Filmmakers and viewers share an abiding weakness for life-stories. Over the years, lives of public figures have come to us in the form of biopics, and tapped into our innate need to know their private selves. The appeal of the genre has only grown in recent times, as the success of films like “Lincoln”, “The King's Speech”, “Dallas Buyers Club”, “Social Network”, “Milk”, “Mandela” and “Jobs” illustrates.
At the ‘Biopic Film Festival’, being held at the American Center Auditorium in Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi, six films representing diverse tendencies within the genre are being screened. These are “Ed Wood”, “Lenny”, “Auto Focus”, “I’m Not There”, “The Insider” and “The Wolf of Wall Street”. The festival, which concludes this Saturday, is being organised by American Center in collaboration with Cinedarbaar. Cinedarbaar has earlier organised retrospectives of Alfred Hitchcock, Wes Anderson and film festivals on the themes of musicals and women filmmakers.
While Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” is an unusual portrait of Bob Dylan, where the character is played by six different actors, Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” tells the story of the eponymous cult filmmaker. Bob Fosse’s “Lenny” deals with Lenny Bruce, the controversial 60s comic; Michael Mann’s “The Insider” tells the story of Jeffrey Wigand, who blew the whistle on the tobacco industry and Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” charts the drug-fuelled rise and fall of stock-broker Jordan Belfort.
According to film enthusiast and literature student Kumar Unnayan, who along with film scholar Anugyan Nag will anchor discussions after the screenings, the line-up represents multiple imaginations of what a biopic can be, and not necessarily stand-out examples of the genre.
Explaining the shift in the choice of subject for biopics, he says while earlier biopics tended to focus on figures of historical renown, over the last few decades the genre has opened up to humble life-stories as well. “With the shift in period, the subject matter too has transformed as we move to a time where the ‘tragic’ and ‘heroic’ have depleted and modernity has thrown a number of individual stories...”
Lately, he adds, biopics have “derived heavily from this phenomenon where we are being exposed to the stories of so called commoner who is within the reach of our fetishes and fantasies...‘Jobs’, ‘Mandela’, ‘12 Years a Slave’, ‘A Beautiful Mind’, ‘Into The Wild’, ‘Catch Me If You Can’, ‘Erin Brockovich’ are all a part of evolution of this genre in the past two decades.”
A biopic, Unnayan argues in conclusion, relies on the nexus of the literal and the fictional.
“It demands not just a hold on the life of an individual but also on how well you can enmesh the individual in and around society...How much you can locate or root your character in and around the times in which they existed separates a good biopic from a bad one.”
(For the festival schedule, visit >https://www.facebook.com/events/304806206357840 )
