Humanity 2009

Stemming from the long tradition of biographical writing, cinema has communicated history by means of re-enactments of the lives of significant public figures through time (Landy 1996). It can be argued that film biographies or ‘biopics’ possess a more personal, graphic and emotional vividness as opposed to professional historians chronicling the subject’s life work (Tibbetts 2005). The musical biopic in particular is a biographical film that focuses on individuals such as musicians, composers, singers and performer/entertainers and has had resurgence in contemporary cinema since 2000 with films such as Walk the Line (James Mangold, 2005), Ray (Taylor Hackford, 2004), De-Lovely (Irwin Winkler, 2004), I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007) and Beyond the Sea (Kevin Spacey, 2004) released in Hollywood alone. Rather than exploring the musical individual’s life history through one linear narrative, films in the twenty-first century have become more complex, connecting past and present, merging truth and fiction, to create multilayered perspectives on one life. El Cantante (Leon Ichaso, 2006) is a contemporary musical biopic that represents the life story of Puerto Rican singer Héctor Lavoe from the 1960s through to his untimely death in 1993. The film is narrated from the perspective of Lavoe’s wife Puchi (Nilda Georgina Perez) which, according to the film, is based on an actual interview with Puchi after Lavoe’s death. Through decoding and interpreting Lavoe’s life story through the film, this paper will argue that El Cantante, amongst contemporary Hollywood musical biopics, is a self-reflexive film in terms of how the biopic represents multiple perspectives of the salsa singer. The film creators acknowledge and audio-visually reflect that El Cantante is a dramatic, not an accurate portrayal of Héctor Lavoe’s life. The biopic (biographical film) boomed in the Hollywood studio-era and over three hundred biographical films were released that focused on various famous individuals including scientists and politicians, but more so with musical individuals such as musicians, entertainers, composers and singers. These biopics in general delivered a simple linear narrative structure of the individual’s life story that was utilised as a guideline for subsequent attempts at representing a star persona on film during the studio-era. More recently, there has been a resurgence of musical biopics that have been released cinematically over the last decade. Currently these contemporary biopics (particularly those that have been released from 2000 onward) have taken on a selfreflexive approach through the film’s mode of audio-visual representation. In other words, these recent films rely on the audience to be aware that the biopic is not a completely accurate representation of a life story; it is a 1 The studio-era is approximately 1930 through to 1960. George F. Custen has researched extensively on this period of biopics in Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (Custen, 1992).