‘Movies That Exist Merely to Tell Entertaining Lies’?: Biography on Film

Abstract

This collection of essays aims to fill a sizable gap in the growing literature on history and film but looking exclusively at biographical films. The approach of the editors and contributors to this volume is to examine films as biographical documents. We define a biographical document as a work – in any medium – which presents the life, or aspects of the life of a prominent or historic figure. The difference between a biographical document and a biography is that the former may legitimately mix fact and fiction but the latter may not. In this volume, a number of biographical films made between 1936 and 2013 are analysed as examples of biographical films. The authors of these chapters examine the topics essential to the assessment of any biographical document: who created it, why it was created, and the full historical and cultural contexts in which it was created. The inaccuracies in these films are also discussed as they affect the impact of a biographical film, especially on popular perceptions of the film’s subject and they also often cast light on the motives behind the production of the film.