Film Biography, Hagiography, and Gender—The Case of Biography Hawai’i

George Custen, William H. Epstein, Dennis Bingham, and other theorists and critics of the biopic and film biography have observed that such life narratives not only serve to reinforce dominant ideologies, but through their formal qualities often assimilate or erase conscious efforts at dissent. And as Bingham notes at length, this effect is especially noticeable in film biographies of women, where the same qualities used to validate male subjects can undermine the significance of a female subject’s life. In a parallel development, Leigh Gilmore, in her recent book Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives (Columbia UP, 2017), and Sidonie Smith, in her equally prescient “America’s Exhibit A’: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History and the Genres of Authenticity” (ALQ 24:3 [2012]), have discussed the strategies employed to attack the credibility, or even the right to exist, of women’s life narratives or testimony that question patriarchy, institutional authority, and life writing generic conventions. In this talk I will briefly discuss the challenges of making television documentaries about women subjects noted for the difficulties they themselves posed to dominant ideologies and institutions. More specifically, I will describe how recognizing the dangers posed by hagiography, and the resistance to hagiography, when making such documentaries can inform efforts to present detailed critiques of social, cultural, and historical conditions without necessarily undermining the integrity or reputation of the female biographical subject. I will provide examples from Biography Hawaiʻi: Harriet Bouslog and Biography Hawaiʻi: Rith Keʻelikōlani, two installments of the television documentary series I have co-produced for the past fifteen years.