Мери Пикфорд и Холивуд: живот као симулакрум
Mary Pickford and Hollywood: Lifa as a Simulacrum

Summary/Abstract: / Mary Pickford was the first world superstar and the first actress to achieve international fame. She was one of the creators of the silent film acting language. She developed an acting technique based on minimalism and simplicity, without losing any strength in expression or emotion. A new film language thus emerged, a physical language, based on signs instead of words. Despite her tendency toward realism in the film, in the real life she had to “play” the characters from the big screen. The Hollywood marketing was trying to make the audience believe that she was actually playing herself, that she herself was this Cinderella who had escaped poverty and had made her dream come true. Baudrillard’s thesis, asserting that the boundary between art and reality faded out entirely the two having collapsed in a universal simulacrum, is evident here. Once the audience started to believe in Mary Pickford’s eternal youth, they became merciless. They were no longer interested in any of her other accomplishments, nor in what she was really like, in what the truth or reality was.

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