IdleRich
IdleRich
Not a big fan of autobiography myself - though for different reasons. Or what I particularly dislike is the film genre they call biopic - in fact it's even an ugly word that feels wrong, it seems like it's winding up to be a proper long word and then it just sort of plops to a clumsy bulging halt when it's hardly begun.
But that's not my problem with the genre either. My issue is that film makers, as a rule, like to tell stories, they like there to be a beginning a middle and an end, and despite what Godard said, as a rule they like them in that order.
And it seems to me that in your average biopic there is a constant struggle between the professed aim of the crudest type of biography (which are invariably the types that get made into films) - which in it's most crude and basic (and I do mean basic) form, is to represent a person by showing you the events of his or her life - and the demands of story telling which in its own most basic form normally requires a hero, a girl, and most important of all, a triumphant and happy ending.
So if they tell the story of a scientist who made some huge breakthrough for which he's very famous, and then spent the next fifty years doing lots of minor stuff, making occasional mistakes, perhaps getting divorced and then dying, your story teller director doesn't like that. He's gonna change it so that the scientist spends his whole film trying for that breakthrough, most likely he'll face some setbacks on the way and he'll race against the evil scientist who likes the same girl and is also trying to make the same breakthrough but evilly.
The film will show a life-long struggle during which he's always trying to catch up with Dr. Notactuallyevilbutdefinitelynotverynice and finally, at the end he'll somehow have a eureka type breakthrough that is completely different from the tedious and uncinematic method by which he actually got there, and it will be so exciting he'll get the girl too and he'll marry her and then they'll cut off the fact that he divorced her with rumours ugly rumours flying around that he hit her, and imply that they lived happily forever.
In short biopics are the most dishonest types of film while claiming to be the most straightforward kind of tru story.
But that's not my problem with the genre either. My issue is that film makers, as a rule, like to tell stories, they like there to be a beginning a middle and an end, and despite what Godard said, as a rule they like them in that order.
And it seems to me that in your average biopic there is a constant struggle between the professed aim of the crudest type of biography (which are invariably the types that get made into films) - which in it's most crude and basic (and I do mean basic) form, is to represent a person by showing you the events of his or her life - and the demands of story telling which in its own most basic form normally requires a hero, a girl, and most important of all, a triumphant and happy ending.
So if they tell the story of a scientist who made some huge breakthrough for which he's very famous, and then spent the next fifty years doing lots of minor stuff, making occasional mistakes, perhaps getting divorced and then dying, your story teller director doesn't like that. He's gonna change it so that the scientist spends his whole film trying for that breakthrough, most likely he'll face some setbacks on the way and he'll race against the evil scientist who likes the same girl and is also trying to make the same breakthrough but evilly.
The film will show a life-long struggle during which he's always trying to catch up with Dr. Notactuallyevilbutdefinitelynotverynice and finally, at the end he'll somehow have a eureka type breakthrough that is completely different from the tedious and uncinematic method by which he actually got there, and it will be so exciting he'll get the girl too and he'll marry her and then they'll cut off the fact that he divorced her with rumours ugly rumours flying around that he hit her, and imply that they lived happily forever.
In short biopics are the most dishonest types of film while claiming to be the most straightforward kind of tru story.
