Digital Commons Network^™

Modern Times, Will Beattie

Masters Theses

At the intersection of glass, photography and sound lies issues of perspective, framing, and information. These factors as well as the conceptual space between object and image offer an opportunity to explore the way we register narrative through contradicting signifiers. Glass historically has been used as an instrument to reveal spaces, moments, and phenomena previously imperceptible to the human eye. This rendering of previously unseen spaces through language, technology or vision, may work to reorient the viewers’ perspective and allow for a new understanding of the world. The power of disruption as a potential catalyst is central to my studio …

Moonshine Babies, Arghavan Heydareslam

Theses and Dissertations

Moonshine Babies is a two-screen film made of collage/cut-out stop-motion and live-action. It is a visual poem based on my journals from when I recently started living in the US as an outsider. The experience left me feeling divided between the empty present and memories of the past. suggesting that there are collective memories among a group of interconnected individuals that unite them within a single narrative.

There was a moment when I asked, "If you are your memories, what does it mean to be somewhere you have no memories of and no one has memories of you there?"

Memories …

Sonja Stojanovic. Mind The Ghost. Thinking Memory And The Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction In French. Liverpool Up, 2023., Catherine Nesci

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Sonja Stojanovic. Mind the Ghost. Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French. Liverpool UP, 2023. xi + 307 pp.

Reframing Space: Religion, History, And Memory In The Early Documentary Film Of The Yugoslav Space, Milja Radovic

Journal of Religion & Film

This paper examines cinematic representations of religion and religious communities in the early cinema of the Yugoslav space. This paper introduces the readers to the rich heritage of the cinema of the Yugoslav space by providing 1) the first study of the representations of religion and the concepts of faith in the early film, and 2) novel approaches in reading religion and history through film. Film is used as a primary rather than supplementary source in historical research on diverse religious and ethnic communities in this part of the Balkan Peninsula. This is the first study that investigates the importance, …

Screening Bodies: Post-Dictatorship Chilean Cinema, Elaine Joy (Ej) Basa

Theses and Dissertations

Censorship was the modus operandi during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. People and media alike suffered as the oppressive Chilean government suppressed many truths about the Coup, the torture and disappearance of victims and their families, and facts about the state violence that took place from 1973 to the late 1980s. The resulting trauma nurtured a culture of silence, a divided social fabric, and many gaps in historical knowledge. Those who absorbed the media experienced a lack of connection and identification with fabricated and falsified histories, thereby essentially cut off from truly engaging with the traumas of Chile’s dark history. The struggle …

Creatività Diasporiche Dialoghi Transnazionali Tra Teoria E Arti, Simone Brioni Dr., Loredana Polezzi Dr., Franca Sinopoli

Department of English Faculty Publications

Creatività diasporiche è un volume bilingue costituito da tredici conversazioni tra studiosi/studiose di materie umanistiche e artisti/artiste il cui lavoro si concentra sul tema della migrazione e dell’identità. I contributi nella raccolta abbracciano forme di produzione che vanno dalla letteratura alle arti visive, dal cinema alla performance teatrale, dai podcast alla musica rap, mentre tra le tematiche ricorrenti emergono dibattiti su identità, lingua, migrazione, memoria e cittadinanza. Questo volume è anche un invito a ripensare il lavoro creativo e quello accademico, in area umanistica, come intrinsecamente legati al dialogo e alla collaborazione. Ciascuna conversazione si concentra sull’Italia intesa come un …

Rooted In Topsoil, Jiaying Wang

Masters Theses

Disillusioned by my transnational identity, I have come to realize that my sense of belonging is no longer attached to any physical location, but instead to a state of mind, to an intimacy with the world. My notion of home is an obscure and unsettled—at times utopian—idea, which can be infinitely decoded, re-positioned and re-established psychologically. This thesis is an investigation of that liminal state, questioning the paradoxical place at the intersection of longing and belonging, interior and exterior, rootedness and uprootedness. Through a collection of short essays that accompany projects, I seek to unpack the precarious emotional complexities that …

Smokebox: Writing Into Embarrassment, Julia Storch

Theatre & Dance ETDs

Engaging with theoretical concepts and dramaturgical tools, this essay follows my journey through The Dramatic Writing MFA program at the University of New Mexico, focusing on the production of my thesis play, Smokebox. In Part I, I give the background and development of my journey as a playwright, exploring the obstacles I faced and overcame through my engagement with coursework and staged readings. I map out the development of Smokebox, from its humble beginnings as a class assignment, to its transformation through workshop, and finally its realization through an intense rehearsal and production process. In Part II, I …

菠蘿包(Pineapple Bun): Exploring Memory And Language Through Animation, Elaine Yang

Scripps Senior Theses

菠蘿包(Pineapple Bun) explores the themes of reconstruction, evocation, and memory through my childhood in Taiwan. Inspired by other Asian American animators, I aim to tell a simple story of connection through my grandfather and I's daily swimming ritual. The film is a 3-minute animated short film following our language barrier and how we engage with each other's differing backgrounds.

Anamnesis: A Film About Forgetting, Neville Pullar Elder

Theses and Dissertations

In the film Anamnesis I bear witness to the injury and death of my childhood best friend Dominic, when I was 11. The film is a quest: A search for a visual memory that I have forgotten or perhaps, deliberately hidden from myself. Can remembering the events in their entirety and chronological order help me heal? Is searching for the lost memories nothing more than a smokescreen to avoid the steps I must take to deal/heal the trauma?

I communicate the relationship between the interplay of memory-making and sense-making and the reconstruction process that enables our past and present to …

After Yang, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of After Yang (2021), directed by Kogonada.

Memorias De Mi Familia, Melissa Z. Montero

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

Memorias de Mi Familia is an hour-long personal documentary through which I explore the meaning of “home.” I was born and raised in New York to a Puerto Rican mother and Ecuadorian father and lived between two worlds—sometimes more. While on a visit to Puerto Rico with my mother, Sylvia, I search for belonging and explore my family’s story of migration between the island and the United States.

Through interviews, family films, home videos and photographs spanning over 60 years, I examine the revolving migration pattern common to many Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora, a …

Ambedo: Immersive Storytelling Through Augmented Reality, Dr. Diane Derr, Law Alsobrook, Sadia Mir

Frameless

The territory of locative media, coupled with augmented reality, offers unique opportunities to excavate and unpack rich historic events, in immersive storytelling. In September of 1943, during World War II, approximately 5,200 Italian soldiers were massacred on the Greek island of Kefalonia by Nazi troops. This massacre is credited as one of the largest ever prisoner-of-war massacres in recent history (Lamb, 1996) and left an indelible mark on the island of Kefalonia. In 2019, Configuring Kommos: Narrative, Event, Place and Memory, an interdisciplinary research project, began an investigation into the triangulation of narrative within the complexity of this tragic …

"Memories Of A Family" (2021): A Reflection On My Process As An Interviewer And Filmmaker, Kyle Day

University Honors Theses

"Memories of a Family" is a short essay film that communicates the complicated dynamic between personal and familial memory. With an experimental approach in editing, Kyle Day uses his family's home videos as a materialized form of familial memory that he deconstructs and reconstructs based on his and his family members' personal memories and subjective views of the family.

Beirut/The Other Side Of The City: The Impact Of Visual Texture Production Of The Lebanese Postmemory Generation, 1989 - Present, Mohamed Moustafa Gameel Ebada

Theses and Dissertations

In 1989, after the Ta'if agreement, the war in Lebanon started to fade, which ended years of one of the most destructive civil conflicts in the region with no decisive winner or loser. The year also marked the birth of a new Lebanese generation who did not experience the war in person. It is a generation of postmemory, a term Maria Hirsch coined to describe the reminisces of those who did not have a personal encounter with past traumatic events. However, it was not before February 2005, when Rafic Al-Hariri's violent assassination occurred, when the postmemory generation started to question …

Mysterious Proposal, Henry Berger

Senior Projects Fall 2021

This is a mysterious proposal regarding a trio of films which harness an ‘energizing vision’ that lingers beyond the movie theatre. There is a focus on travel, memory, landscape and the internal world. I was interested in the ways in which the ephemeral experience of film may alter the way we take in the world around us; the way we process each other.

Still, Unfolding, Ramolen Mencero Laruan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Together with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, still, unfolding, at Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, Ontario), this dossier constitutes the following accompanying components: a comprehensive artist statement, documented artwork, an interview with artist Erika DeFreitas, and a curriculum vitae. These components contextualize my subject-position, and outline theoretical research, motivations, and reflections that drive my work. I expand on the diasporic experience, politics of knowledge, and the autobiographical genre as they are linked methodologies in the retrieval of immigrant histories. The fusion of autobiography and fiction becomes a hopeful approach in challenging forgotten or omitted history and confronts the expectations …

Recurring Scream: Trauma In Wes Craven's Slasher, Ben Muntananuchat

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates trauma representation in the horror film trilogy Scream, by director Wes Craven and based on the story and characters by screenwriter Kevin Williamson. The franchise is a satirical body of work that uproots the formulaic narrative aspects of the slasher film subgenre, of which it belongs to. Craven and Williamson’s method of critiquing the subgenre employs the usage of its cinematic tropes, though elevating them to a level of postmodern parody. I analyze traumatic representation within the franchise’s layers of mediation and postmodern narrative elements, which are often highlighted in academic discussion. The trauma observed revolves around …

Film And The Culture Of Memory In Argentina, Theresa Jo Thomas

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This project examines the culture of memory in modern-day Argentina in the context of the last civic-military dictatorship that took place between 1976 and 1983. Argentina is a country with a long history of filmmaking, a tradition that was suddenly interrupted during the long and dark seven years of military rule. Since the arrival of democracy in 1983, however, filmmakers have explored the trauma created by this period and have created a significant record of films that deal with loss, memory, and trauma. This thesis analyzes several films produced between the return of democratic rule and present-day Argentina in order …

The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.

Tomb Of The Unknown Marxist, Anna Ozbek

Theses and Dissertations

Tomb of the Unknown Marxist tracks a journey of uncovering an individual’s past as a leftist revolutionary in late 1970s Turkey. In doing so, the project explores the political movements of that turbulent period and asks what remains of the revolution in the revolutionary once these moments are well in the past.

Temporal And Topological: Two Ways Of Living Israel/Palestine, Rocco Giansante

Journal of Religion & Film

Elia Suleiman and Amos Gitai are two Israeli filmmakers, Palestinian and Jewish respectively. Gitai’s first film, House (1980), was censored by Israeli Television—the producers of the film—due to its sympathetic portrayal of Palestinians. Elia Suleiman’s debut film, Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996), was criticized at the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia for a sequence showing an Israeli flag and Suleiman himself was accused of being a Zionist collaborator. By comparing the ways in which these two films deal with the political and social implications of the Israel-Palestine conflict, this article highlights two distinct methods of relating to facts on the …

Identity And Memory, Ryley Hinton

Philosophy Summer Fellows

For my Summer Fellows project, I researched personal identity in a philosophical way. The goal was to disambiguate the concept of self-identity, understand what the main notions of identity are, and look at how they apply in different circumstances. My philosophical approach is to treat films as philosophical thought experiments, imaginative situations that reveal the meaning and limits of concepts. Films are great for exploring the topic of identity because they present characters struggling with their self-identity as situations change around them. A major focus of my research is the role of memory in the formation of one’s identity and …

Hashtag Holocaust: Negotiating Memory In The Age Of Social Media, Erica Fagen

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the representation of Holocaust memory through photographs on the social media platforms of Flickr and Instagram. It looks at how visitors – armed with digital cameras and smartphones – depicted their experiences at the former concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme. The study’s arguments are twofold: firstly, social media posts about visits to former concentration camps are a form of Holocaust memory, and secondly, social media allows people from all backgrounds the opportunity to share their memories online. Holocaust memory on social media introduces a new, digital kind of memory called “filtered memory.” This study …

Book Review: Death, Image, Memory: The Genocide In Rwanda And Its Aftermath In Photography And Documentary Film, Scott Ahearn

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

As Rwanda marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the genocide this spring, Piotr Cieplak’s book, Death, Image, Memory: The Genocide in Rwanda and its Aftermath in Photography and Documentation, is timely as an exploration of the documentary imagery developed since 1994 and its “uncomfortable coexistence with the genocide and its aftermath.” His book looks at still and video images from Westerners and Rwandans alike, and examines the ways in which these images succeed or fall short in bringing identity and remembrance to the victims of the genocide.

Needle And Thread, Caitlin Carvalho

Theses and Dissertations

Needle and Thread is an expanded cinema performance that involves the projection of 16mm film, archival footage, video, 35mm slide projection, soundscape and liquid light projection. It explores the fibers of connection, the thread that ties together my matriarchy, utilizing the language of cinema to piece together the memories.

Memory In T/Rubble: Tackling (Nuclear) Ruins, Marilena Parlati

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The 1945 bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to have recently started to recede back in the memory of Western culture. 9/11 and the age of global warfare which we are in have averted our gazes away from that past, in our tremulous expectations of the next traumatic event. In the twentieth century, poets like Tony Harrison have tackled this delicate topic, while Japanese culture has in many ways been forced and willing to reconsider its own agendas and sense of identity from those ‘ground zeroes’ onwards. In both A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the …

Graphic Content Warning; Personal And Political Traumas, Emily K. Wardell

Theses and Dissertations

The written portion of this thesis work is meant to address and further investigate the visual work created using mediums of print and found video. This artistic research has been interested in examining varying associations with truth, recollection, and evidence. This includes the recollection of public histories and news-media narratives as well as my own history and trauma. Through this work my aim was to create a deconstruction and revolt against how associations are formed, and how to understand imagery as information. This thesis first discusses my relationship to appropriated imagery, then connects and examines it through the addition of …

Silver Sands, David Riley

Theses and Dissertations

Silver Sands is a thirty-minute documentary film and accompanying installation that traces the story of Marc Hampton, a gay, desert-dwelling Vietnam vet, former Playgirl model, and vintage car collector who lost two lovers to AIDS. Drawing on videotaped interviews, shots of his house and environs, and extensive use of his personal photographic archive, this work addresses evolving ideas of memory and representation within the queer community. The film is divided into various chapters which function as meditations on masculinity, aging, loss, spirituality and intergenerational relationships. Marc becomes an archetypal figure––the survivor––whose meandering recollections illustrate some of the complexities of gay …

Film Review: L’Insulte (The Insult), Renee Michelle Ragin

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Though the civil war (1975-1990) has long since ended, Ziad Doueiri’s contemporary Lebanon remains embroiled in conflict. In The Insult, a personal dispute between two individuals on either side of an ethno-political divide threatens to reignite national conflict. Under normal circumstances, such a storyline might seem improbable, but the realities of the post-war environment in Lebanon render it plausible. With a series of provocative, if difficult to answer questions, The Insult joins a robust corpus of post-1990 Lebanese films meditating on what, if anything, it means to be “post-war” in Lebanon.