Abstract:

This paper describes how actors are able to articulate complex assertions via their performances, and argues that our seemingly instinctive inclination toward the evaluation of acting can be understood as a tacit acknowledgement and appreciation of these embodied suppositions. With star acting in particular, we can identify the creative mobilization of recurring elements that form a conceptual nucleus, which serves to organize various discursive clusters surrounding an actor’s work. These core principles can be referred to as performative indices, and our interest in their manifestation is twofold: we appreciate the particularities of how a performer enacts these performative indices creatively, and the more skilled performers use them to make assertions regarding the larger beliefs, conditions, desires, ethical tenets, ideologies, problems and tensions that their stardom dramatizes. To become cognizant of such underlying conceptual dimensions of screen acting, then, is to recognize that our interest in actors’ mimetic capacities and/or their cultural connotations as stars is neither axiomatic nor exclusive.

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