Digital Commons Network^™

Alianzas Antimodernas: Estudios Del Cine Español Del Proceso 15m, Pedro Cabello Del Moral

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anti-Modern Alliances: Studies of Spanish Cinema of the 15M Process mobilizes decolonial theory to shed new light upon the politics of the 15M (or Indignados) movement and its visual culture. It tackles anti-modern critiques as embodied in film characters who have been traditionally relegated to the margins of modernity’s grand narratives. The research corpus encompasses a diverse body of works –documentaries, fiction films, activist video essays and their paratexts, which I critically interrogate in dialogue with contemporary feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, anti-neoliberal and anti-ableist debates. Thus, the dissertation examines the methods by which audiovisual works from the past ten years have …

Looking For A Better Chair: The L Word And Learning How To Sit, Beans Fernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the 20 years since the initial airing of Showtime’s The L Word, the series has garnered a massive following among the sapphic and queer community and has cemented itself as a staple of queer media canon. Beyond the basic queer plotlines, though, The L Word captures lesbian and queer identity, politics, and livelihoods while using a seemingly superficial medium to portray queer bodies in a way that brings it to mainstream and cisheteronormative culture. Further, queer media like The L Word is able to guide members of the LGBTQ community into a queer consciousness and existence.

Desire Lines: An Annotated Screenplay, Alexandra Tydings

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores under theorized questions of power, sexuality, and gender on the film set by analyzing the role of the Intimacy Coordinator (IC), a recent arrival in that space. A film set has its own culture, built from conventions, rituals, and hierarchies. The work of the IC occurs at the nexus of some of the most entrenched and invisible of these dynamics, including gender roles, bodily autonomy, and the power to consent. The author, having worked professionally as an actress, a director, and most recently an Intimacy Coordinator in film and television, now turns to feminist and queer theory, …

Authenticity In Fashion And Beauty: Influencer Marketing And The Development Of Parasocial Relationships On Social Media, Catherine Goodheart

Student Theses and Dissertations

Social media influencers are more accessible than celebrities, making their audience form strong connections with them through their niche content. The parasocial relationship formed between influencers and their followers through the followers' media literacy of the influencer’s authenticity enables influencers to market themselves promoting products; without a perceived authenticity, a parasocial relationship will struggle to form. This parasocial relationship is typically to generate profit for the influencer, as many influencers are paid to promote and advertise products specific to their niche(s) on their profiles or on the brand’s profiles. A media analysis was used to study 5 beauty and fashion …

Chemical Meadows, Nate Dorr

Theses and Dissertations

Chemical Meadows correlates water chemistry and photochemistry in New Jersey’s Meadowlands. A vast marshland transformed by industry and environmental contamination, the Meadowlands today are home to seven Superfund sites. By bathing 16mm film in contaminated waterways, sensitive photochemistry reveals hidden histories.

Container Film, Dena Kopolovich

Theses and Dissertations

Container Film is an experimental nonfiction short film that explores the theme of carrying. Drawing inspiration from a blend of anthropological, religious, and artistic sources, the film is guided by an unknown narrator who contemplates the origins of humanity. Unlike conventional storytelling, the narrator’s uncertainty and inner dialogue punctuate the narrative, challenging a traditional linear structure. Jumping between diverse thoughts, she resists depicting human history with a singular hero or linear trajectory. Visually, the film unfolds through vivid tableaux vivants, dance sequences, and curious object arrangements, illustrating the subtle relationship between human cognition and materiality. Through its nuanced, tactile approach, …

Blurring The Boundaries: The Filmmaking Approach Toward Remission, John M. Mastriano

Theses and Dissertations

Remission explores the filmmaker’s personal experience with grief and fatherhood as well as the importance of a shared connection with the natural world that transcends life and death. Though primarily a first-person, reflexive short documentary film, Remission draws from other documentary models and modes, blurring the boundaries of documentary filmmaking.

Oblique, Edward Kijowski

Theses and Dissertations

Oblique is a multi-sensory art installation that provides a story of fragmentation in sound and light rendered by an obtuse hexagon arrangement of speakers and associated lighting prompts. The oblique direction of the soundwaves creates sonic sculpturing that propels listeners into an active state.

Rgb Root Matriz Color Dance, Danielle E. Gauthier

Theses and Dissertations

RGB Root Matriz Color Dance (Color Dance) is an immersive, interactive experience that combines poetic phrases and color filters to create a womb-like environment. Designed by Danielle Gauthier, this artistic piece uses a webcam to respond to users’ movements in real time, allowing them to confront and express their emotions through metaphor and dance. Color Dance creates a unique platform for self-discovery and empowerment by fostering a connection between the body and discomforting emotions.

The Routes, Wei-Ta Chen

Theses and Dissertations

The Routes is a 30-minute documentary that explores the filmmaker's reflection on the ties to family and homeland, as well as the nature of non-fiction filmmaking itself, all the while portraying in parallel the story of immigrant artist Hung-Ju as he delicately balances creative challenges with nostalgia.

Pricks And Pills, Anna A. Charles

Theses and Dissertations

"Pricks and Pills" is a collection of audio pieces designed for an online platform where individuals with diabetes can listen to and find emotional support from others who share their experiences. This audio project provides an intimate look into the lives of people navigating the challenges of diabetes. Through heartfelt interviews with individuals and their families, the podcast highlights their journeys, showcasing both their struggles and triumphs.

Erase The Record, Anne Sofie Noerskov

Theses and Dissertations

Erase the Record follows a young immigrant as she embarks on a magical journey to unearth her vanished memories and elusive cultural identity.
The film delves into the malleable nature of memory in an allegorical universe in which myth, dream, and magic coexist. Slowly unfolding themes of immigration and the imagination, the film sprung from a personal desire to approach immigration as a psychological experience. Erase the Record explores how the physical landscapes we inhabit affect us, and how memory, language, and time are stored in a body and in a landscape.

Reflections Of Little Red Dot: An Interactive Mixed Reality Archival Experience, Chloé Lee

Theses and Dissertations

It has been nearly a decade since I last visited Singapore, a place I am connected to yet an outsider. Reflections of Little Red Dot is a mixed-reality experience that animates my archive of drawings, videos, and 3D imagery from everyday Singaporeans in 2015, the year their country celebrated its 50th birthday.

Walking through this liminal mixed reality space, we hear how citizens are personally affected by the rapidly developing landscape and erasure of personal and historical sites of significance while reflecting on our collective agency to shape the future of our environments. We are invited into homes where loved …

The Fuller The Bucket Is, The Harder It Is To Fly, Jacob Littlejohn

Theses and Dissertations

My abstract paintings are informed by the momentary sublime rooted in the vastness of the natural world. Based on imagined and real landscapes, the work evokes minutia and phenomena that affect our perceptions of reality, and signifies a longing to reconnect with the natural world.

Aguaaaa!!!, Cory Villegas

Theses and Dissertations

“AGUA” is a call for new models of learning and sharing, celebrating the diasporic as a place of global revolution. Salsa, rooted in Latin American and Afro-Caribbean histories, is choreographer Cory Villegas’s expression of cultural legacy. As an Afro-diasporic dance, Salsa carries the wealth and variety of African and Indigenous roots. Villegas contextualizes her thesis event “Las Leyendas: An Afro Cuban Suite,” presenting herself and her troupe Soul Dance Co. as evidence that contradicts the erasure of Latin & Caribbean Culture in US dance history. The paper uses English and Spanish, written, visual, and oral materials with an accompanying webpage.

A Taste For The Distasteful: The Aesthetics Of Gore In The Giallo And Horror Films Of Mario Bava, Thais Casado Bignardi-Engstrom

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the Italian experience with horror in cinema in both psychoanalytic feminist and cognitive Marxist critical film theories through a study of visual renderings of excessive violence and sex in gothic and thrillers known as giallo films created by the film director Mario Bava. This is an art historical study that looks at Bava’s work against the Italian cultural landscape in the post war period.

Cinema And Ritual: Decolonial Feminist Approaches To Image-Making In The Americas And The Caribbean, Natalie M. Erazo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis project is composed of an open-access syllabus hosted on a CUNY commons site, as well as a paper that examines various films and texts responding to the theme of cinema and ritual. Referenced films will focus on ritual as a decolonial feminist methodological framework, rooted primarily in Afro-descended and Indigenous cosmovisions within Latin America and the Caribbean. From a dance ritual spell warding off U.S. imperialism in present-day Puerto Rico, to a poetic visual eulogy for murdered women in rural Mexico, to a community prayer to Yemaya bringing relief for water scarcity in Cuba to a cautionary tale …

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations Of “Peau D’Âne” In Contemporary French And English Texts, Amy M. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations of “Peau d’Âne” in Contemporary French and English Texts explores trans-genre and transmedia adaptations of Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairy tale using feminist and narratological theories to examine gendered aspects of storytelling and the treatment of father-daughter incest and blame in the work of selected French, British, and American creators. Texts are read comparatively, with analyses of the adaptations’ plots, motifs, characterizations, and modifications, both in relation to Perrault and to the other adaptations. This dissertation features prose and poetry texts by female authors—including Christine Angot, Catherine Cusset, and Emma Donoghue—in the first two chapters. Reading these …

Tarot Fabula: Radical Digital Cards, Shuffled Narrative Structures, And Playing The Future In An Era Of Algorithms, Rachel M.L. Dixon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since their earliest recorded use in the 1400s, tarot cards figure as objects for game play, artistic creativity, spiritual divination, and self-discovery. Tarot Fabula (https://tarot-fabula.com) introduces a ludic, interactive website interface that challenges 20th century tarot reading practices as linear narratives. Statistically random reshufflings of tarot decks from archival collections prompt the reader to become a narrative co-creator, drawing them into conversation with traditional reading and interpretive practices as they remix narrative elements portrayed on the cards. Tarot Fabula’s shuffling and reshuffling of cards as historical objects merges contemporary computational methods for generating random results with an interrogation of …

The Complete Sight And Sound Greatest Films Of All Time Database, Katie Donia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Once every ten years, Sight and Sound, a film magazine produced by the British Film Institute (BFI), conducts an international poll of critics and film journalists to determine the “Greatest Films of All Time.” The first poll was conducted in 1952, and ten years later the BFI decided to make their poll decennial, allowing for the list to change and thus to demonstrate how time, changing opinion, and the continuous creation of new films change the film canon. However, despite the opportunity for long-term analysis, there is not an easy way online to see how a film’s ranking has changed …

Frenetic Journey Toward Muddledness: An Experimental Short Film, Fernando Vieira

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As an artist and Film Studies student, I saw the capstone option as an opportunity to consolidate academia with the art of filmmaking into one project. This became Frenetic Journey Toward Muddledness, an experimental short film written, directed, and edited by me. It is a film influenced by early avant-garde cinema, German expressionism, and film noir. Composed of pieces of unrelated footage and featuring an ambiguous, non-linear, and mostly silent narrative, the editing of the film prompted me to ask myself questions about its genre. Its hybridity made it possible to position the film within different categories, but there …

Keeping It Real: The Evolution Of The Black American Sitcom, Ebony E. Prescod

Capstones

The image of the black person has undergone many iterations in American popular culture. From the mammy of post antebellum America, to blaxploitation, to the black upper class -- what it next for the representation of black people in popular media, especially as it is now being helmed by black creatives. What does the black American of the 2020s look like? Now, what does it look like to be true to the black experience, today?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-KpHMb37_khYkOmlR6-gEPGEHLVZA4ND7HwNwhdz6ig/edit?usp=sharing

From Doormats To Three-Dimensions: The Evolution Of Female Characters In Anime’S Action Genre, Sajina Shrestha

Capstones

Strong female characters have always been an outlier and not the trend in the action genre of anime. However, new writers are bringing fleshed-out female characters to the forefront, making for better viewing.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p3FROe7uFQNNTR0rwrnwlTlmXzqpvqCvQotshTUZMxs/edit?usp=sharing

The New New Yorkers, Frances E. Perozo

Capstones

As Texas turns its back on asylum seekers, one New York City community seeks to make them feel welcomed with dignity and care. The New New Yorkers follows the journey of Adama Bah, an asylum-seeking refugee turned citizen as she dedicates her life to welcoming asylum seekers despite Mayor Adams slashing funds, shutting down her triage operations, and attempting to gut the right to shelter, a legal precedent that ensures all migrants and New Yorkers have the right to shelter. Bah is determined to show up for migrants, joyfully.

Exploring Friendships In J.R.R. Tolkien’S Novels And Adaptations: A Study In Social Media, Fandoms, And Variations, Ashley D. Anderson

Student Theses

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy and their adaptations all reveal the importance of friendship and fandom. Utilizing theorists Walter Benjamin and Henry Jenkins the friendship theme is seen in the various stylistic elements in the films and novels; additionally, a look into the fandom presence on social media, their knowledge, and merchandise reveals why the stories have continued to interest audiences over many generations.

Urban Space, Genre And Subjectivity In African And Latin American Cinema, Matthew Marcus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project studies twelve African and Latin American films from a range of eras and countries, with an emphasis on their treatment of urban space, their manipulation of genre elements, and their approaches to character subjectivity. The analysis draws on major works of urban theory by Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Jane Jacobs, and others in order to investigate the relationship between cinema and the urban experience. As the films in the study are mostly set in cities that are not discussed by the theorists, the analysis entails testing their theories against the realities of these other settings, as …

Becoming George Lucas: From Avant-Garde, Auteur, Independent Artist To Studio Executive, Ryan Thompson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Because of the unprecedented popularity of Star Wars, George Lucas, the creator of the multi-media franchise, is one of the most well-known filmmakers in history. What makes Lucas’s relationship with Star Wars unique is that because the franchise has continually been exploited rather than left as a single unchanging, static text, its artistic value, along with Lucas’s legacy, is in constant flux and is often misunderstood. In other words, depending on Star Wars’s position in the public zeitgeist at a given time, Lucas is either revered, detested, or considered incompetent as a filmmaker. While there is no denying …

Only For The Pleasure Of Telling: Filling The Void In Pasolini's Trilogia Della Vita, Courtney Munson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since Pasolini deliberately cultivated an unrecognizable and illegible public image that embraced incoherence, much of the scholarship surrounding him is plagued by contradictions and mutual exclusivity. For some, Pasolini was a utopian prophet, for others apocalyptic, but most agree that he, through his transmedial and highly self-inscribed life-work, was responding primarily to the crises of neocapitalist consumerism, especially its degenerative effects on sexual conventions and the body. Through an investigation of Pasolini’s controversial essays on film theory, the details of his biography, and the films of the Trilogia della vita, this thesis argues that it is a mistake to …

Muscling Through: Athletic Women In Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915, Julia G. Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Muscling Through” reconstructs an overlooked history of strong female bodies in the nineteenth century. It argues that popular representations of athletic women introduced a new category of identity that was distinct from women’s traditional relational and social roles. The project’s central figure is the hyper-able “Sportswoman,” who bridges the gap between two familiar versions of the Victorian woman’s body: the mid-century ideal of docile, domesticated femininity and the sturdy, capable women who enter universities, professions, and public spaces en masse just before the turn of the century. Representationally, the Sportswoman figures a range of attitudes, from anxious to aspirational, toward …

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.