Sharon's Noranian Turn: Stardom, Embodiment, and Language in Philippine Cinema

Abstract

Artist Nick Joaquin vividly describes an era when the decline of the great Philippine film studios spawned an unbridled "star system still in apogee."In the 1960s, star worship fuels the popular cinema and feeds "the avarice of the independent producer."The middleclass lament that mainstream Filipino movies are hardly "quality" pictures, Joaquin writes impatiently, misses the point: "The movie fans crowd to a local movie not because they expect a sensible story or expert acting or even good entertainment"; instead, they go to the movies to see the stars they adore-action film kings Fernando Poe Jr. and Joseph Estrada, glamour goddesses Amalia Fuentes and Susan Roces."Our movie idols remain idolized, whatever the quality of their vehicles, as long as they remain impossibly young, impossibly glamorous, impossibly beautiful" 1 (figure 1).This is a form of star worship that, in its emphasis on an unrealizable world, ends by preventing audience identification.The spectatorial pleasures offered by the star system of the early to mid-1960s, Joaquin argues, are not driven by identification but by wonder, idolatry practiced from afar.In many ways, the superstardom of Nora Aunor represents both a departure from and an intensification of the star system of that decade.Arriving on the movie scene from nationwide success

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