Crash Course in Bio-Pics

A few weeks ago, I had a 45-minute conversation with Hendrik Warnke from the German radio station Saarländischer Rundfunk (SR) about the popularity of bio-pics. About 30 seconds of the interview is featured in a 5-minute segment on bio-pics as part of their Crash Course in World Cinema feature.

Luckily, you don’t have to listen to me struggle with my one year of secondary school German, as they dubbed over me in German. However, you can still hear me in the background!

If you want to read more on this topic, my book Bio-Pics: A Life in Pictures from Wallflower Press can be snapped up all good bookshops and online.

You can listen to the feature here:

Crashkurs Weltkino Biopics

0:00

And here's English translation, they provided.

If you've been to the cinema this year, there's a good chance that it sounded like this or

something similar.

Audio insert 00:13: I'm Robbie Williams. I'm one of the biggest pop stars in the world… I'd liketo work with you through your life. Should I call you Maria or la Callas?… I want you to give a warm welcome to Bob Dylan.

Biopics is the keyword. Short for biographical picture, essentially a film biography.

There's hardly been a way around them in recent years. My colleague Hendrik Warnke has taken a closer look at biopics as part of our Crash Course in World Cinema series and is now here with me in the studio. Hello, Hendrik.

Hello Kai, nice to be here. Biopics have been buzzing around in my head for a while because, as you say, they've really been everywhere for a few years now.

But biographical films are nothing new, are they?

No, films about historical figures have actually been around since the beginning of cinema.

Napoleon, Cleopatra and so on. In the sixties, it fell more and more out of fashion, until there was an upswing again around the turn of the millennium. And since the middle of the last decade, the genre has really exploded.

Why is that?

I naturally asked myself the same question, which is why I spoke to Ellen Cheshire. She is a film historian and author and has been working on biopics for a long time.

Ellen: We are, you know, incredibly nosy. You know, we like to see behind the doors of a celebrity's life. So, it has been that kind of rise in the 21st century of trying to demystify high stardom. So, I think that's why in this 21st century, we have a lot more of these films exploring a bit more of warts and all of people's lives.

To what extent is this trend noticeable in the films themselves?

I’d say that you also notice it in what is shown, the private, the look behind the scenes, so to speak, but above all you notice it in who is shown. These are rarely historical personalities, but increasingly often people who are still alive or have only recently died. Musicians in particular are very popular, ...which is not just for reasons of content.

Ellen: The other one, you know, to be cynical, is money. If there's a lot of Queen fans out there, that'll probably go and see Bohemian Rhapsody, whether the film is good or not, because, you know, there's a lot of banging tunes in there.

Biopics are not only so profitable because of fans who go to the cinema, but many of them are simply long advertising clips. That must be said so harshly.

What exactly do you mean by that?

Well, a full cinema is one thing, but if a lot of people are now talking about the Bob Dylan film and his music, which causes his albums to also sell wonderfully. But many people in film criticism, and I would include myself in this case, have another problem with the biopic.

Which one is that?

Biopics are in a certain dichotomy: do they want to tell a life story as accurately as possible, or do they actually want to talk about a more general topic? For example, how much the music industry eats up personalities. If that's the goal, you often must make compromises in order to stick to the biographical, which means that a lot of the content falls by the wayside.

And if you just retell the story, it quickly becomes very generic. Either you use the same few dramaturgies or, even worse, it feels like someone is reading out a Wikipedia article.

That all sounds pretty negative. But on the other hand, you have to say that biopics move a lot of people, and they are often very successful at the film award ceremonies.

Yeah, of course, you can say that. If you look at the Oscars last month, for example, 7 of the 20 nominated actors and actresses were nominated for a role in a biopic. That's quite remarkable. Also, my point is not to talk down all biographical films in general. Of course, there are also some wonderful biopics. I just usually have the feeling that they are good even though they are biopics and not because they are biopics.

Do you have any recommendations? What should we watch, what should we look out for?

Köln 75 is currently showing in the cinema. It tells the story of music producer Vera Brandes, who organised the legendary Keith Jared concert at the Cologne Opera House when she was 16. Köln 75 is a very playful film that manages to conceal this classic retelling, I was talking about, very well with its meta-humour. A little more sedate, but no less great, is Sing Sing, which you can still see in the cinema if you're lucky. Sing Sing is about a theatre group in the high-security prison of the same name and is a very sensitive and humane film that also has a great rhythm. I can really recommend these two films.

Hendrik, thanks for the exciting insight!

srkultur.de