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The ending is in the encyclopedias: the tension has to be built somewhere else.
How do you hold tension in place when the ending is already in the encyclopedias? It is the first problem a biographical film has to solve, and the ten in this series solve it by moving the stakes elsewhere. The first volume shows the most elegant move in the genre: telling a life in the grammar of another genre — the crime story, the sworn deposition, the epic, the boxing picture — because the borrowed form is already the judgment, arriving ahead of the facts without anyone pronouncing it. The second takes on the question every biography has to settle with itself: how much invention a real life will bear without being betrayed, from the legend admitted out loud to the reconstruction that changes only the order in which the facts reach us. You learn to choose the slice of a life worth telling, to compress decades without cheating, and to keep composite characters honest.
A man turns to the camera and tries to sell us something. Another picks up the newspaper outside a suburban house, like an employee who has lost his job. Five lives cut into a genre that is not theirs, where the editing pronounces the sentence instead of the characters.
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An old man in an asylum confesses to a young priest a rivalry that historians reject, and the film does not try to pass it off as record. Five biographies that declare where they placed their invention: a date moved, a man put on the wrong side of a crisis, an entire subplot.
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Two volumes on the genre that has to decide first of all what not to tell. The first works on the borrowed form, the second on license and on where to put it. Ten films on compression, on point of view, and on how you manufacture suspense in a story whose last page the audience already knows.