Lecture 7 - Celebrity Culture

Celebrity Culture:

Jewish husband and agreed to spy on the Nazis using her position / access to important people internationally

She helped mount a production in Marseille to give herself and her like-minded friends a reason for being there. She helped quite a lot of people who were in danger from the Nazis get visas and passports to leave France. Later in 1941, she and her entourage went to the French colonies in North Africa; the stated reason was Baker's health (since she really was recovering from another case of pneumonia) but the real reason was to continue helping the Resistance. From a base in Morocco, she made tours of Spain and pinned notes with the information she gathered inside her underwear (counting on her celebrity to avoid a strip search) 

Beyoncé Knowles has portrayed Baker on various accounts throughout her career. During the 2006 Fashion Rocks show, Knowles performed "Dejá Vu" in a revised version of the Danse banane costume. In Knowles's video for "Naughty Girl", she is seen dancing in a huge champagne glass á La Baker. In I Am... Yours: An Intimate Performance at Wynn Las Vegas, Beyonce lists Baker as an influence of a section of her live show.

Reclaiming of racial stereotyping/terms of abuse?

operated at 1451 Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood, California between October 3, 1942 and November 22, 1945 (Thanksgiving Day) as a club offering food, dancing and entertainment for servicemen, usually on their way overseas. Even though the majority of visitors were U.S servicemen, the Canteen was open to servicemen of allied countries as well as women in all branches of service. The serviceman's ticket for admission was his uniform and everything at the Canteen was free of charge.

Glamorous stars volunteered to wait on tables, cook in the kitchen and clean up. One of the highlights of a serviceman was to dance with one of the many female celebrities volunteering

She starred as herself in the movie about the canteen. at the Canteen.

Warhol s work on celebrities looks at them as products of consumer culture like his cambells soup tins- celebrities are there to be consumed.

Hollywood seen as churning out stars= money

World of music and the visual collide- good looking, he’s an actor, he can dance he signs up for national service- he’s a superhero

Larger than life existence which seems to anticipate his early death cf Jackson.

Factory churns out products

Collection of outsiders or subcultural characters whom he ‘makes’ into stars by filming, photographing and being ‘seen’ on the NY art scene in 19 62- 68. Parties drugs and sex.

Celebration of alternative/art/bohemian lifestyle which becomes rock and roll.

Opposite of clean cut image of Elvis.

Beckham/Camilla parker Bowles lookalikes

Many images of sexual/comic nature

Uses the tropes of paparazzi long lens photography

Out of focus foreground suggests spied moments

Grainy b&W codes signify press intrusion (no use of flash)

vJohn Stezaker’s work re-examines the various relationships to the photographic image: as documentation of truth, purveyor of memory, and symbol of modern culture. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades’. Through his elegant juxtapositions, Stezaker adopts the content and contexts of the original images to convey his own witty and poignant meanings. 

How do we ‘keep in touch with celebrities lives?

Whereas untill recently we might have had to wait for the magazine to come out now we have  direct unmediated link to the stars-

This lack of mediation means that stars often make their own PR disasters

President Kennedy's last seconds traveling through Dealey Plaza were recorded on silent 8 mm film for the 26.6 seconds before, during, and immediately following the assassination. This famous film footage was taken by garment manufacturer and amateur cameraman Abraham Zapruder, in what became known as the Zapruder film. Frame enlargements from the Zapruder film were published by Life magazine shortly after the assassination. The footage was first shown publicly as a film at the trial of Clay Shaw in 1969, and on television in 1975.[88] According to the Guinness Book of World Records, an arbitration panel ordered the US government to pay $615,384 per second of film to Zapruder's heirs for giving the film to the National Archives. The complete film, which lasts for 26 seconds, was valued at $16 million.

Handout:

This lecture provides a short history of celebrity through photography, film and television of the 20th and 21st Century.. It maps the shift from the Victorian celebrity, who were men and women of the arts; to the Hollywood Era; through Andy Warhols Factory and into the contemporary celebrity where the line between Joe public and star, between fan and idol is easily crossed, or even erased.
In doing so it aims to lead into an examination of contemporary ‘liquid’ identity as Zygmunt Bauman describes it, which is facilitated by technology and social media.
The lecture also touches on the entry of the politician into the celebrity market and aims to present this as a side effect of our increasingly ‘spectacular’ society.
The camera and the eye are always trained on the famous. Their movements are mapped. Papparazzi will stalk celebrities with telephoto zoom lenses to capture their private moments and with flashes to memorialise their public displays and promotions. Perhaps celebrities represent the vanguard of the surveillance society , where ones anonymity is surrendered to the benefits of the cybernetic consumer culture. Our desires are mapped , recorded and thereby become the material for more precise and directed appeals than mass advertising could ever achieve.
Despite their regular protests about the invasion of privacy, celebrities are complicit in being surveilled and monitored: it is part of their job. The camera thus becomes their mirror and the celebrity’s cultural reflection via the camera is internalised into celebrity culture itself. It is a form of narcissism, an obsession with image and the body, and concern over presentation and representation that pervades a city such as Los Angeles. The ripples of this reflecting pool widen outwards to the audiences themselves into a much more expansive internalisation of the look and the desire to be looked at. In the era of new media where blogs and webcams spar for our affections with film and television, the reflections of the private self sometimes become the material for the individuals desire to be recognised in the public world- to be famous.
(Marshall: 2006:549)

Further Research

• Lady Gagas meat dress http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11297832
  
• Bordo, Susan (1990) Material Girl: the Effacements of Postmodern Culture
  
• Rahman, M () Is straight the new Queer? David Beckham and the dialectics of Celebrity
  
• Street, J () The Celebrity Politician: Political Style and Popular Culture
  
• Johnson, R () Exemplary Differences: Mourning and not mourning a Princess
  
• Hinerman,S () ‘I’ll be there with you’: Fans, Fantasy and the figure of Elvis
  
• Debord, Guy (1967) Society of the Spectacle
  
• Baumann, Zygmunt (2004) Identity
  Those in bold can be found in The Celebrity Culture Reader (2006) edited by P. David Marshall, Routledge
  Below Baron Wolman Groupies