Biography

Biographical films, or biopics, depict the lives (or segments thereof) of past and present eminent, famous, and infamous people. The boundary between the biopic and other genres is fluid, since biography can include historical film, costume drama, musical, melodrama, western, crime film, social problem film, documentary, and so on. The biopic distinguishes itself by emphasizing the person rather than a history of an era, at least in its title. The genre is not static, but rather sensitive to cultural and social transformations involving nation and community, and its form and discourse alters over time. Biopics can be allegories of power, tributes to genius and talent, paradigms of economic success, or celebrations of nation formation and patriotism, or they can capitalize on transgressions of prescribed standards of social behavior (as in gangster films, social problem films, and docudramas). Biopics present their historical subjects by means of textual and intertextual strategies that draw on the predilections of the producer, the technological and economic resources of a studio, the likelihood of profitability, the style of a director, and the personae of stars, as well as on existing versions of social history, propaganda, or a particular ideology. The biopic bases its claims to authenticity on research—written histories of a period, biographies, diaries, journals, paintings, architecture, fashion—often relying on and crediting the work of historical advisers.

The classic form of the biopic is sensitive to direct and indirect forms of censorship, and the elimination or reworking of pertinent and sensitive data about the personal life of the biographical subject is a common feature of the genre that elicits criticism about its historical legitimacy. The biopic has been a catapult to stardom for some actors because it creates the illusion of a fit between the physical appearances, mannerisms, modes of speaking, and temperaments of the actor and the famous subject. Yet the use of a star can create a tension between the famous biographical subject and the fame of the star, contributing to the complexity of the portrait or creating problems of credibility. The style can follow the model of established generic formulas, veer in an avant-garde experimental direction, or assume an investigative and reflexive mode.

EMERGENCE OF THE GENRE

From Plutarch's Lives, and from Shakespeare's history plays, with their focus on the tragic fate of monarchs, to erudite and popular biographies, the fascination with the lives of the rich, the famous, and the infamous persists, as does the question of the source of this fascination. In the evolution of cinema, individuals of "consequence" were not slow to appear onscreen: short films were produced in the United States, France, Russia, and Italy, featuring monarchs, political dignitaries, military heroes, dancers, and celebrities. Early documentaries such as The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1895), President McKinley Taking the Oath of Office, President McKinley Reviewing the Troops at the Pan American Exposition, and Funeral of President McKinley (all United States, 1901), The King and the Queen at the Royal Castle at Monza (Italy, 1897), The Assassination of the Duc de Guise (France, 1908), The Coronation of Czar Nicholas II (Russia, 1896), Queen Elizabeth (France, 1912), and Garibaldi and His Times (Italy, 1926) were vignettes of visual history, a harbinger of the power of the cinema to engage audiences with images of prominent people that previously they only could read about in books and, more unlikely, see at public ceremonies. These films assumed that the spectator had some prior knowledge of the subjects filmed, but the pleasure resided in the experience of actually seeing these noteworthy individuals. The main characteristic of these short films was their documentation, their soliciting of the spectator's attention, but they were not docudramas that developed the psychology and motivation of the biographical figures.

By the middle years of the twentieth century's second decade the cinema had turned from an artisanal mode of production to an industrial one with greater industrial and technological standardization. The opportunities for the creation of complex narratives were in place, and biopics such as Joan the Woman (1917), Madame Dubarry (1919), and Anna Boleyn (1920) became part of the cinematic landscape. What technological, economic, and formal changes meant for the biopic is seen in the lengthy Joan the Woman (125 minutes) by Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959). The film's creation of the historical context relied on huge panoramas based on replicas taken from paintings, sketches, lithographs, and photographs of villages, towers, castles, and cathedrals such as Rheims Cathedral, as well as on the use of weapons purchased from museums. Starring the opera diva Geraldine Farrar, the film was enhanced by hand-tinted shots and the use of double-exposure effects to convey her visions, and contrasts between her and the crowds. In presenting Joan as a young woman in love with a soldier who sacrifices herself to religious and national responsibility, DeMille constructed the biopic as a form of melodrama, employing monumental history that relied on spectacle to convey conflict between desire and duty, and the private and the public spheres.

Another version of Joan's life, contrasting sharply with the DeMille biopic, appeared a decade later. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889–1968), signaled another direction for the biopic. This radical cinematic experiment eschewed the epic dimensions of DeMille's Hollywood melodrama, restricting the action to twenty-four hours in the life of the saint and minimizing the use of costumes, objects, and makeup. Dreyer's film focuses on Joan's trial and execution in numerous close-ups, creating a counterexample to expansive and spectacular forms of the biopic. A year earlier, Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (Abel Gance's Napoleon, 1927) presented yet another biopic and experimental treatment of epic, using every possible cinematic device including montage, tinting, split screen, superimpositions, dissolves, matte shots, and dramatic camera angles. The film followed the career of Napoléon Bonaparte from schoolboy to soldier, lover, revolutionary, and empire builder. Its historical sweep monumentalized Napoléon, and its encyclopedic depth established the biopic as a premier form of biography, history, and drama.

THE COMING OF SOUND AND
THE INTERWAR YEARS

The advent of synchronized sound charted new directions for the biopic. More than announcing the arrival of sound on film, The Jazz Singer (1927) anticipated the marriage of the biopic and the musical, highlighting the lives and careers of musical impresarios, entertainers, and composers. The Great Ziegfeld (1936), produced by MGM, with lavish sets, song and dance numbers, guest appearances by popular entertainers, and the use of stars, memorialized the rise and fall of the impresario. Biopics documenting the lives of entertainers increased in number throughout the remainder of the interwar years; films about Johann Strauss, Victor Herbert, Vernon and Irene Castle, and Fanny Brice celebrated the overcoming of adversity through talent and perseverance, and, by implication, the role of cinema in bringing these figures to life on the screen. Images of landscape and architecture, paintings, costumes, and dialogue (and intertitles) all helped to create the historical milieu, and sound enhanced the depiction of the period through orchestral scores of classical music, the introduction of patriotic and folk songs, drum rolls, and sound effects pertaining to coronations, marriages, funerals, and military encounters. Musical leitmotifs heightened character or cued irony.

Biopics about monarchs, literary figures, and political and military leaders featured stars with impeccable acting credits from stage and film, including George Arliss (1868–1946) in Disraeli (1929), Voltaire (1933), and the Iron Duke (1934), and, in the late 1930s, Paul Muni (1895–1967) in The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), and Juarez (1939). These films had a morally uplifting message and a tendency to humanize and universalize ethical commitment, social responsibility, and opposition to vested interests. The Arliss and Muni films had a theatricality that highlighted the acting style of the performer and their ability to impersonate the historical figure.

Biopics also featured popular female and transnational stars of the silent and early sound eras, notably Greta Garbo (1905–1990) in Mata Hari (1931) and Queen Christina (1933) and Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992) in The Scarlet Empress (1934). These films were tailored to their star images and to tie-ins between the films and contemporary fashion. Garbo's portrait of the Swedish queen capitalized on the monarch's bisexuality, ill-fated romance, and disdain for fame and power in a style that accentuated the star's legendary face, ambiguous sexual identity, and independence. Dietrich's portrait of the Russian empress fused the personae of the historical figure and the star, relying on Dietrich's publicized image in movie magazines and contemporary gossip as well as on the director's role in her creation.

The biopic is also associated with crime films of the late 1920s and 1930s. Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932) were thinly veiled, fictionalized accounts of the life of Al Capone that resulted in intensified demands for industry self-regulation. Thus the biopic played a role in the implementation of the Production Code, which was designed to regulate depictions of sex and criminality and to offer a moral image of the industry through commonly accepted and respectable models of moral behavior, appearance, and action.

Biopics of the interwar and World War II years were closely tied to discourses of nation formation. Abraham Lincoln (1930), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) depicted the transformation of an unprepossessing figure to an icon endowed with exceptional abilities and power. The casting of Walter Huston (1884–1950), Henry Fonda (1905–1982), and Raymond Massey (1896–1983), respectively, in the title roles identified them with these qualities. While the Lincoln biopics differ in the selection of the biographical events filmed, in the acting, and in the depictions of communities, the tendency of the films—most evident in Young Mr. Lincoln—is to mask the politics, presenting history as a moral parable or allegory about national unity. To develop the credibility of the historical context presented, the films include portraits of social institutions: the family, the local community, law, commerce, the military, and the government. History is visualized through costuming, photographs, landscapes, and printed documents, as well as reinforced through the uses of music and speeches.

Clive of India (1934), Rhodes of Africa (1936), Stanley and Livingstone (1939), which featured such prominent actors as Ronald Colman (1891–1958), Walter Huston, Spencer Tracy (1900–1967), and Cedric Hardwicke (1893–1964), are biopics concerned with issues of empire. Replete with images of maps, scenes of combat, trials, and oratory, these biopics romanticized the trials and the superhuman qualities of European men—entrepreneurs, expansionists, explorers, and colonizers—who undertook to civilize the "natives." Relying on the rhetoric of a benevolent imperialism, the films highlighted an "exotic" landscape, depicted hostile encounters with indigenous peoples, and underscored the protagonists' successful struggle to create peace and unity in an alien terrain despite the resistance of the natives. According to established conventions, it is not chance that determines these men's victory, but their resourcefulness and indomitable wills.

THE BIOPIC IN WAR

Directly or indirectly, the Hollywood wartime biopic justified national involvement in war, dramatizing the essentially peaceful and moral nature of the American male and distinguishing him from the enemy. Sergeant York (1941), starring Gary Cooper (1901–1961), is an example of the biopic's linking its biographical subject to national crises, and also of the genre's malleability to changing historical circumstances. Set during World War I but clearly making analogies with World War II, the film focuses on the transformation of an uneducated and problematic figure, a "hillbilly," to a wartime hero. Cooper's star image as a shy, modest, and inarticulate American male, slow but sure to rise to action, serves the demands of the York character and of the narrative's ideological designs. In a series of dramatic encounters with the community, his minister, and his military superiors, York fights a series of moral and personal battles that bring him finally to a spiritual conversion that enables him to renounce pacifism and serve the nation. Similarly, in The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Cooper reincarnates his star persona: Cooper takes on Gehrig's persona, but Gehrig becomes Cooper the star. Heroism is played down, becoming all the more prominent for its being muted. In its focus on Gehrig's fatal illness and his equanimity in facing death, the biopic offers a model of heroism transferable to the home front and battlefield, offering a strategy to cope with death. This self-effacing form of masculinity accords with a proper conception of stardom during the war and with the studio's conception of moral responsibility to its audiences at a critical time for the nation.

British biopics of wartime such as Young Mr. Pitt (1942), starring Robert Donat (1905–1958), are more polemic, drawing on allegory to create parallels between the Napoleonic wars and the war with the Nazis. Donat's portrait of Pitt is unmistakably hagiographic; Pitt becomes a martyr to the nation, a monument and testimonial to the British national character, and a figure of wisdom and sacrifice in the interests of national unity and mobilization.

A further development of the biopic came from the German cinema of the interwar and Nazi era, in which the illustrious man's view of history was deployed in the interests of propaganda. Among the biopics depicting the lives of monarchs, political leaders, artists, and scientists, the most notable were Friedrich Schiller (1940), Bismarck (1940), Ohm Krüger (1941), and Paracelsus (1943). These men of genius and prophetic vision realized heroism in the service of their nation against seemingly overwhelming odds. The film narratives are constructed with an escalation of conflicts involving private and public life that portray the protagonists' indomitable will and indefatigable ability to overcome the constraints of the commonplace and everyday world. Built on oppositions between life and fiction, escapism and realism, these biopics rely on the spectators' extratextual memories from schoolbooks, paintings, and architecture. The films utilize costume, musical accompaniment, period settings, props, makeup, and actor's poses to distinguish the individual from the mass.

Emil Jannings (1884–1950), known for his roles in such films as The Last Laugh (1924) and Variety (1935), lent his prestige to The Old and the Young King (1935) and Ohm Krüger. The protagonists of these films realize heroism in the service of their nation but in a manner that separates them and places them above the common people. Despite their ostensible similarity to the conventions of the Hollywood biopic, these biopics reversed the process of humanizing the historical protagonist, portraying him instead as a monument, an immortal being who has risen above history. While they are self-consciously intertextual and rely on conventions of the biographical film, these biopics are not reflexive about their uses of history and their status as film.

POSTWAR TRANSFORMATIONS AND BEYOND

Post–World War II cinema focused on more contemporary biographical subjects—and on the audience as consumers of popular culture—and displayed a more overt reflexivity about its identity as historical spectacle. One direction for the biopic dealt with the lives of entertainers, particularly musicians, and sports figures, as The Babe Ruth Story (1948), The Great Caruso (1950), With a Song in My Heart (1952), The Glenn Miller Story (1953), and The Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), about the actor Lon Chaney (1883–1930). The Great Caruso followed a chronological trajectory to underscore Caruso's "natural" genius, portraying his gradual rise to fame as a vindication of his talent in the face of social class distinctions and economic obstacles. The identification of the aspiring opera singer and movie star Mario Lanza (1921–1959) with Caruso signaled a shift in the ethnic clichés of Latinos as womanizers, exotic dancers, and gangsters; by contrast, Lanza's life and operatic career is integrated into mainstream American culture. His body, voice, and working-class credentials identified Lanza with the regeneration of the "American dream," as an exemplification of the power of "people's capitalism" touted in ads of the 1950s.

Concomitantly, the biopic began to portray eccentric literary figures whose scandalous heterosexual and homosexual behavior had been censored, omitted, or doctored in earlier forms of the genre (for example, in the 1946 biopic of Cole Porter, Night and Day). Biopics such as The Bad Lord Byron (1948) depicted the scandalous heterosexual affairs of the writer, and by 1960, The Green Carnation (1960), a biopic about Oscar Wilde, confronted the writer's homosexuality. Biopics about transgressive women were not new: Madame Dubarry, Queen Christina, and The Scarlet Empress, all from the 1930s, had portrayed the lives of "promiscuous" women. But the postwar biopic was inclined to focus on the scandalous behavior of less illustrious women, signaling the fusion of the biopic with the social problem film by linking marginal behavior to problematic social conditions. Susan Hayward (1918–1975), whose star image was associated with a stormy personal life that made headlines, appeared in two biopics that capitalized on her bad-girl image and best exemplified the fusion of genres. I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955) portrayed Lillian Roth's alcohol addiction, fall from fame, and personal recuperation. I Want to Live (1958) depicted "social misfit" Barbara Graham's connections to the underworld and her arrest, trial, and execution for murder; the film's tone is sympathetic, with scenes that portray her sexual encounters with men, her run-ins with the law, and the injustice of capital punishment. Yield to the Night (1956), another indictment of capital punishment, was a veiled story of Ruth Ellis, who was tried and executed for the murder of her lover. It featured Diana Dors (1931–1984), another female star identified with a turbulent and much publicized personal life.

Biopics about deranged, promiscuous, and violent women (and about homosexuals) survived into the 1980s. Dance with a Stranger (1985), another biopic about Ruth Ellis, focused on her working-class background, her struggles to survive economically with her son as a woman on her own, her exploitation by her upper-class lover David Blakely and his snobbish friends, the desperation that led her to shoot and kill Blakely, the drama of her trial, and her sentence to death by hanging. Prick Up Your Ears (1987) portrayed the unstable, and ultimately violent, homosexual relationship of the gifted playwright Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, which resulted in Orton's death. Other biopics portrayed corruption in high places (for example, Scandal, 1988). The tempestuous relationship between the writer T. S. Eliot with his mentally unstable first wife, Vivian, was dramatized in Tom and Viv (1994). If these biopics were a form of social history, they were indicative of the intertextual character of the biopic as it engaged with the effects of contemporary politics, the ongoing struggles of the film industry in the international market, the impact of television with its endless sensational reportage, and changing discourses of sexual, national, and gendered identity.

Television offers another opportunity to experiment with biography. In addition to his 1950 film about St. Francis, Francesco guillare di deo (Francis, God's Jester, 1950), which was an antihagiographic treatment of the saint, Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977) directed for television The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (1966), in which the king is likened to a theatrical director who transforms social life into spectacle. Ken Russell (b. 1927), a prolific director of biographical television programs and films, has also experimented with the form, in Elgar (1962), The Music Lovers (1971), Lisztomania (1975), and Valentino (1977).

Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1977) and Marlene (Maximilian Schell, 1983) are other alternative treatments of biography on film. Using a montage of clips from films, commentaries and monologues by various personages, impersonations, fictional figures, cartoons, documentary footage, allusions to legends, pornography, and inserts of icons, Hitler is a critical investigation of the German nation and the media that created Hitler. The ostensible subject becomes a vehicle for the deconstruction of the individual "great man" and a depiction of the legendary sources of his construction. Marlene avoids images of the dying diva, but through dubbed narration (as if she were already dead) becomes a meditation on the biopic and death, on relations between filmmaker and biographical subject, and on film as history. Similarly, the Hong Kong film Centre Stage (1991) is an index to contemporary reconstructions of the biopic in its uses of Brechtian distancing, its creation of multiple viewing positions, and its investigative probing of the clichés of public fame, authenticity, and the conventional biopic's treatment of time, narration, memory, and history.

The Hollywood biopic has continued to thrive in the films of Steven Spielberg (b. 1946), Spike Lee (b. 1957), and Oliver Stone (b. 1946). Schindler's List (1993), a blockbuster biopic and a contribution to the growing number of films (and works of critical literature) that memorialize the Holocaust, does not foreground familiar Nazis (though some are present). Rather, the biopic follows the fortunes of a benign member of the Nazi party, Oskar Schindler, a savior of many Jews whose altruism is the pretext for this elegiac treatment of the Holocaust. Malcolm X (1992) follows the familiar narrative trajectory of the biopic, portraying Malcolm's early brushes with the law, his conversion to Islam, and his rise to prominence, as well as the opposition to him that results in his assassination. As a biopic that purports to create an image of the man and his era, the film also situates Malcolm in the context of Black Power, the struggle against racism, and as a contrast to Martin Luther King Jr.

KEN RUSSELL
b. Southampton, England, 3 July 1927

Ken Russell has had a multifaceted career as a dancer, photographer, actor, and producer-director at the BBC, where he was responsible for a series of artist biographies including Elgar (1962), Bartok (1964), and The Debussy Film (1965). French Dressing (1963) and Billion Dollar Brain (1967) were his first films, but it was Women in Love (1969) that marked his coming out as a controversial British filmmaker. Based on D. H. Lawrence's novel and starring Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, and Oliver Reed, it revealed Russell's highly theatrical style and his use of visually compelling images of the eroticized body. Russell would return to Lawrence in a 1989 adaptation of The Rainbow with the same stars.

Russell's fascination with the gothic and with sexually transgressive subjects continued in The Devils (1971), his adaptation of Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon. Starring Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave, this study of corruption by church and state outraged critics with its visually vivid sensual depiction of sadistic and masochistic sexuality in a seventeenth-century French convent. The Music Lovers (1971), a musical biopic, probed Tchaikovsky's creativity through a stylized and theatrical depiction of the composer's incestuous and homosexual relationships. Mahler (1974), a film about another tormented composer with whom Russell identified, treated its subject in grotesque and dreamlike images and revealed the filmmaker's self-reflexive investment in his biopics. Lisztomania (1975) uses fantasy, horror, satire, and intertextual allusions to other films and composers in its depiction of Franz Liszt as a precursor of the rock star.

Maintaining the focus on fame and popular culture, The Boy Friend (1972) is an homage to Hollywood's Busby Berkeley, while Tommy (1975) is a countercultural classic, a rock opera about youth, stardom, and the fusion of popular music and cinema. Unlike the exuberant style of Lisztomania, Valentino (1977), another star biopic, explores the legend of the star Rudolph Valentino in a sympathetic and more restrained style than Russell's other biopics, recalling Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). In his contamination and critical treatment of genre forms, Russell challenges cultural taboos; his experimental treatments of narrative and of visual and sound images are examples of experimental filmmaking that crosses national boundaries and does not comfortably fit the mold of classical genres, realism, or heritage cinema.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Elgar (1962), Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971), The Music Lovers (1971), Mahler (1974), Lisztomania (1975), The Boy Friend (1972), Tommy (1975), Lair of the White Worm (1988), The Rainbow (1989)

FURTHER READING

Baxter, John. An Appalling Talent: Ken Russell. London: Michael Joseph, 1973.

Hanke, Ken. Ken Russell's Films. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984.

Phillips, Gene D. Ken Russell. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

Russell, Ken. Altered States: The Autobiography of Ken Russell. New York: Bantam, 1991.

——. Fire over England: The British Cinema Comes under Friendly Fire. London: Hutchinson, 1993.

Marcia Landy

Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) raised conventional expectations for the biopic but revealed another form for the treatment of historical events on film. The film relied on the public's knowledge of the life of John F. Kennedy, choosing, like a crime detection film, to investigate the investigators of the assassination. JFK called attention to the questions of conspiracy and cover-up that are attached to the president's death, and, hence, took a critical view of American politics. Nixon (1995), also by Stone, is closer to the genre of the biopic in its depiction of the man's rise and fall from power. Beginning with the disgrace of the Watergate scandal,

the film uses flashbacks to offer another disastrous view of US political corruption.

Another permutation of the biopic is the "heritage film," exemplified by works such as Gandhi (1982), Another Country (1984), Carrington (1995), Shadowlands (1993), Restoration (1996), The Madness of King George (1997), Elizabeth (1998), and Shakespeare in Love (1998). This hybrid film form, which combines biography with costume drama, literary adaptation, and melodrama, has returned to the spectacular dimension of the earlier biopic. Marketed to appeal to audiences across cultural, economic, national, and generational divides, the films feature theatrical forms of acting and display, lavish period costumes and furnishings, and a forthright treatment of romance and sexual and gender conflicts in the context of an earlier period.

NEW CHANNELS

The biopic continues to thrive not only in the cinema but also on TV, on the Arts and Entertainment Network and the Biography Channel, and in docudramas about celebrities, royals, and politicians, as well as on the Internet. By far the most biographized contemporary figure is Princess Diana. But very few celebrities escape media treatment. There is an emphasis on their private lives, highlighting their troubled childhoods, struggles to succeed, fame, marriages and divorces, illnesses, and deaths. The televisual biopic proffers the lives of the famous and infamous by means of "documentary" footage of their lives and times, commentary by their biographers, family members, colleagues, and friends, and, in the case of film stars, clips from their films. The biographies benefit from controversial material, scandals, and conflicts with the law. Thus it seems that the "biopic" is alive and well: the unabated flow of media biography is testimony to its continuing popularity, its profitability, and its responsiveness to changing cultural and social conditions.

SEE ALSO Genre;Historical Films;Stars

FURTHER READING

Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1999.

Anderson, Carolyn. "Biographical Film." In Handbook of American Film Genres, edited by Wes D. Gehring, 331–353. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Bingham, Dennis. "I Do Want to Live: Female Voices, Male Discourse, and Hollywood Biopics." Cinema Journal 38, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 3–26.

Custen, George F. Bio/pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. "'Any Resemblance to Persons Living and Dead': Film and the Challenge to Authenticity." Yale Review 76, no. 4 (Summer 1987): 457–482.

Elsaesser, Thomas. "Film History as Social History: The Dieterle/Warner Brothers Bio-pic." Wide Angle 8. no. 2 (1986): 15–32.

Hanson, Cynthia. "The Hollywood Musical Biopic and the Regressive Performer." Wide Angle 10, no. 2 (1988): 15–23.

Higson, Andrew. English Heritage/English Cinema. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Landy, Marcia. Cinematic Uses of the Past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Mann, Glenn, ed. "The Biopic." Biography 23, no. 1 (Winter 2000): v–x.

Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge, 2000.

Schulte-Sasse, Linda. Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University, 1996.

Stringer, Julian. "Center Stage: Reconstructing the Biopic." Cineaction 42 (1997): 28–39.

Marcia Landy