TOPICS: GENRE: BIOPIC in Spring 2025 (FM2091A)

Both a widely popular cinematic genre and one that has long been overlooked by critics and scholars, the biopic is a cornerstone of contemporary audiovisual culture. In drawing attention to select individuals, the biopic is political at heart: to make a biopic is to decide whose life is worth telling – and who gets to tell it. Diving into a rich and multicultural history of fictional, documentary and experimental biographical films, this class explores questions such as: are biopics required to stay faithful to reality? What does the contemporary popularity of the artist biopic tell us about our shared conception of success, of art, of a life well lived? How can biopics challenge established narratives about the past, and help uncover forgotten or erased lives? What does the comparison between biopics about the same historical figure (from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1927 classic Passion of Joan of Arc to Robert Bresson’s 1962 sober trial film, to Luc Besson’s 1999 action-packed drama and Bruno Dumont’s 2019 experimental musical reinterpretation of the same story, for instance) teach us about the history of cinema, and how cinema writes history?