Flavia Soubiran

PhD and lecturer in film studies at University of Montreal. She studied philosophy and film
studies in Brussels Free University. She just received her PhD in film studies at University of
Montreal. Her thesis research focuses on the aging star in the Hollywood Golden Age, from the
30's until the 60's. She published several articles on Bette Davis star career and persona, falling
star characters, fashion and costume designs in classical Hollywood. She is now working on
publishing her doctoral thesis and planning an international conference on film and philosophy in
Montreal.

Vanishing stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age:

A study of the aging star from the 50’ until today

With this paper, I propose to question the fading of Hollywood’s female stars from the
public’s eye. My study focuses on aging actresses imminent disappearance from the silver screen
and from an industry they helped build. They are cast out as obsolete, no longer capable of
meeting standards of fashion, youth and beauty. These vanishing stars lived through the decline
of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the emergence of television in American homes and the decline in
movie theatre attendance (Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Kim Novak and Natalie Wood in the 60’s).
A star of a disappearing Golden Age is also an aging figure, having marked the major
transformations in cinema’s history. I will focus on aging Hollywood stars active in the 50’s and
60’s as they foreshadow the decline of the studio system and re-enact the disappearance of silent
era stars. Jean Hagen’s famous performance in the role of Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain
(1952) and Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) represent classic
examples of this phenomenon. A variation on this idea can be seen in the elderly child-star played
by Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and other « Hagsploitations » of the 60’s.
These paradigmatic roles demonstrate how the Hollywood studio system exploited its aging stars,
acting out their inevitable disappearance, losing their star power, voluntarily retiring or being cast
out violently.
I intend to demonstrate how the figure of the aging star has re-emerged during the
transition from analog to digital cinema (Robin Wright in The Congress, 2013, Julianne Moore in
Maps to the Stars, 2014, Juliette Binoche in Clouds of Sils Maria, 2014). The aging star figure is
coming back to ritualize the emergence of digital, immersive, interactive cinema. Il is not only a
lamentation on a disappearing cinema, but it engages us to imagine a new future for the medium
of cinema, in a culture constantly tempted to contemplate it’s own demise. Between dream and
nightmare, the aging star survives in a world that’s not hers, misfit to a futuristic society, resigned
to live her memories over and over, immersed in the phantasmagoric world of cinema.
I will propose some preliminary conclusions on spectatorship and the disapearence of the
stars of our youth. Hollywood continues to portray a star’s passage from stardom to obscurity,
creating its own sub-genre : the melodrama of the falling star. This star figure symbolizes the
perpetual presence of the vanished, as it affects our lives and memories. Hollywood thus
capitalizes on fields of invisibility, zones of passage of the ages, silenced or caricatured, that call
for philosophical reflection and require our full attention. What is disappearing does not escape
us, but on the contrary is imposing reflection « and at the same time is making it possible to see a
new beauty in what is vanishing. » (Benjamin, 1969, 87)
Bibliographical references :

John Barth, « The Literature of Exhaustion », in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction,
New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984. Originally published in The Atlantic, Boston, August
1967.

Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View. How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960, Middletown,
Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

Karen Beckman, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism, Duke University Press, 2003.

Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, in Illuminations,
Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, Translated by Harry Zohn, New York,
Schocken Books, 1969.

Stanley Cavell,
- The World Viewed. Reflections on the ontology of film, Cambridge, Harvard University Press,
[1971] 1979.
- Contesting tears : The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, University of Chicago
Press, 1997.

Charlotte Chandler, The Girl Who Walked Home Alone, New York, Applause Theatre & Cinema
Books, 2007.

Bette Davis,
- The Lonely Life. An Autobiography, New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962.
- with Michael Herskowitz, This ‘N That, New York, Berkley Books, 1988.

Gilles Deleuze,
- Cinéma 2. L’image-temps, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1985.
- L’épuisé, postface à Quad, de Samuel Beckett, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1992.

Stars au féminin. Naissance, apogée et décadence du star-système, sous la direction de Gianluca

Farinelli et Jean-Loup Passek, Paris, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2000.

Lucy Fischer, Women and Film, Women & Literature New Series Volume 4, Edited by Janet
Todd, New York, Holmes & Meier, 1988.

Rashna Wadia Richards, Cinematic Flashes. Cinephilia and Classical Hollywood, Indiana
University Press, 2013.

Figuring Age : Women, Bodies, Generations, edited by Kathleen Woodward, Indianapolis,

Indiana University Press, 1999.