HNC Photography, IFC - Coursework, Introduction to Film Culture Blog, Part two - Love and Lust, Research & Reflection IFC
IFC Part 2: Love and Lust
Research Point 1
Movie stars are what most of the time drive the audience to see a movie and the modern world we are exposed to stars 27/7 365 days a year, through social media. Whereas only a few years back out exposure to these stars was much less. However, it has always been exposure to the media that drives audiences to the cinema.
As I have briefly mentioned above, movie stars now have a huge presence on social media – Facebook, Twitter, etc. And we can see in real time what is happening in their personal and professional lives. This is on top of the traditional interviews with magazines and television and planned appearances.
This exposure to social media is much freer than that the exposure that that stars of the days of the studio system had here the star was the pawn of the Studio who were told who and when to speak to the press, where they could go and had the private lives kept very many under wraps.
Yes, there was gossip column in those days that brought the private lives of the stars into the public domain – and it ways it did help promote a film, e.g. the affair of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra, but it wasn’t always as a positive. Today celebrities can “tweet” 140 characters or a photograph and any letting us into their world.
Celebrities are also out there endorse products some of which are related to the movies they are in e.g. Daniel Craig and Pierce Brosnan were the faces for Omega watches, the watch of choice for James Bond. However, not all these endorsement are movie related – currently, I can’t walk around Hong Kong without seeing Hugh Jackman as the face of Mont Blanc fountain pens or a four-story tall poster of John Travolta telling me he uses a Breitling. And further back over the years we have Elizabeth Taylor as the face of White Diamond perfume – which from the Elizabeth Arden is not the brand I would have associated with someone like Liz Taylor; Chanel I could believe more.
There is also a huge difference in acting on the stage than for a movie – a stage actor has to be larger than life every action needs to be visible to the who audience. Whereas with Movie acting the is no immediate audience there are camera providing close up and microphones to pick up the dialogue.
In a way, if you were to watch the same performance even by the same actor of the same role on the stage or screen, it could feel like the stage role was more or a caricature of the character. On stage, he has to rely on bold movements whereas in a movie the actor and merely in some cases just act with a facial expression, act more in a natural way.
This natural form of acting that is allowed through movies – allow the audiences to connect with the actors on a different level they look and feel more like us. Even if the person is playing someone we can never be; we can still empathise and feel what they feel and understand their emotions.
Finally, the theatre is live there are no second takes. Cinema you can repeat and repeat and repeat until everything is perfect and no one would ever know. The audiences in 1959 had no idea that Marilyn Monroe dozens of takes to get a simple screen correct in “Some Like it Hot” – if that were in the theatre she would have been exposed. And in this way, Cinema can turn a mediocre actor into a star, where in the theatre you need to know your craft.