent biopics and costume films about female characters have used the past to negotiate issues of gender and women’s roles in the arts from a contemporary perspective. The fact that biopics lend themselves to such projections contributes to their appeal for female directors – including Taymor and Campion – who use biographical films to reflect on their own position as artists in an industry that is still largely male-dominated. This can be seen as a specific iteration of the biopic’s long-standing tendency for self-referentiality. Henry Taylor observes that the tension between fact and fiction inherent in the genre leads contemporary biopics to self-consciously highlight the ensuing contradictions and problematise their relationship to history.6 This self-reflexive inclination takes a particularly interesting form in biopics about artists and writers, which can be read as a displaced poetological statement, offering a commentary on the filmmakers’ own notions of creativity and their understanding of film as artistic work. Christopher Balme, Miriam Drewes, and Fabienne Liptay thus suggest that artist films should be examined as ‘double portraits’ in which the filmmakers are reflected in the depicted artist figures.7
What emerges from these initial observations is that the biopic is a fascinating genre which provides fertile grounds for exploring the contemporary perspectives on history, gender relations, creative work and artistic subjectivity (as well as how these perspectives have changed over time). Like cultural products in general and cinema in particular, biopics not only reflect widespread attitudes and ideas but also have the power to shape them. Biographical films exert a significant influence on popular views on the past and on specific historical figures; they can shift the cultural discourse, for example, towards the inclusion of previously neglected artists and writers into the canon by popularising their stories. Despite this, the biopic remains a largely understudied film genre in academic literature. In the next section, I briefly outline why this is the case and why I have decided to focus my research on biographical films.
Why Biopics?
David Bingham calls the biopic ‘the most maligned of all film genres.’8 Despite being one of the oldest and most consistently popular film genres, the biographical feature film has long been ignored by film scholars and ridiculed by critics. At the same time, biopics have remained popular with audiences and extremely successful at winning awards, especially for the actors portraying historical figures. In this sense, film biographies often suffer a fate similar to that of written biographies (especially popular biographies) which, with their unclear status between historiography and literature, are not quite at home in any discipline: looked down on by historians and literary scholars alike.9
One accusation frequently levelled at the biopic, aside from that of committing factual errors, is that it is an essentially conservative genre. Belén Vidal notes that ‘[b]iography and the biopic carry, in parallel ways, the stigma of backward modes of storytelling.’10 This refers not only to aesthetic conservatism in the adherence to genre conventions but also to a conservative ideology of history represented by biopics. In particular, critics accuse biographical films of perpetuating a view of history as made by the individual decisions of a few Great Men. Klein notes how the genre’s inherent need for suspenseful narratives contributes to the privileging of such ‘obsolete’ notions:
Since, due to the necessary build-up of suspense, biopics usually focus on particularly dramatic personal stories or pick out dramatic episodes from the lives of exceptional people, they contribute significantly to the public perception of historical processes as the results of existential individual decision-making. In this way, biopics might perpetuate ideas […] which have long been obsolete outside of these films.11
At the same time, Vidal argues that this largely conservative and quintessentially ‘middlebrow’12 film genre has recently been experiencing more attempts at subversion.13 This is due both to its shift from a producer-driven to a director-driven genre – as auteur films, biopics have partially become more experimental in their film language – and to a diversification of its subjects, which increasingly include women and People of Colour, a fact that Vidal attributes in part to the diversification of film audiences and producers. She suggests that we are seeing ‘a repositioning of what was once considered as an overwhelmingly conservative genre, into a vehicle for counter-hegemonic interventions.’14
Perhaps due to such attempts at renewal, the biopic has also attracted increased scrutiny from scholars in recent years. Bingham, whose work contributed to this shift, notes that in the early 2000s, the biopic started gaining more critical recognition, and filmmakers became more willing to market their films as classic biopics, a label that many of them had previously rejected.15 The 2019 publication of a Blackwell Companion to the Biopic16 might finally seal the genre’s respectability as a worthy object of study for film scholars. This book aims to add an original contribution to the growing body of research on a film genre where scholarship is still in its infancy.
My interest in the topic was sparked by the growing popular trend of successful biopics on exceptional, creative figures such as artists and scientists. The sheer surge in biopic productions and the prizes they were awarded seemed to make the genre difficult to ignore. Even more intriguing was the fact that many of these biopics appeared to be operating with an emphatic idea of ‘creative genius’ at odds both with academic discourses – which, for decades now, have been deconstructing such notions and declaring the ‘death of the author’ – and with a prevalent popular concept of creativity that can be found in various contexts; from pedagogical manuals to self-help books. The latter posits creativity as a universal faculty, present in everyone, at least in the form of a potential that can be cultivated and unfolded: everybody is creative.
Aside from the quantitative increase in biopic productions, there are also qualitative reasons to engage with this genre. Biopics on artists and writers are relevant not only to film studies but also to art history and literary studies as a hybrid, intermedial genre that interrogates the relations between the arts. Biopics raise questions about issues such as the politics of representation of the past, the oscillation between fact and fiction, the problem of how to compress a life into a narrative form, and the doubling of the body of the actor and the historical figure resulting in a ‘body too much.’17 My interest in the genre as a relevant site of academic enquiry is primarily motivated by how biopics about artists and writers shape collective ideas about creativity and the production of art and literature.
The fundamental, motivating question that is present as the background of this work is then not only how biopics represent creativity and gender, but the larger question of why this film genre, and especially its subgenres that deal with creative subjects, exerts such a fascination for contemporary audiences and filmmakers. How can the study of the biopic contribute to our understanding of creativity in this specific historical moment? I would like to offer some (speculative) thoughts on the subject, although my conclusions are far from exhaustive.
One of the biopics’ main draws for audiences is the reference to a true story, which is almost always emphasised in the marketing of these films. A ‘true story’ appeals to audiences by generating excitement about the possibility of learning a previously unrevealed truth about a famous person. It also draws on the pleasure of recognition of a well-known story and famous anecdotes and the enjoyment of seeing a star actor embody a historical figure. As feature films, biopics are, by definition, works of fiction. Nonetheless, the whole genre is based on the claim to historical referentiality and the promise to present an ‘authentic’ portrayal of a historical figure.18 Not least because the reception of biopics is so focused on the promise of authenticity,19 these films influence the public discourse about their subjects’ lives and notions about creativity. They shape the perception of history and the literary and artistic canon in mainstream popular culture, sometimes cementing the reputation or popular views of certain figures, at others challenging them and, at times, even suggesting a new canon.20
The expectation of a film’s authenticity also plays an important role in its relation to the discourse on creativity and genius. Being able to point to a historical figure as a ‘real-life genius’ serves as a confirmation of the possibility of exceptional giftedness. In other words, it confirms that genius can happen because it did happen. I propose that the biopic’s characteristic promise of authenticity is, in no small part, the promise to explain such exceptional talent through the facts of a life, but that ultimately this promise is disappointed in favour of the persistence of the mystery of genius’s origin. Historically, contemporary artists have rarely been assigned the label of genius. Genius tends to be located in past eras, thus both confirming its existence and maintaining its unreachability (through the absence from contemporary times).21 This strategy has been used in the discourse of creative genius since its beginnings and has also been applied to the biopic genre, which has traditionally focused on personalities from the past. This has changed in recent years. While biopics have long used events from the past to comment on contemporary issues, Rebecca Sheehan has observed the rise of a new category she calls ‘“instant” biopics.’22 These are films that focus on a living subject and recent events, ‘displacing the present from itself through a historicizing representation that remembers the still-living.’23 The representation of an artist in a biographical film will almost inevitably combine the reconstruction of the historical period in which the film is set with ideas (about creativity and more) from the time of the film’s production.
The recent trend of biopics about living characters also suggests a change in how the genre reveals a tension between the protagonist’s exceptionality and the possibility for the audience to identify with him or her by shifting the balance towards the latter aspect. This issue takes on more specific characteristics in the case of biopics about creative individuals like artists and writers, which might indicate a possible answer to the broad sociological question about the current success of the genre. I hypothesise a connection between the genre’s exponential popularity and recent cultural shifts in the understanding of creativity, specifically what Andreas Reckwitz has called ‘Kreativitätsimperativ’24 or the social imperative to be creative. Reckwitz suggests that in our era of ‘aesthetic capitalism’25 individuals are not only considered to be potentially creative but expected to be so in order to be successful, both in the labour market and their personal development alike. Norbert Grob has argued that artist figures in film (and especially the common association of genius and madness) have historically offered a contrast to and legitimation for the audiences’ perception of their own normalcy.26 But if, as Reckwitz suggests, the artist has now become the prototype for subjectivity,27 artists and writers, while being heralded as exceptional, should be expected to function less as figures of difference and increasingly as models for identification.28
These considerations might indicate a partial solution to that seeming contradiction that I observed at the onset of my research, and which informed my initial approach to the subject: the emphasis on exceptional creativity and the celebration of genius figures in a time in which creativity is not thought of as an exceptional but, rather, as a universal quality. Perhaps the idea of creative genius present in these biopics represents a form of exceptionality in degree but not in substance. The great and gifted men and women onscreen hold a mirror up to the audience, who are situated, in Reckwitz’s words, between the desire and the imperative to be creative.29
Genius and Gender in Biographical Narratives
Definitions of the terms ‘creativity’ and ‘genius’ are necessarily problematic.30 Genius, the older and more ideologically loaded of the terms, is a remarkably unstable concept. The etymology of the word can be traced to antique pagan beliefs: the Latin genius originally indicated a male family spirit (it shares a common rood with the verb gingere, to beget), and was then extended to a person’s attendant spirit and demons and spirits more generally.31 Starting in the late 16th century, the meaning of genius started being influenced by its association with the Latin ingenium, denoting a personal disposition, intelligence, talent or wit.32 Genius acquired its modern and still most common uses in the mid-18th century, when it came to indicate ‘[a]n exceptionally intelligent or talented person, or one with exceptional skill in a particular area of art, science, etc.’ or ‘[i]nnate intellectual or creative power of an exceptional or exalted type.’33 Still, the precise attributes of what exactly constitutes such genius have often changed or remained vague. There is no monolithic concept of genius, no single definition of what genius is (or has been thought to be). While genius always designates a form of exceptionality, the question of what this exceptionality consists of, or how it manifests itself, has been answered in the most varied and, at times, contradictory ways. ‘Genius’ can be thought of as a useful but empty term, to be filled with different contents depending on ideological and aesthetic preferences. Its fascination and power to shape discourse probably lie in this very indeterminacy and malleability.34
The notion of creativity is similarly difficult to define. The Oxford English Dictionary provides only a tautological description of creativity as ‘[t]he faculty of being creative; ability or power to create.’35 The term ‘creativity’ has broadly substituted ‘genius’ in the second half of the 20th century. While the adjectival form ‘creative’ is much older and was historically used for divine powers, the OED records the first use of the noun ‘creativity’ in reference to a human faculty only in 1875, for Shakespeare’s ‘poetic creativity.’36 ‘Creativity,’ introduced into the psychological discourse in the 1930s, started to gain traction in the 1950s,37 as the notion of genius – discredited by its association with totalitarian ideologies of the first half of the 20th century38 – was being abandoned in favour of a term that appeared more inclusive and less burdened by history. While the origins of the modern concept of creativity lie in psychological research, the idea of creativity as a universal faculty became widespread in the context of the countercultural movements of the 1960s, to then become more and more widespread and applied to the most diverse contexts.39 While creativity appears as the more inclusive term, it retains the definitional difficulties as well as some of the ideological baggage of the term ‘genius,’ such as some gendered connotations, discussed below. Beyond the issue of basic definitions, the question of what function these notions fulfil in a specific discourse is arguably more crucial: what qualities and faculties do they favour? Why are these attributed to some people and not others?
Extensive studies on the conceptual history of genius tend to be somewhat older, as the topic has not attracted much attention in the past decades. For a historical overview, I have relied on Jochen Schmidt’s 1985 two-volume Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens.40 Schmidt offers an account of the most influential thinkers on the subject of genius from the mid-18th century to World War Two. Though the focus is on German literature and philosophy, the book takes a comparative approach and addresses the broader cultural context and the ideas emerging from France and England. What is conspicuously absent from such general studies is an explicit discussion of how sex and gender figure in the conceptualisation of genius. This is surprising, as well as regrettable, as gender has figured prominently in the genius discourse. Despite this, the issue of gender and genius seems to be intractable and has not received the systematic attention that its cultural relevance would require.
To my knowledge, the only in-depth monograph on the topic is Christine Battersby’s seminal 1989 study, Gender and Genius.41 In her analysis, which ranges from the etymological and religious origins of ‘genius’ in Roman times to the psychological terminology of the 20th century, Battersby traces the continuous exclusion of women from the genius discourse. But while the status of genius has historically been considered out of reach for women, Battersby points to the long history of genius being associated with traits traditionally defined as ‘masculine’ and also qualities commonly understood to be ‘feminine.’ Especially in the 19th century, she writes, supposedly feminine traits such as sensitivity were attributed to male genius while the possibility of female genius was being denied more vociferously than ever.42 Battersby argues that throughout the shifting and often contradictory definitions of what genius is only one thing remains constant: ‘[…] whatever faculty is most highly prized is the one that women are seen to lack.’43 Battersby also acutely observes how gender biases persist in modern psychological research, which has substituted the term ‘genius’ for ‘creativity’ or ‘giftedness’ but continues to operate on many of the ideological implications of the genius discourse.44
This complex issue also intersects with debates about the gendered conventions of biographical narratives and is thus significant for debates about biographical films. Until very recently, biopics have been focused on celebrating so-called ‘Great Men’. In his influential biopic study Whose Lives Are They Anyway?, David Bingham goes as far as to define men’s and women’s biopics as two different genres.45 He writes that female-focused biopics have historically tended to reduce women’s lives to tales of dependency and downfall, ‘weighted down by myths of suffering, victimization, and failure perpetuated by a culture whose films reveal an acute fear of women in the public realm.’46 In Bingham’s analysis, the degrading ‘downward trajectory’ of women’s biopics can be avoided only by consciously applying a feminist point of view.47
In recent years, female protagonists have increasingly moved to the centre of biopic productions. A growing trend of biographical films about creative women in the arts as well as the sciences can be observed since the turn of the millennium.48 Apart from the commercial considerations that may motivate such a shift,49 the trend can be seen as part of a broadly defined feminist project of allowing women to gain cultural visibility. Some of these films bring recognition to forgotten women, while others celebrate well-known and beloved feminist icons – often blending their image with that of Hollywood stars. In either case, biopics about exceptionally creative women have continued to grapple with the genre conventions of the biopic and the traditionally demeaning treatment of female protagonists described by Bingham. This growing corpus of female biopics, many of which explicitly position themselves as feminist works (either through intertextual references to feminist texts in the film itself or through paratextual marketing strategies), prompts the question of how these films approach the representation of creative women’s lives. The question regards both the films’ take on misogynistic genre conventions and the historically exclusive, male-dominated discourse on genius and creativity. In discussing cinematic portrayals of female writers, for instance, Hila Shachar notes that ‘[…] creative authorial identity is often gendered male ideologically, even if the author is a woman. That is, we have inherited ideologies of both gender and creativity that align masculinity with authority, regardless of the sex of the writer in question.’50
Two main approaches have emerged from feminist responses to these issues. They can be characterised as arguments about the merits and demerits of a strategy of appropriation of biographical genre conventions and male-dominated ideas of genius. These debates do not only apply to the representation of creative women in biopics, but more generally, to the idea of the canon, both in literature and art history and its historical exclusion of women and minority groups. When applied to the conventions of biographical narratives, such discussions raise the question of whether women’s lives require different narrative forms than the ones historically used to describe and construct male subjectivity. In an essay in a collection on the theory of the biography, Esther Marian and Caitríona Ní Dhúill identify the conflicting approaches as representative of the opposition of equality feminism and difference feminism.51
The aim of feminist biographers in the early years of second-wave feminism, they explain, was to bring forgotten women into the official historiography by expanding the canon to include Great Women next to the Great Men. In doing so, the basic ideological premises of biographical narratives were rarely questioned. For this reason, there were critics of this approach within the feminist movement. They rejected classic biography’s grand narratives in favour of micro-narratives and alternative models that focused, for instance, on collective and communal structures. Their aim was not merely to avoid reproducing the patriarchal models of biographical narratives but to affirmatively emphasise specifically female/feminine qualities. This, conversely, attracted accusations of essentialism and of replicating the ideology of difference that enabled women’s oppression in the first place.52
Battersby discusses similar debates in relation to the notions of genius and artistic creativity. She criticises concepts such as écriture feminine, with its emphasis on a feminine language linked to the specificity of the female body. Battersby rejects such notions less because of the danger of slipping into essentialism and more out of a pragmatic concern that ideas that ‘undermine the fiction of a stable and unitary ego’53 and construct women as ‘other’ might make it difficult for female artists to achieve respect and visibility in a cultural climate still deeply influenced by the idea of the artist as a singular, creative genius. As the subtitle of her book, Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, suggests, Battersby takes a programmatic position and calls for a feminist appropriation of the term ‘genius’. Because of the persistent influence of the myth of artistic genius, she argues,
a feminist aesthetic cannot simply join the post-structuralists and their allies in deploring the individualism and the élitism of an aesthetics that builds on individually great artists. The concept of genius is too deeply embedded in our conceptual scheme for us to solve our aesthetic problems by simply amputating all talk of genius, or by refusing to evaluate individual authors and artists. Before we can fundamentally revalue the old aesthetic values, the concept of genius has to be appropriated by feminists, and made to work for us.54
In other words, Battersby feared that a deconstruction of the genius figure might prove harmful to female artists who never had the chance to be considered geniuses: that while male genius might need to be deconstructed, female genius would need to be constructed in the first place.55 For this reason, she envisions a ‘feminist aesthetics […] that exposes the prejudice that represents the female as lacking, seeks to show how we can escape it … and then goes on to retrace matrilineal traditions of cultural achievement. A feminist aesthetics interests itself in female, not feminine, genius.’56
Since Battersby’s Gender and Genius was published in 1989, the terms of these debates have, in part, shifted. Poststructuralist theory, as well as Judith Butler’s work and the rise of interdisciplinary interest in gender studies, have greatly contributed to this change. Marian and Ní Dhúill outline how the interest in gender as a social and cultural construction allows to take these questions beyond the realm of feminist biography and historiography and to ask, more fundamentally, how biographical narratives contribute to the construction of gendered subjectivity:
The shift in the research interest is also apparent in the theory of biography, insofar as the more recent contributions no longer solely or primarily aim to fight for a place for women in the biographical canon, but rather ask what significance biography as a genre has for the construction of gender. In a much more fundamental way than before, the critical perspective is directed at the modes of biographical writing, at the premises on which they are based and at the models of subjectivity that biography created The question of why, for centuries, biographical writing has been concerned almost exclusively with men is thus posed in a new and completely different way, namely no longer as a question about the monopolisation of an essentially neutral means of representation by men, but as a question about the connection between the very construction of gender and the writing methods and theoretical premises of biography.57
Contemporary biopics most provocatively reflect these debates in the form of ‘deconstructive’ postmodern films that question the unity of the subject and highlight the moment of performativity in the construction of identity, including gender identity, such as I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007).58 But the films that reflect prevailing popular biopic trends – and which are the more pertinent to the scope of this work – do not radically question either gender identity or biographical traditions. On the one hand, new biopics with female protagonists tend to appropriate classic male biopic conventions. in order to bring more women into the canon of a ‘Hollywood view of history’59 (this appropriation also reflects a general ‘neoclassical biopic revival.’60). On the other hand, they highlight the specificity of female creativity; for example, through a focus on women’s embodied experience. The film Frida is one example of this recent wave. While such films present themselves as a celebration of their female protagonists, this approach also risks reinscribing ideas that have historically been used to exclude women from artistic activities, for instance by reinforcing the notion of an incompatibility between creative work and childbearing.61
Another trend finds a progressive hybridization of the biopic and costume drama with literary adaptations, romances and so-called ‘chick-flicks’ and is characterised by an ironic play with genre conventions and a self-consciously ‘girly’ aesthetic. This evolution of the biopic is exemplified by a popular film like Becoming Jane (Julian Jarrold, 2007), but also finds expression in the work of indie directors, for instance in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006). We are seeing the emergence of a subset of costume films, including biopics, as a new form of ‘woman’s picture’ aimed primarily at female audiences as a privileged place where to negotiate different models of femininity using the past as a backdrop.62
Several authors have observed that the political positions of the woman’s biopics of recent years are often ambivalent, particularly in relation to feminism. This is true of both of the above-described trends. Biopics, like other historical films, frequently incorporate feminist discourse and comment on the oppression of women in the era they are set in, implicitly highlighting the progress made on women’s rights, but also sometimes portraying oppression and discrimination as things of the past. At the same time, they tend to portray heterosexual romance as the central element in the protagonist’s life and identity formation, thus reproducing a patriarchal view that defines women through their relations to men. Madeleine Dobie speaks of ‘ideological splitting,’ writing that that period films ‘gesture toward the social and political concerns of feminism, but also venture into the well-charted territory of another genre of film: the date movie or romantic comedy.’63 This ideological splitting is then especially marked in the trend of the ‘girly’ biopic described above, even if the tropes of the romantic comedy are often tinged with ironic self-consciousness.
Bronwyn Polaschek, observing similar characteristics, speaks of the ‘postfeminist biopic’ as a contemporary iteration of the biopic that is distinct from both the classic woman’s biopic and the explicitly feminist biopic described by Bingham: ‘While some contemporary female biopics remain mired in the outdated conventions of the genre, and recent feminist biopics overtly reject these conventions, the postfeminist biopic uneasily combines elements from both […].’64 Postfeminism is, in many ways, a problematic term, but it is useful for describing the apparent oscillation (or, to use Dobie’s term, ‘ideological splitting’) that can so often be observed in women biopics. Belén Vidal cautions against periodising ‘post-feminism’ as following (and substituting) feminism in a linear fashion. Instead, both she and Polaschek use the term to refer to tensions between ‘the legacy of the historically specific vocabulary (and histories) of (second-wave) feminism, and the retreat into a (pre-feminist) conception of femininity.’65 In this sense, Vidal writes that
[i]f the contemporary biopic is to be considered postfeminist it is not because it has forgotten the lessons of feminism or because it regards them as obsolete; on the contrary, it is my contention that the contemporary biopic shows a renewed engagement with the formative narratives of feminism – the struggle for women’s self-expression; the identification between women artists now and then – while filtering them through the politics of romance.66
Of the films covered in this analysis, both Frida and Bright Star can be broadly located in this frame of the postfeminist biopic. While all three films discussed here revolve around couples, only Bright Star can truly be described as a romance. With its focus on the love story between Fanny Browne and John Keats and the way it uses visual conventions of the heritage film, such as a ‘prettification’ of the past and a focus on beautiful costumes and domestic interiors, Bright Star can be seen as especially susceptible to the ‘ideological splitting’ described by Dobie. But Frida too, despite its emphasis on the protagonist’s independence and strength in the face of adversity, depicts Kahlo’s marriage with Rivera as the main source of meaning in her life, thus illustrating the ‘uneasy’ mix identified by Polaschek in the postfeminist biopic.
These two films show how various and often divergent approaches to the question of the representation of the lives of creative women can result in different sorts of internal tensions within the postfeminist biopic. While the observation of a postfeminist trend in a moment that re-engages with feminist questions in new ways can be useful for locating these films within a broader cultural context, my research interest goes beyond the discussion of these films in relation to either feminism or post-feminism. In particular, I examine how the representation of a gendered subject relates to the representation of notions of genius and the creative process. This applies not only to the female protagonists of the films but to the male ones as well, since concepts of genius and creativity intersect in various ways, both with notions of femininity and masculinity.
About This Book
The book is subdivided into four chapters, which comprise an introductory chapter and three chapters, each focused on the analysis of a single film. The first chapter, ‘The Biopic as a Film Genre,’ defines the term ‘biopic’ and discusses the salient characteristics and most important historical developments of the genre from early cinema up to the present day. This overview serves as a framework that enables me, in the following chapters, to discuss each film within the context of the genre’s history and conventions. The first chapter also introduces topics such as the relationship between fact and fiction in the biopic or the genre’s traditionally different depictions of men and women, which are relevant for the films I examine. In addition, this chapter contains a commented survey of literature on the biopic. While extensive, this survey is not meant to be a complete list of publications on the biopic but to provide a general overview of the state of academic research on the topic. It broadly traces how scholarship on the subject has changed and shifted focus over time and draws attention to some of the most influential literature on the topic.
Chapters two, three, and four are dedicated to extensive thematic and formal analyses of Pollock, Frida, and Bright Star respectively. These three films, made between the years 2000 and 2010, can all be described as conventional biopics. At the same time, they portray their protagonists and the creative process in ways that break with various genre conventions. In this, they illustrate a typical feature of the 21st-century biopic, which Bingham labels ‘neoclassical,’67 namely, the tendency to combine conventional and innovative modes of representation. The biopic of the 21st century distinguished itself from the monolithic, producer-driven, formulaic genre of classic Hollywood analysed by George Custen in his study Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (1992), not least because of radically changed media landscapes and material conditions of film production. Although the biopic has historically been considered a very conservative genre, attempts to subvert it entered the (Hollywood) mainstream in the new millennium.68
As Hila Shachar persuasively argues, contemporary biopics present unique characteristics both in terms of themes and visual language.69 Yet Custen’s book remains the most influential study of the genre to date, while investigations of the contemporary biopic are still relatively few. It is my hope to partially fill this research gap with my study. To this end, I favour in-depth analyses of a small number of case studies over Custen’s ‘supertext’ approach to the genre.70 This allows me to consider the peculiarities of individual representative films and the complex and often contradictory portrayals of creativity and gender in contemporary biopics. The films chosen for this study cover a broad spectrum of commercial English-language biopics since 2000. Each one exemplifies different trends of the contemporary biopic. At the same time, they are exemplary of the 21st-century biopic’s tendency to combine conventional and innovative elements. In their individual ways, Pollock, Frida, and Bright Star all challenge certain conventions and reproduce others when it comes to both the (gendered) idea of creativity and artistic subjectivity and its traditional filmic representation.
Pollock celebrates the autonomous, spontaneous, original artist while at the same time reflecting on the very construction of the artist’s image through popular media. Frida breaks the genre conventions by employing them to portray a disabled, bisexual, communist Mexican woman rather than the typically ‘male, white, and American’71 protagonists of the classic Hollywood biopic (and of a neoclassic biopic like Pollock). In the scenes showing the genesis of her paintings, Frida breaks the realistic illusion through the use of tableaux vivants and animations and hints at the instability of the biographical subject by symbolically fracturing and multiplying it in mirrors and paintings. However, rather than radically deconstructing its subject, the film uses these devices to reinforce the connection between life and work typical of biographical narratives. Lastly, Bright Star tries to break away from the cliché of the solitary genius that dominates the biopic’s representation of creative subjectivity. Instead, the film suggests a model of collaborative creative work and offers an uncommonly mundane portrait of a writer. Bright Star also questions the gendered hierarchy of high art and (feminine) craft by concentrating on Fanny’s sewing. But here, too, in the end, the celebration of the male poet ends up prevailing and reinstating the conventional hierarchies.
I have chosen to focus on these rather ambiguous takes on genre conventions rather than more unconventional films that radically deconstruct the notion of creative genius or the biopic’s form. I am interested in the contradictions and internal tensions that characterise contemporary mainstream biopics’ relation to the idea of genius and their oscillation between the celebration of their subject in the classic biopic form and self-reflexive breaks with this traditionally conservative genre. The choice of looking at mainstream biopic productions rather than more experimental or avant-garde films72 is also grounded in my interest in the broad sociological question, briefly outlined above, of the significance of the biopic as both an expression of cultural trends and an influence on the public discourses about the canon, gender, and creativity. Even if it cannot be comprehensively addressed given the scope of this work, this issue influenced the selection towards privileging successful English-language productions that feature well-known actors and/or directors and that had international commercial releases.73 Pollock, Frida, and Bright Star also represent three different approaches to the depiction of artist couples. The focus on a romantic relationship is, of course, not unique to these films. Indeed, the double plotline, whereby one plot concerns a love story, and the parallel plot concerns a different narrative, often the protagonist’s career or a ‘quest,’ is a staple not only of biopics but of many feature films and especially of the classic Hollywood film.74 What makes the films I have chosen particularly fruitful for the analysis I subject them to is that they feature (heterosexual) couples in which both partners are artists. This feature raises the question of how the couple-structure influences the representation of creative subjectivity, artistic work, and gender roles.
Pollock displays a critical awareness of gender dynamics by pointing to the element of performance and constructedness of the model of masculinity embodied by the American artist-cowboy Jackson Pollock in the 1950s. At the same time, the film reproduces misogynist tropes when it comes to gendered ideas of creativity, and relegates Lee Krasner in the role of the ‘other’, rather than portraying her as an artist in her own rights. At first glance, Frida is a variation of the most clichéd depiction of an artist couple: the creative young woman falls in love with the older male master. But unlike other films such as Camille Claudel (1988) and Artemisia (1997), Frida avoids the mentee-mentor dynamic characteristic of female artist biopics by portraying Kahlo as a self-assured artist independently of her relationship with Rivera. Similarly to Pollock, Taymor employs a structure of juxtaposition but inverts the gender roles: it is Kahlo who is celebrated according to the conventions of the artist biopic, while Rivera serves as the contrast foil to her genius. But the same qualities take on different connotations when the gender dynamic is inverted, and the emphasis on emotion and spontaneity also cements Kahlo’s connection to the realms of domesticity and feeling, traditionally associated with femininity, while the (traditionally masculine) public realms of politics and the international art market remain, in the film’s depiction, Rivera’s domain.
Bright Star is representative of a recent trend of biopics that explore a famous character, in this case, John Keats, through the perspective of a woman largely forgotten by history.75 It can be considered a film about an artist couple because Fanny Brawne, although not an artist in the fine arts, is portrayed as having an exceptional talent for sewing and embroidering. Despite the disparity between Brawne’s work and that of the poet Keats, this is the only instance in the films I look at where the two partners collaborate, even though this collaboration takes an unusual form. Campion shows a gradual merging of the lovers’ creative imaginations, in contrast to the strict juxtaposition in the other films.
For all their differences, however, these three couples are similar in one crucial respect; none has children. The issue is addressed explicitly in Frida and in Pollock (while it does not feature in Bright Star). In both cases, childlessness is connected to the notion of a fundamental incompatibility between creative production and biological reproduction for women. In Pollock, this idea is expressed by Krasner’s pragmatic considerations about the difficulties of reconciling motherhood with her life as an artist. In Frida, it takes a symbolic form, as Kahlo’s creative impulse is presented in part as a compensation for her inability to have children, thus referencing a long tradition of conceiving of art simultaneously in analogy and in opposition to childbearing. While most biopics about artists and writers try, in different ways, to depict the creative process, I have chosen films in which this feature is particularly pronounced. I can think of few biopics, for instance, that feature painting scenes as extensive as those in Pollock or that attempt to capture the workings of the artist’s mind as visually as Frida. Translating the creative process onto the screen necessarily takes different forms in films about writers and visual artists. If the act of painting can be visually and cinematographically extremely attractive – a fact that Pollock makes ample use of in its long painting scenes – it has often been remarked that writing is one of the most uncinematic activities imaginable.76 I discuss two films about painters and one about a poet – categories chosen in part because they are the two most widely represented in the artist biopic and the ones for which there exist the most established (sub)genre conventions. Often, academic literature treats the painter and the writer biopic separately as micro-genres. This focus leads most studies to overstate the specificities of such micro-genres and to overlook the connections between them, such as the common interest in the representation of the creative process.77 I wanted to take a more inclusive comparative approach in exploring both the points of contact and the differences in biopics about writers and artists.
Furthermore, I have chosen one film about a figurative artist and one about an abstract painter because these two forms also find very different expressions on screen. For example, Frida visually models several scenes after Kahlo’s self-portraits and uses the content of her work to illustrate specific events in her life, while Pollock consistently avoids direct visual references to his subject’s painting and, instead, mimics the artist’s ‘action painting’ gestures in the camera movements. In this study, the choice to focus on a few in-depth film analyses limited the biopics surveyed here to two professional categories, but the field could be extended further: while painters and poets are in a way the most representative figures in the category of ‘genius,’ the contemporary biopic’s interest in exceptionally creative figures also includes musicians, sculptors, designers, mathematicians, scientists and, recently, (tech) entrepreneurs. The different forms that the depiction of creativity takes in these remains an open question for future research.
Methods of Analysis
I have derived my research and analysis methods both from the discipline of film studies and the field of comparative literature. The latter has long been concerned with topics such as the history of the ideas of genius and creativity, the complex relationship between fact and fiction in biographical works, and the relation between literature and film adaptations. The last of these is relevant not only for writer biopics and the way in which they use literature in the film text, but also more generally if we view biopics as adaptations in their own right. In the most general sense, biopics attempt to adapt a person’s life for the screen.78 Often, they are direct adaptations of written biographies of their subjects, and, at times, the resulting films are ‘double adaptations’ of a person’s life or their most famous work or works.79
Throughout this book, I take an inductive approach to each film. Rather than applying a unified theory to all films, I have tried to engage specifically with each one and to derive the best-suited methods of analysis and theoretical frameworks from the characteristics of the films themselves – including its formal, visual, and narrative characteristics, but also the biographical, art historical or literary discourses that provide its context. I believe that this approach has resulted in nuanced and also surprising findings, both as regards my analyses of the single films and the conclusions that I have drawn from my comparative readings.
This detailed engagement with the primary film texts required the application of various methods of film analysis. These include an analysis of narrative aspects, the contextualization of single films within historical and generic conventions, as well as detailed scene analyses, including discussions of mise-en-scène, cinematography, composition, sound, editing, the use of film space. I have dedicated considerable attention to analysing the opening sequences of the films – as these offer insights into the film as a whole80 – and the scenes that are focused on the acts of painting and writing. While the specifically cinematic elements are fundamental in understanding the films and their depiction of the creative process, my academic background in comparative literature and literary theory is reflected in the interest in narrative structures. Applying the methods of literary analysis proved especially fruitful for my reading of Bright Star. In my chapter on that film, I pay particular attention to Campion’s intertextual references to the works of Keats to see how Bright Star engages with literary and poetological texts in order to explore gender and genius.
I attempt to situate the examples of 21st-century writer and artist biopics into a broader context, using two main frameworks. The first is that of biographical narratives in general, and the second is that of the (historically and culturally) gendered conceptual history of genius and creativity. At present, there are few major studies of the biopic. Interest in the subject, however, appears to be growing.81 By contrast, there is a much larger corpus of theoretical work on the written biography as either a historiographical or literary genre. The biography’s relation to factuality and fictionality – an issue that has gained increased attention through the tendency of postmodern texts to hybridise and cross genre boundaries between fictional and historical narratives – has been explored extensively in literary studies. Biography has also been entangled in debates surrounding the status of historiography, most prominently in the wake of Hayden White’s equation of historiography’s (and biography’s) use of emplotment and narrativisation (typical of literary texts) with fictionality.82As briefly outlined above, feminist scholars have also scrutinised biographical genres to ask how women’s lives are narrated (and could be narrated) and how biographical narratives both shape gendered notions of subjectivity and are influenced by them. Though the present book does not aim to be a theory of film biography, the insights into biographical narratives derived primarily from the field of literary studies have sharpened my perspective on the biopic as a cultural product that partakes in a biographical tradition much older than film itself.
The second field of literary studies I have drawn on concerns the history of the idea of creative genius. This historical background is fundamental for understanding the depictions of artists and writers onscreen and the underlying notions of creative subjectivity. I have found this particular perspective to be surprisingly lacking in studies on the biopic, in which concepts such as ‘genius’ or ‘creative’ are often taken for granted. Scholars of the biopic rarely question the historical precedents or ideological implications of these loaded concepts. Nor is it often acknowledged that definitions of these terms tend to be fluid at best and obscuring at worst. For these reasons, I engage with the complex history of the idea of creative genius while, at the same time, looking at how each film individually constructs its own notion of creativity, genius, or the creative process.
Since, as Christine Battersby points out, notions that were developed and popularised in the context of theories of creative genius remain deeply influential, the question of how these notions intersect with concepts of gender is extremely relevant to this day. So far, this question has not received the amount of theoretical and historical scrutiny it deserves. While exploring the full historical dimension of gendered notions of genius and creativity is beyond the scope of this work, I hope to make a modest contribution by examining how these issues play out in a medium – narrative film – with a high degree of cultural influence. In light of this, it should come as little surprise that, alongside film and literary studies, I employ the methods and theoretical framework of gender studies. On the one hand, I discuss what models of gender identity inform the analysed films. On the other, I also assume that biopics contribute to the cultural construction of gender just as they participate in the construction of notions of creativity and artistic subjectivity.
According to Howe, genius functions as the ultimate explanation, itself inexplicable, for the emergence of new ideas. Howe also identifies the topos of inexplicability as central to the political appeal of the genius figure. See Howe, ‘Einmüthige Antwort’; and Howe, ‘Nach dem Schicksal. Napoleon bei Heine und Tolstoj,’ German Life and Letters 75, no. 3 (2022): 381.
Recent ‘deconstructive’ approaches to the genre seem to challenge this notion. Bingham cites the emergence of a subgenre of biopics ‘of people who don’t deserve them’ (Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 2010), 147). But even films that go beyond the accepted canon of ‘great’ personalities confirm the genre’s affinity to the idea of exceptionality. In a biopic about Ed Wood, a legendarily bad film director, for instance, the protagonist resembles those of classic celebratory biopics: he is an outsider and visionary convinced of his own greatness whose ‘genius’ is not recognised by his contemporaries. The difference between him and a van Gogh, is that Wood’s work is not appreciated by posterity either. On Ed Wood, see also section 1.3.3.
See also Sigrid Nierberle, Literarhistorische Filmbiographien: Autorschaft und Literaturgeschichte im Kino, Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung 7 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 25.
Howe already identifies this dialectic of singularity and universality, typical of the ‘creative industries’ of the 20th and 21st century, in Edward Young’s 1759 essay Conjectures on Original Composition. Howe, ‘Die Anfänge des schöpferischen Menschen. Edward Young’s Conjectures,’ in Kritische Kreativität. Perspektiven auf Arbeit, Bildung, Lifestyle und Kunst, ed. Kim Kannler et al. (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2019), 21–42; and Howe, ‘Einmüthige Antwort’.
Henry McKean Taylor, Rolle des Lebens: Die Filmbiographie als narratives System, Zürcher Filmstudien 8 (Marburg: Schüren, 2002), 320.
See Henry M. Taylor, ‘Die Realität des Imaginären: Innerlichkeit und Metalepse in The Hours (USA/GB 2002’),’ in Ikonen, Helden, Aussenseiter: Film Und Biographie, ed. Manfred Mittermayer et al. (Wien: Zsolnay, 2009), 16.
Christopher B. Balme, Miriam Drewes, and Fabienne Liptay, ‘Vorwort,’ in Die Passion des Künstlers: Kreativität und Krise im Film, ed. Christopher Balme, Fabienne Liptay and Miriam Drewes (München: Et+k, 2011), 7–8. The authors speak of ‘Doppelbildnisse’ in the German original.
Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?, 11. For a more extensive discussion of the biopic’s reception in academic literature, see section 1.2.
See Christian Klein, ed., Grundlagen der Biographik: Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 1. Bernhard Fetz goes as far as calling biography ‘theorieresistent’ or ‘theory-resistant.’ Bernhard Fetz, ed., Die Biographie: Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 3.
Belén Vidal, ‘Introduction: The Biopic and Its Critical Contexts,’ in Brown; Vidal, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, 8.
‘Dadurch, dass Biopics aufgrund des notwendigen Spannungsaufbaus zumeist besonders dramatische Schicksale thematisieren bzw. aus dem Leben besonderer Personen dramatische Episoden herausgreifen, tragen sie wesentlich zum öffentlichen Verständnis von historischen Prozessen als Ergebnissen existentieller individueller Entscheidungssituationen bei. Auf diese Weise perpetuieren Biopics möglicherweise Vorstellungen […], die jenseits dieser Filme längst obsolet sind.’ Christian Klein et al., ‘Biographische Erzählungen in audio-visuellen Medien,’ in Klein, Handbuch Biographie, 163. My translation.
See Vidal, ‘Introduction,’ 20; and Tom Brown, ‘Consensual Pleasures: Amazing Grace, Oratory, and the Middlebrow Biopic,’ in Brown; Vidal, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture.
Categories such as ‘conventional’ or ‘subversive’ that are sometimes used in this book refer primarily to a film’s relation to genre conventions, that is, to whether it conforms to a prevalent pattern or not. That said, because of the association of the classic (Hollywood) biopic with ideological conservativism, these categories often also reflect political positions that can roughly be categorised as conservative (for conventional biopics) and progressive (for more innovative or subversive films). For instance, the protagonists of the Hollywood biopic of the first half of the 20th century, which set many of the genre’s conventions, were largely powerful white men. The more recent films centred around women, ethnic minorities or LGBTQ characters break with the conventions of the genre and, at the same time, align with a progressive political agenda that pushes to increase the mediatic representation of various minoritarian groups.
Vidal, ‘Introduction,’ 18.
Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?, 13.
Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek, eds., A Companion to the Biopic, 1st (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019).
See Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much,’ Screen 19, no. 2 (1978).
There are instances in which the relationship between fact and fiction (or rather between the fictional filmic narration and other, both fictional and non-fictional biographies) is relevant for my analysis: this is the case when the filmic representation differs considerably from known historical facts or from other biographical accounts. Discussing these instances does not imply a value judgement of the film based on ‘factuality’ or ‘accuracy’. Rather, the filmmakers’ aesthetic or political choice to highlight certain events and ignore others can reveal a particular interpretation of an artist’s life. Considering these choices in relation to other biographical accounts is important to understanding a film’s representation of creative subjectivity.
For an extensive discussion of an audience reception-based concept of ‘authenticity’ in the biopic, see Judith Königer, Authentizität in der Filmbiographie: Zur Entwicklung eines rezipientenorienterten Authentizitätsbegriffs (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015). Both Königer, referring to the biopic, and Fetz, in discussing biographies in general, note that ‘authenticity’ is an effect resulting from a specific type of presentation or performance. Königer calls authenticity an ‘effect of media staging’ (‘Effekt medialer Inszenierung’, 34–35), while Fetz writes that: ‘the paradox of biography consists in the fact that it is only the staging/enactment of authenticity that creates the biographical effect.’ (‘Das Paradox der Biographie besteht darin, dass erst die Inszenierung von Authentizität den biographischen Effekt erzeugt.’) Fetz, Die Biographie, 54. My translation.
Susanne Nieberle notes how writer biopics shape the perception of (national) literary history but also collective identity: ‘By means of their historical and equally symbolic author figures, literary-historical film biographies create a mass-media canon of literary works […]. In this way, they also attempt to participate in the constitution of a collective identity in the discourses on national literature.’ (‘Literarhistorische Filmbiographien entwerfen mittels ihrer historischen und gleichermaßen symbolischen Autorfiguren einen massenmedial vermittelten Kanon literarischer Werke […]. Auch versuchen sie dadurch, an der Konstituierung einer kollektiven Identität in den nationalliterarischen Diskursen mitzuwirken.’) Nierberle, Literarhistorische Filmbiographien, 229. My translation. Doris Berger makes similar observations coming from art history and art pedagogy. See Doris Berger, Projected Art History: Biopics, Celebrity Culture, and the Popularizing of American Art, International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 1–2.
On the retrospective and nostalgic attribution of genius see Howe, ‘Einmüthige Antwort’.
Rebecca A. Sheehan, ‘Facebooking the Present: The Biopic and Cultural Instantaneity,’ in Brown; Vidal, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, 36.
Ibid., 35.
Andreas Reckwitz, Die Erfindung der Kreativität: Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung, 3. Auflage, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1995 (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2012), 10.
Ibid., 11–17. Reckwitz speaks of ‘ästhetischer Kapitalismus’.
See Norbert Grob, ‘Unglaubliches Blau, Grün wie von geschmolzenen Smaragden. Vincent van Gogh im Film: Bilder, Assoziationen, Lektüren,’ in Genie und Leidenschaft: Künstlerleben im Film, ed. Jürgen Felix, Filmstudien Bd. 6 (St. Augustin: Gardez!, 2000), 78.
See Reckwitz, Die Erfindung der Kreativität, 12; 90–94.
See also Torsten Hoffmann and Doren Wohlleben, ‘Verfilmte Autorschaft,’ in Verfilmte Autorschaft: Auftritte von Schriftsteller*innen in Dokumentationen und Biopics, ed. Torsten Hoffmann and Doren Wohlleben (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2020), 11.
See Reckwitz, Die Erfindung der Kreativität, 11.
Given the difficulties in defining the terms ‘genius’ and ‘creativity’ I mostly use them according to the everyday English usage, in which creativity is synonymous with inventiveness or innovative talent, in particular in the arts. Genius is used most frequently in the modern form of ‘a person is a genius’ (rather than ‘a person has genius’) when referring emphatically to this person’s exceptional inborn talent. Since ‘creativity’ is the more general term, I will commonly use it to describe filmic representations. It might appear anachronistic to talk about creativity when referring to films set in historical periods in which the term was not used in this form. I refer, for instance, to both writing and embroidery as forms of ‘creative work’ when discussing Bright Star, a film set in the early 19th century. Here, I apply the contemporary vocabulary because I am interested in the film’s representation of creativity, which should be read in the context of the film’s production era, and in how films set in the past negotiate the interaction between current and historical frameworks. If the terms are used more specifically in reference to particular historical discourses or artistic positions, it will be specified in the text.
Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. ‘genius, n. and adj.,’ accessed September 26, 2021, https://www-oed-com.emedien.ub.uni-muenchen.de/view/Entry/77607?redirectedFrom=genius&. This antique origin of the term can still be found in the idea of a ‘genius loci.’
Ibid. This development is influenced by the French equivalent génie, which combines genius and ingenium (its double meaning is recorded as early as the mid 16th century). In English, ‘wit’ remained the preferred term for ingenium until the early 18th century, when it started being used pejoratively and ‘genius’ became more popular. See Warning, Rainer, Bernhard Fabian, and Joachim Ritter, ‘Genie,’ in Historisches Wöterbuch der Philosophie,ed. Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, and Gottfried Gabriel (Basel: Schwabe AG), accessed September 2, 2022, https://www-schwabeonline-ch.emedien.ub.uni-muenchen.de/schwabe-xaveropp/elibrary/start.xav#__elibrary__%2F%2F*%5B%40attr_id%3D%27verw.genie%27%5D__1662119150103.
OED, s. v. ‘genius, n. and adj.’.
See Howe, ‘Die Anfänge des schöpferischen Menschen,’ 28.
OED, s. v. ‘creativity, n.,’ accessed September 26, 2021, https://www-oed-com.emedien.ub.uni-muenchen.de/view/Entry/44075?redirectedFrom=creativity&.).
OED, s. v. ‘creativity, n.’.
See Matthäus, Wolfhard: ‘Kreativität,’ in: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, accessed September 2, 2022, https://www-schwabeonline-ch.emedien.ub.uni-muenchen.de/schwabe-xaveropp/elibrary/start.xav#__elibrary__%2F%2F*%5B%40attr_id%3D%27verw.kreativitat%27%5D__1662120986984.
On genius and National Socialism, see Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik 1750–1945: Band 2: Von der Romantik bis zum Ende des Dritten Reichs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), 194–237.
For an account of creativity’s move from an ideal of bohemian, anti-capitalist countercultures from 1800 to 1968 into the mainstream (both cultural and financial) of today’s ‘creative industries,’ see Reckwitz, Die Erfindung der Kreativität.
Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik 1750–1945, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985).
Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women’s Press, 1989).
Ibid., 23. For this reason, Battersby insists on the difference between ‘women’ (in her definition, biologically female) and ‘feminine’ in this context.
Ibid., 78.
Ibid., 127–123.
Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?, 23.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 10 and 221.
Biopics about female artists, writers and scientist made since 2000 include: The Hours (2002, Virginia Woolf), Sylvia (2003, Plath), Becoming Jane (2007, Austen), Séraphine (2008, Louis), Agora (2009, Hypatia of Alexandria), Big Eyes (2014, Margaret Keane), Marie Curie (2016), Hidden Figures (2016), A Quiet Passion (2016, Emily Dickinson), Maudie (2016, Maud Lewis), Mary Shelley (2017), Colette (2018), Radioactive (2019, Marie Curie) and many more. Films about female political figures are also on the rise: The Iron Lady (2011, Margaret Thatcher), On the Basis of Sex (2008, Ruth Bader Ginsburg), Harriet (2019, Tubman, Black American abolitionist).
Statistics suggest that films starring women in leading roles have performed better at the box office in recent years: Female-led Films Outperform at Box Office for 2014–2017, accessed June 16, 2020, https://shift7.com/media-research/#arrow-jump. More detailed analyses of leading and supporting roles in major film productions show a world still dominated by men, but in which the number of roles filled by women is tending to increase. See Martha M. Lauzen: It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: Portrayals of Female Characters in the Top Grossing Films of 2019, accessed June 16, 2020, https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019_Its_a_Mans_Celluloid_World_Report_REV.pdf.
Hila Shachar, Screening the Author: The Literary Biopic, Palgrave studies in adaptation and visual culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 95.
Esther Marian and Caitríona Ní Dhúill, ‘Biographie und Geschlecht: Einleitung,’ in Fetz, Die Biographie, 158–62.
Marian and Ní Dhúill write that ‘[t]he representatives of equality feminism had repeatedly accused [difference feminism] of reproducing the ideology of legitimisation according to which the division of labour between the sexes was conditioned by an essential difference between women and men. […] But difference feminism, despite its uncritical relationship to an essentialised femininity, had a sense of the inadequacy of calling for a mere imitation of what men were already practising.’ Marian and Ní Dhúill, ‘Biographie und Geschlecht: Einleitung,’ 162. My translation.
Battersby, Gender and Genius, 145.
Ibid., 20.
Writing about the ‘death of the author’ famously proclaimed by Barthes, Andrew Bennett similarly observes that ‘the death of the author threatened to ‘prematurely foreclose the question of agency’ for women and since women had never been coded as possessing the kind of authoritative status claimed by male writers, the theory of the death of the author simply doesn’t apply to them … In other words, the deconstruction of the author can be seen, in effect, as the deconstruction of the masculine author … and far from constituting an oppressive authority in need of dismantling or deconstruction, the female author was seen as needing to be constructed … to be given an identity.’ Bennett, The Author, The new critical idiom (London: Routledge, 2005), 84–85.
Battersby, Gender and Genius, 10.
‘Die Verschiebung des Erkenntnisinteresses macht sich auch in der Theorie der Biographie bemerkbar, insofern die neueren Beiträge nicht mehr allein und auch nicht mehr vorrangig darauf abzielen, Frauen einen Platz im biographischen Kanon zu erkämpfen, sondern danach fragen, welche Bedeutung die Biographie als Genre für die Geschlechterkonstitution einnimmt. In viel grundsätzlicherer Weise als zuvor richtet sich der kritische Blick auf die Schreibweisen der Biographie, auf die ihnen zugrunde liegenden Prämissen und auf die von der Biographie entworfenen Modelle von Subjektivität. Die Frage, warum sich die Biographik über Jahrhunderte hinweg fast ausschließlich mit Männern befasste, stellt sich damit neu und völlig anders, nämlich nicht mehr als Frage nach der Monopolisierung eines an sich neutralen Darstellungsmittels durch die Männer, sondern als Frage nach dem Zusammenhang zwischen der Konstitution von Geschlecht und den Schreibweisen und theoretischen Voraussetzungen der Biographie.’ Marian and Ní Dhúill, ‘Biographie und Geschlecht: Einleitung,’ 162–63. My translation.
For brief discussions of I’m Not There, see sections 1.1 and 1.3.
George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992), 3.
Bingham, 6.
This topic is discussed both in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, most in depth in section 3.2.
On the new ‘woman’s picture,’ see also Roberta Garrett, Postmodern Chick Flicks: The Return of the Woman’s Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Madeleine Dobie, ‘Gender and the Heritage Genre: Popular Feminism Turns to History,’ in Jane Austen & Co: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, ed. Suzanne R. Pucci and James Thompson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 251. Dobie identifies such ‘ideological splitting’ in British heritage films, but her observations equally apply to many biopics.
Bronwyn Polaschek, The Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 163. For a more detailed discussion of Polascheks position, see the survey of academic literature in section 1.2.
Belén Vidal, ‘Feminist Historiographies and the Woman Artist’s Biopic: The Case of Artemisia,’ Screen 48, no. 1 (2007): 76.
Ibid., 77.
Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?, 6. See also 1.3.3 on the history of the biopic, in particular the section ‘Biopics in the New Millenium.’.
‘Subversive’ biopics have a longer tradition in other national cinemas and in small independent production, especially of the 1970s and 80s. See the work of Gianfranco Rosi, e. g. Salvatore Giuliano, in which the main character is almost entirely absent from the film; or, as an example of subversion of the classic ‘genius’ biopic: Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach; inputs to the renewal of the genre also came from outlying British directors such as Ken Russell, with his self-consciously camp composer biographies. Among the more recent deconstructive American biopics is the already mentioned I’m Not There (2007). For a more in-depth discussion of the genre’s evolution, see section 1.3.
See Shachar, Screening the Author, 2.
Custen writes that ‘In order to understand the importance of this genre, we must come to see the films as the product of an organized culture of production. The contribution of these films to public culture and film culture alike can best be seen not through the analysis of individual works, but through the constitution of a large body that forms a kind of supertext’ (Custen, Bio/Pics, 3). This approach is certainly most appropriate for the system of production of the classic Hollywood studio era Custen focuses on and for the highly formulaic biopic of the time, while it would fall short for the director-driven biopic of the 21st century.
Custen, Bio/Pics, 92.
The history of an experimental biopic tradition that developed in parallel to the more conventional one is briefly discussed in section 1.3.
While successful for biopics, and far more widely received by audiences than any written biography on the same subject, these films are still no blockbusters: with budgets estimated roughly between 6,000,000 (for Pollock) and 12,000,000 (for Frida), they fall into the category of medium-budget movies. They all enjoyed relative success with audiences and critics, as well as commercially (of these, Frida is by far the biggest film in terms of budget and gross profit). Pollock and Frida were nominated for numerous prestigious awards and won, respectively, one and two Academy Awards. Bright Star premiered at the Cannes film festival, where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or.
See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 157.
See also Shachar, Screening the Author, 63.
See, for example, Judith Buchanan, ‘Introduction: Image, Story, Desire: The Writer on Film,’ in Buchanan, The Writer on Film, 3–4.
For a survey of literature on the biopic, see section 1.2.
See Deborah Cartmell, ‘The Hollywood Biopic of the Twentieth Century: A History,’ in Cartmell; Polasek, A Companion to the Biopic, 94.
Andrews speaks of ‘double adaptation’ for biopics about poets, but her argument can be expanded certainly to literary biopics and, with the due differences, to artist biopics in general. See Hannah Andrews, ‘Recitation, Quotation, Interpretation: Adapting the Ouevre in Poet Biopics,’ Adaptation 6, no. 3 (2013): 366 One film whose character as double adaptation is particularly evident is Paul Shrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which interweaves the life of Yukio Mishima with episodes form his novels.
On the significance of opening scenes, see also Annette Insdorf, Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
See also section 1.2.
See Hayden V. White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see section 1.1.1.