Revisiting Star Studies
12-14 June 2013
Culture Lab, Newcastle University
Conference Programme
Day 1 (12 June)
10:30 registration
11:00 Keynote paper 1. Venue: space 4/5; chair: Guy Austin
Neepa Majumdar (University of Pittsburgh, USA): Listening to Stardom:
Considerations of Voice in Star Studies
11:50 -- 1:20 parallel panels 1&2
Panel 1 Star Voices. Venue: space 4/5; chair: Neepa Majumdar
Jennifer O’Meara (Trinity College Dublin) – Star Speed: the Fast-Talking
Voices of Independent Cinema
Tom Whittaker (University of Liverpool) – Being Clint Eastwood’s Voice,
Spanish Dubbing, Performance and Personification
Ann Davies (Newcastle University)--Where is the Voice of Penélope Cruz?
Panel 2 Performing Action: The Face & Body of Contemporary Male
Stardom. Venue: space 7; chair: Rosie White
Lisa Purse (University of Reading) – Confronting the Impossibility of
Impossible bodies: Tom Cruise as Ageing Action Star
Lucy Fife Donaldson (University of St Andrews) – Masculine Tools: the Work
of Jason Statham’s Controlled Body
Faye Woods (University of Reading) – Ryan Gosling’s Face: American
Masculinity and the Reluctant Man of Action in Drive
1:20 - 2:20 lunch (Culture Lab)
2:20 - 3:10 Keynote paper 2. Venue: space 4/5; chair: Sabrina Yu
Yingjin Zhang (University of California-San Diego, USA): Film Stars in the
Perspective of Performance Studies
3:10 - 4:40 parallel panels 3&4
Panel 3 Global Players and Transnational Film Performance (1). Venue:
space 4/5; chair: Sarah Leahy
Donna Peberdy (Southampton Solent University) – Narrative Trans-actions:
Performance in the Global Ensemble
2
Sarah Thomas (Aberystwyth University) – After ‘M’: Transnational Influences
and Echoes in Screen Performance
Sabrina Qiong Yu (Newcastle University) –Transcending the Boundaries of
Language on the World Stage: Tang Wei’s Performance in Late Autumn
Panel 4 Stars and Ageing (1). Venue: space 7; chair: Rosie White
Linda Berkvens (University of Sussex) – ‘When Barbara Strips off her
Petticoats and Straps on her Guns’: Barbara Stanwyck, Maturity, and Stardom
in the 1950s and 1960s
Gillian Kelly (University of Glasgow) – Robert Taylor: The Invisible Star
Kirsty Fairclough (University of Salford) – It’s Complicated: Meryl Streep and
the Acceptable Face of Ageing Stardom in Hollywood
4:40 - 5:00 coffee
5:0 - 6:30 parallel panels 5&6
Panel 5 Global Players and Transnational Film Performance (2). Venue:
space 4/5; chair: Ann Davies
Iain Robert Smith (Roehampton University) – Transnational Vamp: The Global
Stardom of Bollywood Dancer Helen
Mark Gallagher (University of Nottingham) – The Mainlanding of Tony Leung
Chiu-Wai
Darren Kerr (Southampton Solent University) – See You on the Other Side:
Interstitial Scares in the Transnational Supernatural or Why (Transnational)
Horror?
Panel 6 Stars and Ageing (2). Venue: space 7; chair: Melanie Bell
Adrian Garvey (Queen Mary, University of London) – James Mason:
Performance and the Ageing Star
Lucy Bolton (Queen Mary, University of London) – Melanie Griffith: Vulgarity,
Excess and Ageing Disgracefully
Sue Harris (Queen Mary, University of London) – Gerard Depardieu: The
Ageing Star Body as a Site of Generational Crisis
7:30 pm conference dinner at Six, the Baltic, Gateshead
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Day 2 (13 June)
8:45 registration
9:15- 10:55 Keynote panel. Venue: space 4/5
Developing the BFI Film Stars Series, hosted by Martin Shingler (University of
Sunderland) and Susan Smith (University of Sunderland)
Ginette Vincendeau (Kings College London) – Bardot and the Origins of Star
Studies
Pam Cook (University of Southampton) – Nicole Kidman’s Artful Acting: How
to Be an Actress and a Star
10:55-11:10 coffee
11:10-12:40 parallel panels 7 & 8
Panel 7 European Star Systems. Venue: space 7; chair: Sarah Leahy
Rebecca Naughten (not affiliated) – The Industrial Contexts of National
Stardom: A Spanish Case Study
Sarka Gmiterkova (Masaryk University Brno, Czech rep) – Suffer for the Fame:
Jirina Stepnickova and Czech Female Film Stars, 1930-45
Catherine O'Rawe (Bristol University) – Alain Delon: Stardom, Italian Style
Panel 8 Reappropriating Hollywood Stardom. Venue: space 4/5; chair:
Andrew Shail
Ania Malinowska (University of Silesia, Poland) – Heroines at the Outskirts of
Culture: De-romanticising Hollywood Queens
Leonardo Boscarin (Queen’s University, Belfast) –Charles Bronson: the one
(and the many). Exploring star influence in British inmate Charles Bronson and
El Charles Bronson chileno
Eva Bru-Dominguez (University College Cork) – Fleshing out the Past: Ava
Gardner and the Dialectics of history in Isaki Lacuesta’s La noche que no
acaba(2010)
12:40 – 1:40 lunch
1:40 - 3:10 parallel panels 9 & 10
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Panel 9 Constructing and Marketing Stars in Early Cinema. Venue: space
7; chair: Martin Shingler
Andrew Shail (Newcastle University) – The Emergence of Film Celebrity in the
UK
Isak Thorsen (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) – Valdemar Psilander: an
International Star in the Silent Era
Amy-Claire Scott (Newcastle University) – We Do Not Manufacture Princesses
Like You Manufacture Automobiles: Hollywood Studio Stars and
Manufacturing Political Flexibility in Thirty Day Princess
Panel 10 Acting, Performance and National Identity. Venue: space 4/5;
chair: Stephanie Dennison
Mariapaola Pierini (Università di Torino, Italy)– Rodolfo Valentino, The Star as
an Actor
Salma Siddique (University of Westminster) – Goodbye Neverland: Child Star
Ratan Kumar and the Move to Pakistan
Guy Austin (Newcastle University) – Performance, the body and national
identity in the Algerian films of Biyouna
3:10- 4:40pm parallel panels 11&12
Panel 11 Tragic, Late and Crip Stars. Venue: space 4/5; chair: Melanie Bell
Andrea Bandhauer and Michelle Royer (University of Sydney, Australia) – Star
Embodiment: Ageing and the Tragic Star
Elisabetta Girelli (University of St Andrews)--In Your Face: Montgomery Clift
Comes out As Crip in The Young Lions
Leon Hunt (Brunel University) –Too Late the Hero? The Bittersweet Stardom
of Donnie Yen
Panel 12 Aberrant and Unusual Stardom. Venue: space 7; chair: Yingjin
Zhang
Xiaoning Lu (SOAS, University of London) – Chen Qiang: Affect Engineering
and Stardom in Chinese Socialist Cinema
Lin Feng (University of Hull) – “I’m Ugly, but Gentle’: Performing xiaorenwu
(little character) in Chinese Comedies
5
Johnny Walker (De Montfort University) – From Pinter to Pimp: Danny Dyer,
Cult Stardom and the Critics
4:40 – 5:00 coffee
5:00 – 6:00 parallel panels 13&14
Panel 13 Transnational Stardom. Venue: space 7; chair: Sabrina Yu
Yiman Wang (University of California Santa Cruz, USA) – ‘Speaking in a
Forked Tongue’: Anna May Wong’s Linguistic Cosmopolitanism
SooJeong Ahn (Catholic University of Korea, Korea) – Korean Wave (Hallyu)
Stars into Hollywood: Lee Byung Hun from Asia to Hollywood
Panel 14 Transmedia Stardom. Venue: space 4/5; chair: Ann Davies
Julie Lobalzo Wright (King’s College London) – The Crossover: Why Popular
Music Stardom and Film Stardom are Often at Odds with One Another
Sarah Gilligan (Hartlepool College) – Beyond the Harry Potter Girl: Emma
Watson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture
6: 10 pm Optional film viewing at Tyneside Cinema
“Behind the Candelabra”, dir. S. Soderbergh, starring Michael Douglas &
Matt Damon
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Day 3 (14 June)
8:45 registration
9:15- 10:05 Keynote paper 3. Venue: space 4/5; chair: Guy Austin
Stephanie Dennison (University of Leeds): ‘I’m different from you’: Xuxa and
the notion of Whiteness in Brazil
10:05 – 11:05 parallel panels 15&16
Panel 15 Ethnicity and National Identities. Venue: space 4/5; chair: Guy
Austin
Jaap Kooijman (University of Amsterdam, Holland) – Whitewashing the
Dreamgirls: Connecting the Star Images of Beyoncé and Diana Ross
Michael Lawrence (University of Sussex) – Sabu, Prince of Technicolor
Panel 16 At the Margins of Film Stardom. Venue: space 7; chair: Andrew
Shail
Sarah Harman and Clarissa Smith (University of Sunderland) – ‘I want James
Deen to Deen Me with his Deen’: The Multi-layered Stardom of James Deen
Stella Hockenhull (University of Wolverhampton) – Reel Creatures: Animals as
Star Vehicles in Hollywood and non-Hollywood Cinema
11:05 -11:25 coffee
11:25 -12:55 parallel panels 17&18
Panel 17 Star and Audience. Venue: space 4/5; chair: Sabrina Yu
Lori Morimoto (Northern Virginia Community College, USA) – Transcultural
Proximity and the Japanese Fandom of Hong Kong Stars, 1985-2000
Niamh Thornton (University of Ulster) – Betwixt and Between: Gender and
Mexican Film Stars Online
Hanna Klien (University of Vienna, Austria) – When Stars Gaze Back: Darshan
as a Concept of Stardom and Spectatorship
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Panel 18 New perspectives in Star Studies. Venue: space 7; chair: Martin
Shingler
Andrea Bandhauer and Michelle Royer (University of Sydney, Australia) – A
Volume on Stars in World Cinema: New Perspectives?
Joshua Gulam (University of Manchester) – ‘I Didn’t Want to be “The Issues
Guy”…’: A New Critical Approach to George Clooney’s Philanthropy
12:55 lunch and an optional trip to a regional attraction
CLOSE
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Abstract
Soo Jeong Ahn: Korean Wave (Hallyu) Stars into Hollywood: Lee Byung
Hun from Asia to Hollywood
In the international spread of popular culture from South Korea since the late
1990s, known as popularly as the “Korean Wave (hallyu in Korean)”, it was not
Korean films that won the hearts of fans. Rather, it was television dramas and
popular music (K-pop) that initially produced hallyu stars such as Bae Yong
Joon, Lee Byung Hun and Rain, leading this trend in the regional market
especially in Asia. In this sense, it draws attention that the recent hallyu stars
find their way into Hollywood studio films after establishing their career in Asia.
This paper explores the way in which hallyu stars have transformed their career
from Asia to Hollywood by looking specifically at Lee Byung Hun who is
shooting his third film (Red 2) in Hollywood after his successful debut in the
sci-fi sequels G.I. Joe (2009) and G.I. Joe 2 (2012). The paper examines the
ways in which hallyu stars had to take their roles as Asian male stereotype in
martial arts flicks as their first steps of breaking into Hollywood. There could be
risks that they alienate themselves from the local and regional markets and
losing out on opportunities, as well as losing creative freedoms which
potentially could be limited by big Hollywood studios. By illustrating their
career trajectories from TV dramas to films, from Asia to Hollywood, the paper
aims to reveal the new forms and patters of hallyu stars and the Korean Wave.
Guy Austin: Performance, the body and national identity in the Algerian
films of Biyouna
At the age of 50, the female Algerian singer and actor Biyouna—already a wellknown music and TV star in Algeria—embarked on a film career which has
been successful in Algeria, France, and beyond. This paper will consider
Biyouna’s film performance not in a transnational mode but as an embodiment
of specific cultural and social issues at stake in Algeria at the time of her breakthrough film Viva Algeria (Nadir Mokneche, 2004). In particular the paper will
address the gendered performance of the star body in Viva Algeria (and to a
lesser extent in her other Algerian films), situating this in regard to Algeria’s socalled civil war of the 1990s, the ideological discourse around the display of
women’s bodies, and the contemporary violence against women on the part of
radical Islamist factions. There will be close analysis of the function of dance,
performance, and memory in Biyouna’s performance, and reference will be
made to theories of performance by Paul McDonald, Susan Hayward and others
regarding the relation between the voice and body of the actor and the “social
containment of desire” (McDonald) or the “ideological censorship” of the body
(Hayward).
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Andrea Bandhauer & Michelle Royer: Star Embodiment: Ageing and the
Tragic Star
This paper will argue that the body is not simply an object of spectacle. It is also
the site of performance: that of the inner life of a star. By taking two examples,
Romy Schneider as the embodiment of the tragic and the filming of the bodies
of aging stars (as for instance in Amour by Michael Haneke), this paper will
show that an actor always reveals something that pertains to the real. Romy
Schneider embodied characters on the edge, women who are both strong and
fragile and on a road that often leads to disaster. On screen, her capacity to
receive and demand romantic love constitutes both her power and her weakness
and ultimately, the characters she played are almost always victims of the
devastating consequences being risked by her absolute surrender to passion.
What is shown on screen seems to respond to, replicate and even evoke the
tragedy surrounding her private life, which was eagerly followed and
scrutinised by the media. This paper will show that it is this blending of the
private and the screen persona - the fact that the audience was watching her on
screen character(s) perform tragic destinies that could be considered as
projections of her troubled private life – that created the authenticity, charisma
and aura, that, as Dyer states, the audience demands of a star to be accepted “in
the spirit in which she or he is offered” (Dyer, 1991). This paper will also
investigate the recording of human aging by cinema through the filming of the
physical body of stars. Because of its very nature as ‘art of perception’ to quote
Merleau-Ponty, cinema always reveals to spectators, often unconsciously, the
process of aging. Through the filming of bodies, faces and voices of stars,
cinema records the effects of time: although cinema is an art of manipulation of
the real, it cannot conceal ageing bodies, it can use them and groom them but
the body of the actor always escapes its control. This paper will argue that when
viewers watch Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva in Amour (Haneke,
2012) they don’t simply watch the fictional story of an old couple’s end of life,
they also witness the declining bodies of two actors and the evolution of the
acting skills of two stars whose faces and bodies have become very familiar
over many years of media and film exposure.
Andrea Bandhauer & Michelle Royer: A Volume on Stars in World
Cinema: New Perspectives?
This paper will discuss aspects of an upcoming book titled Stars in World
Cinema (Michelle Royer and Andrea Bandhauer (eds) I.B. Tauris, 2013) which
comprises essays on European, African, Asian, Latin American and
Australasian stars and systems. Contributors from a variety of disciplinary
backgrounds explore stars of national cinemas, western and non-western
cinemas in their connectedness outside of the Hollywood model, and reflect on
the global and local functions of stars in the world. The book aims at promoting
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new forms of interdisciplinarity by adopting a hybrid and multiple perspective
on stars and the star industries while focusing on the expertise of scholars who
are involved in national cinemas. What is of particular interest to us is the
polycentric approach to cinema articulated in the book. This paper will discuss
the book not only as a series of essays but as an attempt to map the world of
stardom in their specificity and interconnectedness: attentive to details and local
geographies but highlighting common reliefs and links between various areas of
stardom.
Linda Berkvens: “When Barbara Strips off her Petticoats and Straps on
her Guns”: Barbara Stanwyck, Maturity, and Stardom in the 1950s and
1960s
“When Barbara strips off her petticoats and straps on her guns” is the tag line
for Barbara Stanwyck’s 1954 film Cattle Queen of Montana (d. Allan Dwan,
US) and it indicates one of the major shifts that took place in Stanwyck’s career
and image in the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike many of the female stars of her
generation that were forced to end their careers in the 1950s because there were
insufficient parts for mature women (i.e. women over forty), Stanwyck
“stripped off her petticoats” and extended her film career until well into the
1960s by performing in B Westerns and television series. Stanwyck’s maturity,
emphasized by her rapidly greying hair, affected the roles she played but also
turned Stanwyck into a role model for mature women. This paper will consider
Stanwyck’s unique position as a role model for mature women in the 1950s and
1960s. It will also examine the reasons for Stanwyck’s popularity as a mature
female star in the 1950s and 1960s when the general notion that feminine ideals
were “youthful and thus vulnerable to deterioration with age” (Stacey 226). The
research is done by using original primary materials. It will demonstrate the
construction of Stanwyck’s image by locating it in its original context and it
will offer explanations for the fashionability of Stanwyck as a mature star in the
1950s and 1960s.
Lucy Bolton: Melanie Griffith: Vulgarity, Excess and Ageing Disgracefully
This paper will argue that the star image of Melanie Griffith is centred on
vulgarity and excess, created by her film roles in the 1980s, elements of her
physicality and off-screen life, and that this has led to connotations of cheapness,
artifice, and aging disgracefully, which are reflected in the roles she continues
to play. Griffith’s acting career began when she was a child, but her stardom
began with the film Body Double in 1984 in which she played porn actress
Holly Body. This excessive and parodic film set the scene for many of Griffith’s
roles over the next decade: sexually provocative, dangerous characters,
stripping, dancing, and teasing their way through the eighties. Griffith played
prostitutes, mistresses and molls, and her combination of baby-voice and
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voluptuous body helped her create a persona focussed on bawdy sex. Integral to
this image was the visual excess of the decade, with all its garish colour and
exaggerated proportions. Although Griffith has played many dramatic roles over
her forty-year career, the associations of bawdiness, excess and sexual
availability have remained as integral parts of her persona, seeing her play roles
of aging sex-bombs, such as the mother of Lolita (1997) or the mistress of
William Randolph Hearst in RKO281 (1999). The colour and style of her
emergent starring roles, combined with Griffith’s physical characteristics and
appearance-altering plastic surgery, have led to a popular image of a sex-bomb
aging disgracefully and embarrassingly. This paper analyses the trajectory of
Griffith’s career in light of colour, costume, performance and physicality, and
examines the specific contexts that led to her star image being fixed in the
eighties.
Leonardo Boscarin: Charles Bronson: the one (and the many). Exploring
star influence in British inmate Charles Bronson and El Charles Bronson
chileno
In 1975, Chilean underdog Fenelón Guajardo López won a TV prize of lookalikes impersonating American actor Charles Bronson. Since then, the now
eighty something ad-painter has been subjected to the highs and lows of success
inherited from an actor that he has never encountered but on screen. Similarly,
in 1987 British inmate Michael Gordon Peterson changed his name to Charles
Bronson to market his image as ‘the most infamous prisoner in recent history’.
Despite the fact that he had never seen a Bronson’s film, it is fair to say that
now he is more popular than the American actor he claims to impersonate.
Indeed, a search in Amazon sorts his autobiographical books before any
Bronson’s film or memorabilia. While the Chilean impersonator appeared in his
own documentary and performed in a western with an unknown Italian director,
Bronson the inmate has been the subject of a recent film about his life (Bronson,
2009). How do these subjects appropriate the image of Charles Bronson to
capitalise into the actor success? Which traits of his image do they highlight and
which are they concealing? Could we consider impersonators as off-screen
sources to understand Charles Bronson image? Can this practice help to
fill/bridge the gap between stars and audience ‘in which both desire and
identification circulate’ (Shingler, 2012)? Considering image as an unstable
‘substance’ that can be lent by studios and eventually be stolen by fans, my
paper seeks to take these two case studies to address questions of violence,
masculinity, and success in the public/intimate space in countries as different as
England and Chile.
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Eva Bru-Dominguez: Fleshing out the Past: Ava Gardner and the
Dialectics of history in Isaki Lacuesta’s La noche que no acaba (2010)
For many years, a life-size bronze sculpture of Ava Gardner has towered over
the picturesque coastal town of Tossa de Mar (Catalonia), attracting foreign and
local visitors alike. Commissioned to celebrate the Hollywood actress’s stay in
the village during the shooting of Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying
Dutchman (1951), this statue symbolises the indelible mark left by the star in
this particular socio-cultural environment. In La noche que no acaba [All night
long] (2010), Isaki Lacuesta documents Gardner’s movements around Spain,
from her arrival at this then little known fishing town in 1950, to the years she
spent in Madrid surrounded by the newly emerging social elite that flourished
under general Franco’s dictatorship (1939-75). Here, the director juxtaposes
footage of the young and old Gardner with testimonials from those who came
close to her during those years, ultimately engaging in a transnational dialogue
that is mostly mediated through the aging body of the star. Moreover,
Lacuesta’s careful recovery and editing of archival materials results in the
reframing of Gardner’s bodily traces raising questions about corporeal presence
and its relationship with time and space. This paper seeks to explore Lacuesta’s
dissection of a local history and society through the figure of Ava Gardner.
Attentive to the methodologies and debates addressed by star studies scholars
who have argued for more context-sensitive approaches to the cinema (Gledhill
1991, Staiger 1992, Stacey 1994), I will draw on the writings of performance
studies scholar, Joseph Roach to examine Spain’s uncanny relationship with its
past.
Pam Cook: Nicole Kidman’s Artful Acting: How to Be an Actress and a
Star
Following her move to Hollywood from Australia and her bid for major stardom
in the early 1990s, Nicole Kidman developed a distinctive acting style
characterised by artifice. My paper will look at the different manifestations of
this 'actorly' performance style in films such as To Die For (Gus Van Sant,
1995), Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999) and Australia (Baz Luhrmann,
2008), exploring performance as a response to industrial and cultural
developments in contemporary global media. Kidman's histrionic acting has
been described as postmodernist in the way it draws attention to the
construction of gender. I shall extend this perception by teasing out the impact
of her postcolonial Australian background on her performance style and
enactment of white, modern femininity.
Ann Davies: Where is the Voice of Penélope Cruz?
This paper considers the ways in which the voice of the Spanish star Penélope
Cruz goes unheard. Although Cruz’s natural voice is both distinctive and fairly
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consistent in her roles, it is subject to erasure in different ways within the film
text and outside it. Within her films the use of English (as in, for example,
Vanilla Sky and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) and lip-synching (Volver) serve to
ensure that her active performance is submerged. This phenomenon is even
more apparent in the discourse surrounding Cruz as star, wherein other directors
and actors speak for her (Almodóvar for Volver and Los abrazos rotos/Broken
Embraces, Tom Cruise for Vanilla Sky). The muted Cruz is at odds with the
rapid-fire delivery of Spanish and English in her films that appears to match the
fiery persona promoted in her films. This paper explores these anomalies in
order to question where, if anywhere, the voice of Cruz can be located.
Stephanie Dennison: ‘I’m Different from You’: Xuxa and the Notion of
Whiteness in Brazil
Maria da Graça Meneghel (born 1963) is one of the most successful television
presenters, recording artists, production company heads and film stars that
Brazil has ever produced. Catapulted to stardom in the early 1980s as the blueeyed, blonde-haired new kid on the block in modelling, and girlfriend of
footballer Pelé, in a matter of years Xuxa (as she is known) had become one of
the most instantly recognisable and influential media stars in the country.
Although she is ostensibly a children’s entertainer, her star text has traditionally
hinged on both her overt sexuality and on her representation of colour. This
paper will consider in particular the construction of whiteness in Xuxa’s star
text. Scant attention has been paid to the varieties of whiteness that exist in
‘melting-pot’ nations such as Brazil. If whiteness is fluid and unstable in the
North American and Northern European context, it is much more so in Latin
America, and Brazil in particular, with its large mixed-race population and the
tradition of racial self-identification. The paper questions the usefulness of the
tropes of whiteness suggested by Richard Dyer in White (1997) when applied to
Latin American stars.
Lucy Fife Donaldson: Masculine Tools: The Work of Jason Statham’s
Controlled Body
As an action movie star, Jason Statham’s chief asset is his body. Physicality
dominates his on-screen presence, discussion of his acting skills and attention to
his appeal. His body works hard both as a performer, in terms of physical effort
he puts in to his films as stressed by interviews where he claims to do most of
his own stunts, and as a persona, in terms of identification of Statham-as-star
with physicality and this as a focus of attention in publicity material. Statham’s
body operates as a conduit for a particular masculinity of ordered agency,
effectiveness and single-mindedness. Yet, this order is frequently threatened by
the possibility of rupture by physical defeat, excess and queer sensibilities. By
considering the body as tool for performer and persona this paper will address
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the nature of the body Statham presents and is represented by. Statham’s
physical presence is characterised by order and precision: he is the man that gets
things done. The possibility of losing control and the rupture of secure
masculinity is suppressed by the nexus of the effort/precision/ mastery at the
heart of Statham’s star-image. Taking The Mechanic (Simon West, 2011) as a
case study, this paper will explore the way his physical performance in this film
draws on the Statham persona to create an ur-Statham-text about the slippage
between rupture and control, and what this negotiation articulates about the
male star action body, both critically and ideologically.
Kirsty Fairclough: It’s Complicated: Meryl Streep and the Acceptable
Face of Ageing Stardom in Hollywood
For nearly forty years Meryl Streep has been considered one of the greatest
actors of her generation. Since the 2008 release of her most commercially
successful film to date, Mamma Mia! Streep has become synonymous with the
perceived new visibility of the mature woman in Hollywood and has been a
vocal critic against ageism. This noticeable increase of older women on screen
has been posited as a progressive move towards inclusivity. Streep recently
starred in a number of these highly commercially successful films and she has
been labelled as ushering in a new era in the visibility of older women gaining
major roles in Hollywood. This paper will consider how Streep has been pivotal
to the perceived recognition of older women on screen in major roles. It will
explore how it may appear that through Streep’s success the maturing female
star is now beginning to be revered not rejected. It will examine how despite the
perceived positive nature of these shifts, this acceptance appears only possible
when it is linked to the legitimacy of the craft of acting, where certain actresses
such as Meryl Streep, Judi Dench, Glenn Close and Helen Mirren are spared
unremitting scrutiny of their ageing process and are allowed to mature on screen
because they are considered authentic talents therefore acceptable as ageing
women. This paper will therefore examine Streep’s career in the context of an
increasingly gerontophobic Hollywood and will consider how Streep acts as an
imaginary marker of acceptable ageing in an industry in which growing old is
not only feared but deeply reviled.
Lin Feng: “I’m Ugly, but Gentle”: performing xiaorenwu (little character)
in Chinese Comedies
The popularity of chouxing (ugly star) in the Chinese cinema since the late
1980s has challenged the star system in Chinese film industry during the
previous decades when a male actor’s handsome appearance was regarded as an
important criterion for him being cast as a leading man. Directing the public
attention to a male star’s physical appearance by stressing the attributive
adjective chou, this newly-coined word raises a number of questions: how the
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cinematic emphasis on a male star’s physical appearance engages with the
social interpretation of a star’s screen charisma? And how the construction of a
chouxing’s stardom articulates with the social perception of a man’s sexuality in
mainland China since the late 1980s? To answer the questions, I take Ge You
as a case study and explore the star’s impersonation of xiaorenwu (little
character) in Chinese comedies. I argue that the Chinese cinema’s emphasis of
a chouxing’s physical appearance is a visual manifest of the character’s
imperfectness and ordinariness. Nonetheless, despite of that the cinematic
emphasis of the star’s unattractive appearance often signifies a xiaorenwu’s
unprivileged social status, it neither marginalises nor makes the character a
social outsider. Instead, the imperfectness and ordinariness has endowed the
xiaorenwu with the power as an insider of the Chinese society where the
patriarchal ideology was and still is dominating the social voice. As an insider,
Ge’s xiaorenwu not only has the power to define the notions of tradition and
modern from a heterosexual man’s perspective, but also uses his dominant
position to invite the general public to mock and even marginalise those whose
sexuality do not fulfil the gender paradigm defined by the patriarchal structure.
Mark Gallagher: The Mainlanding of Tony Leung Chiu-Wai
Hong Kong–born actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai rose to prominence as a local star
of Hong Kong television dramas and subsequently earned visibility in a range of
regionally produced, internationally distributed art and popular films. Even as
Leung has participated in successful Hong Kong productions such as the
industry-reviving Infernal Affairs (2002), he has starred too in numerous coproductions with mainland Chinese companies, ranging from the global hit
Hero (2002) to the regional success Lust, Caution (2007). His most recent roles
have been in ideologically uncontroversial—or explicitly pro-state—mainland
co-productions, including Red Cliff (2008), The Great Magician (2011) and The
Silent War (2012). He will next appear as martial-arts icon Ip Man in the longdelayed The Grandmaster, a China/Hong Kong co-production from Hong Kong
director Wong Kar-Wai. Leung’s global reputation has depended strongly on
his repeated collaborations with director Wong. His work in the past decade in
Mandarin-language productions newly positions him as a mainland box-office
attraction. The transit from local to international to mainland productions
involves numerous markers of stardom and creative practice. This paper
investigates Leung’s choice of roles and modulation of performance style to
remain artistically active in greater China’s evolving industrial environment. It
devotes particular attention to Leung’s performances in and critical responses to
The Great Magician and The Silent War. Overall, the paper draws conclusions
about Hong Kong and mainland Chinese industries’ management of performing
talent and contributes to understandings of the evolving dynamics of
interconnected East Asian screen industries.
16
Sarah Gilligan: Beyond the Harry Potter Girl: Emma Watson, Fashion and
Celebrity Culture
Since 2009, the star-celebrity persona of Emma Watson has undergone a
transformation from 'nerdy girl' to rising fashion icon. Despite ditching the
‘Harry Potter girl’ image with a range of glossy magazine photo shoots by
celebrity fashion photographers (Rankin, Testino and Lubomorksi) and
advertising campaigns for Burberry, Lancome and People Tree, her cross media,
off screen persona is characterised by a seemingly incompatible mix of
familiarity and difference in which she is self consciously 'playing Emma
Watson'. Watson does not simply exist as a silenced fashion portrait - her voice
forms an integral part of her representation as an ethical, yet fashion forward
consumer through tie-in featurettes and interviews available online. Watson
forms part of a trend in contemporary popular culture of fuelling the
conspicuous consumption of designer brands and high end beauty products to
ever younger consumers during a recession. Rather than teens being encouraged
through niche and style magazines (Lynge-Jorlén 2012) to experiment and
create their own looks via the consumption of second hand /vintage clothes (see
McRobbie 1989) and affordable make-up, Watson becomes a source of
unattainable branded aspiration. Yet to assume that fans slavishly aspire to copy
Watson's designer looks is to eradicate the consumer of individual agency and
their ability to 'read' the fashion image as a performative image. Therefore in
examining the complexity of star-spectator relations within the contemporary
media landscape, Star Studies needs to examine both ‘trickle down’ and ‘bubble
up’ fashion consumption (Polhemus 2010), together with audience’s digital
participatory practices (Jenkins 2006).
Adrian Garvey: James Mason: Performance and the Ageing Star
Focussing on James Mason’s later film work, this paper will consider the ways
in which a star persona is modulated and becomes more complex over time. In
a 50 year film career, James Mason’s star persona encompassed the Byronic
brute of Gainsborough melodrama, the vulnerable fractured masculinity seen in
Odd Man Out (1947), A Star is Born (1954) and Bigger Than Life (1956), and
the perverse sexuality suggested in The Seventh Veil (1945) and Lolita (1962).
While some of these tropes are echoed in the flawed patriarchs of Georgy Girl
(1966), Age of Consent (1969), Spring and Port Wine (1970) and Mandingo
(1975), other late performances, culminating in The Shooting Party (1985),
introduce a gentle, melancholic register. Closely analysing the detail of voice,
expression, gesture and movement, I will examine Mason’s performances in key
late films as paradigms of aging stardom and masculinity on screen.
Contemporary critical responses will also be assessed, to consider how Mason always a critic’s favourite - came to be constructed as a consummate screen
actor in this period.
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Elisabetta Girelli: In Your Face: Montgomery Clift Comes out As Crip in
The Young Lions
In 1956 Montgomery Clift was one of Hollywood’s hottest stars, a critically
acclaimed actor whose image, however, largely rested on his stunning good
looks; Clift’s heart-throb status vanished overnight when, on 12 May 1956, his
perfectly beautiful face was destroyed in a car crash. Although every care was
placed on Clift’s recovery and face reconstruction, he emerged from the
accident with his left cheek paralysed, his features uncannily altered, and a
suddenly aged appearance. No longer an object of erotic desire, and burdened
by physical and mental pain, Clift was now mercilessly scrutinised by public
and press, and constantly compared to his former self; yet in his first film after
the accident, The Young Lions (1958), Clift took the extraordinary decision to
change his already-battered looks for the worst. By making his ears stick out
almost horizontally, wearing a prosthetic nose, and shedding an excessive
amount of weight, Clift presented a highly disturbing image, in dramatic
contrast to his co-stars Marlon Brando and Dean Martin. This paper analyses
Clift’s deliberate self-distortion as an act of defiance, an explicit declaration of
deviancy from the requirements and expectations of the star system. In the light
of queer and crip theory, Clift’s sensationally alien appearance can be read as a
denaturalising strategy, challenging orthodox notions of stardom and affirming
a new, openly aberrant identity.
Sarka Gmiterkova : Suffer for the Fame: Jiřina Štěpničková and Czech
Female Film Stars, 1930–45
Despite being widely recognized and fondly remembered in popular circles, the
star system that was a central part of the Czechoslovak cinema of the 1930s and
early-to-mid 1940s has drawn scant attention from academics. Accordingly, this
presentation begins to shed much needed new scholarly light on this key aspect
of the nation’s film culture by way of a case study of the Czech star Jiřina
Štěpničková in the period 1930–45.This specific Czech actress whose stardom
was articulated in terms of national and artistic discourses embodied key parts
in films considered as classical in Czech cinema history - namely Maryša
(Marysa, 1935), Babička (Granny, 1940) and Muzikantská Liduška (Liduska
and Her Musician, 1940).I adapt concepts developed in the study of Hollywood
stardom to argue that, during the period, Czech film stardom was intimately
bound up with conceptions of stardom related to nineteenth-century Czech
theatre. This situation, I suggest, had profound implications for the female stars
of Czech cinema. On the one hand, a parallel career on the stage served to
confirm their artistic standing based on the comparative prestige attached to the
theatre. On the other, however, it imposed upon female film stars strict moral
and social codes relating to appropriate femininity, notions of acting quality,
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and citizenship. In short: how to be a good woman, a good actress, and a
national icon.
Joshua Gulam: ‘I Didn’t Want to be “The Issues Guy” …’: A New Critical
Approach to George Clooney’s Philanthropy
For over a decade George Clooney has combined a successful film career, with
high-profile philanthropic work for organizations such as the United Nations.
He has received multiple humanitarian awards, along with high praise from
journalists. These accolades confirm Clooney as one of the more celebrated
examples of a film star-turned-philanthropist. Focusing on Clooney, I examine
how philanthropic power - the power to speak on important social, political and
humanitarian issues - attaches itself to certain stars. The aim is to trace how
Clooney has translated his star power into philanthropic credentials. Through
close analysis of press clippings and critical reception materials, I show that
Clooney’s credibility as a philanthropist derives not only from his everyman
persona, but also from his reputation as a star of ‘good’ Hollywood films; it is
precisely because he has made acclaimed issue movies such as Syriana, that
Clooney is able to speak about South Sudan. This paper contributes to debates
about star philanthropy. Much of the scholarship has concentrated on the media
attention stars bring to campaigns. In a departure from this broad approach, I
look more closely at the widely held distinctions between different types of star
philanthropist; the purpose is to open up new critical approaches to the cultural
politics of do-gooding stars. Why has Clooney had more success as a
philanthropist than figures like Madonna or Sharon Stone? The answer lies not
just in the quantifiable outcomes of their philanthropy, but also in the cultural
value attributed to each star’s cinematic work.
Sarah Harman & Clarissa Smith: ‘I want James Deen to Deen Me with his
Deen’: The Multi-layered Stardom of James Deen
This paper examines the alternative economy of porn stardom through the
career and performances of James Deen. Variously described as the ‘Tom
Cruise of porn’, the ‘skinny boy from Pasedena’ and the ‘everyman on planet
porn’, Deen has won numerous awards and been the subject of incredulous starprofiles in mainstream media. Male performers in porn are not supposed to be
visible; as props for the female star’s orgasmic performance male stars are
simply stand-ins for the male viewer but Deen has achieved a visibility that rewrites those rules. What is it about Deen that makes him a star? In interviews he
suggests it is his professionalism and his single-mindedness - sex is his raison
d’etre - his passion for ensuring that a scene works emotionally as well as
physically so that his female star is ready to go the extra mile for the scene
whether hardcore BDSM, straight gonzo or feature adult films; others claim it is
his boyish looks, his skinny body, his unthreatening onscreen presence –
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assessments which perhaps sideline his ability to make ‘degradation look good’
in his hardcore work at Kink.com. What is certain is that he has a huge female
fan base and appears set to make the seemingly impossible crossover to
‘legitimate’ filmmaking alongside Lindsay Lohan. In this paper, Deen’s
stardom will be examined through his performance style, the aesthetic and
narrative qualities of his films as well as the seeming incongruity of his porngod status.
Sue Harris: Gérard Depardieu: The Ageing Star Body as a Site of
Generational Crisis
Now in his fifth decade of filmmaking, with close to 200 films under his belt
Gérard Depardieu is the generational touchstone of post-New Wave French
cinema. This is particularly evident in the roles that bracket his career, from the
early 1970s to today. From Bertand Blier’s Les Valseuses (1973) onwards,
Depardieu’s early roles provided French cinema with a new template for a
disaffected male underclass, with Depardieu standing for a generation of young
men cut loose from the prosperity and aspirations of the post-war economic
boom, and the political and social institutions of post-1968 France. His recent
roles (Quand j’étais chanteur, Giannoli, 2006; La tête en friche, Becker, 2010;
Potiche, Ozon, 2010; and Mammuth, Delépine & Kervern, 2010) have brought
his career full circle, offering us cinematic portraits of aging, socially fixed and
culturally impoverished figures. Across a spectrum of roles, from provincial
club singer, to illiterate handyman, to factory shop steward, to retiring abattoir
hand, Depardieu increasingly incarnates a figure of quiet ruin, his performance
of social degradation reinforced visually and culturally by the bloated actor’s
much publicised, late-career obesity. The star himself thus becomes the vehicle
for a critique of material obsolesce and working class masculinity in decline,
symbolically adrift in a France he no longer understands, in which he is
excessively present, but on which he seems to have left no official trace. He
thus stands as a site of generational reflection on the transformation of French
working class male identity in contemporary France.
Stella Hockenhull: Reel Creatures: Animals as Star Vehicles in Hollywood
and non- Hollywood Cinema
In Hazanavicius’s 2011 film, The Artist, the central character, George Valentin
(Jean Dujardin) is accompanied by his dog, Jack (Uggie). Throughout the film,
the spectator witnesses Jack, a small terrier, behave in a cognisant and legible
manner, executing a succession of tricks such as walking on his hind legs with
front legs aloft, and gazing at his ‘owner’, begging while seated on his haunches.
Uggie thus presents ‘restored behaviour’ (Schechner 2002), which is a
performance that is rehearsed and repeated in a number of other films and
situations, for example Water for Elephants (Lawrence 2011). Additionally, the
20
success and press coverage of the film resulted in huge acclaim for its canine
star: Uggie received a special mention for his performance at the Prix Lumière
Awards in France, and won the Palm Dog Award at the 2011 Cannes Film
Festival. Also, in recognition for his part, Uggie shared the prize for the best
canine performance awarded by The Seattle Times, along with Cosmo, the
canine character in Beginners (Mills 2010). Not only does Uggie produce a
performance, he is also presented as a star persona through various accolades,
accorded this status by the press and the industry; indeed his ‘acting’ was
described by critics as “the best performance, human or animal, in any film I’ve
seen this year”. In the light of existing scholarship on Star Theory (Dyer 1979,
Shingler 2012), and within the theoretical framework of Star Studies, this paper
examines the notion of the animal in Hollywood and non Hollywood films as
star vehicle.
Leon Hunt: Too Late the Hero? The Bittersweet Stardom of Donnie Yen
In my book Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger (2003)
I described Jet Li as the last major Chinese Martial Arts star. I was aware of
(and admired) Donnie Yen, and yet his star status seemed constrained by an
industry that was largely losing interest in ‘authentic’ performers and had
mainly confined him to supporting roles in film and starring roles on TV.
While Yen had a cult following the west, it was not enough to propel him to the
international stardom enjoyed by Li and others. His Hollywood career more
closely resembles that of Collin Chou, employed to play martial arts muscle in
Highlander Endgame (2000) and Blade 2 (2002.) Even in Hero (2002), Yen
seemed to have been primarily drafted in to provide a distinguished opponent
for Jet Li. His belated promotion to major stardom, then, is an interesting
development. As Hong Kong cinema struggles to re-establish its global
popularity, Yen is exactly the kind of star to attract the kind of international
attention it once enjoyed – perhaps the last such star to have not already broken
through to a global audience. And yet Yen is approaching 50 and (at the risk of
repeating the rash claim about Jet Li) the last of his kind. His recent films, I
will argue, have in some ways breathed new life into local generic traditions –
the post-blockbuster wuxia genre (Seven Swords, 14 Blades, The Lost
Bladesman), the classic kung fu film (Ip Man 1 and 2, Legend of the Fist: The
Return of Chen Zhen) and the urban fighting film (SPL, Flashpoint.) And yet at
the same time, they signal an inability for Hong Kong cinema to move forward
– none of these films reinvent action cinema in quite the same way that writers
like Ackbar Abbas (2000) and Vivian Lee (2009) have argued for the Hong
Kong movies of pre- and post-Handover periods. This paper examines Yen’s
career from SPL (2006) onwards, in particular his connection to the legacy of
Bruce Lee and his teacher Ip Man, and a nostalgia for the ‘authenticity’ of
earlier martial arts cinema.
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Darren Kerr: See You on the Other Side: Interstitial Scares in the
Transnational Supernatural or Why (Transnational) Horror?
Recent foreign-language films have revived the appeal of the supernatural and
owe their success to the transnational flow of gothic-horror cinema where the
relationship between Hollywood and its various others is ‘complex, evolving
and mutually influential’ (Schneider and Williams 2005: 2). The intersecting
and interstitial nature of this relationship not only poses questions around reappropriation, generic exchange and cultural production but also crucially
returns us to a more fundamental question in horror cinema: that of its
(resurgent) appeal. Andrew Tudor’s seminal essay ‘Why Horror?’ (1997) posits
that American horror’s appeal is often aligned to the return of the repressed, the
uncanny and structural psychoanalysis. But in the moment where ‘other’ horror
cinemas appear to succeed in delivering dread where its American counterparts
fail, what has not been considered is the influence and affect of performance.
Performance, I argue, tends to become universalised and homogenised in
American horrors leaving its trail bloodied but its chills anaemic. This paper
will explore the intricate generic and cultural exchange at play in the
relationship between Hollywood horrors and their international others through
an examination of performance in films including The Devil’s Backbone (2001),
Dark Water (2002), A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), [Rec] (2007), The Orphanage
(2007) and The Silent House (2010). Drawing on Richard Bauman’s 1975 and
2000 studies respectively, it will examine performance in terms of actions and
events located distinctly in space, place and time in order to cast light on dark
performance within gothic horrors as a mode of expression that is ‘put on
display, objectified, marked out to a degree from its discursive surroundings and
opened up to scrutiny and evaluation by an audience’ (2000: 1).
Gillian Kelly: Robert Taylor: ‘The Invisible Star’
Robert Taylor can be labelled as a significant ‘forgotten’ star of Hollywood
cinema. Taylor signed to MGM in 1934 and remained there for over thirty years.
Beginning his career as a matinee idol in the 1930s, Taylor moved on to grittier
roles in the post-war period and starred in costume epics such as Quo Vadis? in
the 1950s. Finally, he moved on to a star in weekly detective show on American
television in the 1960s. I argue that Taylor may be ‘forgotten’ today as a result
of his star persona being built around four normative and ideologically
conservative social categories: as white, heterosexual, American and male it
may be that he appears to scholars and retrospective audiences as too ‘normal’
and thus ‘invisible’ in the field of star studies. This is further underlined by the
way in which Taylor seemed to seamlessly fit the genres and trends of each
decade he worked in. Yet Taylor presents a particularly interesting case study of
a star because of his ‘past remarkable’ status and in relation to his longevity, if
we consider that his star persona was principally based around his looks. The
22
fact that he was able to sustain a career for over thirty years opens up questions
and assumptions about stars and the aging process, particularly male stars. This
paper will discuss the invisibility of a star who crossed the four dominant social
norms (whiteness, heterosexuality, American-ness and maleness) yet sustained a
long and successful career despite the apparent limitations of his ‘star qualities’.
Hanna Klien: When Stars Gaze Back: Darshan as a Concept of Stardom
and Spectatorship
In Hindu religion darshan refers to the exchange of glances between the
devotee and the deity in worship. This concept of the gaze bestows power to the
object, as union is only experienced and blessings are only received if the deity
gazes back. Generally, Hindi cinema has been closely connected to visual
culture in India and stars have often been worshipped similarly to deities.
Accordingly, the impact of darshan on forms of filmic representations as well
as stardom has been identified in Indian film studies. This paper investigates the
negotiations of the darshanic gaze in contemporary Hindi films with a special
focus on the global star Shah Rukh Khan, introducing a concept of stardom
beyond the paradigms developed in the context of Hollywood. Recent changes
in Hindi film industry have led to an increasing appropriation of Western film
making practices. Modes of representations marked by iconicity or formal
devices such as the direct, frontal address, which are strongly connected to
filmic representations of darshan, have been transformed in this process.
Consequently, new forms of spectatorship have emerged making scopic
relations based on darshan more accessible to transnational and –cultural
audiences. These forms of spectatorship have considerably influenced the
construction of Khan’s star image. Although the emphasis of the paper lies on
the filmic texts, it also refers to various reception contexts. Clearly
differentiating between spectator and actual viewer, examples from India,
Austria and Trinidad & Tobago offer insights into the impact darshan has on
the relationship between Shah RukhKhan and his fans. Thus, the question of
how local, culture-specific concepts of stardom can be incorporated in other
contexts shall also be discussed.
Jaap Kooijman: Whitewashing the Dreamgirls: Connecting the Star
Images of Beyoncé and Diana Ross
Throughout her solo career, African American superstar Beyoncé’s skin color
has been subject to media controversy, including claims that she was “whitened”
on the cover of Vanity Fair (November 2005), “whitewashed” in a L’Oréal hair
coloring advertisement (August 2008), and put on “blackface” for L’Officiel
Paris (February 2011). In this article, I explore how the argument of skin color
continues to be raised when black pop artists become global superstars. As
Alice Echols has pointed out: “Black artists who defy the tests of ‘blackness’ …
23
may achieve superstardom, but they often find their racial crossings leave them
open to charges of self-loathing and selling-out” (2002, p. 197). Building on the
work of Richard Dyer and others, in this article I will “read” the star text of
Beyoncé in relation to the star texts of comparable personas – both “real” and
fictional. First, I will make the connection between Beyoncé and Diana Ross,
who also has been accused of “selling out” and “whitewashing” her star image
to please a mainstream and global audience (Bogle 2007; Dyer 1986; Kooijman
2005). Second, I will analyze how Beyoncé’s star text plays a significant role in
the shaping of the Ross-inspired fictional character Deena Jones in the movie
Dreamgirls (Bill Condon, 2006). Third, I will compare Beyoncé to the fictional
character of Mahogany as performed by Diana Ross in the movie Mahogany
(Berry Gordy, 1975). In this way, I hope to show how star images can travel
over time, connecting both “old” and “new” stars as well as “real” and fictional
personas.
Michael Lawrence: Sabu, Prince of Technicolor
Sabu was the only Indian film star to be produced in and by the west during
cinema’s classical period. Born near Mysore in South India in 1924, he became
an international star at the age of twelve, and remained an exceptional presence
in popular film, first in Britain and then in the United States. The construction
and perceptions of Sabu’s Indian origin inevitably reflected the historical and
political contexts for his fame, but they were also shaped by the industrial and
technological factors specific to popular cinema. This paper focuses on the
star’s popular association with Technicolor spectacle. Homi K. Bhabha suggests
that skin functions as ‘the key signifier of cultural and racial difference’ and is
‘the most visible of fetishes’. He reminds us, however, that ‘skin, as a
signifier … must be produced or processed as visible’. In Sabu’s Technicolor
productions, popular fantasies concerning his ‘cultural and racial difference’ are
indeed perpetuated by the characters he played, and his ‘difference’ is
emphasised, exaggerated by the colour process in which his skin is presented as
a ‘most visible’ fetish. The vibrancy of Technicolor was perceived to enhance
the vigour and sensuality of what one critic was to call Sabu’s ‘dusky
athleticism’ (1943c, p. 8). But while George Basten has suggested Sabu was
‘upstaged’ by the Technicolor spectacle, and other critics have argued that the
star was simply objectified by the process, close attention to the Puckish brio
and dynamic vivacity of Sabu’s performances suggests how he transcended this
“talismanic” relationship with Technicolor.
Xiaoning Lu: Chen Qiang: Affect Engineering and Stardom in Chinese
Socialist Cinema
This paper examines Chen Qiang’s film stardom as the villainous class enemy
in Chinese socialist cinema (1949-1966) in order to interrogate a predominant
24
theoretical model in star studies that privileges the star’s charisma and the
spectator’s identificatory pleasure in the construction of film stardom. It also
aims to use this case study to explore the complexity of star phenomenon in
socialist China. Despite playing various screen roles across genres, Chen Qiang
is best known and acclaimed for playing the evil landlord on screen. Chen’s
stardom, which discourages identification and emulation, seems rather odd in a
cinema that aimed to propagate socialist ideology and reform Chinese citizens.
His stardom also encapsulates theoretical predicaments of the then prevalent
discourse of “film worker” in China, which emphasized the affinity of the actor
and the character and the correlation of the actor’s performance and his
proactive process of “experiencing life.” By examining key film texts and paracinematic discourses of Chen, this paper explores this structurally distinct
stardom within the framework of participatory politics. It argues that the
politics of participation necessitated the merger of the actor’s political action
and his theatrical performance as well as the collapse of the distinct boundary
between actor and audience, thereby constructing Chen’s stardom that hinges
upon the audience’s immediate emotional responses to the embodiment of the
evil. Ultimately, Chen’s stardom helped engineer a desired affect – class hatred
– in socialist China, hence furthering the masses’ political participation.
Neepa Majumdar: Listening to Stardom: Considerations of Voice in Star
Studies
The register of stardom, as a network of texts, as publicity, as melodramatic
mode, as a form of desire, is one that foregrounds the visual domain, even while
the other senses are acknowledged and engaged. Recent work on star voices
recognizes the cinematic star text as a more properly audiovisual construct, with
its implicit oppositions between voice and body, interiority and exteriority. This
paper uses the figure of Shahrukh Khan to take stock of what it means to listen
to stars in specific socio-historical contexts. One way to restate this interest in
star voices is to consider the actor’s vocality as part of an overall acoustic
ecology constituted on the one hand by the actor’s acoustic signature within the
sound design of a specific film, and on the other, by the different sonic contexts
of film, talk show, stage show, interview, etc. While accounting for various
combinations of star voice and star body (substituting a different voice for the
star body in the case of dubbing, a different body for the same voice in the case
of playback singing in India, and other permutations), my interest is in
competing zones of recognisability in multiple forms of “dual” voice-body star
texts, and in various points of interface between the live and the recorded,
between star bodies and sound technologies.
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Ania Malinowska: Heroines at the Outskirts of Culture: De-Romanticising
Hollywood Queens
In his 1954 novel, The World in the Evening, Christopher Isherwood defined
camp as „a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a
feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich”. His definition points to what
has been so far omitted in cultural interpretations of camp: to impersonation as
an alternative form of stardom based on a borrowing and relocation of an image
to give it an independent (alternative) life. Camp travesty of Hollywood stardom
should not be merely seen as a gender-politics-oriented strategy to build
legitimized social presence. It should be also seen as a process of generating
independent (and competitive) performances, idols and ideals, that propose a
refined version of a Hollywood star and Hollywood femininity, setting the idea
of stardom outside the Hollywood paradigm, to settle and cultivate it at the
outskirts of culture. In my paper, I would like to bring to light camp as an
alternative form of stardom, which full of admiration for “traditional star
images”, makes a blasphemous incorporation and transposition of the
Hollywood model. My presentation will include examples of Polish cinema
(Piętro wyżej, 1937) and literature (Lubiewo by Michał Witkowski, 2004) and
will aim to present how individual images of Hollywood Queens (female stars)
have been transferred outside the Hollywood context to function independently
of their big screen existence to create an autonomous paradigm of stardom.
Lori Morimoto: Transcultural Proximity and the Japanese Fandom of
Hong Kong Stars, 1985-2000
The Japanese female fandom of Hong Kong cinema that flourished from the late
1980s through the early 2000s hinged not on an attraction to the hyperkinetic
action and martial arts films that characterized Hong Kong film fandom in the
West, but on the multi-talented stars who peopled the Hong Kong silver screen.
Singers-cum-TV stars-cum-movie idols such as Leslie Cheung, Andy Lau, and
Aaron Kwok were the focus of a star-centred fandom that, by virtue of stars’
own wide-ranging oeuvres, exposed Japanese fans to a far wider swath of Hong
Kong popular culture than their Western counterparts. For these fans, the
relative lack of mainstream media attention on such stars, together with the low
degree of Hong Kong film distribution in Japan through the end of the 1990s,
meant that fans who wanted more of favourite stars increasingly pursued
alternative avenues of media and information acquisition. These, in turn,
engendered a paradoxically intimate mode of transnational star fandom that
effaced differences of language, nationality, and (popular) culture. In this paper,
I examine the ways in which fannish activity fostered a sense of transcultural
proximity to Hong Kong stars among Japanese female fans and, through
discussion of fan reactions to Aaron Kwok’s first Japanese concert tour of Japan
in 1996, I interrogate the limits of this imagined proximity as it comes up
26
against the reality of the star himself. In so doing, I offer a way of thinking
about transcultural fandom that engages with national and cultural specificity
without being over determined by it.
Rebecca Naughten: The Industrial Contexts of National Stardom: A
Spanish Case Study
Despite stardom's industrial dimension being routinely passed over in critical
analyses, the industrial contexts of stardom in a given national culture is integral
to both the form and content of stardom and the star image. This paper will
argue, following Willis (2004), that stars cannot be separated from the industrial
contexts of their production, and that they also can be seen to be as reflective of
their industry as they are of contemporaneous cultural assumptions. Due to a
number of nationally-specific factors in the Spanish film industry since the
1990s, 'Spanish cinema' has been becoming a more nebulous and hybrid entity.
If stars are 'a means by which Hollywood has been able to present itself as a
global rather than a national film industry' (Drake 2004: 76), this paper
examines what the impact on Spanish stardom has been of Spanish stars and
their images circulating in a national cinema that has increasingly
acknowledged and utilised the codes and conventions of a more international
form of cinema production. This paper will take as its main example Eduardo
Noriega, a Spanish star who emerged in the late 1990s, the point at which a shift
in the balance of factors (industrial versus national and / or cultural) shaping
Spanish stardom was becoming apparent, and will also suggest that the trend for
Spanish stars crossing national boundaries to further their careers is
simultaneously symptomatic of both success and crisis in the Spanish cinema of
this era.
Jennifer O’Meara: Star Speed; the Fast-Talking Voices of Independent
Cinema
While considerable literature has emerged on the production and aesthetics of
American independent cinema in the past decade (King 2005; 2009, Tzioumakis
2006, Berra 2009), discussion of indie stars has been limited. In my paper, I will
argue that popularity of independent actors often rests on distinctive vocal
qualities that enable them to carry dialogue-driven films. This builds on
observations by Kozloff (2000), Murphy (2007) and Berliner (2012) that
independent cinema often distinguishes itself from Hollywood through verbal
creativity. Focusing on two fast-talking indie stars, Chris Eigeman and Parker
Posey, I will outline how their unique embodiment of words has led particular
writer-directors to create roles with them in mind. Diane Negra (2004, 86)
suggests that when Posey was required to play a character in a Hollywood film
with a lisp, it implied her standard caustic delivery was unsuitable and had to be
changed for mass appeal. However, the requirement also draws attention to her
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broader vocal skills, which I will argue are key to appreciating her roles in Hal
Hartley's cinema. Eigeman, on the other hand, has played articulate character in
three films by Whit Stillman, and another three by Noah Baumbach. For one of
these, Stillman insisted to financiers (eager to cast a bankable star) that only
Eigeman could play the part. Using Martin Shingler's (2006; 2011) analyses of
what constitutes a star voice, I will defend Stillman's claim and argue that, for
both Eigeman and Posey, their persona and appeal traces back to a 'distinctive
and easily-identifiable' (Shingler 2006) sound.
Catherine O'Rawe: Alain Delon: Stardom, Italian Style
The major French/Italian co-productions starring Alain Delon (Rocco e i suoi
fratelli/Rocco and his Brothers, (Visconti, 1960), L’eclisse/The Eclipse
(Antonioni, 1962) and Il gattopardo/The Leopard (Visconti, 1963)) have been
little studied from the viewpoint of Delon’s star image and performance style.
One of the reasons for this is the neglect of star studies within the discipline of
Italian film studies: additionally, work on star studies in the Italian context has
emphasised the need to view stars as ‘cultural symbol and conduit for ideas
about gender, values and national identity’ (Gundle 2008) and so has been
unable to account for the influence of non-Italian stars working in Italian
cinema. This paper will examine Delon’s performance style in the three films,
probing the established definitions of his ‘impassive acting style’ (Hayes 2004),
and ‘expressionless face’ (Austin 2003). It will raise the question of whether
Delon’s critical status as ‘homme fatal’ who is ‘too beautiful’ (Vincendeau 2000)
has obscured the range and variety of his performance idiom in these
French/Italian films, and how the fact of dubbing his voice into Italian works to
support or undermine his position as erotic object of the camera’s gaze.
Donna Peberdy: Narrative Trans-actions: Performance in the Global
Ensemble
The network narrative is a multi-strand interlocking narrative device featuring
multiple storylines that overlap as part of a wider thematic. It has become an
increasingly common storytelling strategy both in Hollywood and
internationally, a format facilitated and bolstered by global co-productions and
the transnational movement of directors and actors and encapsulated by films
such as Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), Paul Haggis’s Crash (2004) and
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006). Conversely, the anthology film,
such as Rodrigo García’s Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (1999)
and multi-directed Paris, je t’aime (2006), presents a methodic mosaic of
vignettes with discrete and distinctive storylines that function both
independently and as parts of a whole. Critics such as David Bordwell, Paul
Kerr and Vivien Silvey have suggested that network narratives and anthology
films reflect changes in global production, distribution and exhibition contexts
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and can be read as a response to an increasingly mediated and interconnected
global stage. This paper focuses on the actors, actions and interactions presented
in these narratives, considering how both the network narrative and anthology
film offer different negotiations on the ensemble film. Bringing together a
medley of actors and cultures, the global ensemble offers the potential for a
truly transnational format. However, while the ensemble film conventionally
brings together a cast of several key players whose roles within the narrative
take on equal importance and/or screen time, the global ensemble presents the
illusion of a coherent collective, offering a critique of globalisation via
performances of disconnection, disengagement and disparity.
Mariapaola Pierini: Rodolfo Valentino, The Star as an Actor
Starting from Miriam Hansen’s important contribution until more recent studies
(such as Valentino, Cinema, cultura, società tra Italia e Stati Uniti negli anni
Venti, ed. by S. Alovisio and G. Carluccio, published on the occasion of the
international Conference hosted by the University of Torino in 2009), the case
of Valentino offered to film studies many interesting hints and approaches,
mostly centered on issues related to stardom and reception. The technical and
stylistic aspect of Valentino’s on-screen performances, although investigated, is
still a topic where the acting component needs to be fully explored and analyzed.
The paper aims to investigate Valentino’s complex acting style, focusing on the
various registers of his performances and on the peculiarity of his technique, in
which expressions, gestures and body movements are melted in a unique and
eclectic way. In the context of Hollywood mode of production of the Twenties,
during the contradictory process of institutionalization, Valentino emerges as a
star strongly labeled as exotic, whose performances not only reflect his identity
but also negotiate it through specific signs and strategies significantly managed
by the actor. In this perspective, our aim is to collect and develop the elements
emerged in the Torino Conference, updating the debate and providing additional
perspectives to the analysis of the relations between star and performance.
Lisa Purse: Confronting the Impossibility of Impossible bodies: Tom
Cruise as Ageing Action Star
‘The star functions less as character than as integral production value. Tom
Cruise as ‘Tom Cruise’ in Mission: Impossible is its own kind of spectacle’
(Arroyo 2000: 24). In the Mission: Impossible films (1996, 2000, 2006, 2011)
Cruise establishes an action stardom predicated on the assertion of an emphatic
mode of spatialised physical performance. Each film’s action sequences
foreground not just the character’s penetration of space and mastery of extreme
physical risk, but the actor’s capacity to perform that penetration and mastery.
Such moments bring together an ostensibly real-world location with impossible
physical feats and a performance mode that draws productively from elements
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of Cruise’s complex star persona – e.g. extreme persistence, determination, and
the seemingly ageless face and body – in spectacles of undented fortitude and
physical capability. But Cruise is also one of several actors negotiating their
action stardom in relation to the ageing process. Ageing as theme and as
spectacle has become newly ‘at issue’ in contemporary action cinema, in films
that self-consciously pair an ageing action star with a less experienced or
younger co-star (The Guardian 2006, Live Free or Die Hard 2007, Looper
2012), and the nostalgic returns of 1980s action stars (Rocky Balboa 2006,
Rambo 2008, The Expendables 2010). In the context of a film franchise
predicated on the achievement of the impossible, this paper analyses how Cruise
as ageing action star confronts his own encroaching inability to perform the
impossible. In doing so the paper explores Cruise’s relationship to this wider
cycle of ageing action star performances, and reveals the negotiations around
narrative and action spectacle that attend the presence of these new ‘older men’.
Amy -Claire Scott: We Do Not Manufacture Princesses Like You
Manufacture Automobiles: Hollywood Studio Stars and Manufacturing
Political Flexibility in Thirty Day Princess
One of the fundamental approaches to stardom in the Hollywood studio era is
the argument that star images can contain within them resistance of, and
contradictions to, the dominant ideologies they embody. This tendency has
often been discussed in terms which imply that these contradictions are extratextual side-effects working in tension with fundamentally normative narratives,
but the possibility that the ideological tensions at the heart of certain star images
were a deliberate marketing tactic on the part of the studios is yet to be explored.
In the 1930s a cycle of films emerged which used journalism self-consciously as
a metaphor for studio filmmaking. This cycle includes numerous narratives
which explore the deceptive, unstable, and deliberately contradictory nature of
the diegetic and extra-diegetic star images being produced within and by these
films. Looking at Paramount’s comedy Thirty Day Princess (Marion Gering,
1934), I will show how the narrative explicitly constructs film stardom as a
series of related but contradictory demands which must be embodied by the
same individual in order to maximise financial success for those responsible for
the construction and manipulation of the star identity. Rather than only being
decipherable through a process of counter-reading, I will suggest that the
practice of multiple and conflicting meanings being embodied by the same star
was a practical and deliberate approach to the challenges of marketing films to a
geographically, economically, and socially diverse demographic. The key to
selling a star image to a mass audience, I will argue, is manufacturing
ideological flexibility.
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Andrew Shail: The Emergence of Film Celebrity in the UK
One of the most dramatic of the reinventions that comprised cinema’s second
birth in the UK was the appearance, in 1911, of the first publicity campaigns for
celebrities whose fame was based solely on their appearance in films: celebrities
of the medium. An industry capable of generating and sustaining both its own
population of celebrities and an apparatus for fostering their fame was a major
component of cinema’s emergence as a distinctive medium. This ‘sudden’
growth nonetheless emerged from roots established several years earlier, and
this paper outlines the circumstances in which intra-filmic celebrity, to extend
the metaphor, first germinated and then sprouted. I will explore differences
between the circumstances in the UK and those in the US outlined by Richard
de Cordova in 1990, both to show that Western Europe was developing its own
notion of intra-filmic celebrity even before the influx of publicity for stars from
the American ‘creators’ of film celebrity in 1911, and to show that even this
transatlantic influx was determined by the state of the UK film market.
Salma Siddique: Goodbye Neverland: Child Star Ratan Kumar and the
Move to Pakistan
The division of British India into independent post-colonial nations of India and
Pakistan in 1947 had decisive consequences for the individual careers of many
film artists of the Indian subcontinent. In the early nineteen fifties of postpartition India, Ratan Kumar was a reputed child artist, having gained
considerable popularity for his roles in Bombay films like Boot Polish
(1954)and Jagriti (1954). However, living as they were in the shadow of the
long Partition, Ratan Kumar’s Muslim family finally migrated to Pakistan in
1956.This paper focuses on Kumar’s second innings in the newly formed
Pakistan, where Bombay films continued to be extremely popular and the
audiences happened to be avidly familiar with this child star. Of particular
interest is the film Bedari (1957), which was a Pakistani replica of his
successful Bombay film Jagriti. While marking his first role in Pakistan, Bedari
also marked his last childhood role on screen and paved the way for an
expeditious adulthood to assume the male lead in his next films. His filmmaking
family was influential in this transformation, but no less important were the
backdrop of a crisis ridden film industry in Lahore that was short on ‘stars’ and
an increasingly protectionist home market created in response to the might of
Bombay films. In his appearance on the Pakistani screens and disappearance
from the Indian, the processes of memory and amnesia that have shaped the two
nation states, mark Ratan Kumar’s stardom too. Drawing attention to the
competing identities and nationalisms in the subcontinent at this historic
juncture, the paper locates these conflicts in the persona of the child star Ratan
Kumar.
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Iain Robert Smith: Transnational Vamp: The Global Stardom of
Bollywood Dancer Helen
In the documentary Helen: Queen of the Nautch Girls, produced by Merchant
Ivory Films in 1973, narrator Anthony Korner describes the Bollywood dancer
Helen as “India’s most perennial superstar.” Drawing on the work of Tim
Bergfelder on transnational film stardom, and Edward Chan on the global
reception of Bollywood, this paper will consider Helen in relation to the
tensions underpinning her star image – looking both at her performances and the
debates surrounding her relationship to the broader Indian culture. As Jerry
Pinto has observed, while Helen was technically of Anglo-Burmese descent, she
was “perceived as a white woman” and this impacted on the construction of her
star image as ‘vamp’. Through a close examination of her most celebrated item
numbers including “Yeh Mera Dil Pyar Ka Diwana” in The Don (1978), “Piya
Tu Ab To Aaja” in Caravan (1971) and “Gham Chhod ke Manao Rang Relly”
in Gumnaam (1965), this paper will analyse the ways in which her star image
was constructed in relation to the leading actors and actresses in each film.
Furthermore, by examining the documentary Helen: Queen of the Nautch Girls
along with various written accounts of her career, the paper will explore how
Helen has been positioned in relation to wider debates surrounding the social
and sexual politics of Indian culture. By bringing together this close analysis of
performance with a discursive analysis of Helen’s reception, the chapter will
ultimately consider the ways in which her ethnic background has impacted on
her performance of the vamp.
Sarah Thomas: After ‘M’: Transnational Influences and Echoes in Screen
Performance
M is a film text tied closely to ideas of nationhood and how films may be
interpreted as reflecting specific moments of national culture, politics and
society. These readings have been directed at both Fritz Lang’s original version
of M (1931) – as a cautionary tale of interwar German social and political
pressures; and also of Joseph Losey’s remake (1951) – as an indictment of the
HUAC hearings in post war America. What this paper aims to analyse is how
readings of screen performance both illustrate and complicate this national
perspective by emphasising the transnational aspects of acting that can be seen
in the performative echoes that followed Peter Lorre’s celebrated performance
in Lang’s film. Through a comparative analysis of Lorre’s performance as the
serial killer with David Wayne’s performance of the same role in the 1951
version, I will explore how shifts in national setting and context alter
interpretations of the role, particularly emphasising the performance of
‘ordinariness’ and ‘otherness’ by both actors, and also placing Wayne’s
performance within the context of the transnational genre that Losey’s film
belongs to: film noir. I will also examine other alterations between the two
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versions, including the impact that a significant new character performance (as a
lawyer) by Luther Adler has on the structure and tone of the 1951 film, and how
this affects Wayne’s performance. In order to provide a thorough commentary
on the nature of transnational screen performance that M illustrates, I will
compare Lorre’s earlier transnational performances across the German, French
and British versions of M that were all filmed in 1931, and consider the other
transnational performative echo of ‘M’ that took place in 1951: Peter Lorre’s
own reworking of his serial killer characterisation in his directorial debut, Der
Verlorene (The Lost One), made on his brief return to Germany and which
comments on both performative and cultural contexts between Europe and
Hollywood.
Niamh Thornton: Betwixt and Between: Gender and Mexican Film Stars
Online
Between the mid-1930s and the 1950s there was a so-called Golden Age of
Mexican film, with a high output of genre films by a state-supported studio
system. These produced numerous stars, many of whom built transnational film
careers in Latin America, the US and Europe. Many are still well-known names
and fan vids and clips of their work can be found on YouTube. In a previous
study I considered two prominent female stars, Dolores del Río and María Félix
and how their star text has continued to evolve online through fan vids on
YouTube (Thornton, 2010). While del Río and Félix were the two most high
profile female stars of their time and have continued to have a long afterlife
online through fan vids and clips, there is a different approach to how male star
profiles have developed online. What can be found are clips, interviews and
song sequences. This paper will focus on three male stars, Pedro Infante, Jorge
Negrete and Emilio Fernández, and examine how their YouTube content
compares to that of their female contemporaries and consider how their online
star texts differ.
Isak Thorsen: Valdemar Psilander - an International Star in the Silent Era
This presentation will focus on Valdemar Psilander (1884-1917), who was the
greatest male star of the Danish silent cinema. From 1911 to 1916 Psilander
starred in more than 80 multi-reel films from Nordisk Films Kompagni. Tall
and handsome with a sense of the more restrained acting style that suited film
Psilander quickly became an international name. Especially among audiences in
Germany, Russia, Central Europe and South America he was worshipped.
Through adverts and postcards Nordisk Film used Psilander’s name and face
massively in the promotion of the company’s films. Psilander became tired of
the ‘one-dimensional’ parts he was offered at Nordisk Film and in 1916 he left
the company and established his own: Psilander-Film. But before the new
company took off Psilander died of a heart attack at the age of 32. Nordisk Film
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had so many finished films with the Psilander on the shelves that the company
kept releasing films with the popular star until 1920. Based on research in the
Nordisk Special Collection, the survived business archive of Nordisk Film the
presentation will describe and analyse Psilander’s short and glorious career. A
career, which coincides with the emergence of the multi-reel film and film stars.
Ginette Vincendeau: Bardot and the Origins of Star Studies
The impact of Brigitte Bardot as ‘scandalous’ film star and mass-media
celebrity in 1950s France was unprecedented in its novelty and magnitude.
From 1956 to the early 1960s, Bardot drew audiences worldwide and provoked
both obsessive imitation and violent hostility. She also, unusually, generated at
the time a vast amount of writing beyond film criticism and journalism:
novelists, sociologists and philosophers pondered the BB phenomenon. This
presentation examines salient manifestations of Bardot as object of study, as
evidence of her own importance and of her influence on the emerging field of
studies of popular culture – including Simone de Beauvoir’s famous essay on
her and especially Edgar Morin’s 1957 book Les Stars, arguing that it is no
coincidence that the first ever serious study of stardom coincided with Bardot’s
appearance.
Johnny Walker: From Pinter to Pimp: Danny Dyer, Cult Stardom and the
Critics
Danny Dyer is one of the most prolific actors working in British cinema today.
He is also one of the most critically loathed (and mocked). Best-known for his
star role as a football hooligan in Nick Love’s The Football Factory (2005), the
assumed typicality of his “laddish” persona, and his star-billing on the covers of
many direct-to-DVD films aimed at a young male audience, has afforded him a
“branding” that has proved difficult to shake. Indeed, the critical response to his
work has been typified most emblematically by the prominent film critic Mark
Kermode, whose dubious, high-pitched, impersonation of the actor has become
an Internet viral hit among Dyer’s most vehement detractors. In this paper, I
will argue, that, whilst Dyer’s mediated persona is unquestionably controversial,
the B-movie star is rarely looked at impartially, and that the negative reception
of his films—that are often marketed to suit the aforementioned “brand,”
regardless of their content or narrative—is often informed by class-based
antagonism, as recently outlined in the work of Owen Jones (2011). Grounded
within the historical discourse of the British film star (as advanced by
Babington, et al 2002), and via analyses of some of Dyer’s most severe
criticisms, I consider the complex nature of—and reasons for—his critics’
responses. My arguments are substantiated by the acknowledgement of some of
his most notable—and diverse—career performances, including his early theatre
work for Harold Pinter, the cult DVD hit The Football Factory, the exploitation
34
films Straightheads(2007) and Outlaw (2007), and his later direct-to-DVD
oeuvre, including the much-reviled Pimp(2010).
Yiman Wang: Speaking in a “Forked Tongue”: Anna May Wong’s
Linguistic Cosmopolitanism
In the gallery of racialized actors throughout Hollywood history, Anna May
Wong is a rare example who did not perform English with an “Oriental” accent
on the screen or the stage. She made her transition from the silent era to talkies
in Europe where she not only learned the British accent, but also studied
German and French for her roles in the multi-lingual versions of her films. She
also mobilized her heritage language (Toisan dialect) when an “Oriental”
language was called for by the role. Her multi-lingual performance on the EuroAmerican front formed an intriguing contrast with her lack of mandarin Chinese,
which made the Chinese nationalist attempt to claim her as a compatriot
“travelling in America” inherently problematic. Drawing upon theories of
performance and critical race/ethnic studies, combined with rare archival
materials, my paper probes Wong’s self-reflexive enactment of the “Oriental”
(or other exotic) roles assigned to her. I specifically focus on Wong’s multifaceted vocal performance in the transnational context in relation to audiences
from varied linguistic and cultural backgrounds. I ask: 1) in what ways Wong’s
“Oriental” performance differed from and/or converged with yellowface acting;
2) how to understand Wong’s linguistic cosmopolitanism in the face of and in
relation to the restrictive racial politics in China and Euro-America during the
colonial era; and 3) what kind of agency Wong acquired through forging an
ironic relationship with her stereotypical roles that she oftentimes disapproved.
This paper extends my thesis on Anna May Wong’s “yellow yellowface”
performance (proposed in my 2005 article in Camera Obscura), and argues that
Wong’s unconventional vocal enactment of “Oriental” roles perverts what
Homi Bhabha calls the colonizer’s “forked tongue,” and reinvents it as a novel
minority strategy of negotiating with the hegemonic structure in Euro-America
and China alike.
Tom Whittaker: Being Clint Eastwood’s Voice: Spanish Dubbing,
Performance and Personification
While approximately 80% of all films viewed in Spain are dubbed each year,
Spanish dubbing actors have received little critical attention. If there has been
little scholarship surrounding the role of the dubbing artist, this is arguably
because he or she is usually seen as an invisible conduit between the audience
and the star: his/her anonymity usually ensures that the audience identifies with
the on-screen star, while at the same time remaining undistracted by the heavy
artifice of a disembodied voice. This paper will examine the vocal persona of
Constantino Romero, the Spanish voice of Clint Eastwood, a dubbing actor,
35
who through his frequent media appearances, has a conspicuously visible
presence in Spanish popular culture. In exploring both the reception and the
discourses that surround dubbing in Spain, this paper shows that the dubbed
voice entails its own structures of fascination for the audience. Indeed, so
widely admired are the vocal performances of these dubbing actors, that they
would appear to assert themselves as texts in their own right, serving as
complex sites of negotiation between audience, star and dubbing artist. As I will
show, far from invisible, the material texture of the dubbed voice asserts itself
as an autonomous component of the film, a vocal spectacle which invites the
audience to revel in its performance. The paper will also explore the extent to
which Romero’s vocal persona both contributes towards and calls into question
his Spanish ‘personification’ of Clint Eastwood.
Faye Woods: Ryan Gosling’s Face: American Masculinity and the
Reluctant Man of Action in Drive
Ryan Gosling’s star identity offers a particular modulation of American
masculinity which combines both strength and softness, at once traditional yet
progressive (demonstrated in the range of internet memes build around the
actor). This paper will consider some aspects of this identity and how they
inform his reluctant man of action in Drive (2011). This arthouse action film
from a European director displays a fascination with tropes of American
masculinity and the Hollywood action/thriller genre. Drive utilises Gosling’s
star identity as a ‘serious’ actor, Oscar-nominated and a regular at film festivals,
to wrong-foot its audience as it shifts between crime thriller, tentative romance
and hyper-violence. The mysterious nameless ‘Driver’ is a character built from
archetypes of filmic masculinity: the silent man of action, the romantic saviour,
the moral protector, a man who moves between childlike innocent and violent
avenger. The film plays on the combination of tenderness and control which are
central to Gosling’s star identity, yet pushes his innate intensity – central to his
relationship dramas – to explosive extremes. Drive renders almost mute an actor
whose characters often depend on a verbose charm, with the camera dwelling
on Gosling’s face and expressive eyes – a key element of his star appeal. Whilst
his active body is the source of his skilful driving and physically intense
violence, it is the Driver’s inscrutable face that is foregrounded, whether gazing
at Irene or splattered with blood. This forces the audience to search the face for
meaning, allowing – perhaps encouraging – them to read Gosling’s star identity
onto the blankness, reading the Driver’s actions through Gosling’s prism of
sensitive masculinity. This focus on an – often elusive – emotional response to
the Driver’s escalating violence lends a melodramatic intensity to the film’s
violence, serving its play with genre tropes.
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Julie Lobalzo Wright: The Crossover: Why Popular Music Stardom and
Film Stardom are Often at Odds With One Another
Crossover stardom has become commonplace in the modern age as cross media
opportunities have expanded the ability for stars to achieve stardom in multiple
mediums. Although crossover stardom appears as a contemporary element of
stardom, stars have crossed between mediums since the beginning of cinema
with varying success. Moreover, success and failure is debatable as number of
film appearances may be deemed unsuccessful due to box office returns or
critical appraisals, while one box office hit can lead to the perception of a
successful crossover (For example, Madonna as compared to Eminem). Film
and music stardom do not easily fit together, I argue, as the two mediums
construct stardom in different ways. Although transitions into the cinema by
music stars would seem straightforward due to genre and/or characterization
(music stars appearing in musical films, such as Beyoncé in Dreamgirls or
portraying characters based on the star’s life, such as Prince in Purple Rain),
very often the crossover from music to film necessitates an alteration to their
established star image. Drawing from a range of popular music stars, this paper
will focus on three key areas in relation to music stars as film stars: the
success/failure perception, corporate “synergy,” and the (often) noncorresponding nature of music and film genres. In addition, I will discuss how
film stardom, as theorized by Richard Dyer, is often at odds with popular music
stardom, especially the notion that film stars “must stay broadly the same in
order to permit recognition and identification.” Finally, I hope to reach some
conclusions as to why crossover stardom seems both ever-present and fruitless
in the contemporary era.
Sabrina Qiong Yu: Transcending the Boundaries of Language on the
World Stage: Tang Wei’s Performance in Late Autumn
Language ability (more specifically, English ability) is considered crucial to
transnational film performance. Inadequate language skills or accent often
become a great handicap in a star’s trans-border career. This paper tries to
demystify the myth of English on the world stage through a close examination
of Chinese actress Tang Wei’s award-winning performance in South Korean
film Late Autumn (2011). The story is about a Chinese female prisoner who is
given 72 hours parole to attend her mother’s funeral in Seattle and falls in love
with a South-Korean man played by Korean actor Hyun Bin whom she meets
on the coach. In most of the film, two actors communicate with accented
English. But the film has minimum dialogue. The actors have to depend heavily
on facial expressions, gestures, movements, and above all, creative ways of
delivering dialogue to portray the characters. By analysing Tang’s understated
but powerful performance in this doubly alienated space – in a South Korean
film and set in the US – I argue that the boundaries of language can be broken
37
and expanded by innovative and imaginative performance, and the global
performers are playing an important but underestimated role in redefining film
acting.
Yingjin Zhang: Film Stars in the Perspective of Performance Studies:Play,
Liminality, and Alteration in Chinese Cinema
This paper seeks to link two evolving disciplines and explores the ways star
studies may benefit from performance studies’ emphasis on liveness,
interactivity, and alteration. What interests me in particular is how key concepts
from performance studies such as play and liminality can help us address an
apparent lack of attention in English scholarship to romantic male roles from
Chinese films. While the popularity of martial arts and action genres have
pushed Chinese actors like Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat, and Jet Li to the
forefront of star studies in recent years, equally successful actors like Tony
Leung Chiu Wai have been kept out of sight in most cases. With references to
Tony Leung’s performances in In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000),
which won him the Best Actor Award at the Cannes International Film Festival,
and Lust Caution (Ang Lee, 2007), which provoked immediate controversies
and contradictory receptions in the Chinese-speaking world, this paper analyzes
acts of repetition, dark play, and alteration as illuminated by performance
studies and argues that they contribute to a conjectural view of polysemy in star
studies as they do in performance studies.
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Organising Committee:
Guy Austin
Sheila Heppel
Sabrina Yu
The organising committee would like to thank the following sponsors:
Special thanks to the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the
University of Sunderland for sponsoring the keynote panel.
39