Biographie

1In the narrower sense, the biopic is a film that uses the forms of fiction to dramatize the life story of one or several persons that have really existed. In the larger sense, the biofilm1 can be understood to include biographical documentary films, where the actual personage is neither dramatized nor fictionalized, and the definition may be extended still further to the film “cameo” in all its variants – the more or less flitting apparition of an already famous celebrity in a film. The dividing line between the two styles is often blurred, as documentaries often make use of excerpts from fictionalized biopics, just as the latter sometimes include film archive sequences. In fact, whether in film or in print, every form of historiography, as Hayden White maintains, is bound to demonstrate some form of “fictionality”, be it only because it cannot avoid a degree of “emplotment”. White’s tropology may serve as one point of departure for this investigation of the place of biographical film in biography theory, which will proceed principally in three directions. Much mor

•