David / Forum Kritika: On Nora Aunor and the Philippine Star System 248 FORUM KRITIKA On Nora Aunor and the Philippine Star System Joel David Inha University, Incheon, Korea
[email protected] Abstract Although vital to the existence of the Philippine movie industry, stardom has rarely garnered scholarly attention apart from the auteurist (film-artist) or biographical modes. Part of the reason is external, in the sense that media-studies approaches to star-text discourses emerged relatively recently, and may still be in the process of further refinement. However, a crucial internal reason is that the primary Philippine example, Nora Aunor, inadvertently affirms the earlier, now-conventional approach by virtue of her singular dominance as both top star and top multimedia performer. This study will track relevant trends in star studies vis-à-vis Philippine scholarly output, and will then look at an extreme example of Aunor-as-auteur by way of demonstrating the predicament her presence has posed for local scholarship. Keywords audience, auteurism, Nora Aunor, reflexivity About the Author Joel David is Professor for Cultural Studies at Inha University in Incheon, Korea. The first graduate of the country’s first undergraduate film program at the University of the Philippines, he holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at New York University and was founding Director of the UP Film Institute. He is the author of a number of books on Philippine cinema, now archived at his Amauteurish! blog <http://amauteurish.com>. His latest volumes, titled Millennial Traversals and Book Texts, are also posted on the blog as the country’s first exclusively open-access solo-authored book.