Morderstwo non-fiction. Filmowe portrety Trumana Capote’a

Abstrakt

NON-FICTION MURDER. TRUMAN CAPOTE’S FILM PORTRAITS

In 1958 a farming family of four was brutally killed in Holcomb, Kansas. An up and coming literary star, Truman Capote, found out about the murder from a press note and decided to write a piece about it for the New York Times. The article evolved and grew and eventually became one of the most interesting and commercially successful novels of the 20th century. It took Capote two years to write it but he kept holding off with writing the ending. He waited until 1966, the year of the killers’ execution, as he considered it the story’s grand finale. The harrowing process of writing the novel, and Capote’s traumatic experiences of the investigation itself, were the price he paid for becoming a millionaire and never writing another longer literary piece again. This paper is an analysis of two films based on those events, made a century later: Infamous by Douglas McGrath and Bennett Miller’s remarkable Capote, with an Oscar-winning male lead.

Translated by Anna Trzebiatowska