Film stars in the perspective of performance studies: play, liminality and alteration in Chinese Cinema

Star studies sees film stars as “structured polysemy” and anticipates a salient system of meaning for us to decode and appreciate. Performance theory treats meaning as “conjunctural” rather than “structured” and privileges improvisation and juxtaposition. Approaching star studies through performance theory helps explore a wealth of filmic techniques and performative tactics. This article focuses on Tony Leung Chiu-Wai’s “self-effacing” performance of repetition and examines special cases of play and liminality as well presence and absence in In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000) and Lust Caution(Ang Lee, 2007). These cases challenge our conventional habit of thought and cognition and reveal the unacknowledged potential of artistic alternative and alteration vis-à-vis history and reality. This study of Tony Leung’s performance directs attention beyond action stars to romantic male roles in Chinese films.

‘I want James Deen to Deen me with his Deen’: the multi-layered stardom of James Deen

This chapter examines the alternative economy of porn stardom through the career and performances of James Deen. It draws attention to the previously un-acknowledged acting and performance involved in doing sex for the camera, and analyses Deen’s multi-layered performance style in his pornographic scenes. It also looks at Deen’s effort to expand his stardom outside his film performance which is little valued, by discussing his involvement in adult industry activism and various charity work, and his use of social media and engagement with his fans as a way to supplement or correct his onscreen persona.

Confronting the impossibility of impossible bodies: Tom Cruise and the ageing male action hero movie

This chapter discusses ageing action stardom by examining the physical performance of a range of ageing male action stars in post-2000 action films with a focus on Tom Cruise. In the context of a film franchise predicated on the achievement of the impossible, it analyses how Cruise confronts his own encroaching inability to perform the impossible. The chapter suggests an intense cultural negotiation over the ageing male body and makes the differentiation between Cruise who defies the age-related decline narrative and other stars who do not.

Whitewashing the Dreamgirls: Beyoncé, Diana Ross and the commodification of blackness

The chapter examines how ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ function in the construction of the star image of two African-American superstars from two different eras, Beyoncé and Diana Ross. It emphasises the historical link between Beyoncé and Ross in an attempt to show how their star texts are interconnected and continue to inform each other over time. The chapter reveals how ‘blackface’ and ‘whitewashing’ have been used strategically by the industry to please mainstream ‘white’ audiences. It also shows that two stars skilfully play with skin colour – the symbol of their ethnicity – and reduce it to a pure masquerade, thereby challenging the crude dichotomy of the association of whiteness with artificiality and blackness with authenticity.

‘Speaking in a forked tongue’: Anna May Wong’s linguistic cosmopolitanism*

This chapter explores early American-Chinese star Anna May Wong’s self-reflexive enactment of the ‘Oriental’ (or other exotic) roles through her multi-faceted vocal performance (English with British accent, French, German and Taishan dialect) in a transnational context from Hollywood to Europe, as a way to ridicule the stereotypical roles imposed on her. By analysing Wong’s linguistic performances and the resulting lingua-ethno cosmopolitanism, the chapter explores the strategies employed by minority/marginalized performers to negotiate with the restrictive racial politics in Euro-America and China during the colonial era.

In your face: Montgomery Clift comes out as crip in The Young Lions

This chapter concerns the “aberrant” star image of Montgomery Clift in The Young Lions, after his accident and the loss of his conventional good looks. It analyses Clift’s deliberate self-distortion as an act of subversive intervention in his own image and seeks to challenge traditional star studies which overwhelmingly highlight notions of pleasure and attraction in relation to film stars. With reference to queer theory and crip theory, the chapter opens the field of star studies to the troubling, painful and allegedly ghastly connotations of film stars.

YouTube as archive: fans, gender and Mexican film stars online

This chapter proposes that YouTube should be understood as a digital archive with its own developing aesthetic forms where fans act as attentive and specialist curators of a star text. Through an analysis of three Mexican stars from the so-called Golden Age of industrial cinema, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete and Emilio Fernández, this chapter focuses on their YouTube star texts, and draws out what these mean for the nascent field of online re-meditated star studies. It also considers the ways in which the star’s gender determines how fans produce an online star text and how YouTube can be understood to function as a precarious archive.

‘When Barbara strips off her petticoats and straps on her guns’: Barbara Stanwyck, maturity and stardom in the 1950s and 1960s

This chapter will consider Stanwyck’s unique position as a role model for mature women in the 1950s and 1960s. It will also examine the reasons for Stanwyck’s popularity as a mature female during this period. Unlike many of the female stars of her generation that were forced to end their careers in the 1950s Stanwyck extended her film career until well into the 1960s by performing in B Westerns and television series. Stanwyck’s maturity and visible ageing affected the roles she played but also turned Stanwyck into a role model for mature women. The chapter will demonstrate the construction of Stanwyck’s image by locating it in its original context and it will offer explanations for the fashionability of Stanwyck as a mature star in the 1950s and 1960s.

‘Una diva non come le altre’: Le streghe and the paradoxical stardom of Silvana Mangano

Silvana Mangano’s stardom is marked by a series of paradoxes - a ‘reluctant’ diva who shed the voluptuous body that made her world famous, a star whose career was shaped first by a powerful film producer (husband Dino De Laurentiis) and then by two arthouse auteurs (Pasolini and Visconti). This paper explores these paradoxes particularly through the episode film Le Streghe/The Witches (1967), often seen as the transition from her ‘De Laurentiis career’ to her ‘Pasolini-Visconti career’. Unusual as an actual star vehicle for Mangano, the film casts her as a glamorous movie diva not unlike herself, a bored housewife (married to Clint Eastwood), a fiery ‘Siciliana’, a spoilt society girl and a holy mute. It thus invites particular consideration of Mangano as both actress and problematic star.

Heroines at the outskirts of culture: Hollywood stardom in intra-and transcultural practices of Camp

The chapter discusses the manifestations of camp as shown in the subversive uses of star images. It specifically focuses on the impersonation of Hollywood actresses in non-western contexts, seeing the uses as an attempt at catching up with western modernity. As such, the chapter analyses the problem of engaged fandom, its political and social potential, and the role of camp in mediating cultural differences by means of entertainment.