Between stage and screen: female European stars of early feature films in Australasia

ABSTRACT In the thriving, import-dependent cinema market of pre-First World War Australasia, the transition to multireel narrative feature films facilitated the rise of a movie star culture based on crossover European theatre stars and film actors who exemplify Andrew Shail’s definition of a star as a celebrity whose fame is commodified as a production value. From 1908 through 1915, local distributors like T. J. West and Cosens Spencer imported European features in large numbers and with very little lag time, relying on the fame and talent of the featured stars to convert exhibitors and viewers to the longer, more expensive format and to make cinemagoing a high-status social event. This article draws on the Australasian media coverage of three representative stars – Sarah Bernhardt (France), Asta Nielsen (Denmark/Germany), and Francesca Bertini (Italy) — and several of their most prominent films to demonstrate how the newspaper marketing of such stars and the European narrative features in which they appeared contributed to boosting the prestige and aesthetic legitimacy of the cinema and developing a movie star system in Australia and New Zealand, well in advance of the emergence of a film star culture in the US. The gradual shift in public interest from crossover theatre stars like Bernhardt to purely cinematic stars like Bertini, by way of a liminal figure like Nielsen, illuminates this turn and the strategic marketing that helped bring it about.