7 - A Star is Drawn: Media Hybridity and Ordinary Cinephilia in La Passion de Dora

Summary

In April 1948, readers of the popular French fan magazine Ciné-Miroir were introduced to a new starlet, Dora Grey (nee Denise Gillard), a 19-year-old fashion model who had been cast in the forthcoming film Meurtre au music-hall (Murder at the Music Hall), to be shot in the Paris studios of Osiris Films and on location on the Cote d’Azur. Unlike other actresses whose pictures graced the pages of Ciné-Miroir, however, Dora Grey never actually existed. Or rather, she was the fictional protagonist of the ‘roman en images’ (novel in images) La Passion de Dora, Starlett audacieuse (The Passion of Dora, Audacious Starlet), a serialised comic written by Gerard Heliotte and illustrated by ‘Gal’, which ran in the weekly magazine until July 1948. Over the course of fifteen issues, La Passion de Dora offered Ciné-Miroir readers a genre-bending narrative that combined elements of melodrama, adventure story and gangster film. Week by week, the backstage saga of a young woman's efforts to make it in the movies took twists and turns involving professional and personal rivalries, attempted murder, kidnapping and transvestism, all told in an innovative style mixing images and text.

This chapter investigates La Passion de Dora from a number of angles. It first situates it within the context of the movie magazine in which it appeared, comparing and contrasting it with regular features of Ciné-Miroir that addressed readers through a combination of words and images. Next, it considers it as an example of the ‘drawn novels’ that were popular in women's romance magazines in the immediate postwar period. Finally, it discusses La Passion de Dora as an informal pedagogical tool that took readers behind the scenes to show them the mechanics of filmmaking and provide a playfully reflexive explication of the promotion and publicity methods by which stars were manufactured and marketed to French audiences, a process in which Ciné-Miroir itself is seen to play an active role. In line with recent scholarship on postwar French fan magazines, I suggest that La Passion de Dora was an innovative example of media hybridity that contributed to the formation of an ‘ordinary cinephilia’ among the readers of Ciné-Miroir, simultaneously entertaining them and expanding their knowledge of the cinema so as to make them more expert viewers of films and more expert readers of fan magazines.