Stellar Encounters
Stardom in Popular European Cinema
Description:... Within the intertwined areas of film, TV and media research, studies of stardom have developed into a rich field with numerous ways of approach. This book offers a collection of essays that make inquiries into aspects of stardom in Europe, studying the significance of the subject, its particular incarnations and areas of possible research within film and TV. The essays enter into a dialogue with each other on many different crisscrossing levels from individual to national, from private (lives) to public (images) and from scholarly ground research to theoretical explication. It is the editor's ambition to provide the reader with this previously unpublished material to study and evaluate the different practices of stardom in Europe - and the meanings produced by them - and to consider some initial conclusions that may be drawn from the collection: crucial points and concerns that became manifest while juxtaposing the essays included. Such points are, among others, those dealing with familiarity and the extraordinary, similarity and difference, or individual and community. The contents of the book are, however, arranged in line with a principle that draws attention to the thematic approaches on diverse cases of European stardom. In doing so, we hope to emphasize the variety of ways in which the essays inform each other. This volume is based on contributions to the fourth Popular European Cinema Conference on Methods and Stars which had been formulated to attract researchers interested in elucidating the different ways in which stardom and its various cultural definitions, configurations and histories signify in European popular cinema. This book was appointed the Project of the Month by the Swedish Research Council in December 2007 in its capacity of a tribute to the importance of star studies and research in European cinema. First, the book expands on the seemingly contradictory question of why certain truly popular stars have become obliterated from he
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