"Documentaries" is a very relative and biased term for artists bio pics. In reality they are glossed over and made more glamorous than their realistic counterparts. Of course when creating a good bio pic it is even harder than transferring books into film. A whole life needs to be summarized in a two hour time frame.
It is always arguable that artists live very complex and tormented lives. It is as if they feel things differently than Regular Joe and get a good dose of bad karma and crap thrown at them by the universe to balance their other worldy talent. Painters as far back as Van Gogh and musicians like Mozart certainly had fascinating lives.
However, because of their great success people feel compelled to portray them in a positive light. Therein lies the mistake. These great artists at times could be narcissistic, misunderstood misogynistic and destructive. This characterization might be too hard to swallow for regular moviegoers, yet fictionalizing them might not appease hardcore fans.
Focusing on tormented love affairs is a good way to attract audiences. Movies like Walk the Line and Frida depict two artists journey to try and find love through large obstacles like drugs, fidelity and health problems.
Films such as Pollock do not seem to do well as it is quite hard to like a character who seems to treat his wife like a transferable commodity. And artists who do incredibly deplorable things can never seem to find a good hold on audiences such as Great Balls of Fire where he had a love affair with his 13 year old cousin.
Fictionalized films which perhaps remain truthful to the essence of the artists such as Amadeus create a heightened sense of drama and comedy viewing a fool given the gift of a genius.
Because an artist's life is so incredibly complex and unidimensional, that is, there are numerous points of view of who the artist was at times films have concentrated on seeing the artist's life in small snippets instead of attempting to tell the whole story. We can see glimpses of the complexity of Andy Warhol in his relationship with Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl.


Yet the biggest way to attract audiences is that these films have to have poignant acting in order for us to truly care about them. Jamie Foxx made Ray into a struggling yet deeply beautiful soul which produced great music.
Whatever the method, artist bio pics are a genre which will never be bereft of material as these artists created amazing art in music, painting and dance yet led destructive lives and were very tormented souls.
Maryam DiMauro
Filmsi
**Read more articles by Maryam DiMauro**




