The Current Discourse of the New Biographism in the Contemporary Cinema

Abstract

The article is devoted to the actual problems of the biographical genre in cinematography. This genre arose at the very beginning cinematography and developed in the 1920s. However, the first classic examples of it were created in England in the mid-1930s by Alexander Corda (in particular — «Rembrandt»).Soon, the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union, Italy and Germany began to actively use it with varying degrees of success. We can see the paradoxical flowerishing genre in the 1950s when it underwent final academisization and codification, but lost touch with real life (despite some successes, par example, the film «Taras Shevchenko» by Ihor Savchenko). The follow years demonstrate a variety of undividual options, both in the works of artists of «poetic cinema» («Dream» by Volodymyr Denysenko) and artists of late modernism («Dante`s Inferno» by Ken Russel, «Portrait of Rembrandt» by Jos Stelling). For the first time, artists of naïve direction (Pirosmani, Chontvari) become heroes of feature films. But the genre really changes already at the turn of the century. It draws attention to artists with disabilities, marginals, representatives of national and sexual minorities. A typical example is Frida Cahlo, a heroine at least three films. Finally, the image of female artist — a dissident (Alla Gorska in «Forbidden» by Roman Brovko) or a simple village woman (Katerina Bilokur in «Mad Woman» by Victor Vasylenko) appears in Ukrainian cinema. And even in the realm classics, the most popular characters remain artists with victim fate: Van Goht, Modigliani, Goya, and again Rembrandt. We have, of course, Taras Shevcenko.