Every filmmaker draws inspiration from the world around them; only a few have the honesty, courage and/or ego to turn their life stories into art.
Theatricalized autobiography was relatively rare in early cinema – the first audiences wanted spectacle, not everyday reality.
Zéro de conduite (1933)
Jean Vigo’s 40-minute epic, which begins with white titles and a soundtrack of schoolchildren roaring like animals, is freer and more liberating than any other film of the era. But Zéro de conduite (or “Zero for Behavior,” the grade given by teachers for bad behavior) is also more intimate and personal than was fashionable at the time, drawing directly on the young writer-director’s years at a French boarding school and basing the four central characters on his friends and himself.
My Childhood (1972)
Given his stalwart trilogy of autobiographical dramas – My Childhood (1972), My People of Ain (1973) and My Way Home (1978) – it’s a miracle that Scottish director Bill Douglas survived at all, let alone had a successful career in film. . Shot in grainy, stark monochrome war news footage and told with the simplicity of a religious parable, My Childhood follows 10-year-old Jamie, the child of an absentee father and a mentally ill mother, growing up in the coal fields of Newcraigall, near Edinburgh (in later films Jamie would be sent to an orphanage before finding solace in friendship and self-expression).
American Graffiti (1973)
Almost a decade passed between the events depicted in George Lucas’s sad second feature film and the production of the movie. But already the early 60s began to seem like a distant past, a pre-Vietnamese, pre-revolutionary era of innocence and freedom (at least for ordinary white American boys).
The Mirror (1975)
Expanding the concept of autobiography to include members of his own family-his poet father Arseny Tarkovsky, his mother Maria Vishnyakova-and ultimately the entire Russian people in the 20th century, Andrei Tarkovsky’s most obvious and surprising film is aptly titled. Here, the idea of a lens as a reflective surface reaches its apotheosis-but this mirror is broken, and the film is a broken series of reflective fragments, linked by threads of poetry and haunting images of a dying man.
Big Red (1980)
Independent maestro Samuel Fuller drew on his experiences as an infantryman during World War II for this stark episodic epic. Named after the emblem of the U.S. First Infantry Army, the film follows a platoon of American soldiers from a relatively innocuous campaign in North Africa through the battlefields of Sicily, Normandy and the Rhineland to the liberation of concentration camps.
