COMM 220: Introduction to Film: Biography

This film follows the real-life struggle of a Boston teacher, Annie Sullivan, to communicate with and teach the deaf, blind, and mute child, Helen Keller.

This multiple Academy Award-winning film chronicles the life of Mahatma Gandhi, beginning with his political activities in South Africa during the late 1890s and ending with his assassination in 1948 at the hands of a Hindu extremist. This sweeping epic follows the development of his philosophy of non-violence as he leads the people of India to independence from the British.

Adapted from the Broadway play, this film presents the life of Antonio Salieri, a mediocre 18th-century Viennese composer obsessed with (and jealous of) the musical genius of the age, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Based on the book "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," as told to author Alex Haley, this film follows the civil rights leader through his religious conversion to Islam, which gave him the strength to rise up from a criminal past.

This bleak film tells the "story behind the story" as it examines author Truman Capote, who became famous for writing one of the earliest examples of the true crime genre, "In Cold Blood." While researching the murder of an entire family on a Kansas farm, Capote developed a relationship with one of the accused killers as he sat on death row awaiting his fate.

This revealing drama focuses on the 16th president's tumultuous final months in office. In a nation divided by war and the strong winds of change, Abraham Lincoln pursues a course of action designed to end the war, unite the country, and abolish slavery. With the moral courage and fierce determination to succeed, his choices during this critical moment will change the fate of generations to come.

This book discusses eight history-themed films organized into the following categories: exercising artistic license; drawing lessons from the past; reflecting current controversy in the past; and celebrating heroism. Each chapter surveys the inception and development of a film project, comments on the picture, and assesses critical reactions.

Can films tweak the facts and still be faithful to history? How much of what they present as true is inaccurate or distorted? This book looks at the growing research exploring these questions. It is the only reference guide that discusses the latest scholarship on history in film and on television, and evaluates specific films and programs for quality, accuracy, and ideological biases.

From Lincoln-themed cocktails and waffle parlors to high-tech museums and steamy romance novels, the image of Abraham Lincoln so permeates the national imagination that we now find him in the unlikeliest of places. In this book, author Jackie Hogan examines the uses (and abuses) of the 16th president in the United States today. The book takes readers on a journey through the little white lies of Lincoln tourism, and offers a front-row seat as the martyr president is invoked in heated political debates over such issues as homosexuality, abortion, and the 'war on terror.' Readers enter classrooms that use an idealized Honest Abe to 'Lincolnize' American schoolchildren, then step into the alternate universe of Lincoln fiction and films that transform the Rail Splitter, by turns, into a hapless time-traveler, a sentimental cyborg, an axe-wielding zombie slayer, or a frontier heart-throb.