Biopic

Few painters have had as many films made about their lives as Vincent van Gogh. The interest in his story is due in part to the mystery surrounding his last days, in Arles, France. It is thus no coincidence that all the biopics about the Dutch painter focus on this stage of his life, including the recent works Loving Vincent (2017), an animated film by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, and Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate (2018). A comparative study of these two feature films, representing two different aesthetic and dramatic approaches, is conducted in pursuit of the two objectives of this paper: to identify the conventions of the subgenre of the artist biopic; and consequently, to analyze how both films reflect on the artist's creative practice in order to determine whether the film camera is in fact capable of capturing the brushstroke and the mystique of the genius.

Mixing facts and fiction, Hollywood screen biographies have told the lives of popular music icons at least since The Jazz Singer (1927). However, biopics construct narratives that deal problematically with issues of race. This article aims to describe how representations of African American musicians have changed from 1970s ‘black jazz biopics’ (Gabbard 1996) to more recent films on rock, hip hop and rhythm ’n’ blues acts. On one hand, I analyse the way 1970s music biopics constructed a peculiar new narrative about race and popularity. On the other hand, I show the extent to which films such as Tina (1993), Ray (2004) and Notorious (2009) have subtly modified the racialized distinctions of former biopics, placing black musicians within a cinematic mythology which historically had been reserved to white subjects. The shift from jazz to other music genres, thus, is related to significant changes in biopics’ narratives and visual strategies. However, I argue that music biopics still deal with a distinctive notion of ‘the popular’ (Williams 1983), which frames blackness as otherness and whiteness (Dyer 1997) as just ‘human nature’.

(first publication by Jazz Research Journal and Equinox)

The chapter focuses on the ways in which Hollywood films have represented the material and emotional dimensions of nuclear risk and on how these representations engage viewers. James Bridges’s The China Syndrome and Mike Nichols’s Silkwood both frame their representation of risk as suspense-driven political thrillers and in both cases the fictional drama is heightened by the films’ relationships to real-world risks and events. While the invisibility of radiation raises representational problems, both films use their viewers’ preexisting risk perceptions to engage them in plotlines that are driven by the anticipation of catastrophes rather than by the catastrophes themselves. By telling melodramatic stories about courageous individuals who struggle to uncover the truth about nuclear risk, argues Weik von Mossner, the films not only illustrate Ulrich Beck’s claim that the determination of risk is a form of ethics; they also demonstrate that emotional processes such as fear are vital components of ethical decision making in the face of unpredictable material agencies and the environmental risks they pose.

In the past few years, the South Korean film industry has released a growing number of Korean movies set in the colonial period. This essay focuses on how these films deal with the painful memory of occupation. More specifically, the analysis will be centered on two biopics with narratives that differ from what could be argued to be the mainstream portrayals of the colonial period, which tend to depict the struggle of Korean freedom-fighters under Japanese rule. Moreover, this essay reflects on the meaning of reinterpreting the past through cinema.

This article studies the persona which enabled Marion Cotillard to become a Hollywood star at the end of the 2000s. Insofar as her part in La Vie en rose (Olivier Dahan, 2007) was key to her success in the US, the author's analysis focuses first and foremost on her performance in this film, as well as the media content that accompanied its release. He pays specific attention to the national dimension of her image, the ambivalence of which explains the exceptional success that Cotillard has had in Hollywood, where so many other female French stars have failed.

Cet article étudie la persona qui a permis à Marion Cotillard de devenir une star hollywoodienne à la fin des années 2000. Dans la mesure où son rôle dans La Môme (Olivier Dahan, 2007) fut décisif dans son succès outre-Atlantique, mon analyse porte principale-ment sur la performance de l'actrice dans ce film, ainsi que sur les discours médiatiques qui ont accompagné sa sortie. Une attention particulière est portée à la dimension nationale de son image, dont l'ambivalence explique le succès exceptionnel rencontré par Cotillard à Hollywood là où tant d'autres stars françaises se sont cassé les dents.

Kevin M. Flanagan
Scarecrow Press/Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.

Publisher Page: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780810869554/Ken-Russell-Re-Viewing-England's-Last-Mannerist

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Ken-Russell-Re-Viewing-Englands-Mannerist/dp/0810869543/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436376223&sr=8-1&keywords=ken+russell+flanagan

Questa tesi di triennale ripercorre brevemente la ricca storia del genere biografico nel mondo del cinema. In un secondo capitolo vengono analizzati alcuni film di tre paesi diversi (Nord america, Francia e Italia) in un contesto contemporaneo. Infine viene analizzato il genere biopic nel fenomeno di grandissimo successo di quest'ultimi anni: la serie televisiva. Verrà esposto in particolare il caso di Narcos prodotto da Netflix.

The popular appeal of the biopic has often been subsumed into the broader “mainstream entertainment cinema” category, identifying a critical neglect to consider its attraction as an authentic cultural artefact for the instruction of language and cultural knowledge. This chapter suggests that the biopic’s long history of almost universal appeal throughout its production is an undervalued consideration in the foreign language classroom. The lives of others, be they famed musicians, politicians, sports stars, intellectuals, or members of underrepresented or persecuted minorities, construct a world of persistent draw to the screen for a broad audience. This includes learners of German as a Foreign Language. The different biopic genres featured as teaching models here (music, intellectual history, sports) showcase the capacity of popular cinema and contemporary media consumption habits to satisfy the interests of a diverse learner cohort, which is an increasing reality in modern language teaching. The didacticization of the short trailers adds to a growing resource pool of transnational German pop culture and contemporary German film-making.

RESUMO: A subjetividade na autobiografia de Nelson Mandela, Longa Caminhada até a Liberdade (MANDELA, 1994), está na voz do próprio Mandela como narrador, apresentando os eventos selecionados de sua vida, em um relato contínuo e inteligível, em tom de confidências. Porém, tendo em vista as especificidades do cinema como mídia e linguagem, o desafio passa a ser o de criar um efeito semelhante de subjetividade em uma cinebiografia. Mandela: O caminho para a liberdade (MANDELA, 2013), além de ser a primeira cinebiografia a cobrir o período inteiro da vida do líder sul-africano, consegue criar tal efeito subjetivo por meio da combinação de narrador-personagem, narração em voice-over e o uso de sequências de sonhos do protagonista. Palavras-chave: Mandela. Subjetividade. Adaptação. Autobiografia. Cinebiografia. ABSTRACT: Subjectivity in Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long walk to freedom, lies in Mandela as the narrator who introduces the selected events of his life in a continuous and intelligible report with a confidential tone. However, considering cinema's specificities as a medium and a language, adapting the autobiography to cinema brings the challenge of recreating a similar subjective effect. Mandela: long walk to freedom (MANDELA, 2013), beyond being the first biopic to cover Mandela's whole life span, is able to recreate such subjective effect through the combination of character narration, voice-over narration and dream sequences of the protagonist.

Subjectivity in Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long walk to freedom,
lies in Mandela as the narrator who introduces the selected events of his life in a
continuous and intelligible report with a confidential tone. However, considering
cinema's specificities as a medium and a language, adapting the autobiography to
cinema brings the challenge of recreating a similar subjective effect. Mandela: long
walk to freedom (MANDELA, 2013), beyond being the first biopic to cover Mandela's
whole life span, is able to recreate such subjective effect through the combination
of character narration, voice-over narration and dream sequences of the
protagonist.

Link to Full-Text PDF: https://www.jonathantannerthomas.com/essays/2019/11/12/whos-afraid-of-sally-binford.

On a winter day in January, 1994, just shy of her 70th birthday, Sally Rosen Binford cleaned her house and arranged her things. She wanted to convey a sense of orderliness, of intention. Sally had mailed farewell letters to friends, family, and lovers. When everything was squared away, she proceeded to carefully feed a handful of pills to her companion, a poodle named Jake, and then to herself. They both died on the spot.

La película de Yannis Smaragdís Kazantzakis (2017) se analiza en este trabajo como una adaptación de la novela autobiográfica de Nikos Kazantzakis Carta al Greco (1957). Asumiendo que el texto literario debe ser visto como un hipotexto susceptible de alteraciones, el estudio se centra en la comparación entre la versión novelística y la fílmica. Como sugiere el trabajo, Kazantzakis se basa extensamente en la Carta al Greco, y esta cercanía a la novela a menudo resulta en artificiosidad. Estudiar el trasvase de la novela a la película permite, por otra parte, entender mejor los procesos de adaptación, y de alusión y cita cinematográficas, ya que la presencia de las adaptaciones de novelas de Kazantzakis al cine de Jules Dassin, Michael Cacoyannis y Michael Scorsese es prominente en el Kazantzakis de Smaragdís.

As Bronwyn Polaschek mentions in The Postfeminist Biopic, the film Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2003) is based on biographies of Sylvia Plath that focus on her relationship with husband Ted Hughes – such as Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman. In this paper, grounded in the works of Linda Hutcheon, Mary E. Hawkesworth, and Tracy Brain, I argue that this biography works as a palimpsest of Sylvia and that the film constructs Plath as the Ariel persona, neglecting her " Juvenilia " – her early poetry, as it has been defined by Hughes. Sylvia actually leaves Plath's early life – before she met Hughes – aside and it thus ends up portraying her more as a wife than as a writer. Finally, by bringing information on Plath's life before she met Hughes from a more recent biography (by Andrew Wilson), I analyze how a different image of Plath might have been created if this part of her life were not missing in the film.

Unlike ‘based on a true story’ biopics that often oversimplify complexity and contradiction, the emergence of the so-called anti-biopic provides an alternative mode of biographical film that experiments with more equivocal ways of expressing a life story. Anti-biopics emphasize the uncertainty of biographical creation and narrative reinvention, drawing attention to the ways that mythologized, distortionary, or highly suspect versions take hold. The concept of biofiction provides a valuable model to better understand the anti-biopic’s motivations. Paradoxically, both biofiction and the anti-biopic reflect contrarian modes of fictionalizing the real in order to realize unexpected truths. Focusing on the example of I, Tonya (dir. Craig Gillespie, 2017), this paper examines the self-conscious interplay of biofictional strategies that rebel against facile, potentially distorting narratives. Reflecting on the subjective, speculative, and sometimes surreal nature of truth-making in the current cultural moment, biofiction and the anti-biopic collectively question and critique what we mean by verity.

This paper probes into the genre of the highly acclaimed biographical film on the noted Urdu writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, directed by Nandita Das as Manto (2018). The matter of enquiry of this research paper involves an analysis of the genre and sub-genre of biopic and literary biopic respectively, to understand the postmodernist narrative method of interweaving fact and fiction in order to understand the author and his works through a mutual dialogue and dynamism. In the second part of the essay, there is an examination of the strategies through which the film overcomes the conventional portrayal of the writer-hero as an artistic genius in order to present the contradictoriness that is the cornerstone of Manto’s fictional corpus. Finally, there is an attempt to understand the implications of a film such as this both in the immediate cinematic context of rising popularity of biopics fostering jingoistic nationalist sentiments, and the larger global context fuelled by increasing communal hatred, violence and curbs on freedom of speech and expression.

In flesh and blood: Jane Austen as a postmodern fictional character
This chapter examines postmodern fictionalisations of Jane Austen—in particular, Stephanie Barron’s The Barque of Frailty and Michael Thomas Ford’s Jane Bites Back—and analyzes their intermingling of Austen’s biography and vampire/detective narratives. My chapter proposes that Austen author fictions simultaneously support and subvert essential meanings about the author deriving from the Victorian period (as quaint and saintly). These novels recreate Austen as a contradictory character: from the 1800s and the 2000s, Augustan and Romantic, liberal and conservative. As a primarily western genre, Austen fictionalisations welcome the polyphony and heteroglossia that characterises postmodernism, but also impose their “meaning” on western and eastern Janeite communities. These novels, thus, expose Euro-American Janeitism as a contradictory, multi-faceted phenomenon, but ultimately also postmodernism.

G. Pescatore, La doppia vita di Casta diva, in: Il melodramma al cinema. Il film-opera croce e delizia, CATANIA, Giuseppe Maimone Editore, 2009, pp. 85 -91 (Universitates. Saggi) [capitolo di libro] Il film opera e il gusto popolare Il film opera è stato spesso considerato un genere minore, e sicuramente lo è se rapportato ai grandi generi del cinema classico. Non gli ha giovato poi il suo definirsi in rapporto ad un'altra forma d'arte, la lirica. È apparso spesso come un ibrido, il risultato di una commistione di linguaggi, in cui la tradizione, l'iconografia, i modelli narrativi e finanche il divismo erano quelli del melodramma musicale, trapiantati con volontà artigianale in un contesto, quello cinematografico, che si prestava solo a fare da contenitore. Tuttavia, a ben vedere, non sono pochi i motivi che dovrebbero spingere lo storico, il teorico o più semplicemente il cinefilo a guardare con maggior attenzione al fenomeno. Intanto, bisogna ricordare che il film opera è uno dei più rilevanti generi autoctoni della cinematografia italiana: se è vero che forme di cinema operistico sono presenti nell'ambito di altre cinematografie nazionali, è anche vero che soprattutto al cinema italiano deve essere ascritto il fenomeno, per durata, quantità e anche qualità. E questo non stupisce se si pensa che l'opera lirica ha un enorme rilievo nella storia culturale del nostro paese, al punto che le sue narrazioni, le sue forme, le sue mitologie sono parte integrante di un paesaggio immaginario che definisce l'italianità. È dunque naturale che l'opera rientri tra le fonti primarie che individuano i caratteri originari della cinematografia italiana. A conferma di ciò vorremmo ricordare come il film opera percorra buona parte della storia del nostro cinema, dai primi anni del muto fino a tutti gli anni '50 (con ulteriori appendici che si spingono fino al cinema degli ultimi anni) e come il suo periodo d'oro, dalla fine degli anni '40 alla metà dei '50, sia stato ricco di risultati tutt'altro che trascurabili, in cui il cinema italiano percorreva una via autonoma e originale alla ricerca di un nuovo assetto nelle forme di genere del cinema popolare. Difatti il cinema ha sempre privilegiato nei rapporti con le altre arti, almeno per quanto riguarda la produzione corrente, quella che possiamo definire "media", la fruibilità immediata del riferimento: se opera deve esserci, che sia l'Aida o il Trovatore, se pittura, che sia Michelangelo o Picasso. Che poi i riferimenti più sotterranei, le influenze, le contaminazioni agiscano anche nel caso del prodotto medio su uno spettro di possibilità assai più ampio, è un altro discorso, che comporta una considerazione globale del cinema nel sistema delle arti, e che comunque esula dalla logica della citazione o della ripresa. Certo che se ci si limita al campo del film opera, riferendosi specificamente a quel genere assai popolare nel cinema italiano tra la metà degli anni '30 e gli anni '50, la preponderanza degli adattamenti verdiani o pucciniani è dunque presto spiegata, come pure è di facile interpretazione la presenza di un gran numero di biografie dei grandi compositori. Quel cinema cercava un mercato di massa, nazionale, e magari internazionale, ed è quindi logico che puntasse a storie, iconografie, temi già noti, riconoscibili, suscettibili di una adesione immediata da parte del grande pubblico. Dunque, se Vincenzo Bellini non può forse vantare la stessa popolarità di Verdi o Puccini, così non è se si pensa ai singoli brani, alle grandi romanze: il compositore catanese ha una straordinaria freccia al suo arco, la cavatina di Norma nell'opera omonima. Non stupisce allora che intorno all'aria "Casta diva" si sia realizzata una doppia trasposizione cinematografica della vita e delle opere di Bellini. Né deve stupire che artefice delle due versioni di Casta diva, una nel '35(1), l'altra nel '54, sia Carmine Gallone, regista che è stato tra i migliori interpreti del gusto popolare nel cinema italiano. Realizzatore tra i più sottovalutati del cinema italiano, Gallone occupa una posizione di preminenza nell'ambito del film opera, dalla metà degli anni '30 alla metà dei '50. Al contrario di quanto si potrebbe pensare, tale posizione non è il puro frutto di un calcolo commerciale o di una adesione casuale al genere. Essa nasce piuttosto da una profonda adesione ai procedimenti del racconto melodrammatico propri dell'Ottocento italiano: contrasto familiare o sociale e risoluzione "teatrale", compresenza di forza epica e sentimento, commistione di tradizione

"The biographical film or biopic is a staple of film production in all major film industries and yet, within film studies, its generic, aesthetic, and cultural significance has remained underexplored. The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture fills this gap, conceptualizing the biopic with a particular eye toward the "life" of the genre internationally. New theoretical approaches combine with specially commissioned chapters on contemporary biographical film production in India, Italy, South Korea, France, Russia, Great Britain, and the US, in order to present a selective but well-rounded portrait of the biopic’s place in film culture.

From Marie Antoinette to The Social Network, the pieces in this volume critically examine the place of the biopic within ongoing debates about how cinema can and should represent history and "real lives." Contributors discuss the biopic’s grounding in the conventions of the historical film, and explore the genre’s defining traits as well as its potential for innovation. The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture expands the critical boundaries of this evolving, versatile genre."

MA Thesis
Che Guevara is one of the most popular icons in post-modern culture.
The bereted image of Che gazing at the horizon is the epitome of his
mythological fame and is one of those images people around the world
instantly recognize. Dead at thirty-nine, he has become the face of
youthful rebellion, his image associated with the 1968 uprising and with
political posters. However, as Guevara's image came to be used
commercially, illustrating anything from T-shirts to mugs, one
wonders if there is still any political and historical meaning associated
with it. In fact, several scholars – discussed in the introductory chapter –
have raised the issue of Che's reification, usually with negative
conclusions. I beg to differ. In this Master Thesis, I challenge the idea of
Che Guevara as a frozen and empty image, actualizing it in the sense of
Walter Benjamin, by considering the process of mythologizing Guevara
and by investigating his representation in two biographical movies, The
Motorcycle Diaries (Walter Salles 2004) and El Che: Investigating a
Legend (Maurice Dugowson 1998).
Keywords: Che Guevara; Latin American Cinema; Documentary;
Biopic

As a creative practice research project, this thesis sets out to write a screenplay about Suresh Biswas (1861-1905), a little-known Bengali adventurer who was a wild-life trainer and circus-performer in Europe and later became a Captain in the Brazilian army. The early biographies of Biswas, based on limited and unreliable evidence, pose a challenge to the screenwriter in terms of narrative reconstruction of his life as a biopic. While more information has become available recently, this project examines the creative and critical issues associated with researching this figure, overcoming the problem of scant evidence and positioning him within a presentist context. Drawing on Rosenstone’s conceptual model for understanding how historical knowledge manifests in fictional narratives, it investigates the nature and function of fictional inventions in biopics and the ways in which screenplays make creative use of evidence. In writing Biswas’ biopic, I use the microhistorical research method, knowledge about biopic script-drafting processes, and Bhabha’s notion of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ to present Biswas as a non-Western, non-elite 19th century cosmopolitan, thereby constructing a counter- narrative to the dominant discourse of cosmopolitanism as a matter of exclusive Western, elite privilege. I argue that it is through a judicious mix of fictional invention and a diligent study of evidence that a screenwriter can get closer to the historical subject. The thesis thus initiates in practice, moves to biopic history and criticism, reverts to practice with knowledge about research and writing that not only enables me to overcome my screenwriting problem but also leaves behind a set of insights for other screenwriters working with scant biographical evidence.

L'opera lirica e il cinema possono apparire due forme di espressione artistica piuttosto distanti, con tradizioni e linguaggi assai diversi. Tuttavia, a una ricognizione più attenta si delinea un fitto reticolo di interazioni, di contatti, di influenze che rendono conto di una presenza viva della lirica sul grande schermo cinematografico. Certo, c'è il film opera, a cui molta parte di questo volume e dedicata, ma le interazioni sono spesso più sottili: dalle convenzioni melodrammatiche al commento musicale il cinema si è spesso nutrito della tradizione operistica, dei suoi testi e anche del suo pubblico. Questo volume intende proporre una campionatura di tale presenza, con uno sguardo metodologico nella prima parte e analizzando alcuni casi concreti nella seconda, nella convinzione che parlare dell'opera lirica al cinema significhi anche riflettere sullo statuto del cinema stesso e sui suoi rapporti con le altre arti.

Lincoln features several key moments in which the conventional, realist coordinates of the historical biopic open to a deeper sense of time and place, evoked in the film's references to clairvoyance, haunting, and 'bad dreams'-aspects of Lincoln's interior life that are well known but seldom expressed in film. The theme of haunting in Lincoln is rendered directly, but it is also suggested in the film's multiple references to the medium of photography, and in scenes that recall the flicker effect of early film. The film's complex understanding of time underlines the uncanny nature of the historical biopic, and the strange, almost phantasmatic wish at its core-the wish to impersonate and revivify the dead-a wish that is especially visible in films that take Abraham Lincoln as their subject.

Durante la edad de oro de los grandes estudios de cine norteamericanos, el género del biopic (unas 300 películas entre 1927 y 1960) representó la posibilidad de escribir la Historia, a partir de unas pautas hollywoodenses, para el público norteamericano y también, mediante su posición dominante en el mercado internacional, a escala mundial. En 1952, la figura de Emiliano Zapata, es elegida por Elia Kazan y su famoso guionista, John Steinbeck, en este contexto, para entablar una reflexión sobre el poder que contribuirá a asentar mundialmente la fama del “Caudillo del Sur”, asesinado en 1919. La película que idearon, protagonizada por Marlon Brando y Anthony Quinn, pertenece al amplio corpus de los biopics norteamericanos que al proponerse “vender al público versiones acequibles de la historia” , acabaron muchas veces sustituyendo el mito a la Historia, asentándolo tenazmente en las memorias colectivas.

Biopics of popular music stars have become quite popular in the first decade of the twenty-first century, with a number of box-office successes and movie awards in the genre. In seemingly offering a glimpse of the ‘real story’ behind the star persona, biopics contribute to individual star images but they also reproduce broader narratives of popular music stardom. This paper offers a brief description of some of the central tropes of popular music stardom before detailing how they are reproduced in four recent biopics. Further, the paper also discusses the popular music biopic's ambiguous relationship to truth. On the one hand, the biopic must continually assert its truthfulness in order to gain the authority that a biopic needs to be believable and a source of audience pleasure. On the other hand, however, the biopic can never be a ‘real’ truth as it is constrained by both the conventions of cinematic realism and broader ideologies of popular music stardom. In its complicated merging of truth and fiction, we argue, the popular music biopic reflects the socially constructed nature of stardom more generally.

Film & Making Other History studies the ideas informing the creation of a potential counterhegemonic cinema. With a special emphasis on the contributions of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the role of narrative in shaping history appears here as seminal to elaborating an alternative proposal in the fields of historical and biographical film practices.

The work covers a series of questions related to the historical representation of the subaltern and the usage of biographical forms for counterhegemonic purposes. Can alternative approaches to history make use of hegemonic forms for representing the subaltern without being absorbed by hegemony itself? This book rethinks the strategies that could be pursued to achieve this aim through the examination of cultural practices that have faced these inquiries before, such as Latin American testimonial literature and Third Cinema, and an analysis of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X.

Film & Making Other History has been carried out using a practice-led methodology whereby reflections accompany the research and writing process of the film script They Call me Rodolfo Walsh (Me Llaman Rodolfo Walsh), based on the life and work of Argentine desaparecido writer and journalist Rodolfo Walsh, one of the foundational figures of Latin American testimonial literature.
A work of great breadth that includes the relationship between history and film, as well as the problems of representation in these fields, inquiries about memory and trauma, marginalized communities, Latin American cinema, testimonio literature and history, critical theory, subaltern and colonial studies, this work explores the relevant creative challenges confronted in trying to formulate histories about individuals that themselves were involved in questioning official narratives.

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Alejandro Pedregal was born in Spain and is the film director and screenwriter of several award-winning fiction and documentary works that have been shown in festivals around the world. He has taught film analysis at the Academy of Fine Arts of Helsinki and the Department of Film, Television and Scenography of Aalto University as well as in other institutions in Finland, Spain and Latin America.
Alejandro founded the Lens Politica Film and Art Festival in Helsinki in 2005. The purpose was to establish a platform for debating and discussing socially critical and challenging cultural expressions. He was the director of Lens Politica until 2011 and currently continues his collaboration with the festival. He is a founding member of the artistic group La Strategia Corp. (LSC), where he shares duties with Alberto Cubas, and has composed music for several films. Alejandro writes regularly about cinema and politics for magazines and publications in Spain.

Throughout his career, John Williams has set the musical tone for the American presidency, most elaborately with his scores for Oliver Stone's controversial films JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995). While invested in capturing the character of these commanders in chief through musical codes, Williams's soundtracks are equally engaged in the act of the evocation and telling of “history.” Specifically, they construct a tragic myth of 1960s America in which the promise represented by JFK is destroyed from without, and Nixon from within, both by the malevolent forces of the military-industrial complex. In considering the thematic and dramatic means by which Williams paints his orchestral portraits, I reveal the extent to which music supports Stone's paranoiac narratives, especially in cases where the director's collage-like visual aesthetic puts pressure on the otherwise nostalgic traits of Williams's default tonal style.
I offer a music-analytical approach to JFK and Nixon informed by interviews, studies of political mythology and paranoia, and musicological appraisals of Williams's music. Stone's 1960s-as-lapsarian-metanarrative positions Kennedy as a romanticized absence, an image of the fabular fallen King, and Williams renders him as a public recollection rather than a human being with interiority. Nixon, by contrast, is a tragic antihero, consumed by dark forces of history and an abundance of ambivalent thematic material. Particular attention is paid to the dismantling of Kennedy's noble leitmotif during JFK’s prologue and motorcade sequence and to the near-fascistic musical accompaniment of Nixon's speeches. Having demonstrated the active role these scores play, I conclude that Williams's music constitutes an authoring of history in a strong, albeit postmodern, sense, consistent with but independent from Stone's screenplay.

This article uses fictional depictions of Mary Shelley as the 'mother' of sf to explore how gendered images of the Romantic genius continue to influence our perception of women in genre fiction. The first part of the article introduces the concept of the Romantic authorship, and reviews Shelley's legacy as the mother of sf. The second part of the article analyses Shelley's fictionalised appearances on-screen: in film, television, and new media, from 1935 to the present day. This analysis demonstrates that even in fictions depicting Shelley as an author in her own right, she is still marked by a gendered understanding of how women should function creatively. The way female authors are fictionalised (as opposed to how they are depicted in biographical or academic texts) reflects our expectations of women in the creative industries more broadly.

The aim of this introduction is to provide a context for the articles that follow in this cluster on Women’s Lives on Screen. Starting with some reflections on how biopics can matter to audiences, I propose the use of ‘mattering’ as a concept for the study of women’s biopics which helps consider their objectification of women as biographical ‘material’ on screen in tandem with their emancipatory refiguring of women as biographical subjects that are made to matter. The introduction also offers a brief overview of biopic studies as they relate to the subject of women’s lives on screen. It ends by sketching the breadth of topics covered in this cluster with a summary of the eleven articles.

Using the works of Gaston Bachelard and Susan Stewart as a philosophical foundation upon which to build a theory of the "biorhythmic-pic," this article explores how director Fran¸ois Girard's postmodern biopic Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993) both adheres to and departs from conventional genre patterns of cinematic life-writing.

The biopic has been a present if intermittent genre across the history of Australian film and television. Australia’s first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait, 1906), can be partly classified as a biopic of the nation’s most famous outlaw, while contemporary television has produced a virtual flotilla of 1970s and 1980s obsessed TV-movies and mini-series about entertainment figures, politicians, sports people, and media barons over the last 15 years. The Australian biopic is also dominated by movies about iconoclastic and larrikin-like figures whose lives are marked by a range of factors including conflict, adversity, ‘criminality’, identity, and diversity. This chapter examines the Australian biopic in relation to the processes of adaptation, its complex connection to the historical record, dominant trends both locally and overseas, shifts in terms of the diversity of subject matter and voices over time, and its association with the historical film more broadly. It discusses the genre’s relationship to the much-derided ‘AFC genre’, as well as the contrast between its peripatetic cinematic form and its pre-eminence in contemporary television. In the process, this chapter focuses on five key twenty-first century examples of the Australian biopic: from Chopper (Andrew Dominik, 2000), Red Dog (Kriv Stenders, 2011), and Tracks (John Curran, 2013) to Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002) and the TV-movie, Mabo (Rachel Perkins, 2012). In doing so, this chapter considers how these films reinforce, recast, and deepen the genre’s relationship to history, cinema, subjectivity, and nationalism and embrace particular individual, cultural, racial, and socio-political components.

Resumen:
La ciencia ha estado presente en el hecho cinematográfico desde sus orígenes, ya como impulsora de la invención misma del cinematógrafo en el ocaso del siglo XIX, ya como promotora del continuo desarrollo técnico que los soportes audiovisuales han ido experimentando y garante de la calidad de la imagen y el sonido, a la vez que elemento propiciador de la reciente apertura del cine hacia la digitalización. En este artículo nos proponemos hacer un breve recorrido por los insignos científicos que han sido protagonistas de la historia del medio en un contexto amplio, desde aquellos primeros inventores y pioneros de los efectos especiales y el trucaje hasta los crudos estereotipos sociológicos que el ámbito audiovisual nos ha ofrecido durante décadas, deteniéndonos a analizar el rol propagandístico o admonitorio que la imagen en movimiento ha desempeñado a la hora de reflejar las bienandanzas o adversidades que el progreso tecno-científico puede llegar a acarrear.



Abstract:
It is an undisputed fact that scientific discovery has been notably present in cinema since its early origins, either as a precursor of the Cinématographe’s invention in the twilight of the nineteenth century or even as a tool intended for the technical improvement of the audiovisual aids and the progressive quality of image and sound, as well as a driving force in the opening-up to modern digitalization nowadays. Our aim in this article is to have a short tour around the most prominent scientists that have led the history of film in a wide sense, from the early inventors and the pioneers of special effects and trick photography to the on-screen sociologically stereotypes that audiovisual means have provided for decades. Finally, we also discuss the advertising or warning role that motion pictures have carried out to mainly reflect the prosperities and adversities that techno-scientific progress may entail.

ArtyHum 23 www.artyhum.com 185 ArtyHum Revista de Artes y Humanidades, ISSN 2341-4898, nº 23, Vigo, 2016. Resumen. En este trabajo ofrecemos un acercamiento al Preclasicismo musical, un período intermedio de la historia de la música sobre el que se ha otorgado menor importancia que al Barroco o al Clasicismo Pleno. Sin embargo, desde el punto de vista estilístico puede ser considerado un momento importante de acuerdo con la diversidad compositiva existente, como resultado de los paulatinos cambios que algunos compositores introdujeron entre 1730 y 1760 en favor de un estilo menos vinculado con el contrapunto imitativo. De hecho, la diversidad a la que hacemos referencia puede ser ilustrada a través de una única familia de músicos, como es el caso de los Bach, protagonistas de la película Mi nombre es Bach (2003, Dominique de Rivaz). Johann Sebastian Bach, junto con sus hijos Carl Philipp Emanuel y Wilhelm Friedemann, son algunos de los interlocutores que llevaron a cabo propuestas musicales dispares en torno a la década de los años cuarenta del siglo XVIII, tal como ilustra el film. Abstract. In this paper we offer an approach to Preclassicism, an intermediate period of history of music, less known than Baroque or Classicism. However, from a stylistic point of view, Preclassicism could be considered as an important period according to compositional diversity existed, as a result of gradual changes that some musicians introduced between 1730 and 1760 in favor of a less use of imitative counterpoint style. In fact, that diversity could be illustrated by a family of musicians, Bach family, protagonists of the film Mein Name ist Bach (2003, Dominique de Rivaz). Johann Sebastian Bach and his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann are some of the characters who carried out diverse musical offerings around the decade of the forties of the XVIII century, throughout the cited film. tal como plasman los miembros de la familia Bach. Mientras que el patriarca daba cuenta durante la década de 1740 de su estilo más maduro y perfecto en la composición de la Ofrenda Musical, coincidiendo con la cronología del viaje a Postdam, su hijo Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, que se mantuvo sumiso durante toda su vida al mecenazgo, se erigía como abanderado del Estilo Galante mientras que, por su parte, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach abogaba de forma predilecta por el Empfindsemkeit, dando cuenta de su rebeldía, también en el prisma compositivo. Este trabajo significa, por tanto, un acercamiento a una familia de grandes músicos como los Bach cuyo legado refleja su personalidad individual, su distinta actitud ante la composición musical y las circunstancias históricas en las que vivieron, reflejado, todo ello, a través del arte cinematográfico.

En este texto nos proponemos destacar los aspectos más signi-ficativos de las estrategias de representación-estéticas y narrativas-que entretejen los discursos de los filmes dedicados a Victoria del Reino Unido durante las dos primeras décadas del siglo xxi: The Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Valleé, 2009), Mrs. Brown (John Madden, 1997) y Victoria & Abdul (Stephen Frears, 2017) identificando qué elecciones biográficas son desta-can en ellas-qué aspectos se enfatizan, omiten o inventan-con el fin de comprender los mecanismos de articu lación de las diferentes imágenes f ílmicas de la monarca británica y emperatriz de la India.

In this article we intend to focus on the most significant aspects of the aesthetic and narrative strategies which interwave the filmic discourses devoted to Victoria of the United Kingdom along the first two decades of the 21 st century: The Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Valleé,
2009), Mrs. Brown (John Madden, 1997) and Victoria & Abdul (Stephen Frears, 2017). Our aim is to identify which biographical choices are emphasized –that is, which facets are highlighted, omitted or invented– in order to understand which mechanisms articulate several filmic images of the British monarch and Empress of the India.

Cuando Bronston anunció que iba a llevar a las pantallas una figura mítica para España como el Cid, comenzó la polémica en España y después del estreno de El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1961), las críticas se centraron en la fidelidad del filme a la Historia de España o al Cantar de Mío Cid. En este trabajo voy a intentar justificar la pertinencia del tratamiento cinematográfico escogido en aquel momento, atendiendo a circunstancias contextuales, como la pertenencia del filme a un género consolidado, su inspiración en los textos del mito cidiano precedentes, su rodaje en la España franquista y la personalidad de los dos hombres que más influyeron en su realización:

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his death in 2019, Netflix released two limited series focused on Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio and his assassination. 1994 (directed by Diego Enrique Osorno) and Crime Diaries: The Candidate (Historia de un crimen: Colosio, directed by Hiromi Kamata and Natalia Beristáin) are, respectively, a documentary series and a drama, both delving into the political conjuncture surrounding both Colosio's candidacy and the investigations subsequent to his assassination. Since his dramatic death, the image of Colosio has maintained its associations with heroism and his unrealized presidency has come to embody the "México que no fue," a radically innovated Mexican state that never was and, possibly, will never be. Both series rely on the exploitation of original footage and underlying political takes on the events. This analysis will critically compare the two series from three main thematic perspectives: the Mexican political context at the time of the assassination; Colosio's characterization and private life; and the procedural aspects of the investigations.

El artículo analiza El cónsul de Sodoma, biopic del poeta Jaime Gil de Biedma. Para ello, y con el propósito de mostrar la estrecha relación que la película tiene con la literatura, se estudia su dimensión intertextual, mani-festada a través de varios procedimientos temáticos, argumentales, estilísticos, expresivos y de citación. Asimismo, el artículo también se ocupa de otras cues-tiones del filme como su adscripción al género del biopic literario, su correspon-dencia con la realidad histórica o su reflejo del ambiente literario e intelectual de Barcelona durante la segunda mitad del siglo xx.

El volumen que coordino es un estudio pormenorizado de la producción televisiva creada hasta el momento por Ryan Murphy. El volumen es el primero dedicado íntegramente a un showrunner y tiene trres vertientes esenciales: la arquitectura narrativa de sus series, su construcción estética y su significado cultural. El texto publicado por la editorial Síntesis (del cual se adjunta el índice) combina metodologías derivadas de la escritura de guiones, las teorías de la apropiación, los estudios culturales y, de manera especial, las teorizaciones sobre el Neobarroco y sus aplicaciones a productos culturales asociados a la idea de postmodernidad.

Resumen. Juana I de Castilla es un personaje clave en la Historia de España, aunque su figura histórica ha estado normalmente asociada a un componente legendario, su llamativa locura, que le supuso ser conocida sobre todo como Juana la Loca. Esta característica aún no ha sido debidamente comprobada, pero ha causado un gran interés en su persona, sobre todo a partir de la época del Romanticismo. Sobre su figura surgieron biografías, novelas y obras teatrales, y el cine (sobre todo en España) también plasmaría su vida en alguna ocasión. Así, en el cine mudo ya encontramos alguna cinta sobre Juana, pero serían Juan de Orduña en 1948 y Vicente Aranda en 2001 quienes dirigirían las dos grandes películas sobre su persona. Este trabajo pretende comentar los datos históricos sobre Juana, la filmografía sobre ella y el diferente tratamiento que Orduña y Aranda le dieron a este personaje histórico, evidentemente cada uno sirviéndose de Juana dentro de un contexto ideológico y político muy diferente, ya sea incidiendo en la importancia política de Juana en la Historia de España en el caso de Orduña o como personaje pasional estereotipado en el film de Aranda.
Palabras clave. Juana I, reina de Castilla (1479-1555), Historia de España, Castilla, Flandes, cine español, cine histórico, Cine e Historia, biografía.

Abstract. Joanna of Castile is a key personage in the History of Spain, though her historical figure has been normally associated with a legendary madness, which made her to be known as Joanna the Mad. This characteristic has not been due verified yet, but it has caused a lot of interest on her person, especially during the Romanticism period. Biographies, novels and theatrical works were written taking her as protagonist. Cinema (especially in Spain) also would get inspired by her person in some occasion. The filmic portrait of Joanna of Castile started early during the silent era but there were the movies by Juan de Orduña in 1948 and Vicente Aranda in 2001 that definitely create his contemporary public image. This work tries to comment, on base of historical data, the different treatment Orduña and Aranda gave to this historical personage. It is obvious that each one of those portraits used Joanna in very different ideological and political contexts, conditioning her political importance in the History of Spain in case of Orduña, or presenting her as as passionate stereotyped persona, as in Aranda’s film.
Keywords. Joanna of Castile (1479-1555), History of Spain, Castile, Flanders, Spanish cinema, historical cinema, cinema and history, biographies.

During the first decades of the 21st century, a critical re-assessment of the reenactment as a form of historical representation has taken place in the disciplines of history, art history and performance studies. Engagement with the reenactment in film and media studies has come almost entirely from the field of documentary studies and has focused almost exclusively on non-fiction, even though reenactments are being employed across fiction and non-fiction film and television genres. Working with an eclectic collection of case studies from Milk, Monster, Boys Don't Cry, and The Battle of Orgreave to CSI and the video of police assaulting Rodney King, this book examines the relationship between the status of theatricality in the reenactment and the ways in which its relationships to reference are performed. Carrigy shows that while the practice of reenactment predates technically reproducible media, and continues to exist in both live and mediated forms, it has been thoroughly transformed through its incorporation within forms of technical media.

Resumen: Juana I de Castilla, por desgracia también conocida como Juana la Loca, es una importante figura histórica cuya convulsa biografía generó fascinación e interés sobre todo desde el Romanticismo, cuando se configuró una imagen idealizada de ella en diversas manifestaciones artísticas. El drama teatral La locura de
amor (Manuel Tamayo y Baus, 1855) es la base argumental de la mayoría de películas sobre Juana en el cine español. El análisis de estas
producciones permite identificar diferentes trasvases de la Literatura al Cine y los condicionantes ideológicos, políticos o sociológicos de cada
momento de producción. Historia, Literatura y Cine pueden combinarse para extraer, a partir de la figura de Juana, un reflejo de los cambios sociales de España a lo largo de más de un siglo.
Abstract: Joanna I of Castile, unfortunately also known as Joanna the Mad, is an important historical figure, whose tumultuous life caused fascination and interest from the Romantic era onwards, when an idealized image of her was shaped by diverse artistic works. The drama play La locura de amor (The Madness of Love, Manuel Tamayo y Baus, 1855) is the basis for the plot of most films about Joanna in Spanish cinema. An analysis of these productions allows us to identify different transfers from literature to cinema and the ideological, political, or sociological determining factors at the time of each production. History, literature and cinema can be combined to extract from the figure of Joanna a reflection of social change in Spain throughout more than a century.