ABSTRACT
The idea of the “movie star” might seem to be such a long-standing feature of film production that we can easily forget that stardom was in fact an early innovation of the Hollywood film studios. The “star” had to be invented as a way of marketing the feature film; as historians such as Richard DeCordova and Miriam Hansen1 have demonstrated, the film studios were initially resistant to naming their actors in publicity, mainly by reason of not wanting to pay higher salaries to workers who could, nevertheless, potentially draw audiences back to the cinema and thereby expand studio profits. Be that as it may, the star is now such a powerful tool for creating the sense of product differentiation vital to commodity culture that the international movement of stars allows for critics to assess the different meanings of a film as it travels through a variety of spheres of exhibition. Through the star, the critic can access the everyday languages through which we decide that stars have meaning and importance for us: they embody our conventionalized notions of beauty, wealth, behavior, fashion, but not always for the same reason in the different places in which stardom is embraced.
