Starring Research Articles

Film Stars on a Catwalk: Costumes and Aesthetics of Fashion Shows in Classic Hollywood Films about Fashion Models

Film Stars on a Catwalk: Costumes and Aesthetics of Fashion Shows in Classic Hollywood Films about Fashion Models

Film stars and social media in India: Traversing the space of virtual fandom

Social media is one of the most important tools of mass communication nowadays. It has not only transformed the entire world with its vast reach but has also witnessed a lot of criticism for its misuse. In the contemporary scenario, social media has attained the status of ’social reality as it has touched almost all the areas of society. The social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have changed the way we communicate with our friends and family and share our ideas, photographs, videos etc., nowadays. Since they have an extensive reach, they also make for a better understanding of the various issues discussed on such platforms. To understand it better, the study tried to borrow certain ideas from the author Lev Manovich who has written on ‘the language of new media, which is quite handy for the paper. Specifically, my paper attempts to understand the language of social media in the contemporary context and does an in-depth analysis of the sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. For the same, the study also tries to assess the impact of these sites on the cine-goers due to the uploading of the pictures, stills, videos, and updates about the shoots by the celebrities before the release of the film. This not only raises the curiosity quotient of the movie, but people eagerly await the film's release. Therefore, the paper attempts to analyze the ‘celebrity culture’ and their several posts on social networking sites in the contemporary context, especially in India.

Olson, Kristi A. The Solidarity Solution: Principles for a Fair Income Distribution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 240. $74.00 (cloth).

Olson, Kristi A. <i>The Solidarity Solution: Principles for a Fair Income Distribution</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 240. $74.00 (cloth).

Владимир Соколов: американские годы

Russian actor Vladimir Sokoloff (1889–1962) passed away in the US 60 years ago, in 1962. He was famous due to his achievements in European theatre and supporting character roles in numerous Hollywood films. Though he remained unknown in his own homeland. This phenomenon is typical with Russian émigré actors of so-called post-revolutionary cultural wave, which brought to foreign shores millions of Russian refugees. Unlike many of them, gone into nowhere, Sokolov (or Sokoloff in Europe) has gained international fame and continued successfully his professional career. According to some statistics, he performed characters of 35 nationalities and cooperated with world-known colleagues and directors, such as Doughlas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, Gary Cooper, Antoni Quinn, Ernst Busch, Yul Brynner, and so on. But in Soviet Russia no one of ideologists or colleagues was eager to pay tributes to Vladimir Sokoloff (former Moscow Kamerny theatre virtuoso actor, a friend of Tsvetaeva and Marienhoff). No reviews were published in the Soviet press on his personal highlights abroad or simply talked about his films or outstanding theatre performances. Unless a highly appreciated by the Soviet spectators and officials international film star, Jean Marais, per chance stated in his interview to Soviet film weekly: Look, I was a pupil of your fascinating actor and outstanding teacher, “the great Sokoloff”. The journalists posed questions to film historians, as no one had a clear idea of “that great Sokolov”. This paper is published in memoriam of hardly known in Russia, but still outstanding actor.

Rhetoric of Belonging and Transnational Appropriation in the Development and Marketing of the Bulgarian Popular Feature Love.net

This article focuses on issues of representation and belonging, in an attempt to uncover how popular cinema in Bulgaria caters to national sensitivities while at the same time making the link with the global film industries. The Bulgarian popular feature Love.net (Ilian Djevelekov, 2011) is an example of the shift towards treating filmmaking in Bulgaria as a business as much as a cultural venture. It emerged as part of broader European trends, which put an emphasis on film development, marketing and stars, with the aim to counter Hollywood’s dominant market position. Love.net focuses on the role of the Internet as facilitating love, relations and communication in the contemporary world. On a textual level, and similarly to Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003), it explores the six degrees of separation theory, implicitly advocating for a world of interconnectedness. Contextually, Love.net created a sense of virtual belonging among the local online community, allowing them to participate in the film’s development and engage with its interactive marketing. Transnational stars provided a further point of contact and involvement. Through its mixed cast featuring home-grown and locally popular foreign actors, Love.net both channelled and challenged Hollywood, positioning European cinema as similar in glamour and attraction but different in identity.

The Phenomenal Side of the Operatic Performance: Implications of Promotion Strategies on Cinematic Representations of the 21st Century

During recent decades, scholars have paid attention to the ways in which marketing strategies surrounded the participation of professional opera singers in 1930s/1940s Hollywood films. Opera singers used cinema to promote themselves as film stars, while Hollywood, in turn, made use of real-life celebrities in order to market films containing opera to a wider audience. Recent cinema, just like films from this earlier period, reflects cross-promotion strategies between cinema and the classical music industry through the participation of professional opera singers. When considering these singers; audio-visual appearances and the roles their performances play within the film plots, some films reveal interesting connections with the historical predecessors. This article investigates the use of cross-marketing strategies in three recent films and queries the broader tropes they adhere to through the configurations of the singers; performances and their roles in the fictional situations. Through exploring these films, I argue that they promote a representation of opera that combines two specific tropes in the process of marketing. An audio-visual display of the singers as real-life celebrities points to an elaboration of the aspect of singer promotion seen in films from the 1930s and early 1940s. Beyond this, the more recent trope of associating opera with an audience listening with rapt attention is included, which casts the opera singer in a new light and enhances this bodily promotion of the singer.

Conchita Montenegro and the Spanish press: from national pride to nationalist melodrama

ABSTRACT The Spanish press reported on Conchita Montenegro, a Spanish actress who moved to Hollywood in the early 1930s, with ambiguous and contradictory messages. On the one hand, her stint in Tinseltown was celebrated as a national triumph: a young Spanish woman had managed to seduce and conquer the Hollywood film industry. On the other hand, the fact that in Hollywood she played female archetypes at odds with the conservative morality of Catholic Spain was silenced. Decades later, after her death, the Spanish press has restored Conchita Montenegro’s fame, this time through a sensationalist, melodramatic story similar to the way Hollywood stars are promoted. Based on a comparative study between journalistic sources from both periods, this article demonstrates that the way Montenegro was treated as a film star in the press reflects the same nationalist fervour, even though the focus of her patriotic exemplariness in the 1930s gave way to a melodramatic vision of her Hollywood career more recently.

Touring the Screen: Cinematic Resonances of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes

Touring the Screen: Cinematic Resonances of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes

Born to be a Liquid Crystal: The role of fluorinated chain in the design and synthesis of new mesogens

The title of this article is devoted to the collection of compounds synthesized in this work, in which all the molecules had an astonished performance as “characters of a scientific movie” about liquid crystals (LCs). Just like movie stars, all compounds synthesized have shone magnificently on the LCs stage. The plot of this movie was designed by preparing 3,5-diarylisoxazoles carrying a semi-perfluorinated alkyl chain and a polar-terminated one with flexible spacer group. From the beginning to the end of the synthetic route, all the intermediates and the products exhibited smectic mesophases. The performance as LCs actors was analyzed by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and polarized optical microscopy (POM). The cohesive energy density (CED) was calculated for some of them to analyze the effects of microphase segregation on mesomorphic behavior.

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.

Embodying Charismatic Affect(If): the Example of Bruce Lee (Translation into Russian)

While the concept of charisma is widely used in the social sciences, its embodied nature is less thoroughly explored and theorised. This paper revisits the key embodied characteristics of Weber's sociology of charisma and re-interprets these using Shilling's (2005, 2013) umbrella notions of the body as a source and location of and means for society as a way of analysing the idea of the charismatic body as a force for social change. It then draws on a range of embodied concepts to illuminate how charisma is significant channel of infra and inter-corporeal affective interaction between “leaders” and their followers. In particular, Freund's (2009) social synaesthesia and bio-agency, Massumi's (2002) perspective of affect and the moving body, Thrift's (2010) charismatic celebrity, allure and glamour, Mellor and Shilling's (1997) sensual solidarities, and Seyfert's (2012) conception of affectif. To develop and illustrate this perspective of the charismatically affective body in action, the life of film star and martial artist Bruce Lee (1940–1973) is utilised.

A Multimodal Deep Framework for Derogatory Social Media Post Identification of a Recognized Person

In today’s era of digitization, social media platforms play a significant role in networking and influencing the perception of the general population. Social network sites have recently been used to carry out harmful attacks against individuals, including political and theological figures, intellectuals, sports and movie stars, and other prominent dignitaries, which may or may not be intentional. However, the exchange of such information across the general population inevitably contributes to social-economic, socio-political turmoil, and even physical violence in society. By classifying the derogatory content of a social media post, this research work helps to eradicate and discourage the upsetting propagation of such hate campaigns. Social networking posts today often include the picture of Memes along with textual remarks and comments, which throw new challenges and opportunities to the research community while identifying the attacks. This article proposes a multimodal deep learning framework by utilizing ensembles of computer vision and natural language processing techniques to train an encapsulated transformer network for handling the classification problem. The proposed framework utilizes the fine-tuned state-of-the-art deep learning-based models (e.g., BERT, Electra) for multilingual text analysis along with face recognition and the optical character recognition model for Meme picture comprehension. For the study, a new Facebook meme-post dataset is created with recorded baseline results. The subject of the created dataset and context of the work is more geared toward multilingual Indian society. The findings demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in the identification of social media meme posts featuring derogatory content about a famous/recognized individual.

The exploitation of Sue Lyon: Lolita (1962), archival research, and questions for film history

ABSTRACT This article examines the overlooked history of Sue Lyon and her experiences as a child film star. Lyon was fourteen years old when she was cast in the role of Dolores Haze in Lolita (1962) by James B. Harris and Stanley Kubrick. The article considers how critical feminist archival methods can be used to analyse documents in the Stanley Kubrick Archive (SKA) to uncover the conditions of production in which Lyon found herself. In the few instances that Lyon spoke out in the later stages of her life, she cited her involvement in Lolita as having had a detrimental impact on her mental health. More recently, there have been allegations of a sexual relationship between the film’s producer—Harris—and Lyon during the production. The article considers the ways in which a critical feminist approach to the use of the SKA can be used to uncover the experiences of Lyon during the film’s production and can reframe understanding of the conditions of production in Hollywood that led to the sexualisation and exploitation of a child star.

Eugeniusz Bodo: the tragic face of polish capitalism

This article presents the career of Eugeniusz Bodo who was the greatest Polish male movie star of the interwar period, examines the character he created on screen and its connection to Bodo’s off-screen persona. It also examines his position in Polish cinema after his death, especially during the period following the fall of state socialism, what is described here as ‘poststardom’. It argues that Bodo owed his success to two principal factors. One of them was the conducive circumstances in the Polish film and entertainment industry and his ability to exploit them to the full. Another factor was the match between his artistic persona and certain traits of Polish national character and, especially, the fit between the ideas Bodo embodied in some of his films and the image Poland tried to create during the same period. It also claims that after 1989 Bodo’s appeal was augmented because the details of his death, revealed in this period, rendered him the perfect tragic artist.

Flames of Justice in the Virtual Garden: A Preliminary Analysis of Tweets around the Death of an Indian Celebrity

AbstractSocial media, particularly Twitter, is a powerful medium for expression and discussion across regions and communities in the world today. Using hashtags, a powerful and popular affordance of Twitter, several forms of civic engagement and online social campaigns emerge and inform public discourse. Although several prior studies have investigated the rhetorical impact of such narrative movements on Twitter, an important consideration lies in understanding the structural forms that such narratives take depending on the context and regional culture where the movement originates. To this end, this study embarks on a preliminary analysis of 150 tweets related to calls of action and social justice in the aftermath of the death of a popular Indian movie star. The analysis reveals a diverse spectrum of themes ranging from expressions of loss and grief to critiques of institutions and mechanisms of power. Parallel but powerful themes also demonstrate attempts to nurture and embolden the campaign. The aim of this analysis is to provide insights into how such channels of discourse might be designed to create a medium of freedom of expression and foster safe spaces for civic engagement.

The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel AdaptationNick: A NovelEl gran GatsbyStepping Out with Scott and Zelda: Touring the Fitzgeralds’ Montgomery

The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel AdaptationNick: A NovelEl gran GatsbyStepping Out with Scott and Zelda: Touring the Fitzgeralds’ Montgomery

An analysis of celebrity repositioning through reality television

PurposeReality television is a dynamic, profit-making platform that occupies prime-time slots on the television almost all over the world. Despite its immense popularity and influence, it has received little attention in the extant literature and almost none in terms of its impact on celebrity repositioning. This study aims at examining the relationship between the film stars as brands and the impact of the platform of reality television in repositioning these celebrities in the Indian context.Design/methodology/approachThrough extensive literature review and qualitative interviews, the paper expounds that reality television provides an opportunity to celebrities to successfully reposition themselves at crucial junctures in their career. The framework to study this repositioning has been adopted from the work of Chris Simms and Paul Trott (2007) who created it to study the brand repositioning of various consumer goods.FindingsThe literature establishes celebrities as brands. This study provides evidence that brand repositioning through reality television is possible for these celebrity brands. The symbolic and functional repositioning of these celebrities is presented through thematic content analysis.Research limitations/implicationsThe study provides a useful framework to understand celebrity brand repositioning through reality TV. It can also be replicated to understand the repositioning of a wide variety of celebrities other than film-stars such as sportspersons, social media influencers and politicians.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the need of expanding the corpus of Indian reality television and explains how Indian celebrities reposition themselves through reality television.

Queering Bodies: “Becoming-unrecognisable” in Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together

Abstract This paper is interested in the cinematic apparatus’s potential to produce affect which defamiliarises the visible presence of star-bodies in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (chunguang zhaxie, 1997), thus invoking non-normative and new modes of thinking about queer identification and representation. By close reading the mise-en-scène of the two Iguazu falls sequences, the on-screen star bodies of Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung are defamiliarized when they produce Gilles Deleuze’s affect and “become-unrecognisable” as on-screen subjects. Through this, the encounters with the Iguazu Falls allow us to queer heteronormative and linear narrative time that is associated with (a movement towards) futurity. This inability to pass judgement, I argue, is the ethics of sexual desire which Happy Together proffers when we understand the body that queers and becomes unrecognisable through productive affective assemblages. Instead, we move through the transsensorial potentials for the cinematic assemblage to rethink modes of queering normativity and to redefine bodies in terms of plurality and multiplicity. To that end, this paper presents a new way of thinking about how film stars, familiar tourist spots and even a classic text like Happy Together may be defamiliarized through productions of affects, new-sensations, to provide more ways of revisiting and regarding the film anew.

A Study on the Aesthetic Properties of Feminism Make-up in Cindy Sherman&amp;apos;s Instagram Selfie

Feminism sheds light on women's identities in a variety of ways, along with criticism of gender discrimination and male-centered thinking. In particular, Cindy Sherman's selfie, known as a feminist photographer, expresses various women's images, showing a new identity of women. This study examined feminism makeup that expresses women's self-identification in the recent emergence of Me Too and feminism, and analyzed feminism makeup in Cindy Sherman's self-portrait to find out its aesthetic characteristics. First, the nature of Cindy Sherman's feminism makeup was expressed as dominant masculinity. Through various typical forms of beard, he strongly emphasized masculinity, and his eyebrows were thick and dark, and his facial contour was manly. The beard is a symbol of masculinity and a facial expression of social status and character, so Cindy Sherman actively expresses herself as a feminine figure with feminism makeup. Second, Cindy Sherman's characteristics of feminism makeup expressed the characteristics of benignity, which are caused by the confusion of femininity and masculinity. It emphasizes a positive image to exaggerate the image of a man with feminine features and a manly hairstyle and long, voluminous eyelashes. This positive image can also be seen in postmodernism Androgenus look or Genderless look, and is also the best characteristic of feminism makeup. Third, Cindy Sherman's feminism makeup characteristics had the characteristics of typistic femininity. She expresses her female identity through the image of a powerless and shabby woman by turning herself from a young movie star to an old woman. Fourth, Cindy Sherman's feminism makeup characteristics express the characteristics of detachment with ugly beauty. Such makeup is unstable in shape, and there are many distorted or modified images, but Cindy Sherman's selfies also showed this ugly look of herself. Fifth, Cindy Sherman's feminism makeup is bizarre and gives grotesque horror in the form of witches or vampires. Witches and vampires, who lack femininity, expressed feminism not in the image of women obedient to patriarchal men, but rather in horror. Sixth, Cindy Sherman's characteristic of feminism makeup is to portray herself as a clown or a clown, or a clown, to represent a caricature. Sherman's clown series is already well known for its makeup that shows feminism in women. The clown always smiles in the costume, but the inner figure symbolizes the repressed and sad woman herself and is an expression of Sherman's own image.

Impact of using Celebrity and Non-Celebrity in an Advertisement on Consumer Purchase Behavior in Cosmetics Category

In the current time of data blast and media impact, promotions assume a significant part in changing insight or considering buyer. Celebrities have been utilized for a wide assortment of cosmetics brands. There is restricted investigation on buyer impression of celebrity versus non-celebrity for the cosmetics items. Advertisers use superstar support to help in simple brand review particularly during buying circumstances. Mainstream big names like cricketers and film stars are considered as god by their sweethearts, however it is fundamental for advertisers to build up the connection between cosmetics item and superstar by thinking about the kind of cosmetics item. The work of individuals who partner with promotion office to sort out which kind of and which medium is the awesome the most plausible for their image. Organization needs to arrive at expected advantages of endorsers either big name or average person to guarantee that they are not in clash with an association's worth framework or liable to produce contrary exposure. The motivation behind this paper is to study the factors like credibility, expertise, attractiveness, decision making behavior to study impact of celebrity and non-celebrity endorsers in cosmetics commercials on buying goals of clients.