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Challenging the study of both celebrity and the cinema, Mandy Merck argues that modern fame and film melodrama are part of the same worldview, one that cannot resolve the relation of personal worth to social esteem. Tracing the history of this conundrum back to the philosophy of the 17th century and the theatre of the 18th, she demonstrates its convergence in stage melodrama and its intensification in the Hollywood star system. Are today's celebrities worth our attention? In that demand for judgement and the hope for its visual guidance, the melodramatic imagination survives - permeating not only fiction film, but documentary, the artist's film, and our self-exhibition on social media.
Examining a range of classical and contemporary films from Charlie Chaplin's
City Lights (1931) to Laura Poitras's
Citizenfour (2014) , the many remakes of
A Star Is Born, the compulsory exhibitionism of political celebrity and the unmasking of whistle-blowers, Merck illustrates the ways in which the cinema constantly restages the moral evaluation of prominent individuals, whether they are actors, artists, politicians or activists.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
TOC
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1. Personal Worth and Public Attention
2. The Drama of a Recognition:
City Lights3. Imitations of Celebrity
4. Women's Pictures
5. Melotrauma
6. Melodrama, Celebrity,
The Queen7. Home from the Hill:
Weiner8. Unmasked: Hacktivism, Anonymity and Celebrity
Notes
References
Index
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Mandy Merck is Professor Emerita of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. She has edited the film and television journal
Screen and the Channel 4 television series
Out on Tuesday. Her books include
Perversions: Deviant Readings,
In Your Face: Nine Sexual Studies,
The Art of Tracey Emin (co-edited with Chris Townsend),
Hollywood's American Tragedies and
The British Monarchy on Screen.
Zusammenfassung
Challenging the study of both celebrity and the cinema, Mandy Merck argues that modern fame and film melodrama are part of the same worldview, one that cannot resolve the relation of personal worth to social esteem. Tracing the history of this conundrum back to the philosophy of the 17th century and the theatre of the 18th, she demonstrates its convergence in stage melodrama and its intensification in the Hollywood star system. Are today’s celebrities worth our attention? In that demand for judgement and the hope for its visual guidance, the melodramatic imagination survives – permeating not only fiction film, but documentary, the artist’s film, and our self-exhibition on social media.
Examining a range of classical and contemporary films from Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931) to Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour (2014) , the many remakes of A Star Is Born, the compulsory exhibitionism of political celebrity and the unmasking of whistle-blowers, Merck illustrates the ways in which the cinema constantly restages the moral evaluation of prominent individuals, whether they are actors, artists, politicians or activists.
Zusatztext
Mandy Merck’s exploration of the charms and pitfalls of a self-worth to be gained through the public attention celebrity affords in our media saturated culture is truly an eye-opener. Witty yet scrupulous in its analysis of texts ranging from Rousseau’s theatrical melodrama Pygmalion to Dreiser’s stardom novel Sister Carrie, from the renown tramp in Chaplin’s City Lights to royal prestige in Frears’ The Queen, and culminating in the news notoriety of former congressman Anthony Weiner and whistleblower Edward Snowden, it dissects the long cultural history that has made fame such an interesting thing – on the page, the stage, the screen and in politics.
