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The campus film series, once a staple of college life, has largely disappeared. It is, of course, a victim of digital streaming—which made it possible for students to access content on demand in the comfort of their own dorm rooms or apartments.
But, in my view, the demise of this student-curated, communal cultural experience represents a genuine loss. Nor is this simply nostalgia for my college-going youth. The campus film series played an important role in my classmates’ cultural education, exposing me to international cinema, classic films, independent and experimental films, documentaries, and art-house productions that weren’t shown in mainstream theaters. The campus film series also offered a common experience, where my classmates and I could gather and undergo a shared cultural experience and engage in conversations about what we had seen.
At a time before film studies had been academized, film series provided a student-organized platform where we encountered diverse voices and storytelling approaches that were outside the mainstream and learned how to discuss films’ themes, film-making techniques and various movies’ cultural context.
The demise of the campus film series, I fear, is part and parcel of a broader shift. A host of collective activities that had been organized by students themselves—including campus radio stations and, in a growing number of cases, campus newspapers and college literary magazines—are biting the dust.
I recently had the opportunity to see Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Attendance was paltry, a wholly unintentional nearly private screening. The film was displayed in a new format: ScreenX, which, in theory, provides a 270-degree panorama, expanding the screen onto the auditorium’s side walls.
As Harry Winer, a film and television director, producer, and NYU professor, commented in an email message,
“That fancy SCREEN X format will be a thing of the past in a very short period of time. Distorted images, out of focus, distracting from what’s going on on the screen in front of you. It was a poor effort to emulate the brilliant 1935 Abel Gance triptych version that had three screens. For the intimate moments the action took place on the center screen. When the battles unfolded all three screens would light up to give a sense of the breadth of the battles.”
I fully agree with his assessment of the movie: that it is as likely to turn people off from history as to inspire them to study that history in depth.
As Winer points out, the film provides few insights into how an unsophisticated Corsican outsider (who spoke French crudely) was able to reach the heights of power in refined France. Nor does it explain what drove him psychologically or examine the political manipulations he used to rise to a position of political leadership.
No viewer will understand how the circumstances of the revolution contributed to his rise to power. Or how he grew into mastery of warfare or what made him brilliant on the battlefield, losing just seven battles out of the 60 or 70 that he fought.
It’s perhaps not surprising that the movie tells us virtually nothing about his achievements as an administrator: how he reformed France’s finances, introduced the Napoleonic Code, established a new educational system based on the lycées, transformed the Louvre into one of the world’s first public encyclopedic museums, achieved a concordat with the Catholic church and promoted meritocratic social advancement. Or how he emancipated Jews from ghettos and liberalized legal codes in every European country that he conquered.
But might it not have been possible to at least allude to the ugly side of his rule: the re-establishment of slavery in parts of the French Caribbean, French atrocities during the Haitian Revolution and the invasion of Spain, or his nepotism in awarding power to his incompetent brothers.
Especially disappointing is the film’s treatment of his relationship with his wife Josephine—an obsession that the screenplay considers central to understanding his psychology, behavior and ultimate defeat. The audience gets no idea about what drew him to Josephine or why he put up with her infidelities—or why she tolerated his. According to the film, it was merely the sex, or perhaps her insouciance when others deferred to him.
Still, the film has its strengths. Its visuals have none of the phoniness that we typically associate with CGI. The settings are authentic and the recreations lifelike and convincing. The battle scenes are starkly realistic. Too bad that it doesn’t send tingles down your spine as the best biopics do.
No one goes to the movies expecting a history lecture, but a better biopic would have hinted at the ongoing debates about Napoleon as a man. Was he a liberator, an autocrat and authoritarian, a modernizer, a megalomaniac, an incipient dictator or a psychopath who led his people to disastrous defeat? Did he evolve over time or was he essentially the same man in 1815 as in 1793? Did he fulfill or betray the revolution?
Napoleon was, arguably, the first ordinary person in the history of the modern West to become a world historical figure, a nobody who, like Hitler, seized and secured the reins of power and transformed the course of history. He symbolized democracy’s promise, but also its dangers.
Evaluating his legacy is no easy task. Was he a military genius, or, as Tolstoy claimed, an instrument in the hands of others (who crafted his image and were largely responsible for his financial and administrative achievements) and of history itself?
Ironically, his efforts to spread Enlightenment ideas spurred a counterreaction, especially in Germany. Romanticism, with its emphasis on emotion, tradition, the spiritual, folklore, the supernatural and the volk, was in certain respects a paradoxical by-product of his rise to power.
Ours is a moment when the range of Hollywood feature films has narrowed, with superhero franchises dominating the screen and displacing may other traditional genres:
- Action movies: Films that emphasized adventure, disasters or martial arts and featured rescues, mismatched buddies, military combat or spies.
- Comedies: Not only have slapstick humor and witty dialogue declined, but also black comedies, gross-out comedies, mockumentaries, romantic comedies, screwball comedies, spoofs and satires, teen comedies, and comedies featuring cross-dressing, mistaken identities and fish out of water.
- Crime films: When was the last time you saw a movie featuring a detective, a heist, gangsters or rival gangs? Or a whodunit? Or a courtroom or a prison drama? Most likely on a computer screen.
- Dramas: Today’s movie theaters are largely bereft of the psychological dramas that allow a character to explore their inner conflicts, transformations and personal journeys and that speak to themes of mental health, perception and reality. Also missing are the coming-of-age dramas that focus on a young person’s psychological and moral growth and that helped whole generations imagine what it is like to grow up and achieve maturity. Ditto for the family dramas, centered on marital, filial and sibling relationships and dynamics and often exploring themes of familial conflict, love and reconciliation. The same is largely true of legal dramas, involving courtroom battles, legal investigations or moral dilemmas faced by lawyers and judges and medical and political dramas and even films that focus on personal or collective tragedies.
- Horror movies: Films featuring ghosts, monsters, psychopaths, slashers, vampires, zombies and the occult, the satanic, the supernatural and supposedly found footage, were, in the past, a popular genre that lured a broad audience eager to be scared and shocked and that helped them process and cope with their fears and anxieties. With surprisingly few exceptions, these films have been relegated to streaming services.
The list goes on. Movie musicals—book musicals, concept musicals, jukebox musicals and musicals featuring dancing—have been relegated to the sidelines. Film romances, including teen romances, May-December romances and oddball pairings, have declined. Where has Nora Ephron gone?
Social problem films that highlight injustices or inequalities have grown uncommon, as have the war films, with their emphasis on brotherhood, cowardice, heroism, honor, redemption, duty and protection of the vulnerable.
But certain kinds of genres persist. These include:
- Animations, including anime, with its highly stylized, colorful graphics, and Disney-like animated musicals.
- Fantasy films that draw on sorcery, magic and mythology and often feature humanoid creatures.
- Science fiction films, which often follow the conventions of the Western but now take place in outer space.
Yet another genre that continues to thrive in the midst of the superhero onslaught is the biopic. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, Darkest Hour, Elvis, First Man, Oppenheimer, Rocketman and I, Tonya are just a few of the more recent examples.
That’s not wholly surprising. For a director, a biopic demands a level of artistry in reconstructing the past that is missing from many other genres. For an actor or actress, biopics offer some of Hollywood’s most complex, demanding roles, requiring expert mimicry of a subject’s mannerisms, speech and appearance. For audiences, biopics combine the best that cinema has to offer: the ability to travel to another time and place that is recognizably real and the opportunity to interact with characters who were once living human beings. However amazing it was to see Steven Spielberg restore dinosaurs to life, how much greater was it to meet Abraham Lincoln in the flesh?
Biopics win a disproportionate share of awards:
“Films like Amadeus, Gandhi and Chariots of Fire all garnered Best Picture honors while Capote, The Pianist and My Left Foot all netted performance awards for [their] leads as they occupied roles based on historical figures.”
But making biopics that involve recent figures poses a host of legal challenges: acquiring the rights to people’s life stories. Threats of lawsuits for defamation, violations of personal privacy and name, image and likeness infringement. These pictures inevitably glorify some individuals at the expense of others. Some figures are sure to take offense—either for the way they are portrayed or why they were ignored. As a result, many biopics—including movies about Patty Hearst, Hugh Hefner, Joni Mitchell, Richard Pryor and Gore Vidal—never got made.
Claude Levi-Strauss dismissed biography as low-powered history, but for the public and students, biography is history’s gateway drug. Every historian I know and most history lovers became hooked on history by reading biographies. Biopics can serve the same function.
To be sure, biopics generally conform to certain cinematic and narrative conventions. At their best, the narratives are heavily character-driven, focusing on the protagonist’s development, personality, psychology and motivations. These films’ plots highlight trauma and struggle—and almost invariably include a romantic relationship, even when the portrayal is profoundly misleading (consider the relationship between Alan Turing and Joan Clarke in The Imitation Game). Key themes include self-discovery, personal transformation and, often, a character’s rise, fall and ultimate redemption. The most successful, like Schindler’s List, generally focus on a relatively narrow band of time.
Biopics tend to place as much emphasis on a figure’s private life and their personal relationships and struggles as on their public life, their career and their public achievements. In these films, supporting characters often serve as foils, used to highlight certain aspects of the protagonist’s character, or to represent key relationships that influenced their life. Although most follow a linear trajectory, many others employ nonlinear storytelling, including flashbacks or a fragmented timeline to provide depth and context.
Creative license is taken for granted. Filmmakers may take creative liberties to enhance the story’s dramatic effect, often leading to debates about historical accuracy versus artistic interpretation.
Biopics are valuable not only as sources of entertainment but also as tools for education, inspiration, cultural preservation and social commentary. They offer a unique blend of factual storytelling and artistic expression and performance that is too often missing from today’s multiplexes.
At a time when exposure to the humanities in general, and history in particular, is lagging in colleges, and when the reading of serious nonfiction books is in decline, biopics are probably the single most effective educational tool—providing audiences with insights into the lives of historical figures and offering a lens through which to understand historical events and past eras. As remnants of the past disappear, these films can also offer a visual sense of the past’s look and a deeper understanding of different cultures, social contexts and historical periods.
Equally important, biopics can be inspirational and aspirational, offering stories of resilience, innovation and determination. Not only can these movies humanize historical icons, exposing their struggles and vulnerabilities, but they often tackle universal themes like ambition, sacrifice, adversity and loss.
These films also offer insights into how to transform a life into a compelling narrative, combining elements of drama, conflict, triumph and defeat. Implicit in these films is, inevitably, social, political and cultural commentary.
If, on the one hand, biopics can distort a society’s collective memory, sanitizing, sentimentalizing and romanticizing a past that never was and imbuing flawed figures with a nobility they don’t deserve, these films can also spark cultural conversations about their subjects and the eras they represent. Like Hidden Figures, these films “can tell marginalised stories, correcting a historical record which erases their role.”
Do biopics transform truth into fantasy and myth? Sometimes. Maybe often. After all, academic truth matters far less to Hollywood than emotional truth. As one critic quips,
“They compress history, take liberties with facts and offer a cheap Cliff’s Notes version of interesting lives for those disinclined to read a book. Their creators claim to want to humanize the subjects, but instead mythologize them … More often, sadly, biopics are set pieces meant to be admired for their resemblance to what is known. These sketches aspire to a surface-level reality, which is frustrating considering the subjects are often deep with that indefinable quality we call, for lack of a better word, ‘soul.’ The movies are meant to canonize the actors who resemble the surfaces—not for plumbing the depths.”
Wrote another critic, “The formula for biopics is so insipid, so emotionally manipulative, so unimaginative and so painfully lacking in creativity that I’d rather watch 50 of the most formulaic comic book movies than a single one of the many biopics that Hollywood pumps out each year.”
Do biopics embrace the “great man” theory of history, overhyping the role of individuals and underplaying broader social, political, economic and cultural forces? Certainly. But they also reveal a truth that Lewis Mumford, the historian and critic, described: “A society lives in a man: a man is a creature in society; the inner world is less private and the outer world less exclusively public than people habitually and carelessly think.”
In a fascinating essay entitled “Trap Glazed: Why Black Biopics Matter,” Sesali Bowen, an author, editor and past senior writer for Netflix, observes,
“As twisted as it sounds, public histories that include violence, danger and personal demons make for the best entertainment. This is true across the racial spectrum. But there is something unique about Black people’s relationship to trauma. And with portrayals of these intersectional wounds, there is a fine line between sensationalizing Black pain—and re-traumatizing Black viewers in the process—and using it as a catalyst to inspire, educate and develop a deeper appreciation for the people who shape Black culture. Black biopics, which illuminate the private and public lives of Black celebrities, typically fall into the latter category.”
Biopics can open our eyes to realities that we are too often blind to. It’s sad but true: biopics have become, for many, the new books. In their absence, this society would be even more historically illiterate than it is.
