日本の近代性とアメリカの映画スター――クララ・バウのイメージ流通をめぐって

抄録

The permeation of American film star images in Japan since the mid-Taisho era has been largely ignored in cinema history. This is partly because film scholars in Western countries and Japan have made an a-priori distinction between Japanese cinema and Western cinema, and partly because both have subordinated non-filmic discourses to privileged filmic texts. In this essay I discuss how American films are at once commodities and meanings, circulated and related to other types of discourses in a specific historical context. ‘Film star’ is significant in that it mediates between the industry and consumers as a complex representation of actor, character, and persona in filmic and non-filmic discourses in the capitalist system. The first section of this essay presents an overview of the situation in which star images played a role in changing the form of communication and cultural values and meanings in the 1920s. This follows with discussion of how the circulation of Clara Bow as a progressive but ambivalent image, produced by the Hollywood system, de-stabilized aesthetics, knowledge, and morality in relation to so-called “modan” while invoking forces to fix cultural meanings.