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.At the same time, the New YorkDramatic Mirror named Otis and promoted her appearance as NancySykes.Naming personalities worked in conjunction with the newperformance space of narrative film to individuate performers.Audiencescould begin not only to recognise performers but also have a name to putto the face.As that face and name appeared across films, so an on-screenidentity was pieced together.Further instances of naming soon followed.Edison ran articles onperformers in the company's own Kinetogram periodical.In particular, theFrench pantomime artist Pilar-Morin was promoted across a number offilms, with the effect that her name became the means for theidentification of a specific on-screen identity.It is this use of the nameto construct knowledge of performers across a series of film appearancesthat de Cordova sees as central to advancing the promotion of the 'picturepersonality'.Where the discourse on acting constructed a supra-individual30THE STAR SYSTEMknowledge of film performance as a craft practised by many, the picturepersonality introduced a specifically individual knowledge of the singleperformer.Naming sectioned off certain performers as worthy of special attentionand American cinema began to systematically promote individual actorsas a means of marketing films.In particular, Kalem, Edison, and theFrench company Pathe, all actively announced the names of actors in theirfilms.To promote personalities, production companies introduced newmethods for raising awareness of leading names.Alongside newspaperarticles and advertisements, the names of actors appeared on lobby cardsmade by producers for exhibitors to display in theatres, together withslides of favourite actors to be shown between films (see Staiger 1983).Performers made personal appearances and fan magazines werepublished.By May 1911, the Edison company had started to provide on-screen credits for its actors.Within two years after the first naming of filmactors, cinema had discovered many of the basic promotional tools stillused to sell stars today.For de Cordova, the name of the performer was central to theintertextuality of the picture personality's image.At one level, the namefunctioned to construct the picture personality as an on-screen identity,linking performances in separate films: 'Personality existed as an effect of.the representation of character across a number of films' (1990: 86).The effect of the name extended beyond the screen, however, into storiescarried by the press and fan magazines, yet de Cordova sees this extra-filmic discourse limited to discussion of the on-screen work and roles ofpersonalities.For this reason, knowledge of personalities remainedanchored in the performer's on-screen life, with the identities ofpersonalities defined in terms of 'a professional existence - a history ofappearances in films and plays and a personality gleaned from thoseappearances' (p.92).While the personality discourse was an important stage in theemergence of the star system, for de Cordova the system itself was onlyfully realised after 1913 when stories circulated in the press about the off-screen lives of popular film performers.This new realm of knowledge31SHORT CUTSintroduced readers to life behind the screen, so that the star was knownnot only through his or her roles but also as 'a character in a narrativequite separable from his or her work in any film' (p.99).By combiningknowledge of on-screen and off-screen lives, star discourse constructedboth a professional and private existence for performers.In the stardiscourse, de Cordova identifies a central concern with distinguishing themoral healthiness of work in cinema against life in theatre.Compared tothe night-time work, travelling and general insecurities of the theatre,working in films was represented as offering regular daytime conditionsconducive to maintaining stable domestic and familial lives [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]