Biopic — Volume 1: The borrowed form
The borrowed genre as a verdict already passed on the protagonist.
Your ebooks, ready now and whenever you want
- Download right after payment
- A copy by email, easy to find later
- Your personal library: sign in with your email and download again whenever you want
- PDF and EPUB for common devices, available from your library
The volume
Five lives told in the grammar of a genre that is not theirs, worn from the first scene to the last: the crime story, the sworn deposition, the epic, the boxing picture, a trade observed day by day. The loan brings the judgment with it, arriving ahead of the facts and without anyone pronouncing it out loud. A financier filmed with the camera cinema had built for mobsters stands judged the moment he appears. Recognizing the form a biographer borrows means knowing in advance what he thinks of the man he has chosen. In none of the five does the adversary have a face to beat: it is a hunger that grows by eating, a system that gives you a place and takes it back when that suits, a version of events sworn to by somebody else. The volume on how you choose the slice of a life worth telling.
The five films, and why they are here
The Wolf of Wall Street
The criminal parable applied to white collars: the narrator who takes us by the arm is already the judgment of the film.
Goodfellas
Mob epic lowered to the chronicle of a trade: shifts, wages, debts, and a discharge like an employee left without a post.
The Social Network
The grammar of the courtroom film: two versions that never match, and the verdict left to the editing.
Gandhi
The apparatus of the epic put at the service of a man who never raises a hand: the form decides the weight before the facts do.
Raging Bull
The boxing picture stripped of its one reason to exist: the title arrives halfway and fixes nothing.
Inside the volume
- Introduction to the genre: the essay that binds the volume's five titles together and says what to watch for.
- Five analytical chapters, one per film, from the dramatic premise to the legacy of the work.
- Comparative glossary: thirteen or fourteen craft concepts, tested against these five titles.
- Over two hundred pages, in PDF and EPUB, in your account library.