Transnational Stardom Research Articles

María Félix in Italy

ABSTRACT By the end of 1940s the Mexican film star, María Félix, had risen to the status of living legend at home and piqued the attention of filmmakers abroad. While her participation in Spanish and French productions has been studied, her performances in films produced in Italy, Incantesimo tragico (Dir. Mario Sequi, 1951) and Messalina (Dir. Carmine Gallone), have received less critical analysis. Building on scholarship about the regional and international reverberations of Mexican Golden Age cinema, studies on transnational stardom, as well as star theory, this article reveals how Felix’s projects in Italy constituted transnational experiments within a broader Southern European postwar strategy to counter Hollywood’s market dominance. In contradistinction to her Spanish and French films in which Félix was cast as a foreigner, in Italy Félix played Italian characters. Close film analysis illustrates how to varying degrees, Félix’s roles in Italy engaged her preestablished type known as the mujer sin alma (woman without a soul), and the examination of archival materials shows how the Italian popular press blended Félix’s onscreen characters with the actress off screen. Ultimately, Félix clashed with the ideals of postwar Italian female stardom and was met with an ambivalent financial and critical reception.

Moving between worlds: Performance, the scene of empathy and flexible identity in Infernal Affairs

This article explores the bodily and psychological dimensions of Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s performance in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s urban noir thriller, Infernal Affairs (2002), as a way of trying to comprehend the actor’s flexible, transnational stardom. Through a textual analysis of a pivotal scene from the film, the article argues that Leung’s facial acting facilitates an embodied and empathetic connection between the actor and the spectator, effectuated through cinematic techniques such as close-ups, editing and music. An embodied understanding of Leung’s facial work in the close-up thus challenges the existing scholarship that limits Leung’s transnational appeal to a restrained or minimalist acting style. A greater appreciation of Leung’s modulating, flexible and multi-layered performance is also illustrated through the scene’s juxtaposition of narrative and spectacle. The rupturing of the spectator’s empathetic and bodily engagement with Leung’s character during the spectacle sequence encourages the actor to shift his emotional response and bodily expressivity towards a performance delivery dictated by a flexible identity, thus bringing into relief the film’s preoccupation with a postcolonial identity crisis.

Intersections between Italian and Slavic cinemas

The purpose of this issue is to explore the encounter between Italy and Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe and Russia during and after the Soviet period, as well as the fervid cooperation and fruitful co-productions between the film industries in this vast geographic region. More specifically, this Special Issue covers the following topics: the reception of neorealist films in Slavic countries and the influence of neorealism in Slavic cinema, the links between Italian political cinema and Slavic media, the presence of popular Italian genres of television shows and series in these geographical areas, transnational stardom in cinema and television, co-productions and their adaptation to the needs of national film and television markets, Soviet–Italian film institutional exchanges and co-productions and Italian film festivals in Russia and Italy.

Histrionics of a Hong Kong migrant: Shu Qi’s transnational performance style in A Beautiful Life

ABSTRACT This article examines Taiwanese actress Shu Qi’s theatrical mode of performance in Andrew Lau’s film, A Beautiful Life/Mei Li Ren Sheng (2011), as a way of trying to understand the diverse nature of Shu’s transnational stardom. Through a textual analysis of pivotal scenes from the film, the article argues that Shu’s virtuoso performance highlights a transnational acting style that challenges cultural understandings of acting in Chinese-language cinemas built around minimalism, thus suggesting the need for a reappraisal of what constitutes a ‘good’ screen performance in the East Asian region. Shu’s exaggerated performance style ultimately influences the performance delivery of her co-star, mainland Chinese actor Liu Ye. The emerging interplay between Shu’s and Liu’s acting techniques showcases the regional and transnational potential of Chinese film acting that exploits the energetic and corporeal registers of performance. In place of a minimalist acting style that focuses upon limited bodily movement and emotional restraint, the delineation of the somatic aspects of Shu’s performance, and a critical recognition of the presentational and expressive features of her voice, actions, and gestures, contributes to a more multilayered and exploratory understanding of East Asian and transnational film performance.

Queer and insufficiently Spanish: tensions of gender and national identity around the transnational stardom of Luis Mariano

ABSTRACT During the 1950s, Luis Mariano was the main star of French film musicals. Born in Spain, but exiled to France after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the artist starred in several successful French-Spanish co-productions such as Andalousie/El sueño de Andalucía (1951), Violettes impériales/Violetas imperiales (1952) or Le chanteur de Mexico/El cantor de México (1956). This article analyses Luis Mariano’s stardom from a transnational perspective. Although some French scholars have started to study it within the framework of French cinema, Luis Mariano’s stardom worked in very different ways in Spain, as it implied and generated multiple tensions related to gender, queerness and national identity. Moreover, these tensions caused the introduction of changes in the films to adapt them to the Spanish audiences. Through the analysis of films, reviews, press articles, censorship documents and biographies, among other media texts, this article compares the results of the research on Luis Mariano in France with the investigation of his stardom in Spain, in order to evidence different relationships of the audiences of each country with the star and how he was read and received in diverse ways in each national context.

Crazy Rich Eurasians: white enough to be acceptable, Asian enough to be an asset

ABSTRACT This article explores Henry Golding’s transnational stardom as a site of racial ambiguity, with Golding and producers strategically utilising different aspects of his mixed-race identity in his filmography. I distinguish between two stages of Golding’s transnational stardom: the first in his early career as a regional television host, predicated on his ‘Eurasianness’ for a Southeast Asian audience, and the second in his Hollywood stardom, which emphasises his ‘Asianness’ for a global audience. I argue that mixed-race individuals in Southeast Asian media industries represent an ‘Asian Dream’ that Golding embodies. Golding is an asset precisely because he fulfils Western conventions of beauty in his British heritage and supplies an Asian heritage that is simultaneously authentic and exotic, made more valuable by the fact that he is indigenous. This article examines how producers from different regions use Golding’s Eurasian identity to market their films, and how Golding navigates his Eurasian identity in his different projects. Golding’s racial ambiguity allows him to be a uniquely versatile star, relying on his identity alternately as a British, Eurasian, Southeast Asian, Malaysian or Iban man. Golding thus simultaneously belongs to both, and neither, the Western and Eastern worlds, shifting between roles as required.

Creating Carmen Miranda: Race, Camp and Transnational Stardom by Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez

Reviewed by: Creating Carmen Miranda: Race, Camp and Transnational Stardom by Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez Maria Fantinato (bio) Creating Carmen Miranda: Race, Camp and Transnational Stardom. By Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016, 290 pp. Writing a book about Carmen Miranda, one of the most famous and contradictory Brazilian figures of the twentieth century, is not a simple task. Miranda's life story and the popular reception of her work and persona are contentious, and the archive is vast. Miranda's image has circulated in an extensive array of media since her success in 1930s Brazil and her international fame as singer, dancer, and Hollywood icon in the 1940s. Indeed, it took Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez a decade of archival research in the United States and Brazil, a vast bibliographic review of works produced in both countries, and "innumerable impromptu and informal conversations" to write this book (xi). Using films, press material, posters, cartoons, TV shows, biographies, and book-length studies on Carmen Miranda, as well as theorizations of stardom, performance, and camp, Bishop-Sanchez in Creating Carmen Miranda addresses the creation and circulation of Miranda's star persona on- and offscreen. Rather than telling a "true history," Bishop-Sanchez provides a critical analysis of Miranda's image by focusing on the visual aspects of her performance during her national and international career and the reach of her "star text" beyond the media representation of her image and her short life. To this day, Miranda is remembered for her spectacular costumes, unique singing voice, and imaginative headdress. She blended elements from Brazil and the United States and created a "performative genre, defined across and beyond national lines," in a particularly charged historical moment (5). Neither entirely here nor there, her career was entwined in Brazilian nationalism and racial politics, as well as in Hollywood's consumer culture and the commodification of Latin stars in the midst of Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy and World War II. This book addresses how Miranda's "celebrity sign" intersected with values such as "ethnicity, exoticism, comedy, racial difference, and excessive femininity" while circulating within and between countries (3). The first chapters are dedicated to Miranda's early career in Brazil. The author avoids interpreting Miranda's national success as mere preparation for her Hollywood ascension—a common association that downplays her popularity in [End Page 149] Brazil before her emergence on the international stage. Indeed, before embodying a stereotypical version of South Americanness, Miranda was a famous Brazilian popular music singer, casino performer, film star, and public personality who captivated audiences of multiple social classes. She was also an entertainer formed in the nationalist mold of the Vargas regime in Brazil, and she incorporated Afro-Brazilianness in her stage performances in keeping with the racial, social, and class complexities of her time. Carmen Miranda is often remembered for her appropriation of the costume of the baianas, the Afro-Brazilian women from the northeastern state of Bahia known in urban centers as fruit and food vendors. In chapter 1 Bishop-Sanchez visits stage performances and the carnival culture of early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro and contextualizes Miranda's chosen attire in an era when stylized baianas had already become an important Carioca cultural symbol. After setting Miranda's baiana in this context, chapter 2 deals with the more contentious subject of Miranda's performance of race and connects her success and her baiana stage performance with the racial and cultural politics of 1930s Brazil. Bishop-Sanchez analyzes how Miranda embraced and appropriated Afro-Brazilianness in her mode of speaking, the lyrics she sang, her choice to sing samba, and her costumes and also analyzes Miranda's use of blackface in her "tar doll" (boneca de pixe) routines and the browning of her skin in her baiana presentations. The 1930s were a period of considerable intellectual debate around the concept of race in Brazil, and a positive view of racial miscegenation became part of Brazilian national discourse in line with the myth of racial democracy, famously associated with the writings of Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, which celebrated the country as a melting pot of harmonious racial intermingling. In its application in the performing arts, this...

Brazil in Twenty-First Century Popular Media: Culture, Politics, and Nationalism on the World Stage. By Naomi Pueo Wood (ed.). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014, p. 246, $44.99.Creating Carmen Miranda: Race, Camp, and Transnational Stardom. By Kathryn Bis

Brazil in Twenty-First Century Popular Media: Culture, Politics, and Nationalism on the World Stage. By Naomi Pueo Wood (ed.). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014, p. 246, $44.99.Creating Carmen Miranda: Race, Camp, and Transnational Stardom. By Kathryn Bis

Ksenia Rappoport and transnational stardom in contemporary cinema

This article examines the role of the transnational star in challenging stable notions of Italian identity, through an analysis of Ksenia Rappoport's performances in four Italian films, La sconosciuta/The Unknown Woman by Tornatore (2006), L'uomo che ama/The Man Who Loves by M.S. Tognazzi (2008), La doppia ora/The Double Hour by Capotondi (2009), Il padre e lo straniero/The Father and the Foreigner by R. Tognazzi (2010). Rappoport's characters display ambiguous moral identities that correspond, on the level of plot, to their uncertain national identities: they are foreign-born, yet they 'don't look' foreign and appear integrated in Italian society. Through Rappoport's 'Italian' appearance the directors destabilize firm definitions of italianitá and express the contemporary 'panic over national identity'. This apprehension encompasses the characters' subversion of gender roles and exposes the overlap between gender identity and concepts of otherness. Rappoport remains an outsider in The Father and the Foreigner, where she is the mother of a child with severe disabilities – the ultimate other in a society obsessed with physical perfection. Rappoport's work as a transnational performer thus exposes and explores the anxieties of Italian society at large about new definitions of national identity and culture in an age of global mobility and transnational migration.

Glocalizing stardom: Internet publicity and the construction of Chow Yun-fat's transnational stardom

ABSTRACTAlong with the rising position of Asian film markets in Hollywood's global marketing strategy and the development of Chinese commercial cinema, an increasing number of Chinese actors have been recognized as ‘global’, ‘international’ or ‘transnational’ stars whose names are intended to appeal to audiences across different sections of the global film market. The rise of Chinese stars in the global film market accordingly raises the question of how the presence of these stars are used to sell films across different markets, and how their cross-border stardom should be understood in local contexts. In this article, I use Chow Yun-fat as a case study to explore these two questions. Rather than seeing such cross-border stardom as homogeneously applied to the star's public status across different film markets, I argue that in many cases the perception of a star's global status is often restricted to a certain regional and cultural space, and that the recognition of a star's global value is fragmented and plural across different market sectors.

Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance * Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom

These books on the Japanese silent film star Sessue Hayakawa and the Korean-American character actor Philip Ahn offer important new opportunities to develop our understanding of the transnational history of Hollywood cinema. From the vantage point of the particular systems of production, representation and reception concerning the deployment of East Asian actors within American narrative filmmaking, Daisuke Miyao and Hye Seung Chung have uncovered valuable insights into Hollywood's global strategies during a time of enormous political upheaval and cultural change regarding the construction of American self-identity and the USA's attitudes to its East Asian citizens and neighbours. Both write impressively from ‘within’ in order to stage their understanding of the ambivalent status these two actors possessed in relation to the twin processes of Americanization and modernization. Although some of their research findings vary – inevitably so considering the different ethnic origins of their case studies and the different commercial status...

Making Asian American Actors Visible: New Trends in Biography Writing; Review of Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom, Chung, Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance, Hodges, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend, and Chan, Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (1905–1961).

<scp>Making Asian American Actors Visible: New Trends in Biography Writing; Review of Miyao, <i>Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom</i>, Chung, <i>Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance</i>, Hodges, <i>Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend</i>, and Chan, <i>Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (1905–1961).</i> </scp>

'Just play yourself, "Maggie Cheung"': Irma Vep, rethinking transnational stardom and unthinking national cinemas

Olivier Assayas's 1996 film Irma Vep is a comedy about French filmmaking in an era when first-world conceptions of ‘film auteurs’ and ‘national cinemas’ had long since been destabilized by the complexities of postcolonial nationalisms, television coproductions, and unprecedented global flows of people and capital. The film's comedy pivots on the casting of a Hong Kong star in the lead role in a highly disunified remake of Louis Feuillade's silent serial Les Vampires (1915–1916), which had just been restored and released on video in tandem with the 1995 centenary of French cinema. New-wave director René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud) asks his star Maggie (Maggie Cheung) to keep her performance simple, not to act so much as to be herself, echoing Assayas's own direction that Cheung ‘just play herself’ in his film. This article addresses the implications of the direction to ‘play’ oneself by focusing on a nexus of three overlapping problematic issues: Irma Vep and Musidora as national icon, classical female actors as cinematic archetypes, and Cheung as a transnational star. Rather than placing the onus of bearing meaning (in the sense of national identity as it is mediated by cinema) on woman - whether she is icon, archetype, or star, the article argues that Irma Vep places this onus on the male Français de souche (Franco French) director, and that the film is less about remaking the past than it is about acknowledging the present, specifically the effects of emerging global orders on France and other first-world film industries.

Transnational Stardom: The Case of Maggie Cheung Man-yuk

As Richard Dyer (1979) states in his classic monograph on the star system, stars represent different ways of representing and reworking national cultural contradictions. Dyer’s work has focused upon the Western version of stardom. However, his axiom concerning cultural contradictions may be significantly applied to the case of Maggie Cheung Man-yuk who represents a particular example of a transnational stardom in recent cinema. Cheung’s major roles not only exhibit the multifaceted nature of a changing world where old traditions are called into question and new challenges confront a supposedly secure sense of personal identity. They also extend Dyer’s original definition of stardom by involving issues of transnational, rather than national, cultural contradictions.