from Thomas Elsaesser, “Film History as Social History: The Dieterle/Warner Brothers Bio-Pic”

Such a reading raises, but does not answer the question of what integrative function the different mechanisms of self-regulation might have had on the text, in order to produce a number of typical narrative images and condensations strong enough to found a genre: for the bio-pic did establish such an image not only for itself ("worthy, but dull"), but also for its star (Paul Muni is Pasteur, Zola, Juarez), its director (Dieterle, the humanist, representative of the better Germany) and the studio (successfully answering its critics by winning Oscars with serious pictures). Rather than taking the convergence of these determinants as shaping a genre from the outside as it were, by accumulation and reinforcement (making its existence somehow inevitable), the conjunction of director, producer, star and studio represents a compromise between quite heterogeneous and structurally distinct factors. They require not only a possibly more conflictual model of analysis but may be understandable only in the dialectic between the external threat of censorship and a potential disturbance from inside: too great a desire for autonomy by the individual parts (the star and the director) creating an excess of "personality" in the system and thus requiring a countervailing force of integration: the bio-pics were in some sense this counterforce. The social discourses it intersected with in turn gave a specific ideological meaning to the internal struggles, thereby redefining--at another level--the basis on which Hollywood could market its self-representation. (21)

The bio-pic thus represents a threefold compromise formation: in terms of generic codes, it reworks and rewrites motifs from the studio's other cycles; as a strategic response to censorship, it exchanges moral violence for gratuitous violence; in absorbing the "authorial" ambitions of particular studio personnel, it stabilizes its internal organization. Although a limited and perhaps special case, the bio-pic suggests that the call for censorship was answered not so much by internalization and self-censorship, but by a sort of textual displacement of exhibition values (realism to authenticity; sex to Europe an culture and sophistication; domestic social issues to world politics) and by transferring the image value of star or director into other forms of intertextuality. (23-24)

One of the main contradictions of the bio-pics as ideological self-representations of American capitalist society in general (or the studio system in particular) is that the subjects whose biography the films narrate are "idealists," which is to say, the very nature of their mission implies work either in isolation (writer, politician in exile) or under conditions of artisanal production (inventors, doctors, scientists) rather than as parts of a corporate hierarchized enterprise such as the studio system. By contrast, the economic discourses of earlier Warner cycles (gangster film or the Depression musical) register in a more overtly metaphoric fashion the historical shift in American industry and the film industry from entrepreneurial to corporate capitalism. (26)

Dieterle's bio-pics reconcile the private with the public by engineering situations that allow the hero to present himself, with an impassioned speech or plea to a court jury (Emile Zola), to a crowd of his followers (Juarez) or to journalists, all of them different instances of intra-diegetic audiences which function as delegate of us, the spectators. By electrifying an audience or by addressing a sceptical and hostile gathering, the hero bypasses the "system" and at least temporarily suspends the validity of the institutions and their discourses. It might be worth investigating to what extent this is a significant feature of the cinema in the Thirties in general. With the coming of sound, a new dimension of public life is opened up to cinematic representation. The courtroom, the election platform, the marketplace or even a cattle auction can come to stand for the democratic process itself. (24)

In particular, the desire to represent in the bio-pic an individual who is both within and outside given ideological discourses, who belongs to his age and in some sense transcends it, affects the process of enunciation itself. The Cahiers du cinema article on Young Mr. Lincoln had located this effect as unique to the representations of Lincoln as founder of the nation. But Dieterle's biographies, notably Juarez (in which the hero carries a portrait of Lincoln permanently in his luggage), show some of the same strategies. In The Story of Louis Pasteur, for instance, the primary opposition-the individual against society-is first recast in terms of a limited or local conflict (scientific interests against the vested interests of the medical profession). Closure and resolution, however, are achieved by a kind of mise-en-abyme of different social fields (the sphere of the family, the medical profession, the government and international relations) which are layered concentrically and resolved consecutively. (26-27)

The fact that in Dieterle's bio-pics most of the heroes are non-American facilitates audiences being addressed as "humanity" rather than in terms of vested interests and classes. Humanity becomes the term for all those who can be gathered in a movie theater: this seems to be the condition under which Hollywood can talk about politics. With a bio-pic like Juarez the studio not so much endorses a specific international policy or takes sides within the spectrum of opinion represented by the government of the day, but competes within the public arena by reproducing some of the subject-effects hitherto occupied or identified with other public media. This form of address, on the other hand, strikes us today as uncinematic perhaps precisely because we no longer share the same historical subject position, nor does the cinema situate itself in the same area of public debate as it did then. A fuller understanding of the subject inscribed in the bio-pics and of the economics that have inflected the texts might well require a look at the mass medium which the cinema in the mid- and late Thirties had begun to displace in almost all spheres except for news. The historically vanished intertext of the bio-pic might be live radio broadcasting, and the relevant intertext to Muni's acting or Dieterle's direction something like Roosevelt's fireside chats, going straight to the nation, bypassing the press, and straight into the homes, bypassing government bureaucracies or political parties. (30)