Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Boys And Brokeback: American Attitudes Towards Gays, Todd Bruns

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

Movies, like television, literature and music, reflect a society’s standards, values, trends, and anxieties. The wave of alien invasion movies of the 1950s (Attack of the Flying Saucers, The Atomic Submarine, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and more) revealed the American psychological paranoia of the Cold War, just as numerous movies of the late 1970s/1980s that dwelt on Vietnam (Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, etc.) demonstrated a collective attempt to come to psychological grips with the loss of that war. As standards shift movies can become embarrassing reminders of past social norms that make contemporary viewers justifiably uneasy: …

Boys And Brokeback: American Attitudes Towards Gays, Todd Bruns

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

Movies, like television, literature and music, reflect a society’s standards, values, trends, and anxieties. The wave of alien invasion movies of the 1950s (Attack of the Flying Saucers, The Atomic Submarine, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and more) revealed the American psychological paranoia of the Cold War, just as numerous movies of the late 1970s/1980s that dwelt on Vietnam (Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, etc.) demonstrated a collective attempt to come to psychological grips with the loss of that war. As standards shift movies can become embarrassing reminders of past social norms that make contemporary viewers justifiably uneasy: …

Accelerated Culture: Exploring Time And Space In Cinema, Television And New Media In The Digital Age, Thomas J. Connelly

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to understand the impact of speed on the interrelation and the overlapping of the production and consumption of cinematic and televisual texts. It explores the immediacy of digital media and new economic processes, and how they are informing structures of perception, as well as lending themselves to new and different ways of seeing the moving image in the digital age. These visual expressions are evident in the changing perception of the long take; the increasing use of video gaming aesthetics and database narratives; new and variant forms of narrative and visual styles in television; and the speed …

Teaching Queer Cinema With Independent Media, Patricia White

Film & Media Studies Faculty Works

In lieu of an abstract, this is the article's introductory paragraph:

One of the most exciting dimensions of teaching film (and popular culture) is learning what students already know and then generating an informed and critical epistemology from the familiar. Teaching LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) representation in film and media presents rich opportunities to build on student familiarity — with such mainstream breakthroughs as Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2006) and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003-07) — and to formalize the knowledge and challenge the assumptions that students have about LGBT history, lives, and struggles for representation. …

Time In Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality In 21st Century Programming, Melissa R. Ames

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

This collection analyzes twenty-first-century American television programs that rely upon temporal and narrative experimentation. These shows play with time, slowing it down to unfold the narrative through time retardation and compression. They disrupt the chronological flow of time itself, using flashbacks and insisting that viewers be able to situate themselves in both the present and the past narrative threads. Although temporal play has existed on the small screen prior to the new millennium, never before has narrative time been so freely adapted in mainstream television. The essayists offer explanations for not only the frequency of time play in contemporary programming, …

Politics And Heidegger: Aristotle, Superman, And Žižek, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This essay discusses Heidegger's thinking on the political and technology in the context of metaphysics in an age that is increasingly directed to both technology and the imaginary or the virtual. The context of Aristotelian phronesis is traced back to Aristotle's youth in Macedonia and the circumstance of war and world conquest, to the allure of a comic book character (that would be the Action Comic's figure of Superman) and the cinematic seduction of a pair of eyeglasses to conclude with a review of Latour's network actants and Žižek on Marxism (and Occupy Wall Street).

Historical Accuracy And The Ira Over 70 Years Of Cinema, Eric Scott Elliott

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to examine how the Irish Republican Army has been represented in theatrical cinema since the 1930s. The goal is to demonstrate the necessity for historical accuracy in movies produced for public entertainment, which often neglect historical facts and circumstances in portraying an organization as controversial and complex as the IRA. This has been done by examining five movies produced for wide-distribution and comparing each to the detailed historical record. Upon analysis of these movies, it becomes clear that the films which are the most historically relevant are also the most powerful cinematic productions, both …

How One Writes, Makes, Markets A Movie And How An Audience Reads The Movie: Two Biographical Films Of Hitler As A Case Study, Nick Chi-Shu J. Yeh

CGU Theses & Dissertations

According to John Lukacs, German people's views on Hitler and Nazism once got examined right after the fall the Third Reich in the 1950s but this subject has lost its appeal since then. How do Germans nowadays, specifically those young ones raised in the "New Germany" after the fall of the Berlin Wall, think of Hitler and their country's Nazi legacy? This dissertation is to explore how six young Germans growing up in the new "unified Germany" interpret two films' representations of Hitler and Nazism.

Editor's Introduction: Playing For Keeps: Games And Cultural Resistance [Special Issue], Marc A. Ouellette, Jason Thompson

English Faculty Publications

This edition is as much about Game Studies as it about the games being studied. At its heart there are really two impulses behind the collection of critical thought we have been fortunate enough to gather for this issue of Reconstruction. First, there is the sense that games can’t do anything. Second, there is the sense that games don’t do anything. Their origin (and the underlying biases) makes these sentiments particularly intriguing. In the simplest terms, these premises delineate competing camps, as well. Roger Ebert notoriously asserts that video games will never be art (Ebert). Similarly, and yet quite differently, …

Monstrous Dialogues: The Host And South Korean Inverted Exile, James Lloyd Turner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bong Joon-ho‟s monster movie blockbuster, The Host (Gweomul, 2006), is the most commercially successful film in South Korean cinema history. The film‟s popularity and significance derive from its unearthing of the ambivalence concerning South Korea‟s rapid transformation from a rural dictatorship to an urban democracy with one of the strongest economies on the planet. This ambivalence is buried beneath a veneer of "progress" blanketing contemporary South Korea and constitutes a condition I call inverted exile. The Host explicitly engages life in inverted exile through my notion of aesthetic dialogue. Aesthetic dialogue, takes influence from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and …

Can You Believe She Did That?!:Breaking The Codes Of "Good" Mothering In 1970s Horror Films, Jessica Michelle Collard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The threats found in horror films change with time, each decade consisting of threats that were most frightening for the time period. Horror film scholars, such as Andrew Tudor, determined that in 1970s horror films the threat has migrated from external forces into the home and the family. Invading aliens and monsters were thrown replaced by psychosis and evil children. This notion of making the familiar unfamiliar and threatening is paralleled in concerns addressed during the second-wave of feminism; women were making the normative and familiar idea of mother unfamiliar as they migrated from the private and into the public …

The Happiest Place On Earth - The Microbudget Model As A Means To An American National Cinema, John Goshorn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Happiest Place on Earth is a feature-length film written, directed, and produced by John Goshorn as part of the requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in Film & Digital Media from the University of Central Florida. The project aims to challenge existing conventions of the American fiction film on multiple levels – aesthetic, narrative, technical, and industrial – while dealing with a distinctly American subject and target audience. These challenges were both facilitated and necessitated by the limited resources available to the production team and the academic context of the production. This thesis is a record of …

When The Alligator Called To Elijah: A Handcrafted Exploration Of The Digital Moving Image, Katherine Shults

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When the Alligator Called to Elijah is a feature-length video conceptualized and constructed by Kate Shults in partial fulfillment of the requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema from the University of Central Florida. The video is the result of an evolving exploration of the aesthetic capabilities of the digital image using Flip Video cameras, found footage and Final Cut Pro. Though originating as an experiment, When the Alligator Called to Elijah became a creation of motion collage with very specific production parameters. This thesis is a record of this video’s progression, from development to …

A Blue Flower: The Development Of A Personal Documentary, Nils Taranger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A Blue Flower is a feature-length documentary film by Nils Taranger, made as part of the requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema from the University of Central Florida. The film focuses on the director’s journey to find healing, both physically and emotionally. Following the guidelines of UCF’s program, Nils produced the film on a microbudget (under $50,000) level. The majority of filming took place in Florida with only a one or two person crew. This thesis is a record of the film’s progression from development to picture lock, in preparation for distribution

Founding Fathers On Screen: The Changing Relationship Between History And Film, Jennifer Lynn Garrott

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Rhetorics Of Empire: The Falangist Discourse Of War (1939-1943), M. Elena Aldea Agudo

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) a mix of right-wing ideologies existed among the Francoist forces. In sharp contrast with the Republican forces, the Francoist insurgents were successful in banding together despite their ideological differences. However, in the postwar era, this relative unity gave way to a struggle among the different ideological positions, each striving to impose its agenda for the new State. The party Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (FET y de las JONS) assumed power, but was not entirely successful in advancing its totalitarian project, which it had inherited from the prewar …

Translation And Distortion Of Linguistic Identities In Sinophone Cinema: Diverging Images Of The ‘Other, Henry Leperlier

Books/Book Chapters

In today’s globalized market, Asian films are being increasingly exported; often,

multilingual movies deal with more complex societal issues and catch the interest of

a foreign audience interested in having an open door, one might say multiple doors,

into another society. The nearly complete lack of a system enabling such an audience

to be made aware of the complex multilingual and multilingual characters in such

movies ends up providing a distorted and simplified view of Chinese, Taiwanese,

Hong Kong and Singaporean societies as reflected in its cinemas.

This chapter examines all the resulting issues and cultural misunderstandings that can occur …

An Opposing Self, Christine M. Gamache

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

People have always been both frightened and fascinated by the unknown, and themes touching on the existence of things beyond human understanding have longevity in the literary arena as well as in popular culture. One such theme is that of the doppelgänger, or double, which has been around for centuries but was first made popular by Jean-Paul’s (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) work Hesperus in 1795. Due to a resurgence in the nineteenth century in the popularity of Gothic literature, doppelgängers, or variations of this double motif, found their way into some of the most famous works of literature …

Boys And Brokeback: American Attitudes Towards Gays, Todd Bruns

Todd A. Bruns

Movies, like television, literature and music, reflect a society’s standards, values, trends, and anxieties. The wave of alien invasion movies of the 1950s (Attack of the Flying Saucers, The Atomic Submarine, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and more) revealed the American psychological paranoia of the Cold War, just as numerous movies of the late 1970s/1980s that dwelt on Vietnam (Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, etc.) demonstrated a collective attempt to come to psychological grips with the loss of that war. As standards shift movies can become embarrassing reminders of past social norms that make contemporary viewers justifiably uneasy: …

That's A Wrap! The Organizational Culture And Characteristics Of Successful Film Crews, Lisa C. Cook

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study seeks to determine through survey research what characteristics film production crews possess that makes them so successful as an organization. The factors of age, gender, years of professional experience and education level were tested for their significance on how the respondents view their culture. Hofstede's six dimensions of organizational culture survey questions were rewritten to be applicable to the freelance film crew sample. The presentation of findings focuses on the resultant organizational profile of a film production crew, the workplace values of this group and the influence that the education level of the participants had on responses. The …