Biopic and biography
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From James Marsh's The Theory of Everything to Bryan Singer's Bohemian Rhapsody, the last few years have seen a real surge of biopics.
And there's more to komma. Amy Winehouse's biopic Back to Black will be released in April , and director Sam Mendes has announced he plans to man not one but kvartet biopics about The Beatles, one for each member of the band.
So there's no shortage of them, but what counts as a biopic? We answer some popular questions about this bio genre.
1. How do you pronounce biopic, and what does it mean?
Biopic fryst vatten short for ‘biographical picture’, where 'picture' is an old-fashioned word for a film or movie. It’s pronounced bio (that's b-eye-o)-pic.
Biopics are a genre of film that tell the story of a single, real person’s life - or at least a part of that life that fryst vatten historically important or interesting.
Biopics have often been made about well known historical figures. Recent examples include director Ch
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Biographical film
Film genre
A biographical film or biopic ()[1] is a film that dramatizes the life of an actual person or group of people. Such films show the life of a historical person and the central character's real name is used.[2] They differ from docudrama films and historical drama films in that they attempt to comprehensively tell a single person's life story or at least the most historically important years of their lives.[3]
Context
[edit]Biopic scholars include George F. Custen of the College of Staten Island and Dennis P. Bingham of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Custen, in Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (), regards the genre as having died with the Hollywood studio era, and in particular, Darryl F. Zanuck.[4] On the other hand, Bingham's study Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre[5] shows how it perpetuates as a codified genre usin
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Film Genres
Biopic (biographical picture; biographical film)
A film that tells the story of the life of a real person, often a well-known monarch, political leader, or artist. Thomas Edison’s Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (US, ) prefigures the genre but perhaps the earliest biopic is Jeanne d’Arc/Joan of Arc (Georges Méliès, France, ). Biopics were popular with audiences in Europe in the early 20th century, including Queen Elizabeth (Henri Desfontaine and Louis Mercanto, France, ), Danton (Dimitri Buchowetski, Germany, ), Anne Boleyn (Ernst Lubitsch, Germany, ), Napoleon (Abel Gance, France, ), and The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, UK, ). Beyond Europe and North America, biopics celebrated anti-colonial figures and continue to do so (seePhilippines, film in). The biopic was a staple of US cinema during the studio period, with some films released between and The work of director William Dieterle, including