ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies
The Star
System/Technology
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
“We didn't need
dialogue. We had
faces!”—Norma
Desmond, Sunset
Boulevard (Billy
Wilder, 1950)
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Fred Astaire
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Lauren Bacall
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Warren Beatty
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Ingrid Bergman
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Humphrey Bogart
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Clara Bow
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
George Clooney
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Gary Cooper
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Joan Crawford
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Tom Cruise
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Bette Davis
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Doris Day
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Robert DeNiro
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Leonardo DiCaprio
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Marlene Diedrich
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Clint Eastwood
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Douglas Fairbanks
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Henry Fonda
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Jane Fonda
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Clark Gable
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Greta Garbo
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Lillian Gish
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Cary Grant
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Tom Hanks
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Rita Hayworth
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Audrey Hepburn
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Katherine Hepburn
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Rock Hudson
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Gene Kelly
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Tom Mix
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Marilyn Monroe
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Polla Negri
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Paul Newman
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Jack Nicholson
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Al Pacino
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Mary Pickford
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Robert Redford
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Norma Shearer
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Jimmy Stewart
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Meryl Streep
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Gloria Swanson
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Elizabeth Taylor
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Shirley Temple
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Rudolf Valentino
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Denzel Washington
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
The Star Machine
Stardom as a problem for the academic study of film
Study of stardom must be both industrial and psychological
Stars as marketing devices
Stars as “organising presences in cinamatic fictions”
Barthes on mass culture as a system for showing/regulating “desire”
John Ellis: a star is “a performer in a particular medium whose figure enters
into subsidiary forms of circulation and feeds back into future formances”
Anne Friedberg: a star is “a particular commoditised person routed through a
system of sign with exchange value.”
“For . . . profit to be realised, there must be at least a promise of pleasure.
Enjoyment of the star has to be paid for.”
The star is a person, but also a “form of capital, owned either by the studio
or the individual, and also a form of raw material. . . .”
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
The Star Machine
Hollywood’s task: predictable and inventive
Were stars invented as a marketing device by independent producers, or was
film stardom a continuation of an already existing theatre system?
Do stars always properly “represent” a character fully? What if there is a
“disjuncture.”
Consider p. 112: how do different acts in famous role yield radically different
results?
What is trademark value?
What is insurance value?
How can a star “overturn the delicate balance between static image and
narrative flow on which classic Hollywood cinema rests”?
What does it mean to identify with a star?
What happens when a star is read “subversively”?
Is studying stars “banal”?
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
The Co-Inventors/Discoverers of
Semiology/Semiotics
Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857-1913). Swiss
Linguist
Charles Sanders Peirce
(1839-1914). American
Philosopher
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
“One could . . . assign to semiology a vast field of
inquiry. if everything which has meaning within a
culture is a sign and therefore an object of
semiological investigation, semiology would come
to include most disciplines of the humanities and
the social sciences. Any domain of human
activity--be it music, architecture, cooking,
etiquette, advertising, fashion, literature--could be
approached in semiological terms.”
Jonathan Culler
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
CODE. In semiotics, the usually unstated rules that govern the
interpretation of a sign or signs. A scholar of western films
once titled a semiotics of the genre “I Didn’t Know the Gun
was Coded”; so, too, are the horse, the white and black hats,
the woman, etc.
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
DENOTATION. The literal meaning of an expression. The first
order of signification. A photograph of Barack Obama denotes
(is) Barack Obama.
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
CONNOTATION. The suggestive or associative sense of an
expression that extends beyond its literal definition. A second
order system of signification which uses the denotation of a
sign as its signifier and adds other meanings, other signfiers,
often ideological in nature. A picture of Barack Obama
denotes the actual person but connotes radically different
meanings on the political left or right.
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
MYTHOLOGY. For Barthes, investigation into the acquired
connotative meanings of cultural signs in order to divest them
of their acquired, taken-for- granted meanings. For example,
television, though an object of wonder at the beginning of its
history, is now a commonplace, its significance now so caught
up in the culture's semiotic system that it is difficult to
describe or explain. A mythology of TV would seek to decode
it, to make its connotations again fresh and visible.
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
SEMIOCLASM. The sudden destruction—
implosion/explosion—of a sign, sometimes resulting in its
complete rewriting.
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
SEMIOSIS. The ungoing development over time of the
meaning of a sign.
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
SIGNIFIED. The immaterial aspect of a sign; that which the
signifier represents. May be approached only through the
signifiers of any given text.
SIGNIFIER. The material aspect–an image, an object, a
sound–of a sign. Signifiers tend to take on meaning through
opposition to other possible alternative signifiers (i.e.,
woman/horse) not represented in a given syntagm. According
to Saussure, the relationship of the signifier to signified in
language is entirely arbitrary.
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
From David Lavery, Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space
Age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992: 91,
99-100.
Media critic Ellen Seiter, in a semiotic dissection of the "myth" of
the Challenger, has noted that "on the connotative level, the
space shuttle was used as a signifier for a set of ideological
signifieds such as scientific progress, manifest destiny in space,
U.S. superiority over the U.S.S.R." As a sign, the Space Shuttle
"consisted of a signifier–the TV image itself–that was coded in
certain ways (symmetrical composition, long shot of shuttle on
launching pad, daylight, blue sky background) for instant
recognition, and the denoted meaning, or signified 'space
shuttle.'" This signification had been built up throughout the
shuttle's brief history until it had become an ideological given.
The explosion of the Challenger "radically displaced" these
connotations.
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
The connotation of the sign "space shuttle" was destabilized; it
became once again subject–as a denotation–to an unpredictable
number of individual meanings or competing ideological
interpretations. It was as if the explosion restored the sign's
original signified, which could then lead to a series of questions
and interpretations of the space shuttle that related to its status
as a material object, its design, what it was made of, who owned
it, who had paid for it, what it was actually going to do on the
mission, who had built it, how much control the crew or others
at NASA had over it. At such a moment, the potential exists for
the production of counterideological connotations. Rather than
"scientific progress," the connotation "fallibility of scientific
bureaucracy" might have been attached to the space shuttle;
"manifest destiny in space" might have been replaced by "waste
of human life"; and "U.S. superiority over the U.S.S.R." by "basic
human needs sacrificed to technocracy." (31)
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
In the New York Times of 29 January 1986, at the bottom of the
same page that reprinted the complete text of Reagan's
nationally televised tribute to the Challenger crew, a brief note
announced the Ford Motor Company's cancellation of the
advertising campaign for the Aerostar minivan. The ads, which
juxtaposed the Ford vehicle with the shuttle in order to highlight
the van's technological precision and aerodynamic shape, had
lost their power. The producers of the "soon-to-be-released"
summer movie SpaceCamp faced a similar problem. In the movie
a woman astronaut and five boys and girls participating in a
shuttle engine test on the launch pad are unexpectedly sent into
space to prevent an on-ground explosion. Despite concern over
how the film would be perceived, they decided to release the
film as planned. It did only mediocre business.
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
More than just seven brave men and women and a billiondollar piece of machinery may have been lost on 28 January
1986. The prime "vehicle" for the metaphors of America's
space boosting may also have been obliterated. "Since
Challenger and Chernobyl," David Ehrenfeld has astutely and
conclusively observed, "it is no longer reasonable to doubt that
the world is entering a new phase of human civilization. The
brief but compelling period of overwhelming faith in the
promise and power of technology is drawing to a close, to be
replaced by an indefinite time of retrenchment, reckoning, and
pervasive uncertainty. At best, we will be sweeping up the
debris of unbridled technology for decades, perhaps for a
longer period than the age, itself, endured" ("The Lesson of the
Tower" 367).
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Nonetheless, in fall 1987 my daughter's PTA sent home a "Dear
Parents" letter displaying at its top a drawing of the space shuttle
("USA/PTA" is visible on the tail assembly) and beginning,
"Successful Space Shuttle Missions depend on their dedicated
crews to guide them from liftoff to touchdown. Our PTA is no
different." And in the college glossy Campus Voice Bi-Weekly, the
Air Force saw fit to place an "Aim High" recruiting advertisement
with the shuttle on its launching pad as its prominent central
image and the headline "Before you work anywhere, take a look
at the tools we work with." Such attempts to overcome the postChallenger connotation of the "fallibility of scientific
bureaucracy" and reinstate the shuttle as a metaphoric vehicle
reek of non-sequitur and would seem to suggest a clear and
perhaps contagious case of historical amnesia; yet they testify as
well to the resilience of the dream.
Semiotics
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Rock Hudson
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
George Clooney
Clooney in O Brother Where Art Thou?
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Brad Pitt
Pitt in Burn After
Reading
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System
Jack Nicholson
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System/Technology
Acting
the Kuleshov effect
Hitchcock: “doing nothing extremely well”
Actors as revelations of “performance”
Goffman on performance
No hard and fast rules about good acting
“All good movie actors understand the characters they play.”
Impersonization (and winning awards).
“It is John Wayne getting on a horse in The Searchers (1956), not simply
Ethan Edwards (Wayne, incidentally, is ‘played’ by a man whose real name was
Marion Morrison).
The actor who plays a single character.
The actor as chameleon (Johnny Depp).
Stanislavsky: immobility, gestureless moments
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System/Technology
Acting
King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972); The Long Good Friday (John
Mackenzie, 1980)
Thinking for the camera
Exhibitionistic acting: Astaire
Stagy acting: Martin in The Jerk
Different styles in the same film: Cobb and Brando in On the Waterfront
Earlier meaning of “actor”
The camera moving closer.
Hawks: actors’ small movement; the smallest twitch (Cruise)
The Method: Lee Strasberg in The Godfather, Part II
“Emotional memory”
Brechtian acting
Comic acting—Marx brothers
Digital actors, robots, Schwarzenegger
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System/Technology
Stars Before Sound
Early Anonymity
Differentiating the brand
Stars and transgression
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System/Technology
Stars After Sound
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System/Technology
Stars in Postwar Cinema
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System/Technology
Contemporary Stardom
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Technology
Mike Allen
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Introduction
Film technology has been foregrounded since the beginning
“legendary moments”
“the suppression of radical potential”
“[A]ny innovation and development in film technology is market-led or, at
least, is in a symbiotic relationship with the market.”
Colour and widescreen could have happened in the 1920s.
“New technologies do not simply emerge, but by virtue of their
development, the market promotes their use (sometimes to the point of
insistence), creating needs which the new technologies serve to commercial
advantage” (Peter Wollen).
The “differentiation-appropriation cycle.”
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Introduction
“Each new technological development—the advent of sound, colour,
widescreen, and so on—can be see, through a materialist scenario, to restore
briefly the cine,ma’s initial identity as a novelty, foregrounding the new
technology in ways which distrupt the medium’s carefully constructed,
seamless surface of invisibility.” (Belton)
“These moments [of television narrative complexity] push the
operational aesthetic to the foreground, calling attention to the
constructed nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at
how the writers pulled it off; often these instances forgo realism
in exchange for a formally aware baroque quality . . . . (Jason
Mittell 35)
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Introduction
Improving existing practices
Majority of technological development—intended to enhance, not change
the paradigm.
Times of flux foster innovation.
“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and
bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of
democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”—
Harry Lime in The Third Man
The ramifications of a new technology—right hand column, top, 140
No technology happens in isolation.
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Introduction
War and film technology
Paul Virilio (pictured)
Clip from Dr. Strangelove
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Introduction
The purpose of all innovation: to contribute to experiencing film as if it were
real life (and Bazin’s “myth of total cinema”)
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”—Arthur
C. Clarke.
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Sound
Behind the screen
Unreliable accompaniment
Vast expenditure of the move to sound
Advent of sound set back “mobile framing”
The decision to use one microphone (middle of 2nd column, p. 143)
Magnetic tape—Allies captured from the Germans
Live recording of sound—actors had to continue even if lines were forgotten
(and Fellini’s post-synching)
THX, Dolby and “surround sound”—personal stereo even in an auditorium
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Colour
Color lay dormant for almost three decades
Hand-coloring—not unlike today’s colorizing
Technicolor
1935: color added 30% to production budget.
1940: % of American Film in Color--4
1941: % of American Film in Color--51
1967: % of American Film in Color--75
1976: % of American Film in Color—94
Gone with the Wind—canning Cukor
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Deep Focus
The Debate: Bazin vs. Eisenstein
Welles, Gregg Toland, Renoir, Wyler
The desire of cinematograhers asseting their importance
Below: Orson Welles, Gregg Toland, Jean Renoir, William Wyler
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Deep Focus
Citizen Kane
(Orson Welles,
 1941)
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Deep Focus: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Deep Focus: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Lighting
Not originally artistic
Lighting for dramatic effect
Revelation and expression
The effect of the coming of sound
(humming carbon lights had to be replaced)
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Widescreen
Gance’s Napoleon
Competing with other amusements—becoming more participatory
Format wars: CinemaScope/VistaVision
Framing and subject matter
Anamorphic lenses: Harold and Maude
IMAX
“Anamorphic widescreen uses the entire frame by vertically
stretching the image to fit on the negative. This is accomplished
with special lenses that compress the image as it is filmed. To
correct the distortion caused by a 2.39:1 image being stretched to
fill a 1.37:1 frame, another lens, this one on the theater's
projector, is used to correct the picture's proportions. Anamorphic
widescreen has greater resolution because more film area is
being used to project the same picture.”—Wise Geek Website
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Widescreen
“Next time I write a poem I shall use a wider sheet of paper.”
--Jean Cocteau
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Cameras
Kubrick story
Hand-held
Shaky-cam
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Digital Video
Sky Captain
Green-screen
Re-creating dead actors
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology
Editing
Women as early editors (labor intensive)
Editing bench/table
Digital editing