Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Student-Teacher Romance Film Genre: Hollywood's Historical Representation Of Abuse Of Power, Darby Gilliland

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite vast literature analyzing films that depict romantic and sexual relationships between young students and their teachers, scholarship has yet to explicitly call this category of films and television a genre. The purpose of the present thesis is to define the student-teacher romance film genre and identify patterns that make it up as a means of illuminating the genre’s exploration of abuse of power in the classroom. I use a historical-generic methodology and gaze theory as a framework to conduct this analysis. I identify three distinct eras of the genre and analyze films from each time period. The first era …

Scarico: It’S Only A Movie, Most Of The Time, Thomas Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Exploitation cinema is a domain of motion picture content catering to a viewership interested in imagery that is more provocative than what mainstream audiences desire to see. These types of films are typically considered lowbrow entertainment and have been made in every era, albeit in a limited capacity proportional to the niche audience demand for them. Some time periods see a rise in exploitation film productions in response to a growing demand for such content from a larger share of the broader cinematic audience. This relationship indicates that period-specific cultural factors can cause mainstream audience members to seek out more …

A Boy Born On Wednesday, Charles Krampah

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My relocation to America has presented an unprecedented space for self-examination. The components of my identity and personality have been laid bare before me; My blackness in the face of racism and white hegemony, my African heritage in the face of post-colonialism and imperialism, and my faith in the face of an increasingly secular western culture.

Am I who thought I was? Am I more or less? Why do I feel like a different person, and what does this mean for my future?

My research and art practice serve as a form of introspection. I tell an internal story in …

Screening For Our Fathers: Representations Of Native American Masculinity In American Film, Jeromy Duane Miller

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In this work, I examine representation of Native American masculinity in the American film industry. The American film industry began just over a century ago, and one of its earliest subjects was the Native American. Throughout its history, the American film industry has maintained a steady trajectory of exploitation and erasure of Native American men and their subsequent masculine qualities. While there are notable historical outliers and critical exceptions in the 21st century, Native American men in film have been continually reduced to corpses, devoid of significant social presence, and denied meaningful explorations of their sexuality and interpersonal identity. The …

Badnaam Women Of Bollywood: The Combative Sexual Politics Of Item Songs In India, Ketaki Deshpande

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This study analyzes the controversial Bollywood convention “item number,” a vampy song with suggestive lyrics and hypersexualized imagery of dancing women, as a crucial cultural artefact reflecting the gender and sexual uneasiness in India. Sex avoidance is a common theme in Bollywood films and in the country, where media and people are heavily censored and policed by anti-Romeo squads under the Modi administration. The item girl breaks the sexual tension with a mega hit song and hook step that fuels the economy of dance and desire in India. While the song is completely unrelated to the narrative of the film, …

Artistry In Air: The Story Of The Younkins, Beth Lewis

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For sixty years, a Northwest Arkansas family has dominated the world of general aviation by drawing upon its wealth of expertise, innovation and exceptional talent. Jim Younkin, an electrical engineer, invented an autopilot series that revolutionized the industry. His son, Bobby became one of the top aerobatic pilots in the world and Jim’s grandchildren, Matt and Amanda, also became critically acclaimed performers in the air show business. Like his father, Matt is ranked among the best of pilots in the industry. Jim also received national recognition for his stunning recreations of and restorations of historical aircraft. Bobby operated Younkin Airshows, …

Beautiful People: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Fashion Industry's Thin Ideal, Shane White

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Negative body image among women has become an extremely relevant topic in the last decade. The “ideal” female body image and what a person should look like according to marketing and advertising has become a highly controversial issue. This project seeks to show how the fashion industry has, over centuries, shaped how people think they need to look and in today’s time and show how it has been a root cause of issues like body image complexes leading to negative self-perception, eating disorders, mental illnesses like anxiety, depression and addiction, and even suicide. Over the last three to four decades, …

Election Day — Documentary, John Thomas Tarpley

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Election Day is a three-channel documentary chronicling the places, personalities, and tone of Little Rock, Arkansas, during its titular midterm Election Day in November 2018. Throughout the course of the day, the film branches across the city, capturing mini-narratives, bits of conversation, and tableau of civic activity in the public sphere. It is less concerned with the quantitative facts of the day as it is with conveying the transitory social expressions and moods of a modern, southern city on a uniquely American day. This project represents my continued documentary interest in creating inclusive, contemporary local portraits and counter-historical chronicles of …

New Flesh Cinema: Japanese Cyberpunk-Body Horror And Cinema As Catharsis In The Age Of Technology, Sarah Henry

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This thesis provides a critical analysis of a specific group of films that combine the subgenres of cyberpunk and body horror which I call New Flesh Cinema. Films of this subgenre counter fears and anxieties of technological advancements by re-imagining the rise of technology and its societal effects as a transitional process through the illustration of literal and visceral depictions of the necessary alterations people will have to undergo in order to transition successfully into the new world. To contradict apocalyptic fears of advancing technology, these films offer a vision of a “New Flesh.” I argue the films share three …

Reactions To Gulf War I And Gulf War Ii In American And Iraqi Cinema And Theatre: The Quest For A Global Utopia, Tajaddin Salahaddin Noori

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Many American and Iraqi cultural reactions to Gulf War I and Gulf War II, including the texts selected for this story, expressed the dystopian consequences of these wars. However, this study focuses on exploring the utopian dimensions of the selected texts and investigates how these texts attempt to reconcile both sides of the conflict and produce visions toward a global utopia. Significantly, this study represents the visions toward a global utopia as a series of visions toward oneness. That is, oneness of human beings over otherness, oneness of different nation states under one global community, and oneness of cultural productions’ …

Ix: Story About The Law Of Non-Discrimination - Documentary, Denzel Jenkins

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The purpose of this project is to provide historical awareness for how Title IX, the anti-gender discrimination law in education, evolved to where it is today and the impact it has on universities in the United States. Strong-willed individuals sought change in the late 1960s and 1970s to prevent gender discrimination in education, thus beginning the creation of the law and making it a powerful tool for women’s rights. As Title IX expanded its reach, universities have been shaped by gender discrimination in athletics, sexual assault, harassment and rape. This project outlines the evolution of Title IX through research based …

In The Groove: A Documentary About Vinyl, Jared Endsley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis project, ‘In the Groove’ is to tell the story of why vinyl records, a music format written off as a casualty to the digital age is experiencing a cultural resurgence. In the last several years vinyl records have been the only musical format to record positive sales growth.

For many musicians today, pressing their music to vinyl records yields the greatest return on investment. However, vinyl remains a niche market, supported by a devoted fan base.

This film focuses on a group of artists and vinyl enthusiasts as they navigate this new marketplace.

Moulins: Down The Arctic Drain, Jonathon Nugent Carlson

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This observation-style nonfiction documentary film follows a National Science Foundation expedition to the Greenland ice sheet. The bivouac lasted for 25 continuous days. University of Arkansas Professor of Geosciences Matt Covington, Ph.D. teamed up with University of South Florida Professor Jason Gulley, Ph.D. to plan, propose, and ultimately accomplish the research goals of the expedition with the assistance of Ph.D. student Celia Trunz, M.S., and experienced expeditionary team member Vickie Siegel. As an observational-style documentary film, all scientific background information imparted herein is taken directly from interviews conducted with Professor Covington, to minimize opining.

The film begins in mid-flight, as …

Geography Of The Middle East Through The Western Lens: A Survey Of Films Set In The Middle East And Filmed In The American Southwest, Jake Bryan Rowlett

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Representation of cinematic geography is a struggle in the world of film: a power balance between the work of the filmmakers and the place itself. Often, the filmmakers tip the scales in their favor and the true nature of the place is lost in translation. Throughout the history of cinema, the geography of the Middle East has been manipulated into a vision designed for Western audiences that is strikingly disjointed from reality.

The foundation of modern Orientalist interpretations of the Middle East in film can be seen in the early decades of the film industry, through the “Biblical Epic,” and …

Literary And Cinematic Representations Of Neoliberal Forms Of Contemporary Violence In Latin America With Special Interest In Mexico And Colombia, Ivan De Jesus Iglesias

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In the last decades, with an increased rhythm and greater intensity, the so-called neoliberal violence has come to play a relevant role within the history of world societies. The Latin American institutional, political, social, and economic changes of the 1970’s and 1980’s, especially those produced under dictatorships, contributed to create the conditions for the implementation of the processes of economic liberalization and global market as part of the concept of institutional modernization and cultural globalization that gave rise to the neoliberal mentality. In this context, neoliberalism becomes hegemonic as a mode of discourse and is incorporated into the way individuals …

Modern Palestinian Filmmaking In A Global World, Sarah Frances Hudson

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This dissertation employs a comprehensive approach to analyze the cinematic accent of feature length, fictional Palestinian cinema and offers concrete criteria to define the genre of Palestinian fictional film that go beyond traditional, nation-centered approaches to defining films. Employing Arjun Appardurai’s concepts of financescapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, ethnoscapes, and ideoscapes, I analyze the filmic accent of six Palestinian filmmakers: Michel Khleifi, Rashid Masharawi, Ali Nassar, Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu Assad, and Annemarie Jacir. After a detailed examination of each filmmaker’s body of work, I examine the trends that occur across the genre that have the greatest impact on the Palestinian filmic …

Ironman: The Gordon Haller Story, Jacqueline Marie Antoinette Grajeda

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The documentary film Ironman: The Gordon Haller Story takes a look at an ordinary man who accomplished the extraordinary feat of winning the first Ironman triathlon in 1978. Gordon Haller was born and raised in Oregon before a career in the United States Navy took him to Hawaii where he would eventually participate in the first Ironman competition. He is now a programmer analyst for Walmart, living with his wife in Bella Vista, Arkansas. This 26-minute film includes interviews with Haller as well as his wife, a friend and the director of development at the American Diabetes Association where he …

Negotiating The Politics Of Representation In Iranian Women’S Cinema Before And After The Islamic Revolution, Alshaatha Sultan Al Sharji

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From Mahvash, the Iranian entertainer who sang and danced coquettishly in numerous Iranian films that were produced before the Islamic revolution of 1979, to the skateboarding vampire girl who makes a feast out of abusive men in Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the representation of Iranian women on screen has changed drastically. This comparative study focuses on the politics of representation of Iranian women in the cinema before and after the Islamic revolution, with the aim of deconstructing the readily-available notions of women’s oppression in Iran. It analyzes the works of female Iranian directors Forough …

“Deliberate Voluptuousness”: The Monstrous Women Of Dracula And Carmilla, Judith Bell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Vampire women play a culturally significant role in films and literature by revealing the extent to which deviation from Socially accepted behavior is tolerated. In this thesis, I compare the vampire women of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla to their depictions in recent adaptations. In Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire sisters are representative of the shortcomings of 19th century gender roles, especially in regard to women’s communities. In recent adaptations, the vampire sisters’ revealing clothing, promiscuity, and lack of characterization are still closely connected with villainy, and as in Stoker’s novel, the women’s violent deaths in the …

Purkeys' 25 Year Journey, Ashleigh Brooke Galligan

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The documentary film Purkeys’ 25 Year Journey takes an in-depth look at the Purkey’s family and the business they started in 1990. This 17 minute film focuses on Bruce Purkey and his daughter Robyn. They began Purkeys by supplying batteries, alternators and other parts of a heavy-duty vehicle’s electrical system to one customer, JB Hunt. As the company grew they began to be known across the nation for finding creative solutions to the electrical issues trucking fleets faced. Bruce led the team and received multiple patents for his innovations. In, 2010 Bruce’s son Justin Purkey joined the team and quickly …

(Re)Animating The Horror Genre: Explorations In Children's Animated Horror Films, Megan Estelle Troutman

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This project seeks to define the subgenre of children's animated horror film by examining its classification within the children's film genre and its use of generic conventions of horror. While this project does not aim to conflate children's film as a genre and animation as a medium, the scope of this project will be limited to children's animated horror films from 1993 - present day. In order to explore the subgenre of children's animated horror films from 1993-present, I will focus specifically on the following films: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were …

Intersectionality In Jane Eyre And Its Adaptations, Laurel Loh

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

During the almost 170 years since Jane Eyre was published, there have been numerous adaptations in many different mediums and genres, such as plays, films, musicals, graphic novels, spin-off novels, and parodies. The novel has been read in many different critical traditions: liberal humanist, historicist, feminist, and postcolonial approaches dealing with topics such as the problem of female authorship and consciousness. In addition, it has been read in terms of an ideological struggle based on race, class, and gender; xenophobia and imperialism; female labor politics; and genre issues, to just name a few. As literary critics have explored numerous themes …

Monsters In Common: Identity And Community In Postapocalyptic Science Fiction After 9/11, Jeremy J. Burns

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the aftermath 11 September, 2001, postapocalyptic science fiction has offered a way to make sense of the events of that day, as well as the years of social, cultural and political upheaval that have followed. In many ways, 9/11 began immediately to take on apocalyptic significance in the American national narrative, seemingly marking the end of one period and the beginning of another, entirely different one. To think of 9/11 as a kind of apocalyptic break with the past, however, does not tell the whole story. Moreover, such thinking denies key historical linkages between the American response to 9/11 …

Ideology In Popular Late Twentieth And Twenty-First Century Children's And Young Adult Literature And Film, Iris Grace Shepard

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Texts created for the consumption of children and young adults are not simple texts made for the sole purpose of entertaining young audiences. In fact, these texts are complicated, multi-faceted texts that function both in the creation and performance of childhood. Children's and young adult literature and film disseminated mainstream ideology about young people's place in society and attempt to enculturate young readers and viewers in regards to race, gender, age, and Social class. However, by helping young people interact critically with these texts, critical thinking skills as well as a passion for reading can be fostered. In addition, by …

Happily Ever After Take Two: Rewriting Femininity In Hybridization Fairy Tale Films, Megan Estelle Troutman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The tradition of fairy tales has evolved drastically over the past five hundred years. At the beginning of the 20th century, fairy tale cartoons became widely popular as an independent medium, as well as introductions to larger films. In 1937, Walt Disney started the tradition of fairy tale cinema with the release of Snow White. Since that time, Disney has released and re-released eleven princess fairy tale films. Critics and parents alike ridicule Disney for its depictions of women as submissive and subservient. Recent films have used fairy tale tropes, without referring to a specific classic tale, in order to …

Palestinian Film: Hyperreality, Narrative, And Ideology, Sarah Frances Hudson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have developed diametrically opposed national narratives and identities that are both predicated on the concept of victimization. These narratives have developed into simulacral narratives as the result of the nature of their development. This paper deals with the Palestinian simulacral narrative which bolsters societal values, particularly the value of victimhood, that are crucial to coping with the prolonged conflict. The Western media, at any given moment during the conflict, has either accepted the concept of Palestinian's as victims of the conflict and the Palestinian simulacral narrative, or rejected it. The media then produces a …

The Relationship Among Beginning And Advanced American Sign Language Students And Credentialed Interpreters Across Two Domains Of Visual Imagery: Vividness And Manipulation, Linda Stauffer

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Given the visual-gestural nature of ASL it is reasonable to assume that visualization abilities may be one predictor of aptitude for learning ASL. This study tested a hypothesis that visualization abilities are a foundational aptitude for learning a signed language and that measurements of these skills will increase as students progress from beginning ASL students to advanced language learners and, ultimately to credentialed interpreters. Participants in this study consisted of 90 beginning and 66 advanced ASL students in five interpreter education programs in four southern states along with 68 credentialed interpreters. Students and interpreters were administered the Vividness of Visual …

Cinematherapy As A Clinical Intervention: Theoretical Rationale And Empirical Credibility, Michael Powell

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Two problems must be addressed before cinematherapy can advance as a credible therapeutic intervention: (a) a solid theoretical rationale must exist supporting its use in mental health counseling, and (b) quantifiable data must exist promoting its treatment efficacy, and these data need to extend to various clinical populations representing a range of mental health conditions. This study intends to address both problems by critiquing the theoretical and experimental literature on cinematherapy and measuring the relative effectiveness of a structured, nondirective cinematherapy intervention at improving the hope and optimism of an adult diagnosed with Major Depression. One person (JV= 1) was …