Film Stardom Research Articles

Putting the football back into football stardom: a case study of Gareth Bale as a national football ‘star’

ABSTRACT Work on footballing stardom has struggled with positioning on-field performance within the image of notable players. This is mainly born out of early scholarship that positioned the topic primarily within a celebrity studies framework, leading to a far greater concentration on footballers’ private lives away from the field of play. 1 This paper argues that the closely related, but meaningfully different, star studies framework (traditionally applied to analyse film stardom) provides a more appropriate model for interpreting footballing fame. Unlike celebrity studies, which does not separate the on-screen (or on-field) from the off-screen (or off-field) image, star studies positions the relationship between the two identities as more central to forming the overall star persona. This article develops this approach based upon a case study analysis of Welsh footballer Gareth Bale.

A History of Danish Cinema

A History of Danish Cinema

Neurotic Stars and Spellbound Viewers: Louis Bisch and Psychoanalytic Film Theory in Silent-Era Photoplay

ABSTRACT: Responding to the popular fascination with psychoanalysis in the 1920s, Photoplay magazine commissioned American neuropsychiatrist Louis Bisch to write a series of articles that applied Freudian concepts to questions of film stardom and spectatorship, genres, censorship, and the cinematic apparatus. Markedly different from the 1970s canonical texts in the field, Bisch’s work articulated a psychoanalytic theory that embraces cinema’s lowbrow mass appeal and encourages spectators to adopt a demystified perspective on Hollywood. This article discusses Bisch’s texts as an early instance of film theory written primarily for a female readership and as a forgotten anti-modernist road not taken in the history of theorizing cinema.

Crossover stardom on small screens: the case of Zhang Ziyi

ABSTRACT Arguably no Chinese stars have sparked as much domestic controversy as Zhang Ziyi, nor have any achieved the same level of international recognition. Amid a growing interest in the study of East Asian stars, existing scholarship has addressed, at length, the major controversies that have surrounded Zhang Ziyi. However, little attention has been paid to the changing construction of Zhang’s star persona in recent years, during which time she has begun to assume a more active role in television and on social media platforms. This article addresses this gap in literature and explores the ways in which Zhang Ziyi has reinvented her image using emerging media practices, including making use of television genres, Weibo entries, and WeChat public accounts. Zhang’s foray into small screen entertainment is not only useful for understanding the role that television and digital media play in reconstructing film stardom, but it also showcases the drastic changes in media ecologies that have occurred over the past decade in China.

Review: Rock Star / Movie Star: Power and Performance in Cinematic Rock Stardom, by Landon Palmer

Review: <i>Rock Star / Movie Star: Power and Performance in Cinematic Rock Stardom</i>, by Landon Palmer

Fame amid the Ruins: Italian Film Stardom in the Age of Neorealism, Stephen Gundle (2020)

Review of: Fame amid the Ruins: Italian Film Stardom in the Age of Neorealism, Stephen Gundle (2020) New York: Berghahn, 370 pp., ISBN 978-1-78920-001-0, h/bk, £110.00

Cold war, hot stuff. The official critical discourse and the desirability of film stars in socialist Romania

This article examines the ways in which Romanian socialist politics and state-sanctioned film journalism intersected around film sexuality and foreign film stardom, in order to reinforce the official discourse on sexual morality in the 1960s and 1970s. The ‘60s represented a decade of political and ideological semi-relaxation in socialist Romania. Film audiences retained some access to Western productions, and foreign film stars carried significant erotic appeal to viewers. The state-funded Cinema magazine aimed to disrupt these tendencies either by arguing that the objects of desire were representative of lower quality cinema, or, in full-on Cold War style, by building the case for the decline of Western capitalism through pinpointing all manifestations of sexuality as a symptom of it. This article looks at the ways in which ideological arguments to “redact” film sexuality, while failing to repurpose it, managed to redirect it and reposition it as alien to socialist culture. The article also explores the continuation of this trend during the 1970s, when film stardom and the seductive appeal of film stars were validated by their conformation to political and historical ideologies directly linked to the concerns of the Romanian Communist Party.

The dainty: the aesthetics of female film stardom in the transitional period

ABSTRACT This article discusses ‘the dainty’, an aesthetic category that rose to prominence in the trade and fan press during American cinema’s transitional era as a means of characterizing female stars like Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Marguerite Clarke, Billie Rhodes and Lois Wilson. The readiest reading of the dainty is that, like the stars the term often described, it was a throwback to an older, diminutive ideal of femininity that bore little relation to the ‘modern’ woman as she was emerging in the early twentieth century at the intersection of aesthetic modernism and industrial modernity. This article, however, contends that the dainty has more in common with paradigmatically modern aesthetics like ‘glamour’ than one might initially suppose. As I show, the dainty’s modernity is twofold. First, it lies in the category’s objective register, where its formal qualities, most notably its diminutiveness, afford it an unexpected affinity with modernist mandates of restraint and reduction. Second, it lies in the category’s subjective register, where its association with ‘fastidiousness’ suggests a calculating and discriminating form of aesthetic subjectivity that is peculiarly modern by virtue of its aesthetic reflexivity. In paying close attention to one of the specifically aesthetic categories that define female star images at this period, I join a small coterie of scholars, like Lea Jacobs and Rosalind Galt, who have set out to explore the aesthetic formations through which we evaluate and experience film and film-adjacent phenomena.

Imagining British film beauty: gender and national identity in 1920s ‘star search’ contests

ABSTRACT In the late 1910s and 1920s, a number of British national newspapers were involved in competitions to find potential stars for the British cinema. These ‘star search’ contests were aimed predominantly at young women. Often run in collaboration with British film producers, the competitions reflected, and sought to capitalise on, a moment of optimism about the prospects of the British production sector on the world market. But, as the language used to promote the contests made clear, the winners were also expected to embody a specifically British version of femininity, which would allow them to compete successfully with their Hollywood rivals. Focussing on the publicity surrounding one early scheme, the ‘Screen Beauty’ competition promoted by Pathé and the Express newspapers in 1920, this article examines the role of the British popular press in contributing to a gendered image of film stardom in the years immediately after the First World War.

Fame amid the Ruins: Italian Film Stardom in the Age of Neorealism by Stephen Gundle, and: Neorealist Film Culture, 1945–1954: Rome, Open Cinema by Francesco Pitassio (review)

Fame amid the Ruins: Italian Film Stardom in the Age of Neorealism by Stephen Gundle, and: Neorealist Film Culture, 1945–1954: Rome, Open Cinema by Francesco Pitassio (review)

The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America. Giorgio Bertellini

Review of The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America by Giorgio Bertellini

‘Battleship Femininity’ deconstructed: Unmasking the myth of Eva Dahlbeck and Ingmar Bergman

The Swedish film star Eva Dahlbeck (1920–2008) is now remembered mainly for her contributions to Ingmar Bergman’s comedies in the 1950s. The epithet ‘Pansarskeppet kvinnligheten’ (‘Battleship Femininity’), allegedly given to her by the director, has integrated her stardom into the myth-making process driven by Bergman and the press. This can erroneously give him sole credit for Dahlbeck’s fame despite her already established star status. To reconsider such an auteurist misconception, this article examines Dahlbeck’s stardom from 1946 to 1956, drawing on Richard Dyer’s seminal theorization of a film star as a media construction. By analysing Dahlbeck’s star image and its relationship to three characters she plays in Bergman’s films, the article situates these films in the dynamics formed by diverse media texts and elucidates their historical and cultural context while also providing a case study of film stardom in post-war Sweden.

#ModiWithAkshay: ‘Brand Modi’, social media and Bollywood star power

ABSTRACT On 24 April 2019, the New Delhi-based news agency, ANI, telecasted a ‘non-political’ interview of Prime Minister Narendra Modi conducted by Bollywood star Akshay Kumar. Regarded as a PR coup, particularly in the context of the ongoing Indian parliamentary elections, the ‘freewheeling’ interview underlined Bollywood’s increasing proximity with the Modi-led BJP government. Employing a detailed analysis of the interview and the subsequent controversy, I examine the Bollywood star’s role in disseminating political rhetoric, underlining in the process both shifts in discourses of Hindi film stardom, as well as the increasing politicisation of the new media ecology. In doing so, I also highlight the long-standing relationship and presence of Hindi film stars in the political arena, a fact that has received scant scholarly attention. As social networking sites like Twitter are inundated with selfies of Bollywood stars with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and hashtags like #CelebritieswithNamo and #ModiWithAkshay, it is imperative to analyse this emergent confluence of the political and the popular. Thus, using the Akshay Kumar–Narendra Modi interview as a case study, I examine not only the relationship between Hindi film stars and politics but also, the role of social media in shaping the current dynamics.

Giorgio Bertellini, The Divo and the Duce, Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America

Giorgio Bertellini, <i>The Divo and the Duce, Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America</i>

The star in VR

ABSTRACTSince the mid-2010s there has been sustained investment in Virtual Reality (VR) media and technology, aiming to target a mass consumer market; however the industry is far from stable and challenges of adoption for the mass consumer entertainment market remain. This article examines how film stardom is being employed as a means of facilitating VR, aiding negotiation and engagement with new technologies, texts, audiences and markets. It considers the potential cultural, textual and economic significance of the film star to this emergent media technology by identifying three independent-but-interrelated ways that stardom operates in VR. Firstly, as a discursive site where film stardom connotes quality and economic viability in the promotion of the VR platform. Secondly, as a textual structure that embodies the immersive nature of the VR text, reflecting VR’s own dichotomies of perception and presence. Thirdly, as a transmedia system, connecting global markets and enabling capital investment in both film and VR forms. Throughout all arenas, film star significance is located in continuing perceptions of their ability to act as bridging forces, and as images of quality and depth. This further reflects the parallels between stardom and VR, whereby both rely on the promise of immersive, expansive, connected experiences.

‘Know your role’: Dwayne Johnson & the performance of contemporary stardom

ABSTRACTContemporary film stardom is an intensely intertextual phenomenon, articulated not only through the range of social media platforms available to celebrities and their marketing teams, but also through the increasingly synergistic bodies of work of the modern Hollywood star. More than this, the modern star image is a performance, one which is in constant process of construction and negotiation. In this article, I explore how these factors intersect in the star persona of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. Drawing on a framework of literature dealing with celebrity, social media and professional wrestling, I contend that not only is Johnson’s remarkable crossover success in the film industry connected to his mastery of social media self-presentation, but also that this must be examined in the context of his background in the unique performative environment of professional wrestling. Using examples from Johnson’s wrestling career and instructive exemplars of his employment of social media, I argue that Johnson’s grounding in the unique wrestling practice of kayfabe has informed his engagement with the malleable public-private terrain of social media.

Star products, star capital, fan markets: examining 1940s British film stardom through fan club publications

ABSTRACT This paper examines the development of British film stars and fan club culture during the mid to late 1940s, through studio-sanctioned fan or star-produced magazines for the official fan clubs of British actors Jean Kent, Anne Crawford, Patricia Roc and Richard Attenborough and the British fan club for American actor Deanna Durbin. These previously unexamined resources are contextualised with contemporaneous newspaper articles, novels, film magazines andindustry publications that discuss the British star system and film star fandom. Combined, these artefacts raise prescient issues around the uncredited but essential star labour that nurtured and maintained stars’ brands, star capital and fan followings and around stars as signifiers of Britishness, wealth and status during a period of socio-cultural and film industry upheaval in austerity Britain . By considering the labour and ideologies at the heart of British film star personae and film star fan culture at its zenith, this paper broadens understandings of the British film industry and its relationship with Hollywood, and offers valuable new insights into film fandom more generally, revealing a more complex, differentiated culture of British film fan consumption and authority, British star construction and dissemination, studio control, reflexivity and economic function, than commonly assumed.

Animation and the Star Body

Animation has employed film stars throughout its long history; however, there have been few studies that have examined the relationship between film stardom and animation. This article explores the fantasy and illusion that is present through individual film stars and the medium of animation by investigating one particular example of the employment of a film star image within animation, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in Moana (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2016), and with a particular focus on the human and animated body.

Veronica Pravadelli, Classic Hollywood: Lifestyles and Film Styles of American Cinema 1930–1960

This book by Veronica Pravadelli is an impressive undertaking, which effectively confronts critical approaches to classical Hollywood. Its core aim – ‘to historicize classical American cinema’s modes of representation’ (p. 5) – most directly challenges David Bordwell et al.’s essential theory of a classical form and style that consistently framed an era spanning six decades to 1960. Pravadelli audaciously tackles the limitations of this foundational position, exploring through a myriad theoretical approaches the shifting contexts of social norms, attitudes and definitions of identity that, she argues, play out in cinematic forms that are often the antithesis of classicism. The chapters providing the most convincing support for Pravadelli’s assertion are those that explore 1930s Hollywood cinema, in which she argues that the decade can be defined by a first half acutely tied to notions of spectacle founded in early cinema, and a second wherein the formalities of classicism take shape. Here, and throughout the book, the breadth and precision of the author’s arguments are consistently impressive as she draws them through historical context and close analysis of form, structure and style, making clear how the latter is born directly out of shifting cultural attitudes and social norms. Considering both the treatment of women as visual spectacle and the focus on female narratives in early 1930s cinema alongside the USA’s experience of modernity, she argues for a necessarily gendered reading of spectacle quite specific to this historical moment. Examining the opening imagery in George Cukor’s 1932 film What Price Hollywood? (a tale of film stardom predating his 1937 A Star is Born), which combines images of the lead character’s body with fan magazine photos and the character’s mirroring makeup routine, Pravadelli explains how the stylistic device of the ‘urban dissolve’ aims to position this budding star as a representative of dynamic, modern, urban womanhood and the cultural significance of Hollywood and its fandom. The precision of her analysis clearly outlines how stylistic devices, historical attitudes towards gender and the city, and the blossoming relationship between cinema and audience combine to demand highly specific readings of the position of spectacle during this period.

Mary R. Desjardins, Recycled Stars: Female Film Stardom in the Age of Television and Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. xii + 308. ISBN: 978‐0‐8332‐5789‐6 (hb).

Review of Mary R. Desjardins, Recycled Stars: Female Film Stardom in the Age of Television and Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).