1 Reinvigorating and Reinventing Stardom Symposium Saturday 2

Reinvigorating and Reinventing Stardom Symposium Saturday 2 November 2019 Millburn House, University of Warwick

9:15-9:45 Registration and Tea and Coffee (A0.26)

9:45-11:15 Welcome and keynote from Sarah Thomas, University of Liverpool, ''’Smart' Stardom: avatars, agency and assets” (A0.28)

Chair: Eleonora Sammartino, Imperial College London

11:15-11:30 Comfort Break

11:30-13:00 Panels A and B

Panel A: Local/Regional Stardom (A1.25)

Chair: Michael Williams, University of Southampton

Hollie Price, University of Sussex, ‘Local stars in new film’: Jill Craigie and Postwar British Stardom

In the ‘mid-1940s, Jill Craigie planned to make a film about the suffragette movement with an all-star cast. Detailing these plans, she suggested that ‘the project might be acceptable if it were presented as “a starring vehicle”. Indulging in a ridiculous fantasy, as I often did at the time, I considered which of the most famous film stars might be suitable for the leading parts’. This paper situates and explores Craigie’s reinvigoration of star discourses as part of a postwar climate in which British film stars were becoming increasingly visible, and, as part of which, Craigie herself had been promoted by Rank’s staged publicity photos and magazine articles about her home life.

The Way We Live (1946), Craigie’s film about postwar reconstruction in Plymouth, and Blue Scar (1949), her film about miners in South Wales, were both shaped by the deployment of popular ideas of film stardom. For instance, during the making of Blue Scar in Port Talbot, screen tests for miners and local young women were promoted in regional newspapers as ‘star-hunts’. Likewise, publicity for The Way We Live detailed how Craigie would encourage non-professional actors by comparing them with popular stars like Robert Donat, her ‘discovery’ of 17 year-old Patsy Scantlebury jitterbugging in Plymouth – who went on to be signed to Rank, and her casting of a whole family of ‘real Plymothians’ with their own experiences of wartime destruction. By exploring archival evidence of the promotion and publicity for these two films, I highlight how Craigie’s participatory film projects with regional communities reinvented popular narratives of stardom for local audiences, thus illuminating these films’ blurring of boundaries between stardom and local celebrity.

Ellen Wright, De Montfort University and Phyll Smith, University of East Anglia, Star Products, Star Capital, Fan Markets: Examining 1940s British film stardom through fan club publications

This paper is part on an ongoing project that considers visible and ‘invisible’ star labour, in a context long before social media celebrity culture and the neo-liberal focus upon one’s self-improvement and building yourself a brand.

Considered here is the development of British film stars and their fan club culture during the mid to late 1940s, through studio-sanctioned but fan or star-produced magazines for the official fan clubs of British actresses Jean Kent, Anne Crawford, and Pat Roc, and the British fan club for American actress Deanna Durbin.

These resources, accessed from the Bill Douglas Archive (Exeter), the Steve Chibnall Collection (De Montfort) and the authors’ own collections, are contextualised with broader contemporaneous articles in newspapers, novels, film magazines and British and US industry publications that discuss the British star system and film star fandom.

Combined, these ancillary materials raise prescient issues around the uncredited but essential star labour that nurtures and maintains stars’ unique brands, their what we term ‘star capital’ and fan-following, and around these particular stars as signifiers of Britishness, wealth, status and levity during a period of socio-cultural and industrial upheaval and austerity in Britain and its film industry.

By considering the labour and ideologies at the heart of these particular British film star personae and film star fan culture, this paper broadens our understanding of the British film industry and its relationship with Hollywood, but more pertinently in today’s celebrity culture age, offers valuable insights into star and fan labour and film fandom more generally as well as revealing a more complex, differentiated culture of British film fan consumption and authority, of British star construction and dissemination, of studio control, reflexivity and of economic function, than has been commonly assumed.

Lisa Stead, University of Exeter, Scarlett O’Hara in the South West: curatorial histories and localised star legacies

Turning attention from the screen and towards the archive, this paper explores the way that global star icons make meaning in distinctly regional spaces through the archiving of material fragments of their working and off-screen lives. The paper focuses on a case study of transatlantic classical film and theatre star Vivien Leigh, drawing together methodological approaches from archive and museum studies and feminist film historiography to interrogate Leigh’s connection to the South West of England. Her association with the region was established in the

2 early stages of her career through her first marriage to barrister Leigh Holman, whose sister Dorothy established a museum in the small estuary town of Topsham. A curatorial relationship between Dorothy and collector Freda Wills at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter soon resulted in the swapping and presentation of Leigh artefacts at both locations, originally donated to Dorothy and to RAMM after Leigh’s death by her daughter Suzanne Farrington across the 1960s and 70s.

Drawing upon original interviews with current curators and hands-on work in both collections, the paper traces the working practices of Holman and Wills to explore how a star like Leigh is reclaimed and reframed as a ‘local’ star in these contexts. It considers the curatorial history of items such as a nightdress worn by Leigh in Gone with the Wind, for example, as they passed through the hands of these collectors. In doing so, I aim to illustrate how a material remnant of star performance becomes the occasion for the creation of a complex network of meaning between generations of women; a network centred on a sustained interplay between distinctly gendered discourses on local identity and Hollywood glamour that extends into the present day.

Panel B: National Icons (A0.28)

Chair: Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick

Lisa Duffy, Queen Mary, University of London, Walt Disney: Studio Head as Star

The classical era studio system produced a heaven’s worth of film stars whose personas were carefully controlled by the studio to which they were contracted. However, one studio, Walt Disney Productions, eschewed this setup, choosing instead to make its namesake studio head its major star. Walt Disney imbued his company with his own brand of folksy Americana authenticity, causing all studio projects to be read through his star image. This is true over the trajectory of Disney’s career but becomes particularly pronounced in his use of television. Television creates ‘intimacy, immediacy, and spontaneity’ (Murray 2005), making authenticity seem more accessible, something Disney used to establish a familial presence in pop culture. First appearing on television in 1950 in One Hour in Wonderland, and eventually becoming a weekly presence in America’s living rooms in 1954 with Disneyland, Disney broadcast his persona as ‘Uncle Walt’ to the nation.

Following his death, the question of ‘What Would Walt Do?’ continues to be considered by both the company and fans alike to analyse business decisions made across his eponymous conglomerate, conferring importance onto his posthumous star image. This paper will examine how Disney used various media texts, particularly television, to craft a star persona that superseded all other personalities at the studio, becoming a synecdoche for the company. It will also consider how Disney’s star image

3 is still utilised by the company today to evoke a trustworthy and nostalgic aura around its projects.

Andrew Spicer, University of the West of England, Stardom and Iconicity: The Case of Sean Connery

Reviewing Sean Connery’s brief cameo as Richard the Lionheart in Robin Hood (1991), Magnus Linklater in The Times argued: ‘Connery’s ‘status is now more than that of megastar: Somewhere along the line he has become an icon.’ Linklater doesn’t go on to define iconicity in this context nor does he offer an explanation how and why the transition from ‘megastar’ to ‘icon’ occurred. However, he was clearly identifying something significant as this view was widely shared by other reviewers and by the directors and actors with whom Connery worked. This paper attempts to explore the relationship between stardom and iconicity, exploring the criteria by which stars might be said to become iconic. It uses Connery as a case study because he offers a particularly rich paradigm though which to examine the term. Connery came to prominence playing an iconic character, James Bond, and struggled to be accepted in other roles. It was only very gradually that he could develop a different persona and a different kind of iconicity, the one that Linklater saluted. In examining how and why this transition occurred, the paper also addresses the additional complication of his national iconicity, named ‘Scotland’s Greatest Living National Treasure’ in a 2011 poll and hailed by the Scottish Tourist Board as ‘the only human being all visitors can instantly identity as a Scot’. In exploring the processes of iconicity, the paper also focuses on three problematics: 1) Agency: how much control was Connery able to exercise? 2) Typicality: how representative is Connery? 3) Historical specificity: how far is Connery’s iconicity the product of a specific period in the history of film stardom?

Saki Kobayashi, Stockholm University, ‘Pansarskeppet Kvinnligheten’ Deconstructed: A Study on the Swedish Stardom of Eva Dahlbeck

Eva Dahlbeck was one of Sweden’s most respected and popular actresses from the 1940s to the 1960s and is now remembered for, most notably, her dazzling performance in Smiles of the Summer Night (1956) by Ingmar Bergman, who allegedly nicknamed her “Pansarskeppet kvinnligheten” (“H.M.S. Femininity”). Although she can be counted as Bergman’s collaborating actresses who garnered global recognition helped by his international reputation as a Scandinavian auteur, her status as a “Bergman star” is more complicated. Unlike other names such as Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, or Ingrid Thulin, who broke through first with Bergman’s oeuvres, Dahlbeck had established herself as a star within the Swedish film industry long before. While the remarkable successes of Bergman’s three comedies (Waiting Women (1952), A Lesson in Love (1954), and Smiles) in the home market at that time suggests the popularity of the leading star Dahlbeck, the critical receptions of the characters she played in these films testify how they were understood to fit her star image. Drawing on Richard Dyer’s theorisation of star image as “structured polysemy” and his idea of “fit” between the star and the

4 character they play (Dyer, Stars, (BFI,1979)), this paper analyses Dahlbeck’s star image constructed by various films and media discourses in Sweden from 1946 to 1956 and the relation between that image and the characters she played in Bergman’s films. In so doing, the paper reconsiders the concept “Pansarskeppet kvinnligheten”, which has tended to be ascribed to Bergman despite being a construction of various media texts and highlights the role of a film star in bridging the gap between popular films and art films. Furthermore, while presenting an example of specificity of the stardom in the post-war Sweden, it reaffirms the applicability of Dyer’s model of star image comprised of several opposing or contradicting elements to a non-Hollywood star.

13:00-14:00 Lunch (A0.26)

14:00-15:30 Panels C and D

Panel C: Performance Methodologies (A1.25) Chair: Eleonora Sammartino, Imperial College London

Georgia Brown, Queen Mary, University of London, Vivien Leigh: Introducing a Data-Driven Analysis of Vocal Performance

The critical analysis of film acting is founded upon the descriptions of an actor’s physical movements. These descriptions themselves are based on the definitions of the established dramatic gestures used when acting in the theatre. Beyond using broad brushstrokes of adjectives - such as louder, softer, shouting, whispering - little attention is given to the vocal aspect of a screen actor’s performance. However, when an actor chooses to emphasise certain words, or parts of words, they are providing their interpretation of the script, as well as demonstrating their ability to control their vocal delivery. Although referring to the performance of music, Elaine Chew’s theory that a performance is shaped by the performer rather than by the score, can be applied to an actor and the script. It is the acoustic stresses within an actor’s delivery, that indicate to the audience the actor’s intended interpretation. By modulating their voice quality, pitch contour (intonation) and timing, an actor is able to convey different emotions.

Using Vivien Leigh as a case study, this paper will introduce the methodology of using software originally developed to analyse music performances to study how Leigh used her voice and vocal control within her onscreen performances. This method provides a view of the prosodic prominence and overall rhythms in each of Leigh’s vocal performances by analysing the suprasegmental characteristics of accented words and the associated changes in the fundamental frequency (F0). Thereby enabling a detailed analysis of the subtle nuances within Leigh’s vocal delivery and how those reveal her interpretation of the script and her characterisation.

5 Lydia Millington, King’s College London, Acting in Interviews: Reconceptualising Personification

Claims that stars are not actors but simply present themselves to the camera abound in studies of star performance. The key issue that has fallen through the gap between star, performance and celebrity studies is that we only come to know a star’s “self” from interviews and personal appearances. Acknowledging that interview performance involves dramatic technique is therefore crucial to understanding star performance as a cross-platform craft.

Using breadth of characterisation as a yardstick, rather than breadth of media skill, to evaluate star performance ignores much of an international star’s labour and achievement. Judy Garland is a prime example of a star who acquired the specific performance skills for multiple mediums. This paper examines the relationship between Garland’s interview performances as archived in YouTube videos and her film characters to offer a revised ontology of her image.

In the process, it presents an innovative framework based on textual evidence that a star’s idiolect can originate from both the native body and impersonation of another body. Informed by phenomenological approaches, this schema proposes that, while conscious re-creation of innate traits becomes self-imitation, repetition of imitative gestures, poses and vocal qualities over many years renders them second nature. Thus, personification does not involve a star simply displaying their nature to the camera, but self-reflectively re-enacting once pre-conscious behaviour and pre-consciously enacting once foreign behaviour. This means that performing a star image not only requires the same skills as “transformative” acting but presents the additional challenge of maintaining coherence over many years, as the persona necessarily adapts and develops. Employing mise-en-scène criticism to interpret “non-character” performances, this framework also expands its capabilities as a methodological tool for analysing star performance, enabling it to account for contextual factors influencing interpretation.

Ana Maria Sapountzi, University of St. Andrews, Laurence Olivier, Queer Star: Disruptive Masculinity in The Devil’s Disciple and Spartacus

British actor Laurence Olivier’s last major Hollywood roles are Gen. Burgoyne in The Devil’s Disciple (1959) and Crassus in Spartacus (1960). In both films Olivier is cast as a figure of authority in a military context. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s prolific writings on homosocial desire and her notion of “the closet” this paper revisits Olivier’s performances in these roles and argues, through theoretically-informed analysis, how the actor’s presence in these films challenges hegemonic concepts of heteronormative masculinity prevalent in classical Hollywood cinema. Focusing on details of Olivier’s performance, this work will advance how his acting creates a symbolic incongruity between him and his male co- stars, which puts him in an isolated position of gender and sexual

6 difference. In doing so, he crystallizes a queer onscreen persona which informed the trajectory of his major Hollywood oeuvre and stardom. Casting himself as the point of masculine nonconformity and contradistinction in these films Olivier expresses a form of queer resistance to dominant male normativity and sexual secrecy. Though Olivier’s interpretation of these characters brings him closer to the work of other male stars at the time, such as James Dean and Marlon Brando, whose films sought to engage with questions of gender, the apolitical tendencies of his performances in these texts further enhance the ambiguity and queerness of his presence.

Although Olivier’s performance as Crassus has received some critical attention, his performance as Gen. Burgoyne remains largely academically uncharted. Olivier’s canonical Hollywood work was foundational in establishing his international film stardom and building an onscreen persona defined by a stoic coolness and mysterious sexual energy. This research is part of a larger thesis project which examines Olivier’s career in Hollywood, commonly overlooked in the scholarship surrounding the actor to create a new critical approach and recognise him as a queer star.

Panel D: Femininity and Authenticity (A0.28)

Chair: Julie Lobalzo Wright, University of Warwick

Lydia Brammer, University of Warwick, An Exquisite Body: Ayako Wakao’s Intersecting Identities in Yasuzo Masumura’s Manji (1964)

Ayako Wakao (1933-) is one of Japan’s most distinguished and celebrated classic film stars. Appearing in 160 films between 1952 and 2005, Wakao was most active in the late 1950s to mid- 1960s. She has worked with some of Japan’s greatest directors including Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirō Ozu. Wakao also worked closely with Yasuzo Masumura, a bold and daring director often declared as the most important filmmaker in the post-war cinema period. Both Western and Japanese literature often refers to Wakao as ‘Masumura’s muse’. Between 1958 and 1969, Wakao starred in seventeen of Masumura’s productions playing the lead in such films as A Wife Confesses (1961), Irezumi (1966), and Red Angel (1966). She is considered Masumura’s greatest actress and the roles she played perfectly captured the ‘Masumurian heroine’ - a figure of determination and egoism.

Classical Japanese heroines are characterised by a martyred nature, women who live and suffer for love. The roles Wakao played, however, challenged this passive and submissive “heroic” trait. I argue that Wakao’s self-reflexive identities add a great deal more complexity to the understanding of the characters she played. Through close analysis of the intersecting identities of typically feminine representations of ‘diva’, ‘femme fatale’, and ‘goddess’ that construct Wakao’s character in Yasuzo’s Manji (1964), I will explore how such an image enables a greater understanding of her stardom as well as the changing roles of women in Japan on screen.

Katherine Farrimond, University of Sussex, Old-Fashioned Girls: Retro Femininity and Celebrity Style

In this paper, I draw out some connections between celebrity culture and retro and vintage style – an aesthetic which I understand as broadly and flexibly referencing Western mid-century fashions. In surveying the representation of a number of celebrity women who regularly dress in retro styles, such as Dita Von Teese, Lana Del Rey, Andra Day, and Gizzi Erskine, I consider how the media assessment and evaluation of such figures brings to light the limits and affective associations of retro aesthetics. Looking at interviews, profiles, red carpet coverage and celebrity gossip content allows a consideration of the relationship of retro aesthetics and past styles to celebrity image. A number of key themes emerge from this material. First, such celebrities are variously understood through registers of taste and (high) class. Many celebrity women are applauded for their adoption of designer ‘heritage’ or ‘archive’ pieces for red carpet events, and this often intensifies for those celebrities whose images are primarily built around retro aesthetics. Relatedly, retro celebrity fashion is associated with conservatism and ‘lady-like’ or ‘old- fashioned’ femininity, so that such looks function as evidence of a celebrity woman’s proclivities for old-fashioned romantic partnerships or gender roles. Retro styles are associated with sadness, melancholia and nostalgia, of being stuck in time, or as hopelessly yearning for the past. Unlike Anita Harris’s go-getting ‘future girl’ (2004), the retro girl is a sad girl, drawn mournfully to times gone by. Finally, retro celebrity women might be celebrated for their capacity to challenge the apparently inherent whiteness of contemporary vintage culture, and to bring earlier styles into dialogue with newer ones, and their attendant politics. The mediation of these celebrities, I suggest, understands mid-century style as an index of conservative, middle-class, white femininity (Coontz 2016), which is available to be projected onto the celebrities of the present.

Catherine O’Rawe, University of Bristol, The Girl Non-Professional in the Circuit of International Cinema: Vulnerability, Authenticity, and ‘Vernacular Stardom’

One of the most striking stories on the global film circuit in the last year was the surprise Best Actress Oscar nomination of indigenous woman Yalitza Aparicio for her role in Cuarón’s Roma. Aparicio’s untrained ‘authenticity’ was juxtaposed with the glamorous world in which she found herself, and press and public followed her Cinderella-style journey to the red carpet at film festivals and the Oscars. The tropes that recur in critical and press discourse around Aparicio are typical of coverage of the non- professional actor in general, valued for their bodily authenticity, and for the ‘effect of quality’ they generate.

This paper discusses casting practices in international arthouse cinema, focusing on girls selected by directors such as Andrea Arnold, Alice

8 Rohrwacher, Céline Sciamma, Sean Baker, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Mati Diop, and others. Analyses of these critically acclaimed films often gloss over the performances of their lead actors, in favour of a focus on the rag- to-riches story of the girls plucked from obscurity. The paper instead argues that the ‘natural’ girl, who creates a kind of ontological and epistemological confusion in the viewer as to whether she is simply ‘being herself’ (Lury 2010), speaks to a tension in contemporary femininity between the authentic female body and the performed/performing self.

Finally, examining the non-professional girl’s appearances at film festivals demonstrates her centrality to the intangible mechanisms of the ‘prestige economy’; The ‘vernacular glamour’ of the non-professional girl, understood as an imitation or transient approximation of the star, functions to legitimate stars and festivals, and intersects with Hedling’s (2015) idea of ‘vernacular stardom’. This temporary inhabiting of the star position announces the difficulty of constructing a ‘girl future’ (Harris 2004) in the form of an enduring professional career, relegating them to a space of unrepeatable fantasy.

15:30-15:45 Comfort Break

15:45-17:15 Panels E and F

Panel E: Corporeality and Stardom (A0.28)

Chair: Catherine Lester, University of Birmingham

Christopher Holliday, King’s College London, Technologies of Desire: Digital Deepfakes and ‘Migratory’ Stardom

Deepfakes is a digital process of human image synthesis rooted in the creative potential of artificial intelligence, in which computer software superimposes a ‘foreign’ human physiognomy onto pre-existing film footage. Created by VFX artist Ctrl Shift Face, these convincing visual ‘mash-ups’ mark the next phase in digitally-mediated forms of stardom, which now encompasses the “posthumous” performances of deceased stars achieved through computer graphics (Bode 2010), virtual face replacement technology, and digital de-aging, all popular effects in contemporary Hollywood cinema that signal the depletion of the actor as “central to the process of dramatic signification” (King 2011: 248). However, Deepfakes’ particular remixing of stardom represents the culmination of stars as both “intertextual” phenomena (Dyer 1986: 3) and manufactured “figures for exchange” (McDonald 2012: 11), no longer fixed onto just one ‘heavenly body’ but transferable and rendered ‘migratory’ thanks to the photorealist capabilities of CGI. Many viral videos have, for example, used recognisable film stars to test the representative possibilities of Deepfakes as a technology of pictorial illusion, playfully rewriting film history by retrofitting footage from canonical cinema with new performers and performances (Jim Carrey in The Shining [1980]; Bill Murray in Full Metal Jacket [1987]). This paper argues that Deepfakes ultimately marks the fullest realisation of the

9 star image as attractive and acquirable, (dis)embodying a fascinating political-historical moment in which star performances are “spectacularized” (McDonald 2012: 184), falsified and reflexively ‘performed’ via digital technology in ways that support – yet rework – the star’s typically intensified visibility. By reflecting on the industry and aesthetics of Deepfakes, this paper situates the persuasive ‘reskinning’ of star performers within more cautionary discourses of a ‘post-truth’ society, identifying how the digital management of film stars has been mobilised – by Ctrl Shift Face himself – as a broader commentary on ‘fake news’ and a cultural critique of manipulated media.

Cathy Lomax, Queen Mary, University of London, Joan Crawford: The Bad Mother of Reinvention?

In his biography of Joan Crawford, Donald Spoto writes that she ‘reinvented herself and changed her appearance according to the styles of each decade and the requirements of each role.’ Crawford’s obsession with her appearance and career, to the determent of her personal life, has entered into Hollywood mythology, assisted by the tell-all memoir Mommie Dearest by her daughter which became a film in 1981 starring Faye Dunaway.

Crawford had a difficult childhood and worked her way up from extreme poverty to become a Hollywood star, eventually adopting a name chosen for her in a fan magazine competition. Spoto’s statement draws on this foundation myth, a transformation story that cemented her popularity in the depression era. Crawford’s ghost written autobiography was even described in an advertisement as ‘The Cinderella story of the century’.

This idea of reinvention is so closely associated with Crawford that it becomes an easy explanation for her unusually long career in a field where the majority of actresses fade away in middle age. However I propose that instead of reinventing herself Crawford rather maintained her position as a glamorous screen presence even while performing in the so-called ‘hagsploitation’ roles of her late career.

This paper will track Crawford’s makeup to show that her changing onscreen look was gradual, and rather than distinct reinventions the way she looked was influenced by fashion, an unavoidably ageing face and developing film styles. It will go on to assess how the maintenance of Crawford’s star appearance opened her up to criticism and even ridicule as she aged, a legacy that was cemented by Dunaway’s depiction of her as a monstrous grotesque figure in Mommie Dearest.

Cath Davies, Cardiff School of Art, Dissecting the Deceased: Designing Death within Posthumous Star Images

Dyer’s seminal studies on stardom (1979; 1986) proposed an analytical framing of stars as constructed texts. He maintained that stardom “can only be studied with due regard to the specificities of what they are,

10 namely significations” (1992:1). This paradigm of evaluating the ‘specificities’ of ‘significations’ that compose a star-as-text will be the focus of this paper that aims to dissect posthumous star images.

Dyer’s methodology of textual signification within media representation, firmly ensconced within canonical film scholarly research on the relationship between content and form (Bazin, 1967; Perkins, 1972; Mulvey, 1975) is especially pertinent when assessing representations of death within visual culture. Death is unknowable, it cannot be documented from experience. Its identity is always predicated on allegorical referents, located only within the realms of construction (Goodwin and Bronfen, 1993; Noys, 2005; Townsend 2008). This process “involves images not directly belonging to it…constructed by a culture…always pointing to other signifiers” (Goodwin and Bronfen, 1993:4). An interdisciplinary correlation between star studies and death studies arguably emerges from this preoccupation with strategies of signification. Investigating posthumous images of the famous therefore accentuates formal components beyond ‘the real’ and demonstrates the conceptual techniques that symbolically design death within a star text. ‘Dissecting the Deceased’ will address some of the recurring cultural manifestations that shape death’s visual presence.

Contributing to an academic terrain that frequently focusses on sociological approaches to representations of death, this paper advocates a ‘film studies’ semiotic probing of formal configurations that reiterates “that which cannot be a sign nonetheless produces a plethora of signs” (Townsend, 2008:2). Using Seale’s premise that “in considering death, a recognition of the material life of the body is unavoidable” (1998:20), how posthumous star images frame corporeality will be evaluated. Subsequently, discourses oscillating between tropes of containment and dissolution emerge, highlighting how star images can encourage an aesthetic contemplation on embodiment and mortality.

Panel F: Deconstructing Mythologies (A1.25)

Chair: James Taylor, University of Warwick

Karen McNally, London Metropolitan University, ‘Like a fairy tale of this century’: Layers of Mythology in the Stardom Narrative

Hollywood’s long history of stardom narratives has received limited attention, yet has been generically wide-ranging, crossing the boundaries from musicals to melodramas and biopics, and drawing on their forms, structures and styles to tell tales of stardom that play out in a variety of ways. The essential concern of these films, though, has remained the mythology of stardom, with stars repeatedly characterized through notions of charismatic screen presence, fandom and hard work. While narratives dramatize the construction, achievement and loss of stardom, they simultaneously position Hollywood as a utopian space in which (mainly) women might escape the moralities and restrictions of rural

11 America and find access to the American Dream of success, a kind of modern myth of the West into which the stardom myth is born.

This layering of mythologies more specifically exists in relation to stardom itself, as narratives draw on various myths in their construction of mythology around their star characters. This paper considers some of the ways in which the stardom narrative creates these layers in its consolidation of the myth of stardom. Combining tropes including explicit referencing of earlier fictional star narratives, themes of death, Greek mythology and fairy tales, the merging of imagery surrounding actor and character, and blurring the boundaries between fictional stardom films and biopics, these films emphasize layers of mythology that repeatedly reinforce the aura of myth at the core of Hollywood stardom. Drawing on archival research, and exploring films including The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954), Fedora (Billy Wilder, 1978) and Judy (Rupert Goold, 2019), the paper will consider how the ghosts of stars and stardom narratives past and present permeate these films and illustrate Hollywood’s unwillingness to abandon the myth of stardom.

Leanne Weston, University of Warwick, Best Actress?: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Stardom and Star Myth in Feud: Bette and Joan

This paper explores the ways in which Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Bette and Joan (FX, USA, 2017) deconstructs and reconstructs the star personas of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. With close reference to Feud, its promotional paratexts, and critical reception, it will consider how both women are portrayed, and how this contributes to their posthumous stardom.

As the latest depiction of their lengthy and highly publicised feud, the series is also one of numerous contemporary texts, including Fosse/Verdon (FX, USA, 2019) that seeks to represent, historicise, and mythologise Hollywood’s past. Feud has not only reinvigorated the already significant popular and scholarly fascination with Davis and Crawford, but also revealed the extent to which their feud has come to define their respective star images. This has clear and obvious implications for how the work of both women is received and understood by contemporary audiences.

The detailed reconstructions within the series, including scene excerpts from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (Robert Aldrich, Warner Brothers, USA, 1962) and trailer recreations, including Strait Jacket (William Castle, Columbia Pictures, USA, 1964) increases the visibility of their work and the emotional labour within it, inviting the opportunity to reassess and reinvest in the landmark texts of their respective careers. Through this, narrative restores – albeit briefly – the identity of both women beyond their feud. However, this restorative function is complicated by the fact that the narrative of Feud and the lives of the women who inspired it, remain shaped by men.

12 Feud’s broadcast as a limited series on the FX network situates it within the space of prestige television rather than made-for-television, offering the opportunity to interrogate not only the shifting boundaries of medium specificity and value, but also the function of stars and stardom, to consider how star images are recirculated and remediated within this evolving landscape.

Mark Mckenna, Staffordshire University, ‘Just a Man and His Will to Survive’: Deconstructing Sylvester Stallone

In 1976, the success of United Artist’s Rocky made Sylvester Stallone a household name. The underdog story of a poor but kind-hearted debt collector who gets a chance to change his life by fighting for the heavyweight championship of the world resonated with the cinema going public, becoming the highest grossing film of that year and going on to win three Oscars. Publicity materials for the film drew parallels between the “real-life” underdog story of Stallone and the hardships of his award- winning creation, and these narratives have helped shaped aspects of Stallone’s star image ever since, especially as an ageing performer in post- 80s and 90s cinema. Thirty years later, with the release of Rocky Balboa in 2006, the origin story reappeared once more in the press, only this time to be challenged by entertainment journalist Alex Ben Block in an article that questioned the historical accuracy of the established narrative. Interviewing key figures, Block suggested that the story of Rocky’s creation in United Artists’ promotional material (and then perpetuated in public discourse by Stallone himself), was entirely fictitious, designed to explicitly align an unknown Stallone with the screen character in order to facilitate a sense of authenticity. Instead, archival research into Stallone’s early life presents numerous challenges to the studio’s preferred narrative and begins to destabilise an enduring star image that has repeatedly capitalised on a distinct image of Stallone (and his characters) as an underdog. This paper will explore the continued value of these underdog narratives to Stallone’s star persona and will detail the ways in which Stallone’s early life contradicts this established narrative and reveals Stallone’s carefully managed and constructed performance of self.

17:15-17:25 Comfort Break

17:25 Roundtable discussion and close (A0.28)

17:45 Celebratory fizz

Organised by: Julie Lobalzo Wright, University of Warwick and Eleonora Sammartino (King’s College London)

Sponsored by: BAFTSS and Warwick Humanities Research Centre

13 Biographies (in paper order)

Hollie Price is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Jill Craigie: Film Pioneer project based at the University of Sussex. The project seeks to explore and re- evaluate Craigie as filmmaker, broadcaster, writer and researcher, and Hollie is working with Lizzie Thynne to make an experimental documentary about Craigie. Hollie previously taught in the Film Studies departments at Queen Mary and King’s College London, and she has published on aspects of stardom in mid- century Britain, including the postwar promotion of popular star-couple Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray and Vivien Leigh’s homes and interests in interior design.

Ellen Wright is VC 2020 Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Television History at De Montfort University. She has taught film studies, media studies and photographic theory and her research expertise is in the leisure industries, consumer culture and broader social contexts surrounding Hollywood cinema in the mid-twentieth century, focusing, in particular, upon representations of gender and sexuality often found in the material culture of film. Her most recent publications are due to appear in Celebrity studies and the Routledge edited collection Sport, Film and National Culture later this year.

Phyll Smith writes on the cultural politics of fringe media texts - ancillary or unofficial media (by)products and their producers and consumers: non-feature film products of the 1930-40s such as Serials and newsreels, and their print tie- ins and commentaries, in comics, programmes, and magazines; and unofficial publications such as political pamphlets, fan magazines and cartoons. He teaches at University of East Anglia, and is researching a PhD on American film Serials, their cinemas and audiences.

Lisa Stead is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Exeter. She specialises in interwar British film cultures, archival and feminist film theory and histories of cinemagoing. She is the author of Off to the Pictures: Women’s Writing, Cinemagoing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain (Edinburgh UP, 2016) and The Boundaries of the Literary Archive (Routledge, 2013: with Carrie Smith). Her new monograph, Reframing Vivien Leigh: Stardom, Gender and the Archive, is forthcoming with Oxford UP in 2020. She is the PI of the AHRC ECR Leadership Fellow project Reframing Vivien Leigh: stardom, archive and access (2019-20).

Lisa Duffy is a PhD researcher at Queen Mary, University of London whose dissertation focuses on gender and sexuality in the fantasy spaces of classical Hollywood musicals. Her current research interests include screen musicals, dance in film (particularly dream ballets), comedy in film and television, and Disney. She has a forthcoming chapter on mental health in the musical TV programme Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in Quieting the Madness: Honest Portrayals of Mental Health and Neurodiversity in Entertainment Media, due out in 2020.

Saki Kobayashi is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University. She holds BA in Language and Culture from Osaka University and MA in Cinema Studies from Stockholm University. The proposed paper is a summarised version of her MA thesis, “‘Pansarskeppet kvinnligheten’ deconstructed: A study of Eva Dahlbeck’s stardom in the

14 intersection between Swedish post-war popular film culture and the auteur Ingmar Bergman”. Her current project explores the concept of “Swedish star” and the star-making mechanism in the 40s Swedish film industry with focus on five female Swedish film stars.

Georgia Brown is a PhD researcher in the department of Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research studies the prosodic prominence and overall rhythms in each of Vivien Leigh’s onscreen performances, by analysing the suprasegmental characteristics of accented words and the associated changes in the fundamental frequency (F0). This study will develop an understanding of how Leigh’s voice was impacted by ageing and illness and how this has affected her star image. Georgia has presented her research at the University of Lincoln as part of the Extra Sonic Practice series.

Lydia Millington (Buckingham) teaches at King’s College London, where she is completing her PhD. She is the author of “Analysing Aniston: Tonal Complexity and Non-comedic Approaches to Sitcom Performance” in Television Performance (Palgrave McMillan, 2019) and the forthcoming book chapter “The Body and the Woman: Contemporary Hollywood, Actresses and Nudity” (Cambridge Scholars Press).

Ana Maria Sapountzi is a final year PhD student at the Department of Film Studies, University of St Andrews, undertaking a queer study of Laurence Olivier’s major Hollywood performances. She has a MLitt in Film Studies from the University of St Andrews and a BA (Hons.) in Film and Screen Studies from Bath Spa University. Ana Maria has been a Library Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and has worked at the Andy Warhol Film Archives in the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. Her areas of research interest include gender, sexuality, aesthetics, performance, stardom, and subversion.

Lydia Brammer is currently a part-time PhD student at the University of Warwick. Having studied Film and Japanese Studies at Oxford Brookes University (2006-2010), followed by a Master’s degree in Film Studies at the same institution, Lydia decided to pursue her interests in Japanese cinema at PhD- level. Lydia’s research combines elements of Film Studies and Japanese Studies, with a specific focus on her main interest of women in post-war cinema. As well as undertaking a PhD, Lydia has been working in academic publishing for seven years and is currently a Market Intelligence Analyst at Frontiers.

Katherine Farrimond is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. Her research explores gender and genre in contemporary popular culture. Her monograph, The Contemporary Femme Fatale was published with Routledge in 2017, and she has published numerous articles and book chapters on representations of girlhood, virginity, sexuality and the politics of nostalgia in popular culture.

Catherine O’Rawe is Professor of Italian Film and Culture at the University of Bristol, U.K. She is the author of Stars and Masculinities in Italian Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She has published widely on gender and genre in Italian cinema and television, and is currently working on a project (funded in

15 2018-19 by a British Academy fellowship) on non-professional actors, from Italian neorealism to contemporary global arthouse cinema.

Christopher Holliday teaches Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London specializing in Hollywood cinema, animation and contemporary digital media. He has published several book chapters and articles on digital technology and computer animation, including work in Animation Practice, Process & Production and animation: an interdisciplinary journal. He is the author of The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and co-editor of Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018) that examines the historical, cultural and theoretical points of intersection between fantasy and animation. He is also the co-founder of fantasy-animation.org.

Cathy Lomax is a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London. Her research investigates the role of makeup and artifice in the creation of the Hollywood female star image. Her project about Gloria Grahame, ‘The Girl with the…’, is published in Fandom as Methodology, edited by Catherine Grant and Kate Random Love, 2019, Goldsmiths Press. Lomax is a practising artist, director of Transition Gallery, London and edits art and culture magazines Arty and Garageland. She won the Contemporary British Painting Prize, 2016 and was Abbey Painting Fellow at the British School at Rome, 2014.

Cath Davies is a Senior Lecturer in Constellation (Critical/Contextual Studies) at Cardiff School of Art and Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University. Her research investigates visibility and materiality in representations of death in visual culture, including the spectacle of the liminal body within star personas post- mortem. Her publications include Technological Taxidermy : Recognisable Faces in Celebrity Deaths (2010, Mortality journal); Nowhere Man : John Lennon and Spectral Liminality in Aaron, M (ed) (2013) Envisaging Death : Visual Culture and Dying; No Mere Mortal: Re-materialising Michael Jackson in Death; (2012, Celebrity Studies journal); What Lies Beneath: Fabric and Embodiment in Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In. (2017, Fashion, Film and Consumption journal); She has recently completed work on Fabric and Somatic Integrity in the work of Tim Burton (2019) and Frida Kahlo’s mannequin at the V&A (2019).

Karen McNally is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at London Metropolitan University and a specialist in classical Hollywood cinema and American television and culture. She is the author of When Frankie Went to Hollywood: Frank Sinatra and American Male Identity (University of Illinois Press, 2008), the editor of Billy Wilder, Movie-Maker: Critical Essays on the Films (McFarland, 2011), and the co-editor of The Legacy of Mad Men: Cultural History, Intermediality and American Television (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2020). She has published and presented widely on stars including Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift, Ida Lupino and the Nicholas Brothers, and topics such as race, masculinity, stardom, and the Hollywood musical. Her forthcoming monograph The Stardom Film: Hollywood and the Star Myth will be publishing with Columbia University Press, and she is also working on the edited volume American Television in the Trump Era.

16 Leanne Weston is a late stage PhD candidate and Associate Tutor at the University of Warwick, working on memory and materiality in music programming. Her current research interests include biopics, acting and performance, the representation of gender in popular and visual cultures, feminist criticism, haptics and affect, and film and television aesthetics.

Mark McKenna in a lecturer in film, television and radio at the University of Staffordshire. He has published on cult film and video distribution and his monograph, Nasty Business: The Marketing and Distribution of the Video Nasties is due out in 2020 with Edinburgh University Press. He is currently writing a monograph on Sylvester Stallone and is co-editing a collection (with William Proctor) on horror film franchises.