Lenny: (Auto-)biography, Black-and-White, and Juxtapositional Montage in Bob Fosse’s Hollywood Renaissance Biopic

Abstract

Bob Fosse directed Lenny (1974), about the profane American comedian Lenny Bruce, who died in 1966, at a time when he had won complete artistic control over his films. As an intermedial artist, with equal facility forthe stage and movies, Fosse approached film editing with the rhythmic intricacy of his dance style. Hedevelopeda film style that eschewedconventional chronology, aiming for an atemporaljuxtapositional montage closer to poetry and the live performing artsthan the narrative causality and temporality of Hollywood cinema. Lenny is an intermedialbiographical collage that straddles divergent narrative strands, subjectivities, mid-twentieth-century periods. It contrastsmodes of black-and-white cinematography, making them formsinto themselves. It tells a story (rather than the story, as biopics conventionally insist) of Lenny Bruce, an irreverent, iconoclastic standup comedian who ran afoul of American obscenity laws in the last years before the cultural revolution of the late sixties, even as he helped to change them. Like Fosse’sprevious film, Cabaret (1972), Lenny juxtaposes cinematic and photographic realism with the heightened reality of the stage, where Brucespeaks to us, bursting the chronology of his own biography, and commenting on his own life story.