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A Companion to the Biopic
A Companion to the Biopic

Edited by

Deborah Cartmell
Ashley D. Polasek
This edition first published 2020
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Cartmell, Deborah, editor. | Polasek, Ashley D., 1985– editor.
Title: A companion to the biopic / edited by Deborah Jayne Cartmell, Ashley Dawn
Polasek.
Description: Hoboken : Wiley-Blackwell 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019024054 (print) | LCCN 2019024055 (ebook) | ISBN
9781119554813 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119554738 (adobe pdf) | ISBN
9781119554790 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Biographical films–History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.B55 C65 2020 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.B55
(ebook) | DDC 791.43/651–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024054
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024055
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: Promotional photograph of (from left) Norma Shearer, Maureen O’Sullivan and Charles
Laughton in the film, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by WFinch is licensed under CC BY-SA
Set in 10.5/13pt MinionPro by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

List of Contributors ix
Acknowledgements xiii
List of Figures xv

1 Introduction 1
Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek

Part I Approaches 11
2 Biopics and the Trembling Ethics of the Real 13
Timothy Corrigan
3 Biopics and the Melodramatic Mode 23
Sonia Amalia Haiduc
4 Television Biopics: Questions of Genre, Nation, and Medium 45
Jonathan Bignell
5 Alexander Mackendrick’s Mary Stuart and Alan Sharp’s Burns:
Two Unfilmed Scottish Biopics 61
Brian Hoyle

Part II Histories 87
6 The Hollywood Biopic of the Twentieth Century: A History 89
Deborah Cartmell
7 Silent Biopics 103
Gregory Robinson
vi Contents

8 A Match Made in Heaven?: The Biopic in Pre‐Revolution

Russian Cinema 125
Henrik Christensen
9 The Golden Age Hollywood Biopic: The Barretts
of Wimpole Street 1934–1957 147
Deborah Cartmell
10 Caligula, History, and the Erotic Imagination 159
I.Q. Hunter
11 Representing the Unrepresentable: The Army of Crime
and Biopic Generic Conventions of Identity 191
Hila Shachar
12 Nature Versus Nurture/Wilderness Versus Words:
Syncretising Binaries and the Getting of Wisdom
in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007) 209
Melissa Croteau

Part III Sub‐biopic Genres 231

13 Fleming, Adaptation, and the Author Biopic 233
Jeremy Strong
14 Partial Presidential Biography on Stage and Screen:
Franklin D. Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello 247
Dean J. Kotlowski
15 Can the Biopic Subjects Speak?: Disembodied
Voices in The King’s Speech and The Theory of Everything 269
Alexa Alice Joubin
16 Biographical Fantasia on Screen: Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein,
Karol Radziszewski’s MS 101, and the Strategy of Détournement 283
Robert Kusek
17 The Criminal and the Yarn: Adapting and Performing Notoriety 297
Imelda Whelehan
18 ‘The Man Behind the Myth’: Mr. Holmes and the Fictional Biopic 309
Ashley D. Polasek

Part IV Biopic Performances 331

19 ‘She was an actress …’: Performing Margaret Thatcher
in The Iron Lady 333
Christine Geraghty
 Contents vii

20 Film (Noir) à Clef: Jailhouse Rock, A Hard Day’s Night,

and the ‘Jukebox’ Biopic 353
Robert Miklitsch
21 A Recipe for Life: Constructing the Biopic through New Media 375
Annie Nissen
22 Performance and Prestige in the Biopic, or Stardom and Statuettes 395
Colleen Kennedy‐Karpat
23 The Matter of Black Lives: Representations of Prominent
Afro‐Americans in Biopics 415
Lucinda Hobbs

Index 435
 List of Contributors

Jonathan Bignell is Professor of Television and Film at the University of Reading.

His books include British Television Drama: Past Present and Future and A European
Television History. His articles include contributions to Critical Studies in Television,
the Historical Journal of Radio, Film and Television, Media History, and Screen.

Deborah Cartmell is Professor of English and Associate Pro Vice‐Chancellor for

Research at De Montfort University, Leicester. She is founder and coeditor of
Shakespeare (Routledge) and Adaptation (Oxford University Press) and has written
on adaptations, Shakespeare, and children’s literature.

Henrik Christensen is completing a PhD at Stockholm University on fictional

representations of Dostoevsky in contemporary biographical novels and films.

Timothy Corrigan is Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of

Pennsylvania. He has produced several essays on cinematic description, adaptation,
and filmic speed. His most recent work includes The Essay Film: From Montaigne,
After Marker and two collections, Essays on the Essay Film and The Global Road
Movie.

Melissa Croteau is Professor of Film Studies and Literature and the Film Program
Director at California Baptist University. She has been teaching courses and
presenting work internationally on film adaptation, film theory and history, and
early modern British literature and culture for the past 20 years. Her publications
include the book Re‐forming Shakespeare: Adaptations and Appropriations of the
Bard in Millennial Film and Popular Culture (LAP, 2013) and a coedited volume
titled Apocalyptic Shakespeare: Essays on Visions of Chaos and Revelation in Recent
Film Adaptations (McFarland, 2009).
x List of Contributors

Christine Geraghty is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Glasgow.

Publications include Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and
Drama (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), Bleak House (Palgrave/BFI, 2012), and essays
on Atonement (2007), The Knack … (1965), and Tender Is the Night (1985).

Sonia Amalia Haiduc lectures in English literature and film adaptation at the
University of Barcelona where she is completing her PhD on biography on screen.
She has published on gendered authorship in film adaptation in The Writer on Film:
Screening Literary Authorship (2013) and biopics in the journal Adaptation (2014).
Her current research also explores late‐Victorian and postcolonial Gothic identities
in literature and film.

Lucinda Hobbs is a research student in the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort

University, with a background in commissioning and managing titles on English
and English Literature lists for leading educational publishers, having trained as an
editor and commissioner at Oxford University Press. She is also editorial manager of
the A‐level magazine, The English Review.

Brian Hoyle is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Dundee. He

has published on numerous aspects of British and American cinema. His recent
works include a chapter on artists’ biopics for the collection British Art Cinema:
Creativity, Experimentation, Innovation (Manchester University Press), which he
also coedited. He also oversaw the donation of Alan Sharp’s archive to the
University of Dundee.

I.Q. Hunter is Professor of Film Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester, author

of Cult Film as a Guide to Life (2016) and British Trash Cinema (2013), and editor or
coeditor of 11 books, including Pulping Fictions (1996), British Science Fiction
Cinema (1999), Science Fiction Across Media: Adaptation/Novelization (2013), and
The Routledge Companion to British Cinema (2017).

Alexa Alice Joubin is Professor of English at George Washington University in

Washington, D.C., where she cofounded the GW Digital Humanities Institute. At
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she is cofounder and codirector of the open
access Global Shakespeares digital performance archive (http://globalshakespeares.
org). Her latest books include Race (Routledge Critical Idioms series) and Local and
Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance (coedited).

Colleen Kennedy‐Karpat is an Assistant Professor in the Department of

Communication and Design at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. She edited
Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige (Palgrave 2017) with Eric
Sandberg and is the author of the award‐winning monograph Rogues, Romance, and
Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s (Fairleigh Dickinson 2013). Other essays,
on topics ranging from Bill Murray to Marjane Satrapi, have appeared in Adaptation
 List of Contributors xi

and elsewhere. She teaches and studies media adaptations, genre, stardom, and
directors in France and Hollywood.

Dean J. Kotlowski is Professor of history at Salisbury University. He is the author

of Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy (Harvard University Press,
2001) and Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR (Indiana University Press, 2015) and
the editor of The European Union: From Jean Monnet to the Euro (Ohio University
Press, 2000). He has published 40 articles and book chapters on US political,
diplomatic, and transnational history. He has been a visiting fellow at the
Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University (2017) and has
been a Fulbright Scholar three times, in the Philippines (2008), Austria (2016),
and Australia (2020).

Robert Kusek (PhD, DLitt) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of

Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies,
Jagiellonian University in Kraków. His research interests include life writing genres,
the contemporary novel in English, as well as a comparative approach to literary
studies. He is the author of two monographs, including Through the Looking Glass:
Writers’ Memoirs at the Turn of the 21st Century (2017), and several dozen articles
published in books, academic journals, and magazines, as well as coeditor of 12
volumes of articles, most notably Travelling Texts: J.M. Coetzee and Other Writers
(2014).

Robert Miklitsch is Professor in the Department of English at Ohio University. He

is the editor of Psycho‐Marxism (1998) and Kiss the Blood Off My Hand (2014) as
well as the author of From Hegel to Madonna (1998), Roll Over Adorno (2006), Siren
City (2011), and The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s (2017).
Essays on Todd Haynes’s Carol and Michael Curtiz’s Young Man with a Horn appear
in, respectively, Patricia Highsmith on Screen (2018) and The Many Cinemas of
Michael Curtiz (2018).

Annie Nissen is an Associate Lecturer in English Literature and Film Studies at

Lancaster University. She completed her doctorate at Lancaster University with her
thesis titled To Adapt or Not to Adapt? – Writers and Writing Across Prose Fiction,
Theatre, and Film 1823–1938, and holds a BA (Hons) in Film Studies and Literature
and an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies. Her current research is a continuation
of her doctoral study on the role of writers and writing within historical Adaptation
practices.

Ashley D. Polasek is an English Lecturer at Tri‐County Technical College. Her

scholarship utilizes a range of approaches from the areas of adaptation studies, film
studies, television studies, and fan studies to examine the screen afterlives of Sherlock
Holmes. She has published in Literature Film Quarterly, Adaptation, and
Transformative Works and Cultures, and is the coeditor of Sherlock Holmes: Behind
xii List of Contributors

the Canonical Screen (2015) and the author of Being Sherlock: A Sherlockian’s Stroll
through the Best Sherlock Holmes Stories (2019).

Gregory Robinson Assistant Vice Provost of Student Success, Nevada State College,
writes on silent movies, with a focus on the intersections of text and film in title
cards. His recent publications include ‘All Bad Little Movies When They Die Go to
Ralph Spence: The Silent Era’s Most Famous Title Writer’, which appeared in Film &
History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and ‘Writing on the Silent Screen’, which
appears in the Blackwell Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation.

Hila Shachar is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at De Montfort University.

She is the author of Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature
(Palgrave, 2012), and Screening the Author: The Literary Biopic (Palgrave 2019). She
has recently published the article, ‘“He said we can choose our lives”: freedom,
intimacy, and identity in Blue is the Warmest Colour’, in Studies in European
Cinema (2018).

Jeremy Strong is Professor of Literature and Film at the University of West London.
Chair of the Association of Adaptation Studies (2010‐2016), he is widely published
on movies, books, and culture. His books include Educated Tastes: Food, Drink, and
Connoisseur Culture (2011), James Bond Uncovered (2018), and the novel Mean
Business (2013).

Imelda Whelehan is Professor and Dean of the Graduate Research School at the
University of Western Australia in Perth. She has written widely on feminism,
adaptation studies, and popular culture. Recent publications include Reading Lena
Dunham’s Girls (coedited with M. Nash, 2017) and Key Concepts in Gender Studies
(2d ed. with J. Pilcher, 2017). She is currently writing a monograph on postwar
Hollywood adaptations (Bloomsbury) and is coeditor of the Oxford journal,
Adaptation, with Professor Deborah Cartmell.
 Acknowledgements

Thanks to the supportive and inspiring Hester, Ian, and Jake Bradley and to Paul
Hyde for his constant love and encouragement.
 List of Figures

3.1–3.6 Screenshots from Les Soeurs Brontë (dir. André Téchiné, performances
by Isabelle Adjani, Marie‐France Pisier, Isabelle Huppert, Patrick
Magee, Gaumont, 1979).
3.7–3.12 Screenshots from Angel (dir. by François Ozon, performances by
Romola Garai, Sam Neill, Charlotte Rampling, Michael Fassbender,
Poisson Rouge Pictures, 2007).
6.1 Oscar‐winning biopics of the twentieth century.
6.2 Theatrical poster, Spartacus (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1960).
7.1 Joan in Joan the Woman after the victory at Orleans (dir. Cecil B.
DeMille, 1916).
7.2 Napoleon’s face transposed with that of an eagle, Napoleon (dir. Abel
Gance, 1927).
7.3 Three depictions of Joan’s public execution: Jeanne D’Arc (dir. Georges
Méliès, 1900), Joan the Woman (dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1916), La Passion
de Jeanne d’Arc (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928).
9.1–9.2 Beginning and ending: The Barretts of Wimpole Street (dir. Sidney
Franklin, 1934).
9.3–9.4 Beginning and ending: The Barretts of Wimpole Street (dir. Sidney
Franklin, 1957).
11.1 Affiche Rouge, 1944. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Affiche_rouge.jpg.
15.1 Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) gains a voice for the first time
through a voice synthesiser computer in A Theory of Everything
(dir. James Marsh, Working Title Films, 2015).
15.2 Prince Albert, Duke of York (Colin Firth) addressing the crowd with a
stammer at the official closing of the British Empire Exhibition at
Wembley Stadium. The King’s Speech (dir. Tom Hooper, See‐Saw
Films, 2011).
xvi List of Figures

15.3 Bertie (Colin Firth) reciting the speech ‘To be or not to be’ from Hamlet
during his first speech therapy session with Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush)
while hearing Mozart played on headphones. The King’s Speech (dir. Tom
Hooper, See‐Saw Films, 2011).
15.4 Logue (Geoffrey Rush) ‘conducts’ King George VI (Colin Firth) during
his first wartime speech on radio in The King’s Speech (dir. Tom Hooper,
See‐Saw Films, 2011).
18.1 Screenshot from Mr. Holmes (dir. Bill Condon, Miramax, 2015).
18.2 Theatrical Poster, The Woman in Green (dir. Roy William Neill,
Universal, 1945).
18.3 Nicholas Rowe as ‘Matinee Sherlock’ in Mr. Holmes (dir. Bill Condon,
Miramax, 2015).
18.4 Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
(dir. Alfred Werker, Twentieth‐Century Fox, 1939).
18.5 Ian McKellen as Sherlock Holmes in Mr. Holmes (dir. Bill Condon,
Miramax, 2015).
20.1 The Beatles running: A day in the life. A Hard Day’s Night (dir. Richard
Lester, Walter Shenson Films, 1964).
20.2 Run for your life: Help! A Hard Day’s Night (dir. Richard Lester, Walter
Shenson Films, 1964).
20.3 The Beatles standing still: ‘All I gotta do/is call you on the phone’. A Hard
Day’s Night (dir. Richard Lester, Walter Shenson Films, 1964).
20.4 Pet sounds: (Don’t) touch the animals. A Hard Day’s Night (dir. Richard
Lester, Walter Shenson Films, 1964).
 1
Introduction
Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek

Despite being undoubtedly the most hated of all film genres, the biopic has endured
since the very beginning of cinema. A review of the biopic of Alan Turing, The
Imitation Game (dir. Morten Tyldum 2014), sums up the general contempt for the
genre itself: ‘Sometimes it feels like a line is being crossed. I really wasn’t sure which
side I was on with the Turing movie – certainly knowing how much was wrong with
it was damaging to my enjoyment of it, but did that make it bad art? In the end I
think it did because it was all just so unnecessary and generic, and so persistent…
Good acting, direction, sets etc.…though’ (‘Two NYRB Essays’ 2015). Biopics are
routinely dismissed as bad art, shallow, formulaic, inauthentic, and disrespectful
of history. Among the biopic’s many decriers are film critics, literary scholars,
­historians, politicians, journalists, and anyone wedded to the notion that portraits of
individuals should be ‘true’ to life. But as the reviewer of The Imitation Game
begrudgingly admits, these films are often very watchable, essentially due to the
performance of the lead actor.
The biographical film, or biopic, has become an obvious route to best actor and
actress Oscars (Daniel Day Lewis for Lincoln, dir. Steven Spielberg, 2012; Meryl
Streep for The Iron Lady, dir. Phyllida Lloyd, 2011; and Colin Firth for The King’s
Speech, dir. Tom Hooper, 2010) and an opportunity to capitalize on a star’s appeal
through the portrayal of a famous personality. Regardless of the biopic’s u ­ npopularity
with both directors and academics, the remediation of a famous life on film was and
continues to be commercially viable, perhaps due to the double effect of a fascina­
tion with famous people and the famous individuals playing them. This collection
differs from previous monographs and collections as it promises to offer a historical,

A Companion to the Biopic, First Edition. Edited by Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
2 Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek

theoretical, and thematic approach to the biopic genre, from the beginnings of the
twentieth century to the contemporary period.
The first full‐length study of the genre is George Custen’s Bio/Pics: How Hollywood
Constructed Public History (1992). Custen considers the biopic as a producer’s genre,
fundamentally conservative and marketed through the films’ ‘extensive research’,
which he argues masks these films’ ideological revisioning of historical portraiture
as directed at contemporary audiences. Custen’s study is the most comprehensive to
date and begins in the sound era – the period in which the biopic, as we know it
today, was born – and ends with the collapse of the Hollywood Studio system in
1960. Dennis Bingham’s Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary
Film Genre (2010) tracks the early ‘biopic’ of the Studio Era as influenced by Lytton
Strachey’s mythmaking Eminent Victorians (1918). For example, the notion of a
chosen one, so often featured in biopics, is traced to Strachey: ‘Destiny and vocation
bestow the work of God upon certain people. They suggest powerful belief systems
and explain why the biopic, and most literary biography too, is usually not palatable
to sceptics’ (p. 37). In both Custen’s and Bingham’s work, this parallels with the
central fixation of the biopic on ‘Great Men’ doing ‘Great Things’. For Bingham,
Strachey’s novelistic restructuring of the biographical subject, setting them against
opposing forces such as bureaucracies, opposing families, or corrupt systems, easily
lent itself to the Hollywood biopic. The selection of case studies in Bingham’s book
ranges from the 1930s to the new millennium and, while roughly organised chrono­
logically and by topic, seems somewhat selective as do the case studies in the recently
published ‘Short Cut’ book, Bio‐Pics: A Life in Pictures (2014), by Ellen Cheshire.
Grouped around subjects, such as singers, musicians, and politicians, the case
studies are all taken from the contemporary period, with no attempt to recount the
history of the genre or define its characteristics.
There have been edited collections on the genre, such as special issues of
Biography (vol. 23, no. 1, 2000) and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, ‘Biopics and
American National Identity’ (vol. 26, no. 1, 2011); Tom Brown and Belén Vidal’s The
Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture (2013); and Márta Minier and Maddalena
Pennacchia’s collection Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic
(2014), again a series of case studies drawn from the contemporary period. Blackwell’s
Companion to the Historical Film, edited by Robert A. Rosenstone and Constantin
Parvulescu (2013), also touches upon the biopic in four of its chapters, with only one
chapter (by Dennis Bingham) offering a synoptic account of the genre. Russell
Jackson, in Theatre on Film: How the Cinema Imagines the Stage (2013) devotes a
chapter to theatrical biopics and through a reading of the scripts of films made in
Hollywood’s golden era describes the painstaking elisions that had to be made to the
entertainers’ lives in this period, such as the gambling and womanizing of the title
character in The Great Ziegfeld (dir. Robert Z. Leonard, 1936). In more recent bio­
pics, Jackson observes ‘a wayward love life is now a badge of honour and a guarantee
of human sensibility’ (p. 87). The more complete historical overview of the genre in
this volume supports Jackson’s reading of this trajectory, as biopics have moved from
a form of personal and especially national mythmaking in their early days to a
 Introduction 3

method of demythologising and peeling back the layers of constructed identity as

the twentieth century progressed. Although dealing exclusively with biopics of stage
entertainers, Jackson reminds us of the theatricality of the genre as whole in which
performances dominate. In response to Bingham’s division of biopics by gender,
Bronwyn Polaschek’s The Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo,
Woolf and Austen (2013) argues that recent biopics of women are not always
­constrained by a narrative of victimisation, as in the previous century, but offer chal­
lenges to both patriarchal frameworks and Second Wave Feminism. Polaschek
writes that ‘the postfeminist biopic actively evokes the pleasure of interrogatation
from its female spectators’ (p. 145). Like Jackson, she charts a move away from con­
structed identities in her analysis of more innovative examples of the genre. Two
further collections are concerned with biopics’ formation of national identities:
Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: The Biopic and American National Identity,
ed. William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer (2016), and Rule Britannia! The Biopic
and British National Identity, ed. R. Barton Palmer and Homer Pettey (2018). Finally,
Sonia Amalia Haiduc’s review of books on biopics in Adaptation (2014) reveals a
new willingness to take the genre seriously.
The number of recent studies provides evidence of a growing interest in the genre
and this volume represents the most comprehensive treatment of the genre to date.
Although the classification ‘biopic’ is useful insofar as it brings together films by
highlighting recurring patterns and themes, the authors in this collection are mind­
ful that, like the genre itself, it is more fiction than fact, a critical construct, not ‘a real
thing’. The chapters are organised according to theoretical, historical, thematic, and
performance‐based approaches. The volume provides accounts of the genre from its
origins to the present day, including evolving attitudes and differing perspectives on
the biopic genre.
Part I of this volume features approaches to the genre in relation to what consti­
tutes ‘true stories’, media specificity, and the persistent disrespect for the genre artic­
ulated by film critics and historians. Whereas previous scholarly treatments of biopics
have largely sought to limit and/or codify the genre, these varying approaches prob­
lematise it, making way for the greater diversity of theoretical models and case studies
that follow in the collection. The biopic can be seen as a subsection of historical film
and ‘docudrama’, the names of which announce that they contain a mixture of fiction
and fact. In ‘Biopics and the Trembling Ethics of the Real’, Timothy Corrigan con­
siders how certain auto/biopics grapple with what constitutes ‘the real’ by represent­
ing it as a phantom not to be trusted. His framework helps establish the distinction
between reality and ‘the real’ and also between films that attempt, under the tradi­
tional biopic banner, to strip away falsity to show the real and films that explicitly
address the impossibility of doing so. Sonia Amalia Haiduc connects the disparaged
biopic genre with the equally despised genre of melodrama. She notes a natural kin­
ship between them, as literary biopics in particular ‘encourage viewers to “read” the
[externalization of writing] on screen melodramatically, as an external sign of an
unfolding internal truth being made visible’. She considers ‘auteurist’ biopics, André
Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë (1979) and François Ozon’s Angel (2007), as examples of
4 Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek

biopics’ dependency on melodrama as a way of constructing ‘emotional truth’. In

Chapter 4, Jonathan Bignell discusses television biographies and notes that ‘although
there is no clearly identifiable television biopic genre, programmes ­resembling
­biopics can be identified in many television forms, formats or cycles of production’.
These television forms tend to derive from nineteenth‐century novels and popular
theatre, which tell the story of an individual’s rise from adversity to fame.
Biopics tread a precarious line between telling the truth about a person and pro­
tecting their reputation; and an awareness of their audiences often dictates the
course (or not) of a film about significant personages. Brian Hoyle’s chapter looks at
two unproduced biopic scripts of famous Scottish figures: Alexander Mackendrick’s
Mary Stuart and Alan Sharp’s Burns, which he argues tackle the vexed problems
­surrounding screen depictions of national treasures. The failure of these scripts to
reach the screen reminds us of the general rule that biopics are essentially producers’
films, guided by money rather than aesthetic, social, or moral principles.
Part II provides an overview of biopics over the twentieth century through their
formal evolution and in their changing representations of history. These chapters not
only offer a reference for the technological, thematic, and aesthetic history of the
production of biopics but also address the complex relationships between that his­
tory and the ‘real’ histories that the films themselves depict and fail to depict. Deborah
Cartmell surveys twentieth‐century biopics and in grappling with the fraught
question of defining the genre to begin with, she nonetheless notes the persistent
dependency on stars for their appeal. Not so dependent on famous performances,
silent biopics, at the end of the silent period, seem to promise much more. Gregory
Robinson in Chapter 7 charts the development of the biographical film in the silent
era, from the earliest films which sacrificed the narrative for spectacle to the last
silent films which he argues tell stories with a visual sophistication comparable to
cinema today. In the following chapter, Henrik Christensen looks at the biopic in
early Russian cinema and its relation to national identity and the hostility towards
genre cinema by Russian directors and film critics. In Russian cinema, Christensen
argues the biopic becomes a ‘formidable ideological weapon’. Cartmell continues the
historical narrative considering the evolution of the biopic from the beginning of
the sound era to the 1950s in an analysis of two versions of a quintessential biopic,
The Barretts of Wimpole Street (dir. Sidney Franklin, 1934 and 1957). These biopics
merge historical narratives with Hollywood biographies and ultimately contribute to
giving the genre its bad name by reducing complex and productive lives into a
Hollywood love story.
I.Q. Hunter’s survey of Caligula biopics offers a longitudinal approach to repre­
senting the life of one of the most infamous megalomaniacal tyrants on screen and
considers how the choice of historical subject lends itself to commentary on contem­
porary issues, ranging from the rise of political movements such as Nazism and
Fascism, Stalinism, and McCarthyism, to the end of British empire, as well as to
moments of social flux, such as the paranoia of Watergate and the threat of femi­
nism. His chapter also explores the challenges of representing the life of a vile figure
who must be relegated to secondary or tertiary positions in the narrative to prevent
 Introduction 5

the story from devolving into a mere parade of horrors. Hunter also sees the sexual
excesses displayed in Caligula biopics as capitalising on the genre’s mainstay: that of
the ‘secret life’.
This stereotype of the biopic as sensationalising, diluting, or trivializing history is
challenged in the last two chapters of this section. In ‘Representing the Unrepresen­
table: The Army of Crime and Biopic Generic Conventions of Identity’, Hila Shachar
discusses the 2009 film Army of Crime (L’Armée du Crime, dir. Robert Guédiguian), a
‘Holocaust biopic’, which she argues is a film which powerfully addresses through its
heart‐breaking narrative, the unadaptability or unimaginability of history, in
particular, a history in ‘a realm beyond representation, beyond art and image’. in
which the genre of the biopic seems woefully inappropriate. Shachar interrogates the
ethics of seeking to represent unrepresentable trauma as well as the ethics of using
biopics to enact political messages even in opposition to the genre’s common framing
as a conservative mode. Melissa Croteau also considers how a contemporary biopic
refused to be pinned down by a simplistic formula in her chapter, ‘Nature versus
Nurture/Wilderness versus Words: Syncretizing Binaries and the Getting of Wisdom
in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007)’. Croteau’s subject is a film based on a 1996 book
by Jon Krakauer about Chris McCandless, a young man who relinquished his money
to embark on a journey that ended in his death in the wilderness of Alaska. As
Croteau notes, the film combines the biopic with other genres, in particular, the
nature genre and the action‐adventure film and, like numerous critiques of the biopic
itself, it is a film about misreading and misrepresenting.
Authors in the third section of this volume propose a number of sub‐biopic
genres: representing authors, politicians, philosophers and criminals, all of which
seem to adhere to their own generic conventions. These chapters examine not only
these conventions but also how such films negotiate the broader conventions of the
biopic genre, sometimes noting how one set of conventions enhances and amplifies
the other, as in Sunrise at Campobello (Kotlowski), sometimes noting the ways in
which they conflict with and undermine one another, as in The King’s Speech, The
Theory of Everything (Joubin) and Wittgenstein and MS 101 (Kusek). Jeremy Strong
reads the author biopic, television miniseries Fleming (dir. Mat Whitecross, 2014), as
an example of high‐quality television and as an adaptation of the Bond franchise
through the enormity of the Bond field of references. Fleming is discussed in this
chapter as typical of author‐biopics which ‘tend strongly towards the genres with
which particular authors are associated’ and see the narratives they create as based
on their own life experiences. Author biopics are arguably the most formulaic of all
as they tend to model the life of the author on the fictions they create, not only
reducing and reimagining the author, but reflecting back on the author’s work,
reframing it in terms of autobiography. In the following chapter, Dean J. Kotlowski
tackles another sub‐biopic genre: the presidential biopic. Sunrise at Campobello, the
theatrical (1958) and cinematic representation of Franklin D. Roosevelt (dir. Vincent
J. Donehue, 1960), focuses on the representation of the president’s battle with polio.
Kotlowski relates the demise of the ‘fawning biopic’ of Roosevelt but one
which ­nonetheless casts a shadow on screen treatments of Roosevelt that follow.
6 Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek

Incorporating a range of contemporary reviews and interviews, Kotlowski maps the

influence the Roosevelts themselves had on the biopic’s flattering portrayal of FDR,
not to mention the vilifying of his mother, and notes the interplay of ‘the president
as biopic subject’ with ‘the president as political actor’. Roosevelt’s disability seems to
take centre stage in this biopic and in the following chapter, Alexa Alice Joubin looks
at the representation of disability 50+ years after, this time through the lenses of
The King’s Speech (dir. Tom Hooper, 2010) and The Theory of Everything (dir. James
Marsh, 2015).
Joubin alerts us to the problem with able‐bodied actors playing individuals with
disabilities going on to win Oscars. There is still a tendency for white actors to be
cast in nonwhite roles, particularly characters – both fictional and nonfictional – who
are Latinx (as with Ben Affleck portraying Mexican‐American Antonio Menendez
in 2012’s Argo, Native American (as with Johnny Depp playing Tonto in 2013’s The
Lone Ranger), and Middle Eastern (as with Jake Gyllenhaal in 2010’s The Prince of
Persia). However, long after we have dispensed with the offences of conspicuous
blackface and yellowface, abled actors portraying disabled figures in biopics which
are almost exclusively about their identities as disabled people continues be one of
the last bastions of comfortable prejudice for actors, audiences, and critics alike. As
Joubin disturbingly notes, we find it ‘reassuring to see [abled actors] convincingly
portray disability and get up on their feet to accept [their] award’.
Robert Kusek’s chapter ‘Biographical Fantasia on Screen: Derek Jarman’s
Wittgenstein, Karol Radziszewski’s MS 101, and the Strategy of Détournement’
­discusses another subgenre of the biopic, the seemingly unlikely and infrequent
‘philosopher biopic’, focussing on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Kusek argues that both
Jarman’s and Rakziszewski’s films about the philosopher employ ‘détournement’,
­distorting what really happened, in true philosophical fashion, and interrogating
the real to produce countermessages to their audiences. These distorted biograph­
ical readings, which Kusek calls ‘biographical fantasias’ to distinguish them from
­traditional biopics seeking or purporting to seek the ‘real’, play deliberately with fact,
historicity, and subject identity to undermine the implicit compact with biopic
­audiences that promises a reverence for or depiction of Truth. More common than
philosophers are criminals in the biopic oeuvre, and Imelda Whelehan discusses
Chopper (dir. Andrew Dominik, 2000), a film based on the memoirs of Mark
Brandon ‘Chopper Read’ in the following chapter. Whelehan considers how the
biopic mythologises the criminal (still alive at the time of the film) through
the performance of the actor playing him. In contrast to the mythologisation of the
criminal, Ashley D. Polasek looks at the Sherlock Holmes film Mr. Holmes (dir. Bill
Condon, 2015) as a demythologising of the famed criminal investigator. Using the
model established by Custen in Bio/Pics (1992), Polasek argues that it is possible to
set aside the foundational principle of the biopic – that it is based on the life or part
of the life of a real person – and use the thematic, aesthetic, and promotional con­
ventions of the genre to meaningfully read a film based on a fictional subject as a
biopic. Polasek introduces a new subgenre into this collection, the fictional biopic: a
film that adopts the classic biopic formula, while ignoring the ‘biopic first principle’,
 Introduction 7

that the genre has at its core a real person. This chapter also includes an interview
conducted by Polasek with Jeffrey Hatcher, screenwriter for Mr. Holmes.
The fourth section of the volume explores what dominates most films designated
as biopics: the stars and their performances. One of the richest areas of interest for
the biopic genre is the interplay between subject and interpreter. As biopic subjects
are generally celebrities themselves, biopics are built through layers of performance:
the performance of reality or a perceived reality, the subject’s performance of his or
her own identity, the actor’s performance of the subject’s public and private iden­
tities, and the actor’s performance of his or her own celebrity identity as it reflects on
the embodied subject. The chapters in this section engage with these layers of
performance. Christine Geraghty considers The Iron Lady (2011) as a film that has
come to be watched for the Oscar‐winning performance of Meryl Streep, a quintes­
sentially actor’s picture about another master of performance, Margaret Thatcher.
Geraghty analyses performance as a theme throughout the film, particularly
Thatcher’s shifting and ever‐more adept performance of gender as she navigates the
rise and fall of her political career. Geraghty also considers the convergence of the
actor’s and subject’s performances, as Streep performs Thatcher’s evolution, and, in
turn, actress Alexandra Roach, who plays the young Margaret Thatcher née Roberts
in the film, performs Streep’s performance of Thatcher. Although The Iron Lady is a
Thatcher biopic, in practice, Geraghty argues, audiences will be drawing compari­
sons not between the performances of Roach and Thatcher but between Roach and
Streep and the casting and direction for the actors reflects this practical reality.
Robert Miklitsch considers the musical biopic – or the jukebox movie – in the fol­
lowing chapter and argues that Jailhouse Rock (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1957) is a veiled
biopic of the rags to riches story of its star, Elvis Presley. Another example of the genre,
which takes stars playing themselves to a new level, is A Hard Day’s Night (dir. Richard
Lester, 1964). Miklitsch sees this as a film about imprisonment and the price its stars,
The Beatles, have to pay for success. Though intended as a low‐budget exploitation
film merely to make money quickly before the band fell from p ­ opularity – as all,
including John, Paul, George, and Ringo themselves, expected to happen – Miklitsch
charts how the film’s direction and dialogue offer a unified, fluent discourse on the
price of fame. He explores as well as how the music – drawn from the revolutionary
A Hard Day’s Night album, which marked a significant creative leap for The Beatles
and pop music in general – contributes to the film’s biographical material. By merging
The Beatles’ performances of their own lives with performances of their own songs
(A Hard Day’s Night, significantly, was the first Beatles album to feature all‐original
songs), the music tells the story of the band’s increasing artistic experimentation,
maturity in themes, and dedication to craft, which, though absent from the explicit
narrative of the film are nonetheless implicit in the musical performances. Annie
Nissen considers new media celebrity biopics via a biopic based on a blog, Julie and
Julia (dir. Nora Ephron, 2009). Drawing on a number of intermedial sources, among
them novel, cookbook, television show ­footage and memoirs, this film, it is argued, is
a dialogue between the traditional celebrity biopic and what Nissen considers ‘new
media biopics’, which draw on media life writing and cookbooks, especially celebrity
8 Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek

cookbooks, as a type of life writing. In representing the biopic as a depiction and

product of the contemporary media context, the film complicates the idea of ­‘celebrity’,
which has been redefined in the twenty‐first century due to the egalitarian nature of
access to the means of publication in the age of social media. The creation of new
media biopics from older versions of the genre and the ways in which the film uses
‘recipe’, blending the old with the new, is seen as a metaphor for the biopic genre itself.
Nissen also explores the interrelationship between new media as a means for creation
and as a theme in other new media biopics, such as The Social Network (dir. David
Fincher, 2010), Steve Jobs (dir. Danny Boyle, 2011), and The Fifth Estate (dir. Bill
Condon, 2013). Colleen Kennedy‐Karpat also regards the significance of performance
in films about real people and the biopic’s association with Oscars, cementing the
genre’s ‘reputation as a star vehicle that showcases performance above all else’.
Kennedy‐Karpat writes about the star‐body as being split into two parts – that of
the role and the role player – and reminds us of the emergence of biopic actors in the
twenty‐first century, in particular Meryl Streep and Daniel Day‐Lewis, actors who
are celebrated and validated through their roles in prestigious biopics.
Finally, Lucinda Hobbs writes about biopics of black subjects. In analysing both
biopics about significant black figures in recent political history in Malcolm X
(dir. Spike Lee, 1992) and Selma (dir. Ava DuVernay, 2014) as well as momentary
biopics such as Jimi: All by My Side (dir. John Ridley, 2014), Nina (dir. Cynthia Mort,
2015), and Miles Ahead (dir. Don Cheadle, 2016). Hobbs explores how race and
racial politics are made central to such films whether or not the subject was politically
active. Her chapter also raises questions regarding the exclusion of films about black
subjects from the Oscars for such a prolonged period. The absence of black actors
and filmmakers from the 2016 Academy Awards, unfortunately, mirrors their
absence from the most award worthy of genres: the biopic.
Although it is impossible to generalise about biopics, so diverse and complex as
this collection demonstrates, these films invariably either embrace or deconstruct a
formula which simultaneously embraces and defies historical authenticity and
romanticises their subject, encapsulated in the title of Julian Jarrold’s biopic of Jane
Austen, Becoming Jane (2007), which calls attention to the reciprocal relationship
between part and player: the performance of the actress, Anne Hathaway, becoming
Austen as well as the beautification of the author (made becoming) through her
reimagining in a biopic.
As the authors in this collection explore the uneven boundaries of the genre, the
collection by necessity frequently engages with the challenge of understanding what
is and is not a biopic. Some of the authors seek to constrict those boundaries, noting,
in particular, the ethical and aesthetic issues associated with problematic claims
on ‘the real’ in terms of historical contexts (Corrigan and Kotlowski), fictional
antecedents (Strong), and the attributes and identities of actors and subjects
­
(Shachar, Huang, and Hobbs). Others make arguments for the permeability of those
boundaries with respect to cinematic eras (Cartmell and Robinson), national cine­
matic traditions (Christensen), appropriate source material (Nissen and Polasek),
and generic conventions (Kusek and Miklitsch).
 Introduction 9

One unavoidable result of an exploration of the many debates that range

throughout this collection is the recognition that the biopic genre, reviled as it often
is, is not merely the unfortunate result of a cynically formulaic process. Since the
earliest days of cinema, biopics have been utilised to test the possibilities of film
technologies. They have offered both nuanced performances of shifting identities, as
well as intentional, ideological constructions of celebrities. They build and decon­
struct history, mythologise and demythologise individuals, and integrate forms and
modes associated with a host of other, generally far more respected genres.
Ultimately, any critical discussion of biopics begins and ends with a discussion
of reality and the real. The current historical moment rings with the phrase ‘fake
news’ and its even more aggressively contradictory cousin, ‘alternative facts’. Both
phrases are used with varying degrees of rhetorical violence to force reality to
submit to an ideological narrative. This subjugation of the actual to the narrative
‘real’ underpins the discourse throughout this volume, and with it, an exploration
of the ethics motivating that submission: can such a submission, which may drive
the biopic away from reality, actually drive it closer to truth? Consider the
­biographical musical Hamilton, which at the time of writing is eagerly awaited as a
film adaptation. Hamilton does not merely engage in colorblind casting; it inten­
tionally casts minority black and Latinx actors as white figures from American
history. The producers came under fire in 2016 for an open casting call for the
show, specifying ‘non‐white men and women’. In response to pushback, the pro­
ducers reasserted their commitment to diversity: ‘it is essential to the storytelling
of Hamilton that the principal roles, which were written for nonwhite characters
(excepting King George), be performed by nonwhite actors’ (quoted in Paulson,
2016). Is Hamilton fake news? Or does it leverage ‘alternative facts’ to realize a
more truthful vision of the American immigrant experience and the founding
principles of American democracy to contrast with the more pervasive and
destructive whitewashing of history? The question is a compelling one, and it
serves as a justification for the kind of systematic and in‐depth analysis of the
biopic genre that this volume offers.

Works Cited

Bingham, Dennis.(2010). Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film
Genre. Rutgers University Press.
Biography. (2000). The biopic. 23(1).
Biopics and American national identity. (2011). a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. 26(1): 1–33.
Brown, Tom and Vidal, Belén. (eds.) (2013). The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture.
Routledge.
Cheshire, Ellen. (2014). Bio‐Pics: A Life in Pictures. Wallflower Press.
Custen, George. (1992). Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. Rutgers
University Press.
Epstein, William H. and Palmer, R. Barton. (2016). Invented Lives, Imagined Communities:
The Biopic and American National Identity. SUNY Press.
10 Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek

Haiduc, Sonia Amalia. (2014). Books on biopics. Adaptation 7(3): 353–360.

Minier, Márta and Pennacchia, Maddalena. (eds.) (2014). Adaptation, Intermediality and the
British Celebrity Biopic. Routledge.
Jackson, Russell. (2013). Theatres on Film: How the Cinema Imagines the Stage. Manchester
University Press.
Palmer, R. Barton and Pettey, Homer. (eds.). (2018). Rule Britannia: The Biopic and British
National Identity. SUNY Press.
Paulson, Michael. (2016). ‘Hamilton’ producers will change job posting, but not commitment
to diverse casting. New York Times (30 March). http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/
arts/union‐criticizes‐hamilton‐casting‐call‐seeking‐nonwhite‐actors.html (accessed
20 October 2018).
Polaschek, Bronwyn. (2013). The Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo,
Woolf and Austen. Palgrave.
Rosenstone, Robert A. and Parvulescu, Constantin. (eds.). (2013). The Blackwell Companion
to the Historical Film. Blackwell,.
Stratchey, Lytton. (2003). Eminent Victorians (ed. John Sutherland). Oxford University Press.
Two NYRB essays on recent biopics and their issues with history. (2015). MetaFilter
(11 January). http://www.metafilter.com/146019/Two‐NYRB‐essays‐on‐recent‐biopics‐
and‐their‐issues‐with‐history (accessed 22 March 2019).
 Part I
Approaches
 2
Biopics and the Trembling Ethics
of the Real
Timothy Corrigan

Let’s begin by noting the obvious: that the real is not reality, and the tension
between them is often the most productive part of a film and our engagment with it.
Most broadly all films might be said to be explicitly or implicitly engaged with adapt-
ing reality as an attempt to define or categorise the real in different ways. Whether
we regard cinematic representation as an indexical, semiotic, or some other system,
since 1895, movies have performed this adaptive action to frame reality, among
other shapes, as an epistemological fact, a philosophical concept, a psychological
state, an aesthetic category, a cultural situation, an ideological position, a personal
expression, or a historical event – all potentially different versions of a real. Certain
films clearly emphasise one or another of these frameworks to underpin a specific
reality principle for understanding the real. Others overlap and mix these registers
as a way of foregrounding and complicating the very notion of the real. Thus, as an
extremely complex example, Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) might be said to
explore and represent the layers of an ever elusive reality as it spins through different
spaces of the real, creating a continually regressing mise en abyme that contains the
metaphysical, the psychological, the sexual, and the legal real.
For me, the question of what counts as ‘the real’ – and the variety of cinematic
responses to it – becomes invariably informed by the search for cinematic value. Put
simply, to adapt a real is invariably an act of valorising where the real lies. Dramatising
and problematising the movement and tension within the adaptation of the real thus
foregrounds a central question about ethics and value within adaptation itself – as
both a questioning and securing of its assumptions and faith in the power to adapt
and appropriate reality as the real. With touchstones in the work of Giorgio Agamben
and Jean‐Luc Nancy, here I want to look at two recent and extraordinary auto/bio

A Companion to the Biopic, First Edition. Edited by Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
14 Timothy Corrigan

pics – The Missing Picture (dir. Rithy Panh, 2013) and Stories We Tell (dir. Sarah
Polley, 2012) – to see how these films investigate and complicate the real and, in the
process, valorise specific relationships to it. Whereas more conventional adaptations
often appear to promote an ethics of the real as what I’ll call self‐evident, these films
explore the difficult terrain of demarcating the real across the shifting and unstable
grounds of uncertain evidence. The word ‘trembling’ in my title comes from Jean‐
Luc Nancy and I emphasise it to mark this other encounter with the real – in its most
provocative and creative state – as something that is there but not there, as evidence
that resists adaptation. At the heart of the adaptation of evidence rather than self‐
evidence, the key strategy becomes reenactments which provoke two actions: (i) a
desubjectivisation of the world and the self which in turn (ii) releases the real into
the domain of phantoms.

Adapting Realities

With a more restricted and focused defintion of adaptation, the drama of adapting
the real becomes commonly a matter of transposing, uncovering, translating, medi-
ating (or any number of adaptative metaphors commonly used in adaptation studies)
source material from one medium to another. These are well‐worn questions: Is the
adaptation true to the spirit of Shakespeare or Austen? Does the cinematic character
adequately embody the literary character? Are themes maintained? Are stylistic ele-
ments creatively but accurately reconfigured? More interestingly, if the adapting text
strays significantly from the source, has the adaptation convincingly created an
alternative real? The recent Anna Karenina (dir. Joe Wright, 2012), for instance,
reclaims the real of its source novel through a relatively extreme stylistic transforma-
tion that identifies and refashions the reality of the novel as a sexual theatrics, an
interpretation which condenses and highlights the cumbersome reality of the novel.
Indeed, with these literary adaptations,that vague and indeterminant zone where a
‘real’ moves is explicitly signalled in the different phrases that gesture towards it as
‘based on’, ‘inspired by’, and ‘adapted from’.
Perhaps closer to and more obviously embedded in the core of the matter,
­documentary films can be described most directly as adaptations of reality as a
certain figuration of the real. Since the 1920s and John Grierson’s definition of a
documentary as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’ to the explosions of contempo-
rary documentaries as personal, essayistic, animated, and interactive, documentary
practices have claimed to circumvent and adapt reality as objective, orchestrated,
political, immediate, digital, three dimensional, and unrepresentable. In the last
20 years especially – partly because of the so‐called digital turn in contemporary
cultures – these questions have grown especially prominent, vexed, and contentious.
Today especially, the real – as spread across our vast media landscapes – has become
a turbulent, exciting, and sometimes silly field of different practices (ranging from
digital ethnographies to reality shows) in which the status of the real is continually
adapted, redefined, and debated.
 Biopics and the Trembling Ethics of the Real 15

Indeed let me here refocus this field of documentary adaptations even more
s­pecifically on biographical or autobiographical films, because both practices are
especially rich terrain for questions about subjectivity, adaptation, and their relation
to the real, questions which foreground issues about the value and ethics of
adaptation. Implicitly or explicitly, these films describe human agency in the world
and the extent to which that agency can circumscribe and define the reality of that
world through the movement, expressions, desires, and gestures of its subject. In
these cases, the human subject typically anchors, discovers, or acts as guide for the
subjective terms of the real. The perspectives and actions of the individual become
the assumed agency for discovering and presenting the key truths as evidence in a
social or natural world. Focused on a real historical identity, these agents of the real
create and reflect their worlds as a kind of knowledge and value. For example, films
such as Rob Epstein’s The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1984) or Nanni Moretti’s
Dear Diary (Caro Diario, 1993) map very different worlds through different age-
nices whose personal tragedy or personal tragicomedy imbue those worlds with
specific ethical values about sexual politics in one case and psychosocial, aesthetic,
and physical resiliency in the other. Conventional biographical and autobiograph-
ical subjects ultimately measure and determine the real as a particular value pro-
duced by knowledge, emotion, and memory across the activity that filters reality.
Less conventional biopics or autobiopics, however, might reflexively dramatise that
action and agency in order to open it to an ethics of potential and possibility. In these
cases, especially, reenactments become the centre of a complex shifting between
adapting reality and the real, between what I will describe as decreating and recre-
ating evidence of the real.

Evidence and Ethics

To open up these questions in a somewhat provocative way, I am going to do what

true philosophers often decry: cherry‐pick ideas from the work of Agamben and
Nancy as part of a shorthand to rethinking the problematic of adapting the real.
More exactly, I want to borrow some of their positions to create a critically reflexive
model whereby adapting the real can mean inevitably gesturing towards it in a way
that defines it as always inaccessible and resistant to the look of adaptation. In these
cases, in short, adaptation points to a real it cannot truly represent.
I am particularly interested in Nancy’s suggestions in his book The Evidence of
Film – his reflections on the films of Abbas Kiarostami – where the real resides ‘in
leaving things unclosed’ (2001, p. 10). This central evidence that film mobilises thus
identifies ‘a blind spot’ that opens that cinematic gaze and ‘presses upon it to look’ at
what it may be unable to see (p. 12). This is a cinema of ‘eye openers’, Nancy claims,
where the real resists, precisely, ‘being absorbed in any vision’ and where ‘a world
refers only to itself ’ (pp. 16, 18). This more radical real opens to ‘an increased
­plurality’, revealing its ‘essentially multiple essence’ through cinema’s ‘internal mul-
tiplicity’ of ‘pictures, image as such, music, words and finally movement’ (pp. 22–24).
16 Timothy Corrigan

Here a film ‘ceaselessly moves, so to speak, in the film or out of the film in order to
reenter it’ (p. 24). Here discovering the real becomes, significantly I think, a kind of
education, based on the etymology of the word education, ‘to bring out’ the real of
the world: ‘The evidence of the cinema is that of the existence of a look through
which a world can give back to itself its own real and the truth of its enigma …, a
world moving of its own motion, without a heaven or a wrapping, without fixed
moorings or suspension, a world shaken, trembling, as the winds blow through it’
(pp. 24, 44).
Dovetailing with Nancy’s notions about cinema and the real are Agamben’s argu-
ments about ‘gesture’ and two terms related to his conception of gestural montage:
repetition and stoppage. For Agamben, gesture implies ‘the exhibition of mediality’
as well as ‘the process of making a means visible as such’, so that in the world of
images, ‘gesture is the point of flight from aesthetics into ethics and politics’ in the
world (Grønstad and Gustafsson 2014, pp. 7–8). Here gesture describes the ‘decre-
ation of the real’, or decreation of facts as part of a larger desubjectivization of
reality. In Jean‐Luc Godard’s work, for instance, Agamben (2014) tells us that
gesture ‘functions as an unveiling of the cinema by the cinema’, which takes us to
the realm of mediality where adaptation thrives in the intersection of adaptive
encounters (p. 25). Gesture in the broadest sense of the term calls forth the inter-
stices in the act of adapting the real so that ‘repetition and stoppage’ become the
salient vehicles for revealing a world beyond the image as potential and possibility:
‘repetition is not the return of the same but the return of the possibility of what
was’; it ‘realizes the messianic task of cinema’ to create ‘an image of nothing’ that no
longer recounts meaning and thus returns the real to the ethical potential of new
meanings and new possibilities (p. 26). The ethics and value of reality are thus a
possibility and potential: a ‘zone of indistinguishability’ or, in Agamben’s phrase,
‘bare life’ (Väliaho 2014, p. 111).
Reshaping these remarks, I am interested in how cinematic adaptations gesture
towards the real as this zone of ‘bare life’ in the realm of possiblity. Conventional
adaptations of real events and people usually mould and defer this zone in order to
redirect value to the illusion of representational authenticity, coherent identities and
subjectivities, and the closure of memory so that the ethical challenge of the real is
foreclosed as the self‐evident. The documentary biographies and autobiographies I
address here instead openly undermine representational authenticities, trouble their
identities, and unmoor memories across the challenge of evidence and the action of
reenactment as adaptation.
Bill Nichols and Ivone Margulies are two of a growing number of scholars who
recognised this strategy of reenactments as one of the richest and most suggestive
directions in contemporary documentaries. As Nichols (2008) characterises reen-
actments, they initiate a ‘desubjectivization’ of the subject in ‘a gap between the
objectivity/subjectivity binary and the workings of the fantasmatic’ (p. 77). Here,
‘Facts remain facts’, as he points out, ‘but the iterative effort of going through the
motions of reenacting them imbues such facts with the lived stuff of immediate and
situated experience’ (pp. 77–78). Taking a different tack, Margulies (2012) aligns
 Biopics and the Trembling Ethics of the Real 17

reenactments with ethics where the repetitious exemplarity of reenactments ‘con-

verts’ the spectator because they produce ‘an improved version of the event’ as a
‘modern morality tales’: ‘Inflected by a psychodramatic (or liturgical) belief in the
enlightening effects of literal repetition, reenactment creates, performatively
speaking, another body, place, and time. At stake is an identity that can recall
the original event (through a second‐degree indexicality) but in doing so can also
re‐form it’ (p. 220).

Decreating and Recreating Real Identities

I want now to refocus the relationship between the kinds of agencies explored in
these documentary adaptations and the worlds they map. I will be schematic and
look at two distinctive versions of these kinds of films, The Missing Picture and
Stories We Tell. In these two instances, we witness historical agencies for engaging
versions of the real specifically as a process of decreating the real and recreating it,
after Agamben, as an open ‘zone of indistinguishability’. Whereas adapting the world
as a self‐evident real reflects mainly that self rather than the world, these films
explore the elusive evidence of a world as a pressure on the agency of that self, map-
ping the territory where a real becomes visible through Agamben’s notions of stop-
page and repetition and foregrounded especially through reenactments.
In Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh’s 2013 autobiographical account of the
Khmer Rouge genocide from 1975 to 1979, the real is blocked, stopped in its track
by the imponderability of the violence of that genocide and the erasure of virtually
all evidence and representations of that violence. During the four years of this
Cambodian holocaust, virtually all the vestiges of a prerevolutionary society were
eradicated by mass murder, mass torture, and mass imprisonment, with most repre-
sentational evidence of these atrocities destroyed by Pol Pot’s revolutionary soldiers.
As the film and Panh’s voice‐over reflect on the death of his family, they meditate on
the incomprehensible loss, while they concomitantly work to document a horrific
reality whose only remaining representational records have been emptied of truth,
or more exactly whose real truth is its emptiness – like the images of the city of
Phnom Penh, emptied of people and marked only by deserted buildings. Panh
explains the film’s titular argument, in a postrelease interview (Brzeski 2013), as a
particular provocation that generated the larger investigation of the film: one of the
Khmer Rouge ‘photographers said he had shot some images of an execution. But I
was never able to find them – maybe somebody hid them somewhere or they are
being kept underground. The search for that image became important to me – as a
record. This was the first “missing picture”. I also asked myself whether an image can
ever really tell the truth. An image is not the truth – even if it’s taken from a final act
like an execution – it can not tell the full truth. Part of the picture will always be
missing …. [Later] the idea for the film completely changed. The missing picture
took on more meanings – of the Khmer Rouge execution, of a family universe that
no longer exists in this world, and more’ (para. 5).
18 Timothy Corrigan

In search of this fundamental loss and vanishing, the film proceeds as a series of
remembrances of Panh’s life as a child with his family (in a home that is now a
brothel) and his years in a prison camp where death and brutality permeated his
daily experience. As Panh struggles, in voice‐over, to remember a life that has dis-
appeared, memories return in the film as fragile and stationary puppet shows in
rickety buildings with toylike inhabitants. Because the real here is always a missing
image, the attempt to locate that real means to ‘decreate’ the image itself by inhabit-
ing it with painted clay recreations of people as unanimated figurines and events as
unanimated arrangements of these figurines (sometimes superimposed on docu-
mentary footage), staged dioramas (recreating fragile memories), and immobile
‘actions’ that counter the illusion of realistic images.
As these real memories drift into an unreal space, so necessarily does Panh as an
autobiographical subject, so that this ‘decreation of the real’ becomes, in turn, part
of a larger desubjectivisation of the film’s autobiographical reality. Since the real sub-
ject, who is Rithy Panh, has in a sense been effectively erased by the extreme ideo-
logically subjectivisation of reality, Panh returns as a disembodied voice and a
variety of wooden and clay figurines. What remains of him is a phantom self whose
look wanders and wavers before his past. At one point, Panh’s own self teeters on the
edge of this vanishing reality in a television insert where an interview with him
seems to dissipate into the larger atmosphere of an unreal moving television image
inserted into a landscape of radical stoppage.
To adapt a lost or missing reality can thus be accomplished in The Missing Picture
only by gesturing toward it as an unattainable real. In Agamben’s term, the real as a
‘whatever singularity’ can be documented only by representing it as a ‘cinematic
stoppage’ – achieved in this film as a layered montage across the image or in the
literal immobility of its figures that gesture beyond themselves (2014, p. 26). At one
point, Panh’s voice‐over comments: ‘When we discover a picture on the screen that
is not a painting or a shroud, then it is not missing’. Here, in this film, however, there
are only the stoppages of shrouds and painted selves.
Informing this impossible autobiography is the impossiblity of adapting this real
to the cinema as subject. In a manner quite different from Agamben’s examples, The
Missing Picture is thus both a deconstruction of autobiographical adaptation and
more largely of the cinema itself. It attempts, in Agamben’s phrase, to ‘unveil the
cinema with the cinema’ by dramatizing the stops in intermedial shifts usually
buried within (2014, p. 26). Cinema itself disappears in this film like Panh’s decre-
ated memory of a Cambodian film studio before the revolution. What remains are
only rusty film reels of Khmer Rouge prison camps as evidence of the full degrada-
tion of a cinematic real. In those four years of a reality of brutal devastation, as Panh
remarks, ‘There is no truth. Only cinema. The revolution’.
One sequence is especially illustrative of this action to ‘decreate’ and ‘unveil the
cinema’, as it offers real documentary footage that it then decreates within the con-
text of a vastly different real. Here clips of the Apollo moon landing document a
historical reality which then becomes doubly displaced into zones of the unreal that
deny its presence. On the one hand, the Khmer Rouge soldiers refuse to believe the
 Biopics and the Trembling Ethics of the Real 19

truth of this event; on the other, this triumphant footage of ‘one giant leap for man-
kind’ gestures towards a (real) world impossible to imagine when contrasted with
the contemporaneous brutality in Cambodia.
Over a conventional documentary footage from the period, Panh’s voice‐over
crystallises this difficult engagement between contesting realities: ‘I want to be rid
of this image, so I show it to you’. To decreate the impossible real means ultimately
to evacuate the reality of the image where, in Panh’s words, ‘Conquest through
emptiness is an image with glaring simplicity’. In the end, his triumph may be, as
he puts it, that he has not found nor ever will find ‘the missing image’; a historical
reality in this film has been painfully redirected to an open space of the real. If
Panh as subject and his memory as object remain beyond the image, their trem-
bling real may be manifest only in phantoms of unseeable thoughts that gesture to
the grounds for an ethical relation with the real: ‘For if an image can be stolen’,
Panh says, ‘a thought cannot’.

Recreating the Real

In Sarah Polley’s 2012 Stories We Tell that open field of possiblity where the real
dwells becomes an opportunity to recreate it through the force of repetition as mon-
tage. Like a classical narrative that slips off its usual path, Polley’s search for origins
becomes a search for one’s own essential identity. More exactly, Polley approaches
the crisis of her autobiographical encounter with a lost mother and father from a
direction where the real opens up as a phantom far different from Panh’s. She mixes
documentary footage, talking‐heads interviews, and, most important, reenactments,
to interrogate and investigate that essential moment of identity as a ‘search for a
father’ in which a decreation of one real recreate it as another self.
Polley, who has a visibly and vocally prominent presence throughout the film,
pursues the mysteries of her parents’s relationship and her own birth as a story that
moves closer and closer to answers, while refocusing the accumulation of perspec-
tives and commentaries by contrasting three possible biological fathers: Michael, the
father who raised her, whom she knows and loves despite the professed difficulties
in his marriage to Polley’s mother; Geoffrey Bowes, an actor in the Montreal pro-
duction where her mother worked decades earlier; and Harry Gulkin, a well‐known
film producer, also present in Montreal at the time that her mother, Diane, became
pregnant with her. These different father (figures) become a version of the larger
and more philosophical contrasts that organise this documentary, among them the
distinctions between the different ‘stories we tell’ about our personal experiences
and lives – to ourselves and to others.
The early part of Stories We Tell also introduces Polley’s siblings (Mark, John,
Joanna, Susy) as well as other relations and friends of her mother, all of them
­presented as ‘talking‐head’ figures who comment on the life of Diane Polley, their
experiences with this dynamic woman, and her early death from cancer. Woven
within this accumulation of commentaries and remembrances is a series of old
20 Timothy Corrigan

photographs and home‐movie sequences of the actress‐mother frolicking around

the house, playing at the beach, and at one point singing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ on an
audition tape. Gradually, this oblique portrait begins to reveal various differences in
her personality that suggest an increasingly complex history of the mother, who for
all of her extrovert exuberance was ‘a woman with secrets’. Indeed, the central secret
that the film gradually uncovers is the surprising source of a pregnancy that ­produced
Sarah herself.
While the title of the film indicates a focus on various individual tales about the
mother, the film accumulates, contrasts, and develops through these little narratives,
which have been shaded and shaped by the limits and prejudices of first‐person
memory and which ultimately demonstrate how no overarching perspective can
fully explain, or even fully develop, the mother’s character, personality, and history.
One of the possible fathers, Harry Gulkin, claims, toward the conclusion of the film,
that only two people have the ‘right’ to tell the story of Diane’s affair, because only
she and he were there. Otherwise, he says, ‘you can’t ever touch bottom’. Indeed, for
Polley, that elusive ‘bottom’ of any experience or personality neither can nor perhaps
should actually be touched or documented. Although there may be a reality
enmeshed within these diffferent perspectives, its status as a real remains a protean
and elusive notion that can never be fully secured.
Early in the film, Sarah describes the interviews that organise the film as part of
an ‘interrogation process’ – which is as much an interrogation of Polley as subject
and her ‘essential self ’ as it is of the other players and family members in this drama.
Just as it contrasts and complicates the truth of those accumulated interviews, Stories
We Tell turns and twists that interrogative position in particularly contemporary
ways. It reflexively engages and undermines the narrative interrogation that ­supports
most memories and, at the same time, reflexively calls attention to its own work as a
personal film that uses theatrical and reflexive reenactments to undermine the
objectivity of any perspective.
The film begins with a dramatically reflexive sequence in which Polley brings her
father, Michael, to a recording booth where he hesitantly reads and reenacts the nar-
ration that we later find out he wrote for the film. At different points in the film,
Michael reads this narrative commentary which, we eventually learn, he was inspired
to write because of the climactic revelation that he and we experience and because
of his subsequently renewed bond with Sarah. He reenacts as performance, in short,
the reenactment he wrote of his life.
As he moves in and out of his own narrative, Michael appears sometimes as part of
a third‐person perspective on his own history, while, at other times, he expresses
himself through a first‐person testimony about his experiences with Diane.
Throughout this reflexive narrration, Sarah regularly interrupts Michael to have him
reread lines (‘take that line back’) and so calls attention to the constructive fabric of
his narration itself, set within her fragmented documentary. As a related strategy, past
events in the film are often retrieved through what seems to be authentic found foot-
age and home movies, but toward the conclusion of the film, many of these events
and film clips are revealed to be reenactments with scenes reconstructed and actors
 Biopics and the Trembling Ethics of the Real 21

playing the roles of the main characters. Like the deconstruction and theatricalisation
of Michael’s narrative, these reenactments make what at first seem like the traditional
facts and actualities of documentary form into another representational dramatisation
that may or may not be an accurate p ­ ortrayal of those facts, blurring the lines bet-
ween different versions of the real as adaptations of reality.
These repetitions as reenacted montage thus open onto a different place for the
real made possible by, in the end, a climactic gesture. The film opens with a quote
from Margaret Atwood: ‘When you’re in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all but
only a confusion, a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass … like a
house in a whirlwind.… It only becomes a story when you’re telling it to yourself, or
someone else’. This dark, whirling house – like Nancy’s ‘world shaken, trembling, as
the winds blow through it’ – is that open zone where the real offers new possibilities,
new values, and a new ethics. It is that zone that spreads and thickens the evidence
of the real – like the passing reference to the parallel plot of Marriage Italian Style
(dir. De Sica, 1964) – where the question of a self‐evident patrimony gives way to a
less determinant world where ‘children are children and they are all equal’. This is a
world where the elusive evidence of the real not only insists on decreating the image
but allows for a recreative adaptation where the self‐evidence of DNA gives way to
the recreative evidence of imaginative affect and emotion, where ‘that great moment
of truth’ for Sarah and Michael becomes the gesture that she offers after all the stories
have been told, a gesture that ‘makes [her] revelation of their non‐biological rela-
tionship worth it’, where, as Michael puts it, ‘was I or wasn’t I your father’ becomes
‘an unimportant question’. As Agamben (2014) might say, here ‘repetition is not the
return of the same but the return of the possibility of what was’ (p. 26).

Conclusion

In adaptive dramas of the real, documentaries – and more specifically biographical

and autobiographical documentaries – typically mobilise the phantoms of their
­historical agents to investigate, to adapt, and to offer evidence of the real as a place
where ethics and value emerge as a possibility and potential. More traditional docu-
mentaries tend to stabilise that real and its agents as, ultimately, a self‐evident value.
At the centre of the more reflexively adventurous of these films like The Missing
Picture and Stories We Tell, however, tactics of cinematic stoppage, gesture, and rep-
etition decreate as in Panh’s film, and recreate as in Polley’s film, the real in order to
open it up as a slippage that points to the interstices of a possible, and not a defini-
tive, ethics. This interdeterminancy has increasingly created a space made visible
through reenactments, where the adaptive process that is a documentary becomes
doubled within the look of the documentary. In a world more and more contested
and distorted by ideological claims of the real as self‐evident, these kinds of reenactments –
as seen in Panh’s and Polley’s films – situate the real as a phantom whose acknowl-
edgement as such is, for me, perhaps one of the most important educational tasks of
adaptive documentaries today.
22 Timothy Corrigan

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. (2014). Cinema and history: On Jean‐Luc Godard. In: Cinema and
Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics, and the Moving Image (ed. Henrik Gustafsson and Asbjørn
Grønstad), 25–26. Bloomsbury.
Brzeski, Patrick. (2013). Busan: Cambodia’s Rithy Panh on his Cannes winner The Missing
Picture (Q&A). The Hollywood Reporter (6 October). https://www.hollywoodreporter.
com/news/busan‐cambodias‐rithy‐panh‐his‐643788 (accessed 16 March 2019).
Grønstad, Asbjørn and Gustafsson, Henrik. (2014). Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the
shape of cinema to come. In: Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics, and the Moving
Image (ed. Henrik Gustafsson and Asbjørn Grønstad), 1–17. Bloomsbury.
Margulies, Ivone. (2002). Exemplary bodies: Reenactment in Love in the City, Sons, and Close
Up. In: Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (ed. Ivone Margulies). Duke
University Press.
Nancy, Jean‐Luc. (2001). Abbas Kiarostami: The Evidence of Film (trans. Christine Irizarry
and Verena Andermatt). Yves Gevaert.
Nichols, Bill. (2008). Documentary reenactment and the fantasmatic subject. Critical Inquiry
35(1): 77.
Väliaho, Pasi. (2014). Biopolitics of gesture: Cinema and the neurological body. In: Cinema
and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics, and the Moving Image (ed. Henrik Gustafsson and
Asbjørn Grønstad), 103–123. Bloomsbury.
 3
Biopics and the Melodramatic Mode
Sonia Amalia Haiduc

My own greatest desire is for realism. Therefore I employ what is called ­melodrama –
but which might as well be called ultra‐realism – for all my thinking has led me to the
conclusion that there is the only road to screen realism that will still be entertainment.
Perhaps the strangest criticism I encounter is that I sometimes put wildly improbable
things, grotesque unrealities, on the screen when actually the incident criticised is
lifted bodily from real life. The reason is that the strange anomalies of real life, the
inconsequences of human nature, appear unreal.
(Hitchcock 1937)

Rosenstone’s (1995) Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History
explores the relationship between history and film, fact and fiction, written histories
and filmic reenactments of history:

The difference between fiction and history is this: both tell stories, but the latter is a
true story. Question: Need this be a ‘literal’ truth, an exact copy of what took place in
the past? Answer: In film, it can never be. And how about the printed page, is literal
truth possible there? No. A description of a battle or a strike or a revolution is hardly a
literal rendering of that series of events. Some sort of ‘fiction’ or convention is involved
here, one that allows a selection of evidence to stand for a larger historical experience,
one that allows a small sampling of reports to represent the collective experience of
thousands, tens of thousands, even millions who took part in or were affected by doc-
umentable events. One may call this convention Condensation too. But isn’t there a
difference between Condensation and invention? Isn’t creating character and incident
different from condensing events? Is it not destructive of ‘history’? Not history on film.
On the screen, history must be fictional in order to be true! (pp. 69–70)

A Companion to the Biopic, First Edition. Edited by Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
24 Sonia Amalia Haiduc

Appropriating Rosenstone’s jocular dialogue with an imaginary interlocutor,

I would argue that, on the screen, biography must be ‘melodramatic’ in order to be
true. After all, as Dennis Bingham points out, the biopic is ‘by no means a simple
recounting of the facts of someone’s life. It is an attempt to discover biographical
truth’ (2010, p. 7). Further expanding on the thorny issue of truth, he adds: ‘At the
heart of the biopic is the urge to dramatize actuality and find in it the filmmaker’s
own version of truth. The function of the biopic subject is to live the spectator a
story’ (p. 10).1 Bingham’s definition touches upon the tensions inherent in the reen-
actment of life on screen between the multiplicity of entangled ‘truths’ simulta-
neously inhabiting and communicating between the plane of the actual and the
fictional worlds of filmic narratives. Of these ‘truths’ I would like to focus on the
matter of emotional truth as a product of melodramatically-constructed emotional
authenticity through the lens of melodrama and explore the interventions of the
melodramatic mode into the biopic genre in two self‐reflexive, ‘auteurist’ biopics,
André Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë (1979) and François Ozon’s Angel (2007).
Emotional ‘truth’, a central preoccupation in biopics, is not coterminous with
­biographical truth, as Bingham seems to imply when he asserts that one of the moti-
vations behind making a biopic is ‘for both artist and spectator to discover what it
would be like to be this person, or to be a certain type of person’ (p. 10). By ‘truth’
I understand a certain readable, recognisable, coherently constructed sense of
­interiority that speaks to the reality of the human condition and is encoded in the
presence and the gestural performances of the actors’ bodies on screen, expressed
through (melo)dramatic form. It approximates what T.S. Eliot called the illusion of
‘life itself ’ (quoted in Christie 2002, p. 283).

The Weight of Melodrama

But first, a few remarks on the question of melodrama, one of cinema’s most con-
tested ‘force‐fields’2, subject to continuous reevaluations and redefinitions since
the term was first borrowed from Italian by Rousseau to define his play Pygmalion
in 1770. Like the biopic, melodrama suffered critical derision and neglect until
the 1970s, when it was rescued out of obscurity by feminist critics in a vast, still
ongoing project of reassessment and redefinition as a coherent aesthetic system
with specific expressive features. Gledhill’s (1987) introductory chapter to the
seminal Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film
opens up the discussion about the importance of the ‘melodramatic mode’ to
Hollywood film with an observation on melodrama’s low status at the beginning
of the century as ‘the anti‐value for a critical field in which tragedy and realism
became cornerstones of “high” cultural value, needing protection from mass,
“melodramatic” ­entertainment’ (p. 5). According to Gledhill, the melodramatic
mode both intersects with and competes against the demands of realism, given its
significance as both a type of aesthetic practice and a way of viewing the world
associated with lowbrow entertainment. In a later reassessment of melodramatic
 Biopics and the Melodramatic Mode 25

modality, Gledhill points to the term’s continuing effect: ‘melodrama provokes,

much as today, anxiety of the establishment as to the cultural degeneration and
insubordination of the lower orders’ (2000, p. 230). This assessment echoes the
suspicion and accusations of ‘betrayal’, ‘simplification’, and overall ‘dumbing
down’ with which biopics have been generally received by the critical and
academic establishment. The repeated assertions that the biographical film in
question fails to capture the ‘real’ historical figure’s complexity, and, in the case of
literary biopics, the writer’s (unfailingly) subversive and nuanced work, suggest
the anxiety is connected with the disrespectful intrusions of popular culture into
the spheres of high culture.
A point of agreement amongst melodrama’s critical theorists is that the melodra-
matic form ‘is notoriously difficult to define’ (Cook 1991, p. 249). One of the initial
difficulties was connected to its generic specificity, the elements which identify a
specific genre, versus a broader field whose elements are difficult to pin down as it
intersects with other fields. Consequently, melodrama has been alternately seen within
Film Studies as a distinct genre, a mode that cuts across generic boundaries, an exces-
sive style, and even as a certain type of sensibility – films that are not necessarily cate-
gorised as melodramas can nonetheless be experienced ‘melodramatically’.
Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama
and the Mode of Excess helps reconceptualise melodrama as a mode by placing it in
the tradition of the nineteenth‐century novels of Balzac, Dickens, Hugo, Dostoyevsky,
and Henry James, whose texts reworked a substratum of early nineteenth‐century
French popular theatre. For Brooks, melodrama represents the theatrical impulse
itself: ‘a dramaturgy of hyperbole, excess, excitement, and “acting out”’ (1995, p. viii),
whose forms emerged in France at the end of the Enlightenment and were shaped by
the radical secularisation process initiated around the French Revolution. His study
conceptualises melodrama as a form of resacralisation that became essential to the
modern imagination. The loss of the unifying, communal form of the Sacred resulted
in the transfer of the quest for ethical imperatives onto the individual: ‘mythmaking
could now only be individual, personal … the individual ego declares its central and
overriding value, its demand to be the measure of all things’ (Brooks 1976, p. 16) His
interest lies in melodrama as a ‘form for a post‐sacred era, in which polarization and
hyperdramatisation of forces in conflict represent a need to locate and make evident,
legible, and operative those large choices of ways of being which we hold to be of
overwhelming importance even though we cannot derive them from any
transcendental system of belief ’ (p. viii), ‘as a mode of conception and expression, as
a certain fictional system for making sense of experience, as a semantic field of force’
(p. xvii).
As a transnational form with a long history, ‘melodrama’ as a term has been
applied to theatre, opera, fiction, a specific cinematic genre or to ‘a pervasive mode
across popular culture’ (Williams 2018, p. 213). Currently associated with a type of
‘women’s film’ focused on psychological exploration, the domestic sphere and
strong pathos, melodrama was traditionally used by the industry and the trade
press of the classic Hollywood period to describe mainly action‐oriented, crime
26 Sonia Amalia Haiduc

and retribution dramas, ‘extravagant adventures, full of blood and thunder, ­clashing
swords and hair’s breadth escapes’ (Singer 2001, p. 48). Later on, it became
­associated with the gangster film and the western, types of productions generally
associated with male audiences. For Linda Williams, these associations are still in
place in the contemporary blockbuster: ‘The hero of the blockbuster movie displays
his or her virtue not only in spectacular actions, but also first in forms of suffering
that makes his subsequent action seem morally legible. This pathos of the suffering
victim turned into righteous action hero is, for better and for worse, the alchemy of
melodrama’s cultural power’ (2016, p. 54). The current associations of the term
with female‐centred narratives of romantic and maternal self‐sacrifice such as Now,
Voyager (1942) and the Sirkian family melodramas of the 1950s were generated by
feminist critical debates in the 1970s and 1980s and resulted in the creation of a
new, fertile critical framework laminated onto an existing industry category; in the
process, this critical project also ‘successfully reoriented the gender politics of film
theory itself ’ (Langford 2005, p. 29).
An important addition to the field of melodrama studies is Christine Gledhill’s
observation in ‘Signs of Melodrama’ that film stars and melodrama share a similar
rhetorical system. In both melodrama and stardom, the ‘person’ is central to the
system, becoming the source of desire and motivation, morality and ethics: ‘melo-
dramatic characterisation is performed through a process of personification whereby
actors – and fictional characters conceived as actors in their diegetic world – embody
ethical forces … Here moral forces are expressions of personality, externalised in a
character’s physical being, in gesture, dress and above all in action’ (Gledhill 1998,
p. 210). Developed by Lee Strasberg, Method acting went beyond interpretation,
seeking to extract emotional truth from the unconscious of the actor in order to
ultimately merge the actor’s self with the character (pp. 222–223).
As Vidal (2014) points out, ‘the actor is the cornerstone to the biopic’s edifice of his-
torical allusion. His/her performance is the emotional hook for the spectator’s investment
in the biographical narrative … The biopic trades on a sense of authenticity that stems
from the actor’s body itself ’ (p. 11). The embodied authorial figure in biopics, then,
becomes a locus of emotional authentication that allows us to identify and decode the
forces in conflict that are part and parcel of melodrama’s semantic force field.

The Biopic Body/The Melodramatic Body: Once More

with Feeling

Studies of literary biopics are bound to remark on the difficulty, if not impossi-
bility, of representing the process of writing on screen. The externalisation of
writing is more than a device to render visual an act which lacks visual appeal.
Accompanied by gestures writ large such as vigorous typing or furious handwriting,
against soaring music, biopics encourage viewers to ‘read’ the act on screen melo-
dramatically, as an external sign of an unfolding internal truth being made visible.
The stylistic strategies of melodrama create a heightened expressivity that is
 Biopics and the Melodramatic Mode 27

enhanced by means of camera, lighting, mise‐en‐scène, the use of objects, mon-

tage, colour, and sound. As Brooks demonstrates, the language of melodrama is
essentially gestural, connected in its nonverbal mechanisms to the melos of melo-
drama. Similar to the music that is characteristic of the genealogy of the form, the
gesture is an essential ingredient in melodrama’s articulation of that which it posits
as inaccessible to verbal language.
In literary biopics, then, the construction of authorship as a desire, a ‘moral occult’
charged with temporally and spatially transcendental meanings in a postsacred
world, is inscribed on the body on screen. As a genre primarily focused on the
individual ‘acting’ his or her role in culturally meaningful ways, the biopic
­foregrounds the body as a site and generator of meaning. The body, its movements
and gestures become necessarily metaphoric as they speak of something else beyond
immediate expression. Moreover, given the fact that the genre trades on notions of
‘accuracy’ and ‘authenticity’ in relation to historical figures, these are predominantly
constructed through close imitation of appearance, bearing, gesture and recognisa-
ble idiosyncrasies, an imitation of person and personality. Extending from the
central subject’s embodied, meaningful presence and acts, the interactions of bodies
on screen also carry a whole host of meanings that aid in the construction of
embodied authorship. How dynamic the physicality of a particular performance is
generally depends on the subject of the film, whether it is a musician, an actor, a
sportsperson, a member of royalty, or a writer.
Reviews of literary biopics have tended to underline that writing is far from being
an especially compelling activity to watch. Nonetheless, I would argue that the visual
dynamism supposedly lacking in these types of biopics is located in and around the
body as text in motion, a body ‘pregnant’ with meanings, an ultimately melodra-
matic body. In ‘Melodrama, Body, Revolution’ Peter Brooks defines the melodra-
matic body as ‘a body seized by meaning’ (1994, p. 18) onto which the unadulterated
messages of melodrama must be inscribed clearly and visibly in order to ‘represent
meanings that might otherwise be unavailable to representation because they are
somehow under the bar of repression’ (ibid.). I would argue that one of the ‘repres-
sions’ attached to the biopic bodies is that of the ‘real’ body to which the actor’s
performing body must subject itself, while at the same time attempting to convey a
multiplicity of narrative meanings that the ‘real’ body, needless to say, did not pos-
sess, but which history has grafted onto it: ‘Melodrama privileges the body because
it is ultimately on the latter where the socio‐political stakes its struggles. It both
makes the body visible and exposes the conditions by which it is visualized’
(Marcantonio 2015, p. 3) The body becomes, then, a locus of contingent historicity,
the readability of which is dependent on external manifestations of emotion made
visible and meaningful. In a manner reminiscent of the melodramatic text, where
‘the surface of the world – the surface of manners, the signifiers of the text – are
indices pointing to hidden forces and truths, latent signifieds’ (Brooks 1995 [1976],
p. 199), the biopic body is always pointing to and being haunted by the hidden, his-
torically charged ‘real’ body – Comolli’s ‘a body too much’ (2009) whose absence is
made visible by the performing body.
28 Sonia Amalia Haiduc

The few studies on the biopic published to this point have examined its myth‐mak-
ing potential and the genre’s connections with discourses on national identity.3
According to Ian Christie’s ‘A Life on Film’, from the beginning of talkies ‘from America
to Russia, across all the national cinemas of Europe now able and required to speak
their own languages, there seemed to be a concerted project of national biography
through cinema’ (2002, p. 292). Indeed, the biopic ‘feeds fantasies of national identities
to the international film scene’, but it also ‘blurs the contours of national cinemas
through transnational encounters’ (Vidal 2014, pp. 2–3). Two such ‘transantional
encounters’ are Téchiné and Ozon’s productions. Les Soeurs Brontë is a stylized bio-
graphical film about the complex relationship between the four Brontë siblings, the
other a camp adaptation of a partly fictional biography of bestselling writer Marie
Corelli based on a novel by Elizabeth Taylor published in 1957. The former is a
relatively big‐budget film produced by Gaumont and filmed in French, starring
Isabelle Adjani as Emily, Marie France Pisier as Charlotte, and Isabelle Huppert as
Anne. The initial three‐hour version was drastically cut to around two hours upon
release. The film belongs to an unusual corpus in European cinema (though not in
Hollywood) of the biopic set in another country (Marshall 2007, pp. 23-4). Angel is a
UK/Belgium/French production filmed in English which originated as Ozon’s personal
project – he wanted to adapt what he called a very English story in the manner of
Hollywood’s sweeping melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s. Both directors were thor-
oughly implicated at the scriptwriting, casting and editing stages. Their forays into a
diverse range of genres and styles tests the limits of traditional conventions of autho-
rial continuity, to bear witness to the diversity of authorial desire, while the transna-
tional/cross‐heritage dimension of these productions challenges automatic associations
between cinematic discourses of authorship and national identity.

Biopic, Melodrama, and Literary Memory

Figures 3.1–3.6 Screenshots from Les Soeurs Brontë (dir. André Téchiné, performances by
Isabelle Adjani, Marie‐France Pisier, Isabelle Huppert, Patrick Magee, Gaumont, 1979).
Another random document with
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d’un rose livide, qui pâlissaient et s’avivaient tout à tour, la
tourmentant de démangeaisons douloureuses.
Elle n’y prit garde, s’en cacha de son amant par une sorte de
pudeur, et aussi pour ne pas lui créer des inquiétudes inutiles. Elle
ne s’en alarma pas elle-même, mettant le tout sur le compte des
fatigues de leur voyage, de leur nouvelle installation et de ses tristes
émotions encore récentes.
Mais peu après, Hamidou se trouva comme elle, éprouvant ce
qu’elle éprouvait, et alors, s’étant mutuellement renseignés, tous
deux prirent le parti d’en rire.
Ils en riaient d’autant plus qu’ils crurent avoir une scarlatine
légère, selon le diagnostic d’un vieux sorcier moghrebin, leur voisin,
lequel soignait, pour ce mal-là, quelques enfants de la ville arabe.
Et de fait, sans autre traitement que quelques simples anodins
ordonnés par le vieux marabout et accompagnés de quelques
versets du Coran, le mal disparut et ne laissa pas la moindre trace.
Ce furent, alors, pour les deux amants, des mois d’un bonheur
parfait, inouï, et comme le Rétributeur n’en concède que très
rarement à des créatures élues, dont il marqua le front du doigt pour
des desseins pleins de mystère.

Le merveilleux talent d’Hamidou était apprécié du Mozabite ; et

les salaires qu’il gagnait suffisaient pour assurer leur existence, au
delà même, car ils vivaient simplement de la vie arabe, comme
d’ailleurs tous leurs voisins, dans ce quartier musulman de la ville
haute.
D’abord, par prudence, comme on l’a vu, puis par goût et par
habitude, enfin et surtout pour complaire à son amant, qui la
préférait ainsi, la Madalena s’habillait comme ses voisines.
Elle se voilait comme elles pour sortir, et, comme elles, sortait
rarement pour les besoins du ménage ou pour aller au bain maure,
accompagnée d’une vieille négresse qu’Hamidou lui avait donnée
pour servante.
 Enfin, pour combler leur amoureuse béatitude, Hamidou obtint de
son Mozabite qu’il emporterait et ferait chez lui son ouvrage.
Dès lors, ils ne se quittèrent plus un instant, et la claustration à
laquelle ils se vouèrent d’un accord tacite, eut, pour eux, des
voluptés ineffables.
Bientôt, de la Sicilienne, il ne resta plus grand’chose en la
Madalena. Conquise par l’amour à l’Islam dont sa grande âme avait
compris, depuis longtemps, l’austère et simple beauté, ce fut avec
un bonheur profond que, pour donner à son amant cette joie
suprême, elle prononça, devant le vieux marabout moghrebin, les
paroles qui la sacrèrent musulmane :
« Il n’y a d’autre Dieu qu’Allah et Mohammed est son Prophète ».
N’ayant qu’une âme, pouvaient-ils, vraiment, ne pas avoir même
idéal, même Dieu, mêmes espoirs, de s’aimer encore et toujours
dans le même ciel que leur ouvriraient les mêmes prières ?
L’Islam, avec le bel épanouissement qu’il donne à la vie
intérieure, n’a-t-il pas d’ailleurs, pour ceux qui s’aiment,
d’incomparables délices ?
Désormais donc, la Madalena devint vraiment ce que ses
voisines et voisins l’avaient toujours crue : Lella Zina, une pieuse
Moghrebine amenée du pays natal par son époux et qui, par sa
bonté, ne tardait pas à se faire adorer de tout le monde.
L’aisance, en effet, nécessaire à la charité, venait chaque jour,
car ils étaient deux, maintenant, à exécuter des broderies
merveilleuses. L’amour ne fut-il pas, de tout temps, le plus puissant
des thaumaturges ? Quelques mois lui avaient suffi pour faire de la
Madalena une brodeuse sur étoffe, comme Hamidou, incomparable.
Une part de l’argent qu’elle gagnait, servait, d’un commun accord, à
secourir autour d’eux les plus criantes misères.
Et Dieu sait si, dans cette pauvre Kasbah, elles sont
nombreuses.
Enfin, pour tout le quartier musulman, elle était bien Lella, la
Sainte, la Madame, autant dire une Maraboute.
 Quand elle sortait pour aller, enveloppée et alourdie de ses
voiles, à travers les ruelles de la Kasbah, les enfants se disputaient
pour avoir d’elle une caresse, les vieillards, une main au cœur,
inclinaient la tête, et les pauvresses qu’elle soulageait pleuraient en
baisant le pan de son bel haïk de soie blanche.
Et autant se réjouissait Hamidou de la voir ainsi aimée, vénérée
et sainte que de la sentir belle et sienne.
*
* *

Or, voici, qu’au plein de cette félicité pareille à nulle autre, de

nouveau la Madalena se sentit malade : mais, cette fois, au grand
désespoir d’Hamidou, son mal s’aggrava avec une rapidité terrible.
Ce furent, d’abord, des douleurs qui, pendant la nuit, lui broyaient le
crâne, comme si on l’eût martelé sur une enclume. Elle se réveillait
brusquement en poussant des cris dont s’épouvantait Hamidou qui
ne savait que lui faire.
Le vieux Moghrebin consulté, ne s’alarma pas, disant que ça
passerait comme le reste. Il écrivit sur des petits carrés de papier,
quelques sourates du Saint-Livre, en fit des boulettes qu’elle devait
avaler comme pilules, et déclara qu’Allah, miséricordieux et clément,
se chargeait du reste.
Mais hélas ! Il fit si peu que, loin de s’atténuer, les douleurs du
crâne redoublèrent et s’étendirent même à tous les os de la malade,
lui arrachant, pendant la nuit, des cris qu’elle ne pouvait réprimer,
malgré toute sa volonté de ne pas ajouter à la détresse du pauvre
Hamidou couché près d’elle.
Pourtant, ce qui la désespérait plus encore que ces tortures
nocturnes, c’était de se voir maigrir, pour ainsi dire, à vue d’œil. De
plus, chaque matin, quand elle démêlait devant son miroir sa
splendide chevelure, il en restait, aux dents de son peigne, des
poignées énormes, qui allaient de jour en jour grossissant, et dont la
vue mouillait son front d’une sueur froide. Enfin, après chacune de
ces crises aiguës, elle sentait branler et voyait jaunir ses dents,
jusqu’alors plus blanches et plus éclatantes que des perles.
Et ce lent évanouissement de sa beauté, mais par-dessus tout, la
perte bientôt consommée de sa chevelure, la jetait en de mornes
désespoirs qu’elle s’efforçait, sans y parvenir, de dissimuler à
Hamidou, dont la navrance était encore plus profonde que la sienne.
Il se résolut donc, enfin, ce par quoi il aurait dû commencer, à
faire appeler un des médecins de la ville, mais, avant, il perdit
encore un temps précieux en mandant, sur le conseil d’une voisine,
la vieille Frendah, cette sorcière de Bab-el-Oued, dont la réputation
de guérisseuse dépassait le Sahel d’Alger, et que, de leurs très
lointains douars du Sud, accouraient consulter de riches nomades.
Elle arriva, palpa longuement le crâne de la malade, et tous les
os de ses membres, et annonça que c’était un djin amoureux de
Lella-Zina qui, chaque nuit, venait lui frapper la tête et les membres,
et lui arracher un peu de sa chevelure.
Elle se livra à de bizarres incantations, ordonna de faire boire à la
malade une mixture plus étrange encore, dans laquelle entraient du
lait d’ânesse, de l’urine d’âne, des pépins d’orange et quelques
graines de courge, pilées ensemble.
Elle ordonna, en outre, de lui appliquer une peau de chèvre noire
sur la poitrine et sur les membres.
Le mal bien entendu empira : les beaux cheveux de Lella Zina
restèrent plus encore à son peigne ; quelques dents achevant de se
déchausser, tombèrent ; son amaigrissement s’accrut, la peau de
ses bras devint squameuse comme celle des couleuvres, et il lui
sortit, aux doigts des pieds et des mains, tout autour des ongles
qu’elles firent lentement tomber, de petites plaies douloureuses et
très profondes.
Enfin, quand le docteur arriva, il n’eut pas de peine à reconnaître
la nature du terrible mal, et put, par une médication énergique, en
arrêter la marche ascendante, mais la science, déclara-t-il, était
impuissante devant les ravages accomplis et qui faisaient de la belle
Lella Zina une créature méconnaissable.
 Alors, à certaines paroles et investigations du médecin, la pauvre
femme comprit, elle aussi, quel était son mal, et eut de lamentables
intuitions sur son origine.
Elle se rappela, en effet, que pendant un de ces accès de rage
jalouse, Vittorio lui avait dit au milieu d’un tas d’injures immondes :
— Un jour, tu seras pareille à Thérésa la Gouge.
Elle frémit, mais courba la tête, résignée comme une bonne
musulmane.
Pourtant, elle se sentit incapable de survivre à cette beauté qui
lui valut l’amour d’Hamidou, et était sa seule raison d’être en ce
monde.
— Ma vie ne peut désormais être pour lui qu’une continuelle
déplaisance, il ne me reste donc qu’à mourir, pensait-elle, tandis
qu’Hamidou, refoulant au fond de son âme bonne, sa désespérance,
redoublait de dévouement, de tendresse délicate, de tendresse
d’amant épris, pour lui rendre l’existence encore meilleure.
— Eh ! que t’importe, trésor, ne cessait-il de lui répéter, puisque
tu es toujours belle à mes yeux et que je t’aime ! »
Or, comme il avait eu l’affectueuse précaution de faire enlever du
logis toutes les glaces, la Madalena ne pouvant plus se regarder et
entendant ces douces paroles sentait s’apaiser son ardent désir de
suicide.
Mais un jour, ayant mis la main sur un de ces petits miroirs
engaînés de cuir brodé dont se servent les mauresques, elle eut la
triste curiosité de s’y contempler, se vit, et poussa un rugissement de
détresse, tant elle s’apparut semblable à Thérésa la Gouge.
Hamidou était derrière elle, et lui enlevait, mais trop tard, la fatale
glace.
La pâleur de la pauvre femme ajoutait encore à la laideur de son
visage. Alors, n’osant plus même l’embrasser, comme une chienne
ou une esclave, elle se jeta à ses pieds, les baisa dans une étreinte
frénétique.
 — Hamidou, clama-t-elle, de grâce, ne m’empêche plus de
mourir. Ecoute, tu m’as donné la plus grande preuve d’amour qu’un
amant puisse donner à son amante. Tu m’as aimée laide et malade
autant, même plus, que dans la splendeur de ma beauté et de ma
saine jeunesse. Nulle créature n’a donc eu plus de bonheur que ta
servante. Oh ! mourir, maintenant, encore tiède de tes caresses !
ami, crois-moi, ce suprême sourire de ma Destinée serait plus doux
que les autres. La tienne te réserve encore des matins roses, car tu
es jeune et tu es beau, et tu mérites d’être aimé jusqu’à la tombe.
Ami, ami, je t’en supplie, laisse-moi mourir en baisant ta main
secourable et bonne.
Devant ces accents de désespoir, Hamidou vit bien que tout était
fini, que tout bonheur était désormais pour elle impossible. Il aurait
beau l’aimer ardemment dans sa beauté évanouie, se dépenser en
mille efforts pour lui faire oublier la cruauté du destin, l’image de sa
laideur ne cesserait de la hanter et empoisonnerait toutes les heures
de son existence.
Et lui, Hamidou, pourrait-il encore être heureux en la sentant
malheureuse ? Alors, il regretta d’être épargné par le mal, et les
paroles du sorcier de Bab-Ménara lui revinrent à la mémoire, avec
une netteté sans pareille :
— Une roumie prendra ton cœur, et pour le reste, permets au
vieil Abdallah de clore ses lèvres.
Ce reste, il le connaissait à cette heure.
Il courba la tête devant l’inéluctable Mektoub, et serrant
tendrement dans ses bras son amante :
— Trésor, fit-il simplement, la vie sans toi serait pour moi pire que
la mort, et puisque tel est notre destin, mourons ensemble.
Et le soir même, ils s’enfermèrent dans leur chambre, allumèrent
le fatal réchaud, puis ayant revêtu leurs plus beaux habits,
s’endormirent dans la paix de Dieu, après un baiser suprême.
Le lendemain, la vieille négresse qui couchait sur une natte dans
la cour, ne les voyant pas sortir, força la porte et les trouva morts, les
mains enlacées et se souriant encore l’un à l’autre.
 Elle comprit tout le drame, l’approuva dans son âme simple, et
afin que rien ne vînt ternir, aux yeux des musulmans, la réputation
de sainteté dont jouissait sa bonne maîtresse, elle enleva le
réchaud, et après s’être assurée que rien ne pouvait trahir le suicide,
elle appela les voisins à l’aide.
Ils accoururent avec le vieux moghrebin en tête, et tous furent
étonnés du sourire de béatitude qui voltigeait sur les lèvres des deux
cadavres.
— « Mektoub ! » murmura le marabout après avoir constaté la
mort ; et il déclara que, sur l’ordre même d’Allah, l’ange Azrael avait
dû leur apparaître dans le jardin des délices. Ce qui expliquait la
douceur ineffable de leur sourire.
Quand on voulut les séparer pour remettre leur dépouille à celui
et à celle qui lavent les morts, selon les rites, il fut impossible de
rompre l’étreinte qui liait la main droite d’Hamidou à la main gauche
de son amante. Il eût fallu les rompre aux poignets d’un coup de
hache.
Force fut donc — ce que leur conseilla d’ailleurs le vieux
marabout — de les coudre dans le même linceul, et de les coucher
dans la même fosse, leur regard encore brillant d’amour tourné vers
La Mecque.
On leur éleva, dans le cimetière d’El-Kettar, une petite koubba
maraboutique ; et le vendredi qui est le dimanche des musulmans,
les femmes arabes de la Kasbah, viennent, accompagnées de leurs
enfants, prier et manger des confitures parfumées sur la tombe de
Lella Zina qui fut, pendant sa trop courte vie, si secourable et si
bonne.

Isabelle Eberhardt.

SORTI DES PRESSES

DE LA
 MAISON EUGÈNE FIGUIÈRE ET Cie
7, RUE CORNEILLE, PARIS
ET
72, RUE VAN ARTEVELDE, BRUXELLES,
LE 15 AVRIL 1913
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ISABELLE
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