Chapter 1 - Origin and establishment of the Argentine star system

Summary

Cinema is a product of the emergence of modern life (Benet 2004: 17–34). The mass migration of people from rural to urban areas at the turn of the century brought with it the need to regulate time, space and labour, which promoted new forms of entertainment and leisure (Charney and Schwartz 1995: 3). The development of a mass culture came alongside the fascination for new technologies and modes of representation. What started as a medium to capture time and movement was soon transformed into an art form that had to negotiate its place among – and in connection to – other popular cultural practices, such as theatre, music and fine art. Longer film strips enabled the creation of more complex stories and the configuration of an institutional mode of representation (Bürch 1991). The turn to fiction as a leading film product (Thompson and Bordwell 2019: 20), and the need to increase the respectability of film, generated a discourse on acting in film that heightened its status to that of the already highly regarded stage acting (Shail 2019: 3). The development of a general cinematic language included the exploration of continuity effects and the regular use of close-up shots where facial expression started to prevail over physical gesticulation to enhance argument development (Gubern 1994). As has been demonstrated by various scholars (deCordova 1991; Shail 2019; Lusnich 1996), all these formal changes, in serving to give film performers more visibility, are part of the foundations of a ‘star system’.

The star phenomenon was not only an outcome of new representational regulations, aesthetic improvements and cutting-edge discourses on acting and art quality, but also of the professionalisation of the production and consumption processes of motion pictures. In the first decade of the twentieth century, different film industries started to flourish across the globe. The United States became dominant, as it had the largest market, with more theatres per capita than any other country (Thompson and Bordwell 2019: 17). It was there where film production companies realised that the star image was an important source of economic value (McDonald 2000: 118). The shifted status of film as commodity meant that the filmed body was ‘established as a site of textual productivity’ (deCordova 1991: 50), not ‘just a source of labour but also a form of capital’ (McDonald 2000: 10).