Although Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous American film stars, and a monumental cultural figure, her film work has been studied far less than her biography. Applying C.S. Peirce’s semiotic categories of icon, index, and symbol, this research explains how Monroe acquired meaning as an actress: Monroe was a powerful, but simplified, public image (an icon); an indicator of a particular historical and social context (an index); and an embodiment of significant cultural debates (a symbol). Analyzing Monroe as an icon reveals how her personal life, which contradicted her official publicity story, generated public sympathy and led to a perceived intimacy between the star and her fans. Monroe’s persona developed through her roles in films about marriage. We’re Not Married (1952) and Niagara (1953) expose the pitfalls of marriage. In response to fan criticism of Monroe’s aggressive persona in these films, however, Darryl F. Zanuck, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), consciously distanced Monroe both from her aggressive persona and her implicit criticism of marriage. Monroe’s films, in particular, The Seven Year Itch (1955), Bus Stop (1956), and Some Like it Hot (1959), also revealed the tensions inherent in postwar understandings of female sexuality. Monroe’s role in her final completed film, The Misfits (1960), both acknowledges and resists her status as a symbol. This film unites Monroe’s screen persona and off-screen life in resistance to conventional values: her character embraces divorce, lives with a man who is not her husband, and openly criticizes men who betray trust. This film most extensively interweaves Monroe as an icon, an index, and a symbol. In so doing, it reveals how Monroe embodied the contradictions inherent in both postwar culture and Hollywood stardom.

This investigation undertakes to re-centre the figure of the film star and their film appearances in the field of star study. To this end it uses Charlton Heston as its focus in a re-appraisal of existing methods of accounting for the star phenomenon in cinema. It also concomitantly re-assesses existing accounts of the significance of Charlton Heston as a film star. This thesis posits a robust method for identifying the specificities of the star’s contribution to a film’s meanings and effects across the body of their work by drawing on Andrew Britton’s understanding of the ‘star enactment’. Present approaches through which to engage with the details of a star’s performance are considered in detail and the weaknesses of those that seek to impose external schemas onto such discussions are highlighted. The difficulties with approaches that attempt to account for the star as a signifying phenomenon through the concepts of acting and performance are also considered. Existing methods which may allow for a fruitful investigation into the significance of the star enactment, such as the commutation test, are re- formulated in this study and their benefits are demonstrated through their application to key Heston star enactments. These new understandings are also made possible through the application of an ‘ekphrastic’ method of rendering film moments. Previous readings of Heston’s star figure are also re- appraised, and their conclusions questioned, through closer reference to the evidence of details from films. The fruitfulness of this method for analysing and commenting on film is thus demonstrated and Heston’s relationship to genre and its effect on performance style is also considered in order to be able to confidently assert the specific features of the Heston aesthetic.

In this thesis, the author focus on the description of mass, later called popular culture, and its products, the two selected, originally British, talent singing reality show, "Česko hledá SuperStar" (and "Česko Slovenská SuperStar") and X Factor. Their competitors are the subject for qualitative research of articles in periodical press. The aim of the research is using qualitative content analysis to analyse "Mladá fronta DNES" and "Blesk", and how published texts construct contestants of selected shows. For research was selected period of time when the competition was broadcasted, February - June 2004; February - June 2008 and September - December 2009.

This study discusses and analyses recorded/filmed speech, translation, and cultural identity in film discourses in early European sound film. The purpose is to frame these issues from a number of theoretical perspectives in order to highlight relations between media, speech and translation. The points of departure are 1. “universal language” vs. “linguistic diversity”, 2. “media transposition” vs. “language translation”, and 3, “speech as words” vs. “speech as body”. An important aspect in order to discuss these topics is the problem of “versions”, both different translated versions, and versions in different media of speech representation. The correlation of theory with a historical focus offers a contextualisation of translation as an issue of cinematic culture, and also sheds new light on topics that previously have been referred to as details (such as foreign accents in film) or as phenomena considered to be unrelated to “cinematic quality” (such as “filmed theatre”). The object of analysis consists of German, French and Swedish films, trade and fan press, and film theory from the 1920s and 1930s. The study begins with a theoretical and historical introduction, which addresses representation of speech in reproduction media focusing on early sound technology predominantly from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Chapter two offers a discussion of speech as signifier of differentiated ethnicity in relation to a utopia of universal language embodied in film and sound media. Chapter three addresses film speech as a multimedia issue revealing a problematic of version as a context for the various means of translating. Chapter four offers a general discussion of film translation in the period of transition to sound with a focus on dubbing, subtitles and inter-titling. The two last chapters deal exclusively with the multiple language version film, a translation practice based on re-making the same script in different languages.

This thesis explores women’s writing and its place in the formation of female film culture in the British silent cinema era. The project focuses upon women’s literary engagement with silent cinema as generative of a female film culture, looking at materials such as fan letters, fan magazines, popular novels, short story papers, novelizations, critical journals and newspaper criticism. Exploring this diverse range of women’s cinema writing, the thesis seeks to make an original contribution to feminist film historiography. Focusing upon the mediations between different kinds of women’s cinema writing, the thesis poses key questions about how the feminist film historian weights original sources in the reclamation of silent female film culture, relative to the varying degrees of cultural authority with which different women commentated upon, reflected upon, and creatively responded to film culture. The thesis moves away from conceptualization of cinema audiences and reception practices based upon textual readings. Instead, the thesis focuses upon evidence of women’s original accounts of their cinemagoing practices (fan letters) and their critical (newspaper and journal criticism) and creative (fiction writers) responses to cinema’s place in women’s everyday lives. Balancing original archival research with multiple overarching methodological frameworks—drawing upon fan theory, feminist reception theory, audience studies, social history and cultural studies—the thesis is attentive to the diversity of women’s experiences of cinema culture, and the literary conduits through which they channeled these experiences. Shifting the recent focus in feminist silent film historiography away from the reclamation of lost filmmaking female pioneers and towards lost female audiences, the thesis thus constructs a nationally specific account of British women’s silent era cinema culture.

This dissertation addresses the industrial history of American-based celebrity gossip over century, beginning with the first Hollywood stars in the 1910s and reaching into “celebrified” culture of the 2010s. Gossip, broadly defined as discourse about a public figure produced and distributed for profit, can operate within the star’s good graces or completely outside of the Hollywood machine; it can be published in “old media” print and broadcast forms or online and on a phone. Regardless of form, tone, and content, gossip remains a crucial component of the ways in which star images are produced and consumed. The dissertation thus asks: how has the relationship between the gossip industry and Hollywood in general changed over the last century? And what implications do those changes have for stars, those who exploit their images, and media industries at large? / Not available / text

While it is very common for supermodels to make the occasional foray into cinematic performance, and some of them manage to turn these forays into full-time careers in acting, it is very rare that supermodel-actors are afforded any academic attention. This thesis seeks to change this through a case study of two supermodel-actors: Devon Aoki and Abbey Lee. Using a methodology that combines extratextual contextualization with close analysis of image and film materials, and grounded in a perspective that centers the body, it analyzes Aoki and Lee’s careers as they cross over from one form of stardom to another. The focus of the analysis lies in the way that the bodily capital which is the basis of their modelling work also informs their acting personas as they are shaped through their on-screen work, publicity and reception. Furthermore, the thesis applies the concept of niche stardom, adapted from Diane Negra, to illustrate how Aoki and Lee inhabit a stardom which is specific to certain audiences with specific values and tastes. The analysis finds that there is a significant overlap between Aoki and Lee’s modelling and acting personas, and that this overlap is channeled through the representations of their bodies which, are the sites of heterogeneous discourses of gender, sexuality and race.

Ce mémoire propose d’explorer quel(s) statut(s) sont accordés aux compositeurs contemporains dans le contexte musical parisien des premières années du XXe siècle à travers une analyse de la presse musicale spécialisée de l’époque. Le corpus de notre recherche est constitué de trois revues, chacune ancrée dans des sphères de sociabilités bien distinctes : La Revue musicale (histoire et critique), une « revue savante » proche du milieu de la Schola cantorum ; Le Mercure musical, une « petite revue » d’avant-garde militant en faveur de la musique de Maurice Ravel ; et Musica, une « grande revue » destinée à un lectorat issu de la petite bourgeoisie en plein essor, essentiellement féminin et pratiquant la musique en amateur. Cette étude révèle que la traditionnelle opposition entre la conception du compositeur-artisan et celle du compositeur-génie issue de la fin du XVIIIe siècle et du XIXe siècle voit apparaître un troisième joueur à l’aube du XXe siècle : le compositeur-vedette, un statut qui était jusqu’alors généralement réservé aux interprètes. Ces trois statuts coexistent dans le panorama de la presse musicale du tournant du XXe siècle, et leur promotion par certains organes de presse spécifiques répond à une logique tantôt esthétique, tantôt économique. Il se dégage de cette étude que la presse musicale constitue non seulement un indice des variations qu’a subies la figure du compositeur dans le spectre de la grandeur en culture, mais qu’elle a également joué un rôle actif dans ces transformations. / This master thesis proposes a look of various statuses given to contemporary composers in the Parisian musical context at the beginning of the 20th century, through an analysis of the specialised press of that period. The corpus of my research consists in three different journals, each one with its own distinct sphere of sociability: La revue musicale (histoire et critique), a scholarly publication close to the Schola cantorum; Le Mercure musical, an avant-garde publication which has championed Maurice Ravel’s music; and a third, Musica, a magazine with a much larger audience, intended for the growing middle class, and which readership is mostly constituted of women and music learners. This thesis reveals that the traditional opposition between the concepts of craftman-composer and of genius-composer — a concept deriving from the end of the 18th century and the 19th century — sees the rise of a third component at the beginning of the 20th century: the star-composer, a status which was until then only limited to performers. Those three statuses coexisted throughout the musical press during the early 20th century. Their promotion by specific publications was in some cases done for aesthetic reasons and in others for economical motives. The outcome of this study reveals that the musical press is not only an indicator of the changes in the composers’ status within the array of cultural greatness, but it has also played an active role in these transformations.

No description available.