Biografia performowana. Orson Welles i widmowy pakt z przyszłością
Performed Biography: Orson Welles and the Spectral Pact with the Future

Summary/Abstract: A century after Virginia Woolf’s question about a new way of writing biography (“The New Biography,” 1927), biographical scholarship in film studies still rarely ventures beyond classical conventions. The case of Orson Welles shows that filmmakers’ biographies enter their most productive phase only posthumously. The author proposes the concept of performed biography as a tool of film historiography in three senses: as a cultural practice of an author self-mythologising in media circulation, as the researcher’s method of writing through the artist (autoethnography of relation), and as a hybrid form of writing about cinema. The author also introduces the notion of the spectral pact, whose manifesto is F for Fake (dir. Orson Welles, 1973). The structure of the text – analytical sections interwoven with séances – is designed as an enactment of the method. Decades after the diagnoses of literary biography’s collapse and the biographical turn in the humanities, performed biography is film studies’ answer to the question of how to write an artist’s life today.

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