“The Biopic Genre: Filmic Portrayals of Iconic Men and Women”

1. THESIS TOPIC AND HOW TO APPLY .

“The biopic genre: Filmic portrayals of iconic men and women” Institution of higher education: University of Angers (France) Doctoral school: ED 496 SCE (Sociétés, cultures, échanges) Research center : CRILA (Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires en Langue Anglaise), UPRES EA 4639 Thesis supervisor: Taïna Tuhkunen, professor of American studies, specialist in American literature and cinema. Beginning of thesis: autumn 2014 Duration of thesis: 3 years Funding: Thesis grant from the Pays de la Loire region (€ 86 000 gross over 3 years + 6 000 € for colloquium, laptop, books, and other similar expenses).

Keywords: biopics, biographical films, cinematographic genres, icons, myths, cinema and gender, cinema and history.

Eligibility: To qualify for the 3-year thesis grant, the Ph.D. applicant must hold a Master’s degree, or the equivalent which in the country in question is sufficient for doctoral studies. S/he should possess solid knowledge in the field of literature, history and culture of the English-speaking countries, as well as the necessary language skills to carry out the proposed project either in French or in English. Previous knowledge in film analysis would be highly appreciated.

The application documents will include: 1. A detailed curriculum vitae. 2. Application letter elucidating motivations for this grant programme. 3. Grades obtained at the end of the Master’s degree. (Copies of university transcripts. If the transcripts are issued in a language other than French and English, a translation has to be provided). 4. A copy of the Master’s thesis.

The candidates should send the above-mentioned documents either by mail or preferably by electronic mail to [email protected] Taïna Tuhkunen, Maison des Sciences Humaines (MSH), 5 bis avenue de Lavoisier, 49000 ANGERS before June 16, 2014. The preselected candidates will be contacted for an interview with a selection committee. Possibility to set up a video-interview.

Allocation de thèse 2014-2017 – Université d’Angers

2. CONTEXT OF THE THESIS AND RESEARCH ORIENTATION .

This thesis project in the field of American and English studies entitled “The biopic genre: Filmic portrayals of iconic men and women”, proposed by the CRILA research center of the University of Angers, and financed by the Pays de la Loire region, is part of CRILA’s interdisciplinary activities following the recent creation of its axis of study “Civilisation et Arts visuels” http://www.univ-angers.fr/fr/recherche/unites-et-structures-de- recherche/pole-ll-shs/crila/civilisation-et-arts-visuels.html

The selected doctoral student will benefit from an interdisciplinary environment involving CRILA and other research centers in the Pays de la Loire Region. Besides the student’s integration in the Doctoral School / Ecole Doctorale « Sociétés, cultures, échanges », s/he will participate in a variety of projects elaborated, or in the process of being generated by CRILA (seminars, international colloquiums, etc.). Within the CRILA, s/he will be able to find “food for thought” for the thesis on “iconic men and women in biopics” during the seminars and other activities organized conjointly with the two other axes of the research center: short stories / Journal of the Short Story in English and Anthony Burgess.

Within the next few years, the CRILA research center intends to pursue its scientific activities on the following themes: “icons”, “myths” and “rewriting” – keywords articulated in such a way as to extend their critical scope to cinematographic objects of study. Moreover, the doctoral student will benefit from CRILA’s membership in the international consortium « Globalizing United States Studies Consortium » (GUSS), an academic network of universities working currently on myths and icons. The first international symposium organized by the network took place at the University of Angers in 2012 on “The Garden and its Myths in Great Britain and the United States from the 18th to the 21st Century” (papers in the process of being published). The second symposium is planned for 2015, also hosted by the University of Angers, this time on icon-related issues – a particularly pertinent topic for contemporary examinations of biopics, iconic figures, as well as iconicity and iconoclasm in film.

3. THESIS TOPIC AND DIMENSION .

Increasingly frequent in French media, the biopic genre (translated into French by “films biographiques », « biographies filmées », or « biographies romancées ») raises the question of differentiation between filmic portrayals of men and women, one of the principal theses advanced by Dennis Bingham in his recent book Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (Rutgers University Press, 2010). According to Bingham’s postulate, the biopic genre does not recreate « true stories » of men and women having really existed according to the same criteria, but rather according to narrative strategies and aesthetic modalities conditioned by existing cultural conceptions and categories. Through a transdisciplinary approach, this thesis exploring various interconnections involved in the creation and interpretation of biopics will seek to determine the origins and the distinctive traits of this particular cinematographic genre or current. It will also examine to what extent the biographical portraits created by cinema have kept evolving and fluctuating, despite backlashes, and without necessarily freeing the biopic characters from the kind of sexual stereotyping that tends to impregnate the (generally) historical figures whom the biopic endows with a body, a voice and color on screen. It will thus put to test, in the light of a sufficiently representative corpus of non-documentary films, the validity of the claims according to which the “life stories” proposed by mainstream cinema are generated by systems that perpetuate and/or reinforce gender stereotypes. For, contrary to “Great Man biopics”, one of the tensions tackled by “female biopics” seems to be the creation of filmic portrayals of women led to accomplish heroic acts in a world where they are seldom encouraged to become “heroes”, let alone “actors” or “authors” of their life-stories. The cultural mirror offered by these films presents us with a world with far more male scientists (Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, etc.) than woman scientists, Marie Curie being practically the only token woman. As the biopics trace the path to power of a number of male politicians or statesmen

Allocation de thèse 2014-2017 – Université d’Angers

(Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Roosevelt, Hitler, JFK, Lumumba, Malcolm X, Richard Nixon, Ronald Regan, Mandela, Gandhi, etc.), fewer biopics look at female leadership and geniuses otherwise than through their hereditary and non-elective roles, to show them as more or less malevolent agents or instigators. By focalizing on the lives of Margaret Thatcher, Marie Stuart, Queen Elizabeth the first and second, Queen Christina of Sweden, Eva Perón, Winnie Mandela and other “iron ladies”, these films also seem to be inclined to present women as “First Ladies”, spouses of kings (Grace of Monaco, Diana, etc.), or as wives of heads of state (Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, etc.). At the same time, and as suggested by the attempts to renew gender-related processes of creation on screen, the codes of “classic biopics” are under intense reassessment, namely due to the impact of “female empowerment” – to the point of running the risk of bordering on hagiography, excessive praise – perceptible through narrative, visual and discursive strategies that mark the elaboration of challenging, sometimes openly iconoclastic portrayals of women such as Alice Paul, Rosa Parks, Crystal Lee Sutton, Erin Brockovich and Angela Davis. Or, in the category of “artist biopics”, on emblematic female artists, such as Jane Austen, Frida Kahlo, Edith Piaf, Georgia O’Keeffe, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Janet Frame whose filmic biographies invite us to other rereadings of History, and of personal history. While the term “biopic” is not widely known by the general public in France, the films falling under this heading are steadily gaining ground in the media. Present beneath other names and labels (to be distinguished from more “Hollywoodian biopics”) since the first great biographical film, Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927), cinematographic portrayals multiplied during certain periods of the 20th century, before falling into relative unpopularity. Today it would be difficult to disregard the rise and success of these films, together with the emergence of “strong woman biopics” since the 1990s, which raises the question of the feminization of the genre. Many websites on cinema and TV series list up to hundreds of biopics. Consequently, when faced with the multiplication of biographical movies dedicated, more specifically, to characters of recent history, it would be pertinent to try and determine the extent to which the fluctuations and variations of the biopic genre might be read as indicators of socio-cultural changes, or as signs revealing the persistence of certain stereotypes, including within the scenarios and typologies regarding the pivotal characters in such recent films as 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013), The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013), Yves Saint Laurent (Jalil Lespert, 2014), Mandela : Long Walk to Freedom (Justin Chadwick, 2014), The Butler (Lee Daniels, 2013), Diana (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2013), Grace de Monaco (Olivier Dahan, 2014), Violette (Martin Provost, 2013), [Steve] Jobs (Joshua Michael Stern, 2013), Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2013), J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood, 2012), Hannah Arendt (Margarethe Von Trotta, 2012), Hitchcock (Sacha Gervasi, 2012), My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2012), The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2011), or The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2012). As illustrated by the few examples of recent biopics, focalization often continues to operate through public characters, rendered “iconic” by their political or social roles or, as highlighted in Martin Scorsese’s most recent movie, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), by a character (Jordan Belfort) standing for the world of business and finance, here a stock exchange broker trying to conquer the New York Stock Exchange. Besides these biopics which flirt with American success stories, together with other myths and literary and filmic fictions, among the recent productions can also be found an increasing number of “musical biopics” centered upon singers and musicians, as well as “bios” on other types of artists and writers – or, in another potential subgenre – lawbreakers, delinquents, and other types of marginal and/or transgressive characters, sometimes by their mere wish to innovate or shake up the rules and codes of society. While it would be impossible to ignore the question of the norm and the margin, the “real person” vs. the “character” (fact vs. fiction), it would be quite as impossible not to ponder over the various interactions between different cultural productions, (auto/biographies, literature, journalism, visual media, etc.), for biopics seem to maintain dense intertextual, interpictural, and interfilmic relations with iconic objects and places with which they enter in resonance.

Allocation de thèse 2014-2017 – Université d’Angers

Therefore, and bearing in mind the rich (historical, political, ethnic, sexual and / or sexist ramifications, etc.), the “rewriting” practiced by the biopic renders possible a variety of critical approaches. Its scenario praxis draws our attention on the underlying discursive and narrative strategies of the men and women highlighted through “starification” on screen. – To the extent that one could ask if the contemporary biopic was not a means for the 20th and the 21st centuries to perpetuate ancient icons, magnifying and regenerating déjà-vu figures and images by continuing to reinvest them with qualities superior to those of common mortals. However, unlike the major film genres, recognized as such (the western, gangster film, melodrama, musical, etc.), the biopic remains curiously ill-defined. This lack of satisfactory definitions could allow interesting problematizations for a doctoral student interested in the theorizations of generic categories in the field of film studies, especially when taking into account the numerous crossings and hybridizations, de- and remythifications the biopic is capable of. This challenge will of course not exclude the interrogations concerning the part of fiction and imagination (individual and collective) involved in the work of the movie makers who do not hesitate to rely on creative license, ramble through auto/biographies or exploit “master narratives” in order to complete their filmic portraits of individuals “bigger than life”. As indicated by the bibliography hereafter, the biopic genre has become an object of intensive studies in the United States and Great Britain, while the equivalent expression used in the academic studies in France still seems to be “film historique” or “film en costumes”. According to George Custen, one of the first film theorists to claim that biopics participate in the construction of public history in Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (1992), the biopic genre has long suffered from a lack of esteem, as if the mere fact of having been “inspired by real-life events” could only generate minor or secondary cultural products. While this statement most certainly calls for some nuancing, the explicit wish of the biopic to be “inspired by reality” entails inevitable questions concerning the veracity and the process of cinematographic re/creation – speculations which sometimes find their place in the teaching of history, politics, and foreign cultures. Besides these mimetic and pedagogical aspects, it would be possible to question the ways the biopics reflect, in their singular fashion, the popularization of the private life of public figures and personalities representing the world of show business, politics, sport, etc.) through the contemporary phenomenon marked by another (false) anglicism used in France: “peoplisation”. Or, to remain in the realm of film studies, the analysis of biopics could rely, at least partly, on the new “actoral” approach to cinema, promoted by scholars involved in “actoral studies”. Keeping in mind these potential, yet non-exhaustive approaches, as well as Dennis Bingham’s postulate according to which men and women whose life stories are transposed onto the screen are not equal, one will try and understand the workings of the modes and codes of representation involved in the construction of iconic characters on screen. One will elucidate the concept of representation, but also that of reception, in the various meanings of these terms. Whatever the final approach and adopted method of analysis, the developments will be punctuated by microanalyses that will take into account the technical and aesthetic processes (for example, camera angles, light and frame effects, images perceptible per se as “iconic”), while paying attention to the filming of the body of the biopic subject, and of the spaces (public and private/intimate, even fantastic) where the subject evolves, without losing sight of the non-verbal elements (music, movement, sound, silences, colors) and of every other means or strategy serving the creation of biopic portrayals, in order to account for the ways cinema has not ceased to de/construct and re/shape iconic characters till the beginning of the 21st century.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

- ALTMAN, Rick, Film/Genre, London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1999. - BARNIER, Martin, FONTANEL, Rémi, (éds.), Les biopics du pouvoir politique de l'Antiquité au XIXe siècle: hommes et femmes de pouvoir à l'écran, Aléas (cinéma), Lyon : 2010.

Allocation de thèse 2014-2017 – Université d’Angers

- BERGER, Doris, Projected art history: biopics, celebrity culture, and the popularizing of American art, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. - BINGHAM, Dennis, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? : The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. - BOURGET, Jean-Loup, NACACHE, Jacqueline (éds.), Le Classicisme hollywoodien, Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009. ––––––––––, Hollywood, la norme et la marge, Paris : Armand Colin, 2005 (1998). - BROWN, Tom, VIDAL, Belen (éds.), The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, London: Routledge, 2013. - BURCH, Noël, SELLIER, Geneviève, Le Cinéma au prisme des rapports de sexe, Paris : Vrin, 2009. - BURGOYNE, Robert, The Hollywood Historical Film, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. - CHRISTIE, Ian, “A Life on Film”, in FRANCE, Peter, ST. CLAIR, William, Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 283-301. - CUSTEN, George, F., Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992. - DENZEL DE TIRADO, Heidi, « Les biopics des femmes fortes: réécriture biographique des femmes fortes » in BÖHM, Roswitha, GREWE Andrea, ZIMMERMANN, Margarete (éds.), Biblio 17, volume 179, Siècle classique et cinéma contemporain, 2009. - FONTANEL, Rémi, Biopic : de la réalité à la fiction, CinémAction n° 139, 2011, Condé-sur-Noireau : Editions Corlet. - MENEGALDO, Gilles, STOKES, Melvyn (éds.), Cinéma et histoire, Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2008. - MOINE, Raphaëlle, Les genres du cinéma, Paris: Nathan, 2002. - NEALE, Steve, Genre and Hollywood, London & New York: Routledge, 2000. - POLASCHEK, Bronwyn, The postfeminist biopic: narrating the lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. - ROSENTHAL, Alan, From Chariots of Fire to the King's Speech: Writing Biopics and Docudramas, Southern Illinois University Press, 2014. - SHELDON, Harvey, The History of Hollywood Musical Bio Pics, 2010. - STARFIELD, Penny, Femmes et pouvoir, CinémAction n° 129, Condé-sur-Noireau : Corlet Editions, 2008.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT Taïna Tuhkunen, [email protected] cell phone: + 33 (0)6 19 91 34 83. CRILA: http://www.univ-angers.fr/fr/recherche/unites-et-structures-de-recherche/pole-ll-shs/crila.html http://www.univ-angers.fr/fr/recherche/unites-et-structures-de-recherche/pole-ll-shs/crila/civilisation-et-arts-visuels.html

Allocation de thèse 2014-2017 – Université d’Angers