1. The Candle in the Wind
1. BBC World News, live coverage of Princess Diana Funeral, September 6, 1997.
2. Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures,” rewritten 1947, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford and London, 1999), pp. 279–292.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Robert Turnock, Interpreting Diana: Television Audiences and the Death of a Princess (London: British Film Institute, 2002), p. 41.
6. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 2004), p. 125.
7. Rosalind Coward, From Diana: The Portrait, forward by Nelson Mandela (Kansas City: McMeel, 2004).
8. Richard Johnson, “Exemplary Differences: Mourning (and Not Mourning) a Princess,” in A. Kear and D. Steinberg, eds., Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture, and the Performance of Grief (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 37.
9. See for example Kevin Noa, Two Princesses: The Triumphs and Trials of Grace Kelly and Diana Spencer (First Books, 2002).
10. P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 81–82.
11. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser (London: Picador, 1979), chapter 13.
12. David Gritten, Fame: Stripping Celebrity Bare (London: Allen Lane, 2002), p. 7. I wish to thank the Los Angeles entertainment lawyer Michael Perlstein for bringing this superb book to my attention.
13. Richard Stolley quoted in Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 43.
14. Ibid.
15. Leo Braudy has richly detailed the history of fame in the West. See Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Vintage, 1997).
16. David Lubin, Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). In that book Lubin speaks to the culture of movies that provides context for the public’s projection of film qualities onto this pair.
17. Classic papers in this regard are Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, vol. 16 (1975); Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, eds., Revision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984); and Kaja Silverman, “Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects: Film Theory’s Structuring Lack” Wide Angle vol. 7, nos. 1-2 (1985).
18. The persona’s relation to opera is profound. For a discussion of the feminine role in grand opera, see, above all, Catherine Clement, Opera: The Undoing of Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
2. There Is Only One Star Icon (Except in a Warhol Picture)
1. Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles (Doubleday: New York, 2007).
2. Wendy Leigh, True Grace: The Life and Times of an American Princess (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2007), p. xi.
3. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 9.
4. Ibid., pp. 580–581.
5. Ibid., p. 581.
6. Ibid., p. 6.
7. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), pp. 39–40.
8. For a superb introduction to this desultory state of affairs, mostly concerned with Picasso’s celebrity, see John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (New York: Pantheon, 1989).
9. Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
4. A Star Is Born
1. David Gritten, Fame: Stripping Celebrity Bare (London: Allen Lane, 2002), p. 16.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, p. 18.
4. Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 20; his quote is from Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 141.
5. Gamson, Claims to Fame, p. 24.
6. Ibid., p. 25.
7. Quoted from Maureen Dowd, “Mel’s Tequila Sunrise,” New York Times, August 2, 2006.
8. Ibid.
5. The Film Aura: An Intermediate Case
1. Cf. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 791–811.
3. Which is why he praises Brecht’s “epic theater”: for refusing theater per se and the aura of the actors associated with it.
4. For a good discussion of this diminished role of the aura in Benjamin, see Miriam Bratu Hansen’s introduction to Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
5. David S. Ferris, ed., Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (Stanford:
6. Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 45. 6. Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures” (1947 [1934]), reprinted in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 289–302.
7. Ibid., p. 302.
8. Panofsky reduced the screenplay to something that could be whatever it wanted so long as it did not dominate visual effects. This he called “the principle of co-expressibility.” Where dialogue is in danger of dominating, something visual happens to match its importance, often a close-up. Panofsky’s particular way of thinking this through does not do justice to the screenplay, which is not the “junior partner” in a movie, kept in check visually in case it should assert itself too much. The meanings found in the screenplay are generative for everything that happens. Coexpressibility is right insofar as the movie must never become too “talky.” However, a better model for thinking the relationship between screenplay and camera is one of mutual generativity within a complex system. The screenplay is written—sometimes adapted from a documentary, work of history, short story, novel, play—with visual realization in mind. Flow, rhythm, character, plot are all imagined for the screen, often with particular actors, actresses, and locations. Equally important, a sound film synergizes visual rhythm with sound rhythm; sound becomes central to physiognomy. The medium of sound film is not simply visual reality as such; it is also sound.
9. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 23.
10. Kendall Walton, “Transparent Pictures”, Critical Inquiry 2.2 (1984): 251.
11. Kendall Walton, “Pictures and Photographs: Objections Answered,” in Allen Richard and Murray Smith, eds., Film Theory and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 60. Walton’s original essay on this subject was “Transparent Pictures” (see note 10).
12. Walton, “Transparent Pictures,” p. 253.
13. In formulating this I am hugely helped by my student, Everett Kramer. We hit on this idea more or less together and at the same time, but he was just perhaps a little clearer. His help has been invaluable to me.
14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, no. 122, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958).
6. Stargazing and Spying
1. Tania Modleski, “The Master’s Dollhouse: Rear Window, from The Women Who Knew Too Much,” reprinted in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 849–861.
2. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: Hollywood Comedies of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
7. Teleaesthetics
1. P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 121. Further references will appear parenthetically in text.
2. Raymond Williams, Television, Technology, and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 1990).
3. Patricia Mellencamp, “TV Time and Catastrophe: Or Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Patricia Mellencamp, Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism (London and Indiana: British Film Institute/Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 241.
4. Ibid.
5. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, eds., Revision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), p. 238.
6. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 7.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 207.
9. Lawrence Goldstein, “Homesick in Los Angeles,” originally published in Poetry, vol. 73 (May 1985), reprinted in Lawrence Goldstein, The American Poet at the Movies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 249–250.
10. Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
11. The ultimate moral for aesthetics is that an aura in art is never something that happens purely because of a mechanical apparatus. The film apparatus (camera, shot, editing, screening) is for all intents and purposes the same as that of TV, whereas the aesthetic results of these media differ dramatically and fundamentally oppose each other. An aura is the effect of a total art form: from the apparatus of reproducibility in film’s case to its screenplay, story, beginning-middle-end, composition of shots, placement of the star, etc. etc…. If Days of Our Lives develops an aura over time, or Oprah, it will be because it becomes a cult environment, a kind of theater. Perhaps Diana carries the aura of stardom because royalty is also a thing (largely) of the past. She wears its historical mantle.
8. Diana Haunted and Hunted on TV
1. Andrew Morton, Diana: Her True Story (New York: Pocket, 1998), pp. 353–355.
9. Star Aura in Consumer Society (and Other Fatalities)
1. For a superb introduction to this desultory state of affairs, mostly concerned with Picasso’s celebrity, see John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (New York: Pantheon, 1989).
2. Richard Stolley, quoted in Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 43.