How Hollywood biopics both showcase and modify various notions of what it means to be an American.
Biopics-films that chronicle the lives of famous and notorious figures from our national history-have long been one of Hollywood’s most popular and important genres, offering viewers various understandings of American national identity. Invented Lives, Imagined Communities provides the first full-length examination of US biopics, focusing on key releases in American cinema while treating recent developments in three fields: cinema studies, particularly the history of Hollywood; national identity studies dealing with the American experience; and scholarship devoted to modernity and postmodernity. Films discussed include Houdini, Patton, The Great White Hope, Bound for Glory, Ed Wood, Basquiat, Pollock, Sylvia, Kinsey, Fur, Milk, J. Edgar, and Lincoln, and the book pays special attention to the crucial generic plot along which biopics traverse and showcase American lives, even as they modify the various notions of the national character.
Table des matières
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Strategic Patriotic Memories
William H. Epstein
PERFORMERS AND SHOWMEN
Empty Words: Houdini and Houdini
Murray Pomerance
Woody Guthrie, Warts and All: The Biopic in the New American Cinema of the 1970s
Dennis Bingham
‘Weird Andy Hardy’: Ed Wood and American National Identity
Constantine Verevis
HOT AND COLD WARRIORS
Topography and Typology: Wyatt Earp and the West
Homer B. Pettey
Patton (1970): Celebrating the Un-American National Hero
R. Barton Palmer
J. Edgar: Eastwood’s Man of Mystery
Douglas Mcfarland
ARTISTS AND WRITERS
Nationalizing Abject American Artists: Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Jean-Michel Basquiat
Julie Codell
Adapting Plathology: Sylvia (2003)
Claire Perkins
‘The Dark Lady of American Photography’: Steven Shainberg’s Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006)
Monika Pietrzak-Franger
EMANCIPATORS AND MARTYRS
The Great White Hope (1970): A Forgotten Biopic?
James Burns And Abel A. Bartley
Kinsey: An Inquiry into American Sexual Identity
Gabriele Linke
Toward a New LGBT Biopic: Politics and Reflexivity in Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008)
Julia G. Erhart
Spielberg’s Lincoln: Memorializing Emancipation
R. Barton Palmer
Afterword: The Making of Americans
William H. Epstein
Contributors
Index
A propos de l’auteur
William H. Epstein is Professor of English at the University of Arizona. His previous books include Recognizing Biography and Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biographical Criticism. R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature and Director of Film Studies at Clemson University. His previous books include Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place and (with William Robert Bray) Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America.
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