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This anthology offers a guide to studying the stars and the phenomenon of
stardom. Its concern is not individual stars but the cultural and theoretical
issues stars raise, although particular stars feature as examples. These are
largely American because Hollywood has established the dominant paradigm
of both mainstream cinema and stardom. However, Behroze Gandhy and
Rosie Thomas work on Indian stars highlights both the separate identity of
other world cinemas and the national specificity of Hollywood.
The hegemony of Hollywood is also a reason for the almost exclusive
focus on film stars. Yet stardom arose in the theatre before burgeoning in the
cinema, a relation discussed in a number of these essays. Latterly, with the
break up of the studio system and the emergence of the star as independent
producer, freer to choose roles and focus on acting rather than image, the
production of the bezazz and gossip of stardom appears to have passed from
the cinema to the music industry or sports world. However, as Kobena
Mercers closing analysis of Michael Jacksons pop video, Thriller, suggests,
while other entertainment industries may manufacture stars, cinema still
provides the ultimate confirmation of stardom. So it is argued, the very
different forms of television produce personalities not stars; to achieve
stardom means breaking out of the medium. Nevertheless, as David Lusted
shows, television circulates and elaborates star personae who originate in
other entertainment fields.1
The star challenges analysis in the way it crosses disciplinary boundaries:
a product of mass culture, but retaining theatrical concerns with acting,
performance and art; an industrial marketing device, but a signifying element
in films; a social sign, carrying cultural meanings and ideological values,
which expresses the intimacies of individual personality, inviting desire and
identification; an emblem of national celebrity, founded on the body, fashion
and personal style; a product of capitalism and the ideology of individualism,
yet a site of contest by marginalised groups; a figure consumed for his or her
personal life, who competes for allegiance with statesmen and politicians.
Not all these facets can be equally represented in an anthology of necessity
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limited as to length and cost. The major emphasis of this selection is the role
of stars in the production, circulation and negotiation of meanings, identities,
desires, and ideologies. Other areas of interest such as theatrical stardom,
fashion, national stars, performance and kinesics, television personality
which receive limited attention heremay be followed up through the
bibliography.
A decade has passed since the publication of Richard Dyers Stars which
laid the groundwork for star analysis within film studies.2 Till then, work on
stars had been largely the province of fandom on the one hand or of
sociology on the other. While the one focused on personal biographies, the
other took stars as industrial marketing devices or social role modelsa
means of creating and organising audiences and disseminating stereotypes.
Film criticism acknowledged the role of the star in films only rarely,
generally in connection with genre (the western and John Wayne) or with a
director (John Ford and John Wayne). Richard Dyers approach, combining
semiotics and sociology, introduced the notion of the star text. He analyses
the star image as an intertextual construct produced across a range of media
and cultural practices, capable of intervening in the working of particular
films, but also demanding analysis as a text in its own right. While semiotics
provides methods for analysing such texts, sociology asks how they
function in society. Thus study of stars becomes an issue in the social
production and circulation of meaning, linking industry and text, films and
society.
Such issues were consolidated in the seventies under the rubric of cultural
studies which responded to and fed an increasing awareness within
subordinated cultures of the political significance of representation. In this
perspective, stars personalise social meanings and ideologies. Actors become
stars when their off-screen life-styles and personalities equal or surpass
acting ability in importance. Stardom enacts the power and material success
of individual lives. Thus stars are implicated in the critique of individualism,
consumerism, and social stereotyping; they become an object of cultural
politics.
Such a politics, however, cannot neglect the meanings and pleasures that
stars hold out to their audiences. Richard Dyers work offered two routes into
the cultural complexity of stars. If star images relate to social meanings and
values, this relation is not one of simple reflection or reproduction. Textual
analysis shows how star images reconcile, mask, or expose ideological
contradictions. However, the premiss that such images are intertextual and
contradictory opens up the possibility for divergent or oppositional readings
by different audiences.
Dyers work on stars coincided with a period of growing interest in
psychoanalytic approaches to the cinema, which produced quite a different
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6 See C.Gledhill, Introduction and P.Cook, Stars and politics in C.Gledhill (ed.)
Star Signs: Papers from a Weekend Workshop, op. cit.
7 For discussion of the concept of negotiation see C.Gledhill, Pleasurable
negotiations in D.Pribram (ed.) Female Spectators, London, Verso, 1988.
8 See L.Williams, When the woman looks in M.A.Doane, P.Mellencamp and
L.Williams (eds) Revision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, Los Angeles,
American Film Institute, 1984 and Something else besides a mother: Stella
Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama in C.Gledhill (ed.) Home is Where the Heart
Is, London, British Film Institute, 1987; J.Walker, Psychoanalysis and feminist
film theory: The problem of sexual difference and identity, Wide Angle, 1984, vol.
6, no. 3; D.Pribram, Female Spectators, op. cit.