Stardom and the Classical Vernacular: History, Myth and Sexuality

自20世纪初以来，电影明星一直被认为是希腊的神和女神，拥有“古典”美。然而，尽管理查德·戴尔和埃德加·莫林的关键著作中提到了古典主义对明星的重要性，但这种联系在很大程度上仍然被认为是理所当然的，而且没有具体说明。在电影研究之外，学者们对明确涉及古典历史和神话的电影文本的兴趣在过去几年里显著增长，通常是雷德利·斯科特(Ridley Scott)的《角斗士》(Gladiator，2000)或奥利弗·斯通(Oliver Stone，2004)的《亚历山大》(Alexander)等历史动作片。然而，古典学家和历史学家的优秀研究在很大程度上忽略了将电影本身作为文本对象来审问，或者考虑电影明星在体现和调解这段历史中的意义。这项研究将详细阐述明星如何向观众带来对其当前上下文的含蓄典故，以及经常追溯到古希腊和罗马以获取灵感的无数视觉文化参考。正如我将展示的，无论是姿势还是肖像，绘画，雕塑还是文学，电影中明星的概念往往取决于古典主义。这项研究将支持完成两篇论文和相关的会议论文，提交给同行评议的电影研究期刊，并将作为一个更大的研究项目的基础。这项研究的目的是获取与一系列明星及其电影的批评性和受欢迎程度有关的原始材料。我已经在伦敦的英国电影学院图书馆承担了其中的一些工作，拟议的研究扩展了我早期的研究，为我的专著《艾弗·诺维洛》(BFI，2003)拓宽了明星研究的背景框架。通过在洛杉矶玛格丽特·赫里克图书馆和南加州大学档案馆进行的最终研究，该项目将评估古典过去与其文物、图标和风景之间的具体关系，以及观众对电影明星和明星的接受程度。这项研究还旨在介绍明星身份与当前关于记忆、情感和电影的跨学科辩论之间的联系。古典主义，明晰了通过现在表达出来的永恒和过去的概念，可以很好地解释电影在视觉文化中的认知方式，更具体地说，明星是如何体现这种关系的。第一篇文章旨在建立一个方法论框架，通过这个框架来定义从1910年代到当代流行的好莱坞和欧洲电影中的经典明星话语的视觉和文学术语。第二篇文章将把这些方法和理论问题应用于1925年M-G-M电影《宾虚》(弗雷德·尼布洛饰)的个案研究，这部史诗电影在意大利和加利福尼亚州拍摄，确立了拉蒙·诺瓦罗作为20世纪20年代好莱坞主要人物之一的地位。通过研究制片厂的原始制作文件、剧本和剧照，这篇文章将研究M-G-M宣传所采用的公开的古典肖像，显然是被电影的历史背景所合法化的，如何在1924年至1927年期间对诺瓦罗明星形象的种族和性取向的发展产生了迷人的影响。尽管自1999年以来，公众对诺瓦罗的兴趣与日俱增，至少出版了三本传记，但这项研究将首次在电影研究中提供对这位重要但被忽视的明星的实质性考虑，并将是第一部在更多基于历史的文本方法中考虑明星在电影中的作用的作品。

Since the early 1900s film stars have been valorised and promoted as Greek gods and goddesses possessing 'classical' beauty. Yet despite the significance of classicism to stardom being referenced in key writing by Richard Dyer and Edgar Morin, this association continues to be largely taken for granted and unspecified. Outside Film Studies, scholarly interest in film texts explicitly engaging with classical history and myth, often in historical action films such as Ridley Scott's 'Gladiator' (2000) or Oliver Stone's 'Alexander' (2004), has grown significantly over the past few years. However, excellent research by classicists and historians has largely neglected to interrogate film as a textual object in its own right or to consider the significance of film stars in embodying and mediating this history. This research will elaborate the ways in which stars bring to their audiences implicit allusions to both their immediate context and a myriad of references to visual culture that frequently extends back to ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration. As I shall demonstrate, whether it be in pose or portraiture, painting, sculpture or literature, cinematic conceptions of stardom are frequently contingent on classicism.This research will support the completion of two articles, and related conference papers, to be submitted to peer-reviewed Film Studies journals and will serve as the foundation of a larger research project. The objective of this research is to access primary materials relating to the critical and popular reception of a series of stars and their films. I have already undertaken some of this work at the library of the British Film Institute in London, and the proposed research extends my earlier research into widening the contextual frameworks of star studies for my monograph on Ivor Novello (BFI, 2003). Through final research conducted at the archives of the Margaret Herrick Library and University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the project will assess the specific relationship between the classical past and its artefacts, icons and landscapes, and audiences' reception of film stars and stardom. This research also aims to introduce connections between stardom and current interdisciplinary debates about memory, emotion and cinema. Classicism, crystallising notions of both the 'eternal' and the 'past' but articulated through the present, can illuminate much about the way film is perceived within visual culture and, more specifically, how the star embodies that relationship.The first article aims to produce a methodological framework through which to define the visual and literary terminology of 'classical' star discourse in popular Hollywood and European cinema from the 1910s to the contemporary period. The second article will apply these methodological and theoretical questions to a case-study into the 1925 M-G-M film 'Ben-Hur' (Fred Niblo), the epic filmed in Italy and California that established Ramon Novarro as one of the leading Hollywood figures of the 1920s. Examining the studio's original production files, scripts and stills, the article will examine how the overtly classical iconography deployed by M-G-M's publicity, evidently legitimated by the film's historical setting, had fascinating influences on the development of the ethnicity and sexuality of Novarro's star persona between 1924 and 1927. Despite the increasing public interest in Novarro indicated by the publication of at least three biographies since 1999, this research will provide the first substantial consideration of this significant but neglected star within Film Studies, and will be the first work to consider the role of stardom in the film within more History-based approaches to the text.