Abstract
Casting From Forest Lawn Cemetery: Re-Animating Dead Screen Stars
Lisa Bode
During the 1990s, with the pervasiveness of what Lev Manovich has called a computer-driven 'remix culture' (2001, 2006), footage of dead stars such as Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, and John Wayne began to be repurposed via editing or compositing for advertising and guest appearances in films and TV shows. Despite controversy this has continued into the 2000s. It is now also possible to bestow performance footage or digital likenesses of celebrity personas with new gestures and expressions that they themselves did not generate before the camera while alive. I call such images 're-animations'.
Although intellectual property law has emerged as an important issue in the future production and control of re-animations (Beard, 1993, 2001), legality is only one aspect. Others are suggested by the fevered speculation and commentary about, and responses to, digital reanimations of deceased actors, stars and celebrities in the English-speaking news, entertainment and technology media. This media discourse rarely mentions IP law. It is ambivalent at best, mixing fascination, fear and distaste, signaled by phrases like 'grave robbing', 'raising the dead', and 'exploitative and perverse'.
If urban English-speaking audiences are accustomed to watching films and listening to music recorded by those who are now dead, what lies at the heart of these fascinated and fearful responses to the digital re-animation of dead stars? What are the aesthetic, cultural and ethical issues around re-animation that media producers must address in their work and its promotion, and how are they seen to address them? This paper will canvass these issues in part through a focus on Marlon Brando's animation as Superman's father, Jor-El, in Superman Returns (Singer, 2006), suggesting that the topic might be approached from a combination of Film and Animation Studies with additional input from Anthropology.
