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Star Studies in Transition: Notes on Experimental Videographic Approaches to Film Performance Catherine Grant (bio) When I see Marilyn Monroe I catch my breath . . . —Richard Dyer, Stars So what’s a scholar-fan to do? —Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon In his 1995 book The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, Robert B. Ray writes that, if “instead of thinking about the avant-garde as only hermetic self-expression, we began to imagine it as a field of experimental work waiting to be used . . . then, we might begin to apply certain avant-garde devices for the sake of knowledge.”1 The first video published in the inaugural issue of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies was an experimental audiovisual work very much in the spirit of Ray’s challenge, one produced by a foundational scholar in cinema studies who is also (and not coincidentally) a celebrated avant-garde filmmaker. That video was Laura Mulvey’s (primarily) visual analysis of a fragment of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953), the beginning of its song-and-dance duet “Two Little Girls from Little [End Page 148] Rock,” performed by Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe.2 Mulvey worked through a “mechanical ballet” aesthetic, which she knew to be somewhat “evocative” of the practices of the Austrian experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold.3 She later reflected on her process: “Originally, perhaps when I started doing these kinds of analysis, I wanted to find the temporalities of the avant-garde within Hollywood cinema. [But] out of fictional performance, moments of emotion and something ineffable [inhabit] the image and [overwhelm] it.”4 Elsewhere she wrote, “Before I had ever thought of re-editing the [Gentlemen Prefer Blondes] sequence, I had watched it many times, fascinated by Marilyn’s ability to hover between movement and stillness and the way that the pauses, slow motion and repetitions of delayed cinema simply, in this case, materialized something that was already there. I realized that my attention had been literally caught as the figure moved into a fleeting moment of stasis; and that I paused the film to catch the high point within this unfolding of a gesture.”5 In reworking the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes fragment (audio)visually, this research eloquently responded to both the ineffable and the expressive as they alternately inhabit Marilyn Monroe’s gestures in time and movement. In materializing something that was already there through the reproduction of exploratory techniques of replay and pause, Mulvey succeeds in creating an analytic and affectual artifact that performatively stages and invites an experience of increasingly close and sustained attention to it. Through her time-based segmentation and animation of Monroe’s bodily movement the (otherwise optically unconscious) “mediality of gesture” and “interrelations of the cinematic and performance” become more visible, or salient.6 Mulvey’s experimental video thus repurposes Monroe’s star performance to inform and instruct a [End Page 149] sequential understanding—“in media res”—of its detailed workings, in ways that can be, and indeed have been (re)articulated and added to verbally later.7 Originally made in the late 1990s, before the appearance of YouTube and about a decade before the publication of Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (her 2006 book in part about the forms of “delayed cinema” that her video explored and enacted), Mulvey’s audiovisual work on Monroe (which she used to illustrate many of her presentations on the performer) might lay good claim to being among the first instances of academic videographic star studies.8 Yet interpreting it as such is entirely dependent on the context in which one encounters the work, given that it is unencumbered (as a stand-alone artifact, at least) by a conventional explanatory framework or apparatus. In this respect, free from credits or academic markings, it looks and sounds exactly like an avant-garde artwork that one might chance upon in a gallery rather than one fueled at all by scholarly intentions. What is more, its author has described part of her video’s purpose as a “tribute to the perfection” of Monroe’s performance, a rhetorical move that may also remind us of some of the sensibilities...
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