i very much appreciate jeff apfel's thoughtful and shrewd comments re: depp's
stardom, especially his summation:
 
 
>  I suspect, despite our artistic
> and spiritual pretensions, we are animal enough in our makeup that it is
> impossible to contain human sympathy to the screen, and that its spillover to
> non-formal considerations is just inevitable.  In trying to get rid of
> *celebrity*, one might well be forced to jettison the baby of human sympathy
> with the bathwater of odious stardom.
>
> Jeff Apfel
 
 
but this answer, which i find convincing, kinda forces the issue in a
slightly new and i think important direction . . . for if it's true that our
personal investment in the off-screen personae of movie stars is an integral
part of the kind of exchange that takes place between screen and viewer, then
how can i [we??] ever hope to get our students to respond to movies that have
totally unfamilair--not to say long dead or even foreign--casts . . .
increasingly i find that a crucial hook for student interest is the identify
of the "stars" -- and like a good academic i try very hard to wean them away
from this kind of investment in the film so that they can read it more
accurately and with greater disinterest . . . but jeff's comments make it
seem that this agenda is not only doomed to failure, it may itself be
academic in the worst sense: narrow, irrelevant, self-absorbed, ignorant of
the very issues that are really most important . . .
 
. . . so now i find myself wondering: do others on the list [among those who
teach] a) find that star power is an essential ingredient in student
response, and--if so, b) what can and/or should be done about it? . . . or
should we revise our theories of cinema to take stardom into account as being
at least as important as, say, montage?
 
. . . there may be some important larger issues lurking in these
ostensibly trivial questions
 
mike frank
 
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