Biographies or a “writing about someone’s life” bios γραφίς

Biographies are among the oldest forms of writing going back to the great civilizations of the ancient world: Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia and Mesopotamia. Rulers probably tasked scribes to write them.

The Greeks developed the form and earliest works until the 5th Century CE when they become known as Biographia or “Bios” for short. Isocrates (Life of Evogoras and Xenophon (Agesilaos). Thucydides’ biographies tend toward history, while Plutarch pairs biographies for educational use. This we can see quite early that biographies have different functions and uses depending in part on who wrote them, when they wrote them and what their purpose was in writing them,

WHAT IS A BIOGRAPHY???

Problems of definition

Definitions are made by people. They do not come from God nor are they carved in stone. They are subject to change. there are several types of definitions - those based on "usage", technical definitions which have very resticted specific meanings within a given field and operational defointions, which are definitions which are used when working on a problem. Operational defintions may be rather temporary and changed as work progresses.

As an example, consider the word "myth" which often means something untrue (e.g. "That's just a myth"). However technically, when used by folklorists the word means a story "believed to be true and sacred". Hence the usage definition (a false story) is in direct opposition to the technical one - "a story believed to be true". There are different kinds of biographies:

Kinds of biographies:

There are also stories “inspired by”, “based on” and “roman a clef” which are based on biographies or real events.

WHAT IS A BIOGRAPHY AND CAN WE DISTINGUISH IT FROM HISTORY (this lecture) or from non fiction (Next lectures).

A biography is a writing about a real person. What about Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar?

Biography vs. Historical film vs. Docudrama vs. Documentary

To have a biography written about someone, the person must accomplish something that makes them interesting. (Compare Fanfare for the Common Man – notice it is not Fanfare for A Common Man. A common man is not interesting The common man is something else.

Bio explains (or attempts to explain) why the person did what they did that made them famous or notorious. Historical films simply document the event without explanation. A large number of biographies are in fact more historical films (about real people) than biographies by this definition

In some ways there is a tie made in biographies between a “personal” side and a “public side”. A historical drama generally deals only with the public side.

We can ask whether or not the personal side needs to be a childhood event or something going on at the moment.

Relative to film – documentary vs. narrative. We are looking at narrative and as a result start with a fake bio which is handled like a documentary – Zelig (see also Citizen Kane)

There are various kinds of non-fiction film which include documentaries, docudramas, mockumentaries, “essays”, “art films” and instructional films, and so on. Some of these like docudramas

All of these may be biased in specific directions. In Ric Burns documentary Coney Island there is mention that Freud visited Coney Island while there is an image of a man with a beard and hat, whom we are “lead to believe” is Freud, but isn’t. Also by juxtaposing the killing of the elephant and the burning of Luna Park he attempts to indicate a link between the two events although they happened nearly a decade apart.

Nanook of the North, a famous documentary has many staged scenes, but the scenes are accurate “reproductions” of what happened. (T.V. ads are now required to talk about “dramatization” and so on. Most people don’t argue that commercials should not be accurate while at the same time arguing that all art (and possible science and everything else) is inaccurate.

The classic “docu-drama” Roots invents all manner of material for which there is no historic evidence. Clever editing is also used in many of the Michael Moore films to make you believe something (of the opposite) of what is actually happening. An Inconvenient Truth is apparently so flawed that it can not be shown in the school system in Britain and scientists have written letters protesting its inaccuracy with sufficient enthusiasm that the Nobel Prize has been damaged as a result of giving him the Peace Prize.

Biographies and film share somethings in common. Aristotle and Plato used two terms, diegesis and mimesis to talk about the way in which a story is told. Diegesis TELLS the story while mimesis SHOWS the story. In a sense the narrator descriibes the world of the story (and may comment on it) while mimesis mimicks or mimes it. Diegesis tells, while mimesis shows. These terms have gone through a complex evolution and students should consult some of the works that involve the study of narrative (narratology)

Originally the difference lay in the idea that a play was mimetic (i.e. shown) while epic poetry was diegetic (i.e. narrated). Film seems both diagetic and mimetic in that what is seen on the screen is "shown" but the placemement of the camera and editing and other kinds of filmic techniques may be seen as "narration".

In post modern theory, the argument is that basically everything is narrated and there is no way to get at the "reality".

As a result, both history and biography and all the related forms which appear to report (or document) the truth are themselves selective and hence the truth can not be known.

FILM: ZELIG

Not a bio of a real person, but form of documentary is there. Accuracy is irrelevant – style is everything. The film gives us the essence of the documentary bio style, without worrying about accuracy which will come up later. This is a kind of “documentary” genre. What are its salient points that make it “documentary”?

In general, actors portray the real people, about whom the story is being told. Two film, To Hell and Back and The Jackie Robinson Story have the main character played by the actual person not by an actor. There may be others.

AFTER THE FILM

Zelig is not a real person, just an invented character in a film, yet the film is much like a documentary about a real person. Because he is not real, questions about the “truth” or “accuracy” of the biography can be postponed. What makes this a biography in the documentary style?