Banfield, Russell (2025) 'Starring' Sterling Hayden and Angie Dickinson: approaching star studies through found footage creative practice. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.
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Abstract
My practice-led research project makes an original contribution to the academic field of star studies primarily through the creation of two short found footage films focusing on two minor Hollywood stars, Sterling Hayden and Angie Dickinson, who have been neglected in scholarly work. Through the close focus on, and re-use of, footage of Hayden and Dickinson, my creative-critical research has resulted in a range of insights about stardom, cinephilia, genre and gender. I discuss these insights as well as my methods in a written exegesis which attempts to articulate the specific interaction at play in my work between practice and theory, and further reflect on the value of contributing to star studies through found footage practice. Central to found footage filmmaking is the relationship between the filmmaker, or in my case the research practitioner, and the footage used. This inevitably personal aspect means that my project is informed not only by “film history,” but also by my film history, by my memories of the films and actors I appropriate in the processes of my research. My two short found footage films, The Drowned Man (on Hayden, 17 mins) and The Woman in the Yellow Dress (on Dickinson, 20 mins), are inspired, then, by the kinds of subjective experiences that Paul Willemen called “cinephiliac moments,” a concept accounting for the fetishistic relation between viewer, in this case me, and specific moments in film. Through such moments, in my films, I construct two imagined narratives about Hayden and Dickinson, collecting footage of each actor from numerous screen performances, and editing these sequences together using methods familiar to film analysis – matching plot, costume, location, gesture. Both narratives are pastiches – of film noir and the TV movie, respectively – that call into question the conventions and representations of Hollywood narratives, the representation of masculinity and the role of women, through critical interventions of juxtaposition, détournement, and compilation. What emerges out of these practices, which I contextualise and explore in the written exegesis, is both a commentary on Hayden and Dickinson within the context of Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s, and a personal reflection on cinephilia and masculinity.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Copyright Holders: | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who asserts his/her right to be known as such according to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. No dealing with the thesis contrary to the copyright or moral rights of the author is permitted. |
| Depositing User: | Acquisitions And Metadata |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Feb 2025 15:30 |
| Last Modified: | 04 May 2025 01:58 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/54991 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.18743/PUB.00054991 |
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