Film Stars

Sinemamızın kadın yıldızları kimlerdir sorusu sorulduğunda Türk sinema tarihi boyunca sinemaya emek vermiş yüzlerce oyuncu arasında birkaç isim aklımıza gelir. Bu isimler onların cazibesine kapıldığımız, oyunculuklarından büyülendiğimiz için mi aklımıza gelmektedir? Yoksa onlara yakıştırılan “Sultan”, “Hanımefendi”, “Afrodit” gibi sıfatlardan dolayı mı yıldız olarak zihnimize kazınmışlardır?

Elinizdeki kitap, Türk sinemasında yıldızlığı ve kadın yıldızları ele alarak, sinemada “star sistemini” üreten ve sürdüren film endüstrisini, film üretim olgusunu inceliyor. Bunu yaparken de yıldızlığı doğuran toplumsal yapının nasıl işlediğini vurgulayarak kadın yıldızlar ile dönemin kadın algısı –toplumda ideal olarak kabul gören kadınlık kodları– arasında bağlantılar kuruyor.
Bizi Türk sinemasının ve onun kadın yıldızlarının dünyasında ilginç bir yolculuğa çıkaran, bu yolculuğun her evresinde kadın çalışmalarından beklenen eleştirel yaklaşımı okurdan esirgemeyen bir eser…

The purpose of this article is to describe a set of photographs of Eliane Lage (1928–),
a movie actress featured in Caiçara, Ângela, Sinhá Moça and Ravina – the first three produced
by Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz (1950-1954), and the fourth by Cinematográfica
Brasil Filmes. Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz aspired to be one of the largest film
producers in Brazil and, accordingly, its Advertising Department set out to establish Eliane Lage
as a great movie star, like those in the world’s dominant movie industries. This paper brings to
light some photographs which, coupled with information published in the press, were intended
to tell the public at large who Eliane Lage was by exploring extensively certain aspects of her
“biography”, such as her privileged background, her denial of stardom, her detachment, her
passion for her husband, and her love of nature. The picture selection includes: a photo essay
by the architect Gregori Warcharchik; studio marketing photographs; snapshots taken by
photographers at the time; and pictures that are part of the actress’s personal collection.
KEYWORDS: Cinema. Actresses. Eliane Lage. Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz.
Cinematográfica Brasil Filmes.

Like famous females Jackie O. and Princess Di in later days, Shirley Temple's achievements included recognition as "year's most photographed" celebrity. Surprisingly, few attempts have been made to theorize the phenomenal popularity of Shirley Temple and her films. Most accounts are biographical, including every step of her career, synopses of her films, and recycled studio anecdotes about the child. Among these  histories, especially Temple Black's autobiography, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson figures prominently as Temple's tap dancing mentor and a big fan as well. The inclusion of Robinson in these nostalgic memories is, however, a most interesting trick of historiography. During their partnership the popular press cautiously excluded his face from coverage and promotion of Temple's career. The coupling of Robinson and Temple offers a unique opportunity to examine how ideologies of race function in the processes of popularity maintenance. Archival research exposes conflict and contradiction between 1930s mainstream press coverage of Temple and more recent histories addressing themselves to Temple's career and popularity. Histories of stars often rely on popular press sources, but the "natural" definition of "popular" often replicates the very unnatural and constructed white predominance of American popular culture. The segregation in press coverage mirrors social relations of the time and must be taken into account when reconsidering star phenomena predating U.S. civil rights legislation. Comparing coverage from the Black press with coverage in the mainstream press, the essay's argument is that, ideologies of race and racist discourses informed promotional efforts and strategies in the popular press, maintaining Temple's "white" innocence through the elision of Robinson's "threatening blackness." Exclusion of Robinson was coupled with suppression of sexuality, both his and Temple's, in an effort to sustain the requisite quality of innocence on which the childstar's marketability rested.

The essays collected in this book focus on unusual relations and marginal objects, with the purpose to draw a portrait of Luchino Visconti less fossilized than that resulting from canonical authorial perspectives, and more vividly connected to both ideological clashes and the secular interests of cultural industry. These ten essays (five of which previously unpublished) cover neglected aspects (and the reasons of their removal) surfacing in sometimes extravagant aesthetic contrasts (between Hollywood and Thomas Mann, Greek theater and avant-garde, political commitment and popular cinema); in harmonies and dissonances in the collaborations with Marcello Mastroianni, Nino Rota and Helmut Berger; in the often gross comments of the extreme right-wing press; in the hostility of the Venice Film Festival; in the distortions produced by the lens of popular culture through political or even porn parodies, post-1968 ironies, and unexpected affinities with popular genres. What come out are new readings of films such as "White Nights", "Rocco and His Brothers", “Sandra", “Ludwig" and "Conversation Piece", but also a general revision of Visconti’s career.

Presented at the conference All About Cinederella: retellings in the cultural imagination at University of Bedfordshire, 10 June 2017

The on-screen makeover is a rites of passage, the moment when the ugly duckling child becomes a swan-like woman. But the message can be troublesome and too much makeup can transform the subject into someone whose surface does not reflect who they feel they really are.

In my paper I will look at the star makeover in A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954) and Beyond the Lights (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2014). Films where makeup can be either an indicator of sexual availability, or a medium to turn you into the person you think you could be.

In A Star is Born James Mason plays the fairy godmother, wiping makeup from the yet to be christened Vicky Lester’s face (as played by Judy Garland) before reapplying it as he guides her through the process of becoming a star. Noni as played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw in Beyond the Lights is a nascent R’n’B star, who appears in her videos as an overtly sexual woman, with extreme makeup and clothing. Her transformation is aided by Nate, a young policeman for whom she wipes off her makeup, removes her hair extensions and starts to develop a career as a more ‘natural’ performer.

I will refer to masquerade theory in my analysis of both films and look at how they relate to contemporary stars such as Alicia Keys who is currently spearheading the no makeup movement.

This article provides a stylistic examination of Sidney Lumet's thriller Deathtrap (1982), analyzing how its strategies of staging and performance generate narrational effects of suspense and surprise. It argues that Lumet anchors these performative strategies to a broad authorial program grounded in expressive subtlety; as such, Lumet's film reminds us of a waning tradition of US filmmaking in which stylistic ingenuity resides at the denotative and expressive (rather than the decorative or parametric) levels of stylistic discourse. The article treats Lumet's stylistic choices as creative solutions to a distinctive set of aesthetic problems. It canvasses-and identifies the functions of-the motivic staging schemas patterned throughout Deathtrap; and it illuminates how these schemas, actuated by star players, shape the viewer's cognitive uptake in substantive ways.

Este artículo responde a tres interrogantes: ¿Qué lugar ocupan los actores en el aparato productivo franquista? ¿Cómo están organizados estos profesionales? ¿Qué tipo de acuerdos cierran con la patronal y con el Estado? La respuesta a estas cuestiones explicará, a su vez, la acción social más relevante protagonizada por los actores en este periodo: la huelga de 1975.

To celebrate TURKAN SORAY's autobiography, which recently appeared, and her appearance at the Ankara Book Fair, here is an interview I did with her in Istanbul in May 2010, where we talked about her life and career.  A version of it was originally published in EXPLORING TURKISH CULTURES (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011)

Desde el nacimiento entre bastidores y los violentos años del vodevil hasta el encuentro con Arbuckle y el nacimiento de una estrella.

Recorrido por su años en los escenarios, el estrellato infantil, los problemas con la Gerry Society, el tour por el Reino Unido y el descenso del Big Time al Small Time.

This book explores the widespread phenomenon of celebrity fandom and provides the reader with deeper insights into the emotional dynamics of a consumer’s parasocial fan relationship with a celebrity. Following an overview of how fandom and celebrity have previously been portrayed across different academic fields, the chapters take the reader on a narrative journey into the life of a fan. Using the author’s autoethnographic account of his personal fan relationship with a film actress thereby as a case study, this detailed study examines how consumers can become emotionally attached to a celebrity and how this attachment can add meaning to their life. By exploring the complex nature of consumers’ behaviours and experiences, Celebrity Fandom and Consumer Behaviour uncovers the (para)social link between the celebrity and an individual’s personal desires. This book has an interdisciplinary appeal and will provide an insightful read not only to scholars, students and anyone interested in celebrity fandom, but also to talent agents, publicists and marketing managers working in the entertainment industries.

Markus Wohlfeil was Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Stirling, UK, the University of East Anglia, UK, and University College Cork, Ireland. His research focuses on celebrity fandom; film tourism & consumption; film marketing & business; the role of myth creation, interpretation & adoption within punk subcultures; the reincarnation of punk's DIY culture on PledgeMusic; and experiential marketing communications. He also has a personal interest in amateur filmmaking, watching & collecting movies, going to punk gigs, listening to vinyl records and playing table tennis.

Please note that this manuscript here is only the first half of the first chapter plus table of contents - and posted for promotional purposes.

Chaplin nació en el seno de una familia de artistas profundamente ligados a las tradiciones del vodevil y el music hall el 16 de Abril 1889. Su trayecto por los escenarios a los dieciséis años, Chaplin se convertía en actor del West End londinense.

La Fred Karno´s Speechless Comedians sería su nuevo destino

Karno era el más famoso de los empresarios de los sketchs para el music hall, poseía diez compañías de sketchs que estaban en gira de forma permanente.Tal y como señala David Robinson (1996, 22): “Karno era un hombre rudo, ineducado y con frecuencia desagradable, pero era un genio en la creación de situaciones cómicas. Poseía un talento extraordinario para la invención de gags así como para el “timing”; al margen de esto había descubierto que la comedia podía ser, con frecuencia, mucho más efectiva cuando surgía con un toque de sentimiento o pathos: ésta fue una lección que iba a resultar de una importancia suprema para el más famoso de sus alumnos, Charles Chaplin.

En el otoño de 1910, fue elegido para realizar un tour de 21 meses por los Estados Unidos con la compañía de Fred Karno. Fue allí donde Mack Sennett vio actuar al joven Chaplin y le realizó una oferta para unirse a la Keystone Film Company, iniciando la carrera más meteórica de la Historia del Cine.

This review brings home the drawbacks of the latest biography of India's first female superstar, Sridevi. A starry-eyed fanboy who turns biographer with this book  completely 'sanitises' the image of Sridevi in order to establish her greatness, which, actually does more harm than good to the actor's super-stardom. This is certainly not the ideal way to write an authentic biography.

Un’esplorazione approfondita del divismo cinematografico maschile nella produzione nazionale, resa finalmente oggi possibile grazie ai recenti restauri delle pellicole del muto. Il fenomeno divistico maschile, accanto a quello femminile, ha attraversato i drammatici cambiamenti culturali e sociali del nostro Paese a cavallo della Grande guerra, dall’epoca giolittiana sino all’avvento di Mussolini. Il libro ne ripercorre le varie fasi: da quelle aurorali legate al teatro, sino alle interpretazioni cinematografiche più consapevoli. Dal protodivismo dei mattatori, passando per la nascita del tipo elegante — spalla della diva —, sino ai forzuti più o meno muscolosi. Si giunge, infine, al confronto con modelli e stereotipi che influenzano fortemente l’immaginario dello spettatore italiano, anche politico. Il percorso si presenta come una parabola che, di schermo in schermo, collega il vate e il duce alla storia del primo Novecento italiano.

This chapter surveys Oscar Isaac's cultural and professional background en route to examining the performances that ushered him into film stardom in the 2010s. I focus in particular on his multidimensional mastery of melancholic tones in Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013), Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014), and A Most Violent Year (J.C. Chandor, 2014). I also consider his musical abilities through the phenomenological concept of Stimmung ("mood," "atmosphere," and "attunement").

[From the blurb] Located in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu film industry is the second largest in India. The Telugu film industry exhibits particular cultural traits that relate not only to filmmaking, but also to the impact of popular culture on politics.

Megastar is a book on the powerful presence of popular culture and the different ways in which our daily lives are mediated by the circulating power of film. Steering clear of formulations that have reduced a highly complex set of issues to a linear narrative, this book studies the particularities of south Indian cinema: its economics, on-screen manifestations, its consumption, and importantly, the cinema-politics association.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: ‘A Pirate's Life For Me’‘No, Mate. I'm Free Forever. Free to Sail the Seas Beyond the Edges of the Map…’: Queering the Fantasy Blockbuster‘Guidelines, rather than Actual Rules’: Pirates of the Caribbean and the Curse of the Heterosexual Matrix‘The Captain does seem to be Acting a bit Strange … er’: Queering Stardom and PerformanceConclusion: ‘We shall have a Magnificent Garden Party and You're not Invited’?ReferencesIntroduction: ‘A Pirate's Life For Me’‘No, Mate. I'm Free Forever. Free to Sail the Seas Beyond the Edges of the Map…’: Queering the Fantasy Blockbuster‘Guidelines, rather than Actual Rules’: Pirates of the Caribbean and the Curse of the Heterosexual Matrix‘The Captain does seem to be Acting a bit Strange … er’: Queering Stardom and PerformanceConclusion: ‘We shall have a Magnificent Garden Party and You're not Invited’?References

2 vol. (725 p.)
Jury : Vincent Amiel, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, Jacqueline Nacache, Geneviève Sellier (Directrice de thèse), Ginette Vincendeau.
Doctorat d’études cinématographiques et audiovisuelles, mention Très Honorable avec les félicitations du jury à l’unanimité (Université de Caen Basse-Normandie).
soutenue le 10.11.2007

In 1900, a troupe of flamenco artists was invited to participate in the spectacles presented by the Spanish Pavilion in celebration of the World Exhibition, held in Paris. In consequence, between April and July of that year, the Lumière Brothers Company filmed two brief motion pictures featuring Spanish dance and song. The first film, titled “Danse espagnole de La Feria Sevillanos,” shows a cuadro flamenco (flamenco performing ensemble) performing song and dance, accompanied by a guitar player and palmeros (hand-clappers). As far as it is known, this is the first filmed document of a cuadro flamenco in performance. Since an Afro-Cuban singer-dancer, Jacinto Padilla “El Negro Meri,” occupies the foreground of the stage, the film is also an anomaly, useful for the study of Blackness and national identity in flamenco. The second film, titled “Danse espagnole de La Feria Quadro flamenco,” shows a pair of performers dancing a “sevillana” in the bolero school style, accompanied by an ensemble of string players. The titles of these Lumière films are, thus, inverted in the original catalogues. This article aims to explain the context of production of the films and to identify, as far as it has been possible, the artists who appear. Scholars, writers, and artists who have studied flamenco and Spanish dance of the turn of the twentieth century have written this history focusing primarily on performers whose professional careers mainly developed within Spain’s borders. This article proves that lesser known artists, settled in Paris in the 1900s, made important contributions to the dissemination of Spanish dance on the international stage.

Located in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu film industry is the second largest in India. The Telugu film industry exhibits particular cultural traits that relate not only to filmmaking, but also to the impact of popular culture on politics.

Megastar is a book on the powerful presence of popular culture and the different ways in which our daily lives are mediated by the circulating power of film. Steering clear of formulations that have reduced a highly complex set of issues to a linear narrative, this book studies the particularities of south Indian cinema: its economics, on-screen manifestations, its consumption, and importantly, the cinema-politics association.

The book is part of the 'South Asian Cinema' series edited by Rachel Dwyer, which presents new research on past, present, and emerging cinematic trends and includes the titles Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies (2008) and Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai's Film Studios (2009). Megastar, with its an interdisciplinary approach, will appeal to students and researchers of cultural and film studies, sociology, politics, and history, as well as general readers interested in Telugu cinema.

To account for the complex performative and cultural phenomenon of cinematic sex appeal, this article investigates Chinese actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai Leung as a regional and global star, focusing on attributes of his acting that convey sex appeal or have been received as sexy. Leung appears as a popular star in a regional Asian context but as a more rarefied, art-cinema performer internationally. Despite this bifurcated reputation, his sex appeal provides a powerful symbolic currency bank- able in local as well as global contexts. Through attention to the elusive category of sex appeal, I identify features of Leung’s acting and stardom that inform his overall career activity.

Cette étude du film de Jean-Luc Godard "Le Mépris" se fonde sur une analyse comparée du "scénario" conservé à la Cinémathèque française et du manuscrit autographe publié en 2013. Elle le réinscrit aussi dans son contexte de création et de réception en convoquant diverses sources filmiques et critiques.

Tracing a fifty-year history of Telugu cinema, as a industry and cultural form, this book shows how film is directly implicated in the rise to prominence of an elite which continues to dominate parts of the country to this day; and, the emergence of a new idiom of mass politics.

This book examines in detail the career of Andhra Pradesh’s best known film star, Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao (NTR) to show how Telugu cinema re-defined notions of linguistic identity and community for a non-literate public to create complex and multiple linkages between the consumption of cultural commodities and political mobilization. The in-depth analysis of NTR’s remarkable election campaign in the 1982-83 and revisits the “decline of Congress” thesis to draw attention to the larger transformation of electoral mobilisation with to the convergence of film, newspaper and the audio cassette on a performer who carried over his acting style from the screen to the election platform.   

The book concludes with a discussion of the lasting legacies of NTR in the present times when film has yielded its pride of place to television, the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh is imminent and institution of the star-politician itself appears to be on the wane.

"The work of the Women and the Silent Screen Conferences [...] is to collectively create a new realm of cinema history, neither 'the' history, nor 'a' history, but a strange double world." These words are from Jane Gaines in her keynote address for the fifth Women and the Silent Screen Conference, held at the Stockholm University in 2008. This proceedings volume gives a representative picture of the breadth of the conference.

The rich and varied contributions address theoretical issues around this double world of "cinematification" and feminist historiography, advancing questions on the authorship of pioneering female filmmakers and the role of female stars in early cinema. Other topics explored include transnationalism, the performance of femininity, fandom and fashioning, and branding within the studio system. The diversity of subjects in this volume reveals both the complexity and the problems of the field of research that the Women and the Silent Screen Conferences represent. Not only do these papers deal with well-known, concrete issues within feminist scholarship, but they also consider a more fundamental question: that of the medium as such in its early years, and its conceptualisation within a feminist scholarly framework."

This paper accompanied a curation, Siting Contemporary Indian Art, which featured, along with film, other sections on contemporary Indian art, visual and performance cultures. The venue was the House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2003. The curation traverses popular, art and documentary films to explore a sense of how the body and actorly performance intervene in and shape a sense of Indian urban forms. See the separate entry on curation for the concept, programme, and notes on directors.

As contemporary cinema intersects with both celebrity (Church Gibson 2011) and convergence culture (Jenkins 2006), it is vital that the academic analysis of screen costuming moves beyond the film text to consider the wider institutional processes and consumption practices connected to fashion and spectators. In examining the role of costume and fashion as a source of meaning and pleasure this article forms part of my wider research project, which includes a forthcoming monograph and adopts both textually centred and interdisciplinary cross-media methodological approaches. This methodological shift is reflected in this article – the examination of Shakespeare in Love (Madden 1998) adopts a predominantly textually centred approach focusing on the cinematic representation of Viola / Thomas (Gwyneth Paltrow) in which I argue that costume functions as both a spectacular intervention and a visual narrative of gender transformation and sexual fluidity. In then shifting to a cross-media approach, I will discuss both Gwyneth Paltrow and Keira Knightley in relation to issues of fashion, femininity and celebrity culture. As contemporary popular cinema shifts from character centred narratives to the formation of transmedia worlds existing over multiple media platforms, the text-spectator relationship is one grounded in a participatory convergence culture (Jenkins 2006). In the final section of this article I argue that the meanings and pleasures of cinematic costume are increasingly characterised by what I term ‘tactile transmediality’. Through moving my analysis beyond the film text to explore gaming, cosplay and fashion in relation to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (Verbinski 2003, 2006, 2007, Marshall 2011), I will argue that clothing enables a tactile platform in which the spatial distance between the text and the spectator can be bridged via adornment and touch and thus the processes of identity transformation and performativity can be played out in our everyday lives.