Introduction

Abstract

In 1977, as a film studies undergraduate, I attended the two-week British Film Institute Summer School in Stirling, Scotland. I no longer recall the specific theme of that summer's school, but it almost certainly turned around the questions of ideology, representation and materialism that were at the heart of the BFI's educational project in the late 1970s. Preoccupied with those questions myself, I nevertheless spent much of my free time there huddled with another participant (a local who attended the school every year) in a contest to determine which of us could identify the greater number of bit players in the Hollywood films we were viewing each day. (He bested me once, I remember, by spotting a pre-stardom Dennis O'Keefe deep in the background of Harry Lachman's 1935 film Dante's Inferno.) My friend and I joked about ways in which we might bring bit players into each day's heated and earnest discussions – as examples of quasi-proletarian Hollywood labour, for example, or as distractions from an over-determined gaze upon the gendered star body. We accepted, of course, that our obscurantist knowledge had no place within the concerns of the Summer School. While this hardly seemed like the greatest of injustices, the terms under which one might theorize the bit player or the character actor have remained with me as a challenge. The essays gathered in this dossier offer a variety of ways in which we might begin to confront this puzzle.