JOURNAL OF AUDIOVISUAL ESSAYS

SCREEN STARS DICTIONARY

The Screen Stars Dictionary begins as a joint project between Tecmerin. Journal of Audiovisual Essays and Ariel Avissar. Inspired conceptually by Ariel’s own project, the TV Dictionary, we aim to establish the defining characteristics of specific stars with a single, polysemic word that crystallizes his/her/their oeuvre

Our goal is to create a diverse space for intercultural and aesthetic exchange, which covers major Hollywood figures but also expands centrifugally to other locations, (trans)national industries, and ways of understanding stardom in all types of screens.

Above all, we hope you enjoy the featured videos; they are thought-provoking and highly entertaining. Our deepest gratitude to all contributors for their willingness to participate and their commitment to share their talents and insights.

Call for Contributions

We would like to invite others to join this project and contribute to the Screen Stars Dictionary. If you are interested in submitting a proposal, send an email with your idea to both Ariel Avissar (arielavissar24@gmail.com) and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega (vrortega@hum.uc3m.es), the collection’s editors.

This will be the process:

1. Send us your proposal; your video should attempt to capture the defining characteristics of a film or TV star, from any nationality, using a single word, combining diverse definitions of this word with a single or multiple clips of the featured star. Videos should ideally be no longer than four minutes, and can be in any language, with English and/or Spanish subtitles

2. Ariel and Vicente will give you feedback

3. Send revision(s) and receive feedback until accepted, via google drive or wetransfer (file size should be under 500MB).

4. Once accepted, we will send you a short video intro to add at the beginning of your piece; additionally, the video credits should include all media sources used in the video, and the source(s) of the dictionary definitions used.

5. Once you add the intro and credits, submit the final video. It will be uploaded to Tecmerin’s Vimeo account and published in the Screen Stars Dictionary Vimeo collection (see here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/10404168).

6. Ariel and Vicente will curate a selection out of the videos added to the collection. This curated selection will be published in future issues of Tecmerin

SCREEN STARS DICTIONARY (Issue 15 – June 2025) – Aging Stars – Fading to Dust or Shining as Stardust?

“Aging Stars – Fading to Dust or Shining as Stardust?”, a special issue of the Screen Stars Dictionary, curated by Barbara Zecchi, along with our regular editors, explores the paradox of the intersection of age with stardom: actors are immortalized on screen, yet their bodies are subject to time. Aging stars embody this tension, facing both the camera’s relentless gaze and cultural pressures to defy age. In a media landscape dominated by the cult of youth, especially in Hollywood and the Global North, aging is often framed as decline—something to resist, hide, or erase. Yet, as this issue shows, aging can also be a space for resistance, transformation, and reinvention. 

The videoessays collected here engage aging stars who variously conform to, complicate, or subvert the demands of successful aging. The seven contributions traverse regions, generations, and star personae: Javier Bardem’s outsider position resists easy age categorization while engaging global struggles (Vicente Rodríguez Ortega); Seizo Fukumoto’s fase becomes a site of expressive endurance in late-career Japanese cinema (Lindsay Nelson); Jessica Lange’s nostalgia conjures bittersweet longing for bygone eras as an aesthetic strategy (Flavia Soubiran); Diana Ross is still giving face, commanding presence and glamour well into her 80s without capitulating to invisibility (Jaap Kooijman); Isabella Rossellini embraces reinvention, affirming aging as feminist agency (Barbara Zecchi); Arnold Schwarzenegger embodies back—the iconic return—as an ageless persona enacting the imperative of eternal youth through perpetual comebacks (Daniel O’Brien); and Ana Torrent’s enduring spirit remains anchored in the hypnotic gaze that has marked her from childhood to adulthood (Celia Sainz). Together, these entries complicate the binary of fading or shining, revealing aging stardom as a complex, multifaceted phenomenon that resists simple scripts.

SCREEN STARS DICTIONARY (Issue 14 – December 2024)

SCREEN STARS DICTIONARY (Issue 13 – June 2024)

SCREEN STARS DICTIONARY (ISSUE 12 – December 2023)

SCREEN STARS DICTIONARY (Issue 11 – June 2023)