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Whose
Lives Are They Anyway?
Price: $32.50
Subtitle: The Biopic
as Contemporary Film Genre
Author:
Dennis Bingham
Subject: Film
Studies, Cultural
Studies, American
Studies
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4658-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4657-5
Pages:
432 pages
Publication Date: February 2010
Praise for Whose Lives Are They Anyway?
"Bingham offers a highly readable, erudite, multi-faceted,
and marvelously innovative treatment of the genre in its contemporary
manifestations."—Marcia Landy, author
of Stardom Italian Style: Screen
Performance
and Personality in Italian Cinema
"A charmingly written, impressively
researched, consistently intelligent study of the movies’ most
critically neglected genre. Few film books in the past decade have
given me so much pleasure and edification."—James Naremore, author of
More Than
Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts
Description:
The biopic presents a profound paradox—its own conventions
and historical stages of development, disintegration, investigation,
parody, and revival have not gained respect in the world of film
studies. That is, until now.
Whose Lives
Are They Anyway? boldly proves a critical point: The biopic is a
genuine, dynamic genre and an important one—it narrates, exhibits, and
celebrates a subject’s life and demonstrates, investigates, or
questions his or her importance in the world; it illuminates the finer
points of a personality; and, ultimately, it provides a medium for both
artist and spectator to discover what it would be like to be that
person, or a certain type of person.
Through detailed analyses and critiques of nearly twenty biopics,
Dennis Bingham
explores what is at their core—the urge to dramatize real life and find
a version of the truth within it. The genre’s charge, which dates back
to the salad days of the Hollywood studio era, is to introduce the
biographical subject into the pantheon of cultural mythology and, above
all, to show that he or she belongs there. It means to discover what we
learn about our culture from the heroes who rise and the leaders who
emerge from cinematic representations.
Bingham also zooms in on distinctions between cinematic portrayals of
men and
women. Films about men have evolved from celebratory warts-and-all to
investigatory
to postmodern and parodic. At the same time, women in biopics have been
burdened by myths of suffering, victimization, and failure from which
they are only now being liberated.
To explore the evolution and lifecycle changes of the biopic and
develop an appreciation for subgenres contained within it, there is no
better source than Whose Lives Are
They Anyway?
About the Author:
DENNIS BINGHAM is an associate professor and director of film
studies in the IU School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University–Purdue
University Indianapolis. He is the author of Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of
James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (Rutgers
University Press).
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Price: $32.50
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