Today, many Englishisms have appeared in our lexicon, one of them is the buzzword “biopic”. What it is? The token comes from the merger of two words - biography (biography) and picture (picture). So, biopic is a "biographical picture, a movie." Films about the life and fate of a famous personality - this, therefore, are biopic films.
Features of the genre
A biographical film is usually built not only on real events that happened in the fate of a particular celebrity, his task is to reconstruct the life path of a person. Some authors say about the biopic that this is an attempt to talk about events and times that had a decisive influence on the fate of man.
Any “dream factory” specializes in biopic. Hollywood will make such a picture in the spirit of an exciting fairy tale for adults; Russian film companies will try to present the most accurate “report” on the life path of a famous person. In Bollywood, melodramatic and expressive colors will be used to recreate an epic personality, and Japanese cinema will give an extremely rich, tough and original picture.
Pioneer among biopic
The first biographical film was released in 1899. The ten-minute biopic “Jeanne d'Arc” by Georges Méliès, in the pantomime technique characteristic of silent films, narrated about the visions, exploits and martyrdom of a medieval heroine. Since then, film biographies have been continuously shot in films. The best biopic are becoming a world heritage and a popular source representing the general public the history of the lives of wonderful people. In our review, we focus on vivid samples of the 21st century, shot in the biopic category. What are these films and how were they met by the public?
Dostoevsky
The well-known and talented director Vladimir Khotinenko undertook work on the "icon" of Russian novels. As a basis, he took the script of Eduard Volodarsky, who rewrote more than half. The eight-part film of 2011 “Dostoevsky” emotionally and figuratively presented the fate of Fyodor Mikhailovich through the prism of the most controversial circumstances of his life. The picture was well received by the audience, but literary critics, who claimed that, in fact, everything was not so, were unhappy with it. Well, maybe they know better. The Dostoevsky biopic, however, received the Golden Eagle Award for Best Mini-Series.
Modigliani
The biographical drama about the fate of the Italian expressionist Amadeo Modigliani was shot in 2004 by American Michael Davis. In the picture, the viewer meets with another celebrity of the beginning of the last century - Pablo Picasso. The circumstances of Modigliani's life are shown at the point of sharp rivalry between the two titans of expressionism. The film aroused great interest among the public, and the excellent music created by Guy Farley played a significant role in this.
Clock
In 2002, a tape appeared about the life and work of Virginia Woolf. The role of the English writer went to the magnificent Nicole Kidman, who won an Oscar for her. The biography of the writer in the film by Stephen Daldry gracefully coexists with the stories of two women living in different times - the bored housewife Laura (she lives in 1951) and the editor-in-chief Clarissa (2001), who saved the former passion from AIDS, who is the son of the same housewife. The fates of the three women are whimsically intertwined and somewhat strikingly similar. Baiopik was a frantic success, he was highly appreciated by fans of intellectual cinema. The film claimed the Oscar in ten nominations.
Finally
These three paintings can be called indicative when it comes to cinema in the biopic genre. What does it mean? For each of these films, it is important not so much the strict correspondence of the biographical outline in the biography of the person, as the aesthetically meaningful experience of the main events that somehow influenced the life and work of the great man.