Stardom and the Classical Vernacular: History, Myth and Sexuality

自20世纪初以来，电影明星一直被推崇为拥有“古典”美的希腊神和女神。然而，尽管理查德·戴尔和埃德加·莫林在关键写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，而且没有明确说明。在电影研究之外，对电影文本明确涉及古典历史和神话的学术兴趣，通常在历史动作电影中，如雷德利·斯科特的《角斗士》（2000）或奥利弗·斯通的《亚历山大》（2004），在过去几年里有了显著的增长。然而，经典学家和历史学家的优秀研究在很大程度上忽视了将电影作为文本对象本身进行讯问，也没有考虑电影明星在体现和调解这段历史方面的意义。这项研究将详细阐述明星如何向观众暗示他们的直接背景和无数的视觉文化参考，这些视觉文化经常追溯到古希腊和罗马，以获得灵感。正如我将要证明的那样，无论是在姿势或肖像，绘画，雕塑或文学中，电影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文章和相关的会议论文，提交给同行评审的电影研究期刊，并将作为一个更大的研究项目的基础。本研究的目的是获取与一系列明星及其电影的评论和大众接受有关的原始材料。我已经在伦敦的英国电影学院图书馆进行了一些这方面的工作，这项拟议的研究扩展了我之前的研究，拓宽了我关于伊沃·诺维洛的专著（BFI, 2003）的明星研究的背景框架。通过在玛格丽特·赫里克图书馆和洛杉矶南加州大学的档案馆进行的最后研究，该项目将评估古典历史与文物、偶像和景观以及观众对电影明星和明星的接受之间的具体关系。这项研究还旨在介绍明星与当前关于记忆、情感和电影的跨学科辩论之间的联系。古典主义结合了“永恒”和“过去”的概念，但又通过现在来表达，可以在很大程度上阐明电影在视觉文化中的感知方式，更具体地说，就是明星如何体现这种关系。第一篇文章旨在建立一个方法论框架，通过该框架来定义从20世纪10年代到当代好莱坞和欧洲流行电影中“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论和理论问题应用到1925年M-G-M电影“Ben-Hur”（Fred Niblo）的案例研究中，这部史诗电影在意大利和加利福尼亚拍摄，使拉蒙·诺瓦罗成为20世纪20年代好莱坞的主要人物之一。本文将研究M-G-M公司的原始制作文件、剧本和剧照，研究M-G-M公司的宣传中使用的明显经典的图像，以及电影的历史背景，如何在1924年至1927年间对诺瓦罗的明星角色的种族和性别的发展产生了迷人的影响。尽管自1999年以来，至少有三本传记的出版表明公众对诺瓦罗的兴趣日益浓厚，但本研究将首次在电影研究中对这位重要但被忽视的明星进行实质性的考虑，并将是第一部在更多基于历史的文本方法中考虑电影中明星角色的作品。

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.