Film and Media Studies Commons^™

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

40 Years Of Koyaanisqatsi: The Greatest Experimental Film Ever Made, Brian Thomas

Honors Program: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

The 1983 experimental film Koyaanisqatsi remains a visionary artistic work 40 years after it was initially released, because it continues to resonate in contemporary society by vividly depicting the intersection of human life and technology, prompting viewers to contemplate "life out of balance" and its implications. The film makes us question where life is headed and the ways in which we "live technology" today.

The Concepts Of Law And Morality In Castle In The Sky, Kiet T. Tran

CAFE Symposium 2023

This project examines the film Castle in the Sky by Studio Ghibli, directed by Hayao Miyazaki and how it uses “chaotic good”, “lawless evil” and “lawful good” being ideas rework from Future Boy Conan (1978) also directed by Hayao Miyazaki through an examination of the relationships between the characters.

“It's So Normal, And … Meaningful.” Playing With Narrative, Artifacts, And Cultural Difference In Florence, Dheepa Sundaram, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article considers how player interactions with religious and ethnic markers, create

a globalized game space in the mobile game Florence (2018). Florence is a multiaward-

winning interactive novella game with story-integrated minigames that weave

play experiences into the narrative. The game, in part, explores love, loss, and

rejuvenation as relatable experiences. Simultaneously, the game produces a unique

experience for each player, as they can refract the game narrative through their own

cultural, identitarian lens. The game assumes the shared cultural space of the player,

the player-character (PC), and the non-player-character (NPC) while blurring the

boundaries between each of these …

The Role Of The Reader Is To Fallow: Responding To The Negative Reception Of Paul Verhoeven’S Film Adaptation Of Starship Troopers, Julian Meyerstrom

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Robert A. Keinlein’s science fiction novel Starship Troopers (1959), and its film adaption of the same title directed by Paul Verhoeven (1997), received mixed critical reactions. Both pieces came across as supporting fascistic ideals to most critics upon release, despite the two creators opposing political and moral beliefs. Using Louise Rosenblatt's reader response theory as a framework for analyzing both the novel and film adaptation, this paper postulates the film adaptation fails to deliver an accurate critique of the novel by placing the burden of moral knowledge on the audience. Keinlein’s novel guides the reader into his moral sensibilities, whereas …

Depicting Absence: Thematic And Stylistic Paradoxes Of Representation In Visual And Literary Imagery, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

The article draws up an inventory of, and compares strategies for, the theoretical and critical treatment of the absence–presence interplay at stake in the literary and visual representations of absence. This brings to our attention a multiplicity of heterogeneous and, to a greater or lesser degree, marginal signify-ing phenomena that have in common patterns of disrupting and deviating from the standard conventions of creating and conveying meaning through figures of absence. Lacking a name for these disparate yet similar instances where meaning is created from empty signifiers, we have chosen to call them figural voids. This attempt to produce a …

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

Empty Time As Traumatic Duration: Towards A Cinematic Aevum, Kelli Fuery

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

Frank Kermode uses the term aevum to question the links between origin, order, and time, associating experience with spatial form. Without end or beginning, aevum identifies an intersubjective order of time where we participate in the “relation between the fictions by which we order our world and the increasing complexity of what we take to be the ‘real’ history of that world”; being “in-between” time is a primary quality of the aevum. Regarding cinema, aevum identifies this third duration as emotional experience, occuring as traumatic time. It facilitates thinking beyond lived temporal experience of everyday life to a philosophy …

Curating Digital Pedagogy In The Humanities, Katherine Harris, Matthew Gold, Rebecca Frost Davis

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

This is the published introduction to the born-digital, open-access, peer-reviewed *Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities*. More a rationale and scholarly study of both Digital Pedagogy and DPiH in general, this introduces articulates the uses, theory, rationale about digital pedagogy as it has been shaped in U.S. institutions since the explosion of Digital Humanities in 2009. As a separate field now, Digital Pedagogy is built on the generosity of its practitioners, but saving the *stuff* of teaching and pedagogy is difficult. The introduction historicizes this now-published project, its open peer review process, and its development in the early years (starting in …

Something To Do With A Girl Named Marla: Eros And Gender In David Fincher’S Fight Club, Vernon W. Cisney

Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty Publications

David Fincher’s 1999 film, Fight Club, has been characterized in many ways: as a romantic comedy, an exploration of white, middle-class male angst, an existentialist search for meaning amidst the moral ruins of late capitalism, an anarchist manifesto, and so on. But common to nearly every reading of the film, critical and laudatory alike, is the assumption that Fight Club is indisputably a celebration of misogynistic, masculinist virility and violence. On its face, this assumption appears so overwhelmingly obvious as to render superfluous any argumentation in support thereof, and absurd any opposing argumentation. Consider the ubiquitous homoerotic adulation of 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 …

Are Postmodernism And #Metoo Incompatible?, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

If postmodernism renders the replicant Rachael legible as a glossy simulacrum, then #MeToo renders her brutally legible as a victim of sexual violence.

Scipp: An Expanded Community Of Practice - Community Publishing, Juan Delgado, Kelly (Kl) Straight Dortch, Daiana Rodriguez, Alex Avila, William Beshears, Juliana Cruz, Gina Hanson, Frank Houlihan, Lacey Kendall, Larry Light, Cati Porter, Molly Tor, Timothy "Isaac" Pieper, Bianka Sanchez, Sara Trowbridge, Daniel Aguilar, Bernardo Benigno, Arely Bernal, Alejandra Bueno, Emily Campos, Jason Cannon, Griselda Caudillo Gallo, Joshua Clemente, Sarah Coblentz, Diana D'Arcangelo, Georgia Darwin, Mary Grace Deasis, Kaylan Els, Keith Fernandez, Maria Flores, Khiyara Frontela, Anthony Galvan, Monica Galvez, Martin Garcia, Jessica Godin, Freda Guzman, Madison Hall, Diana Huitron Munoz, Jennifer Ledesma, Maria Lias Chacon, Rebekah Linares, Prisma Loya, Elijah Magana, Alberto Mancillas, Lorinda Maya, Jennifer Pimentel, Nancy Ramirez, Angelica Rodriguez, Alexis Ruvalcaba, Sandra Sandoval De Rosas, Emily Stoddard, Andrea Tinajero, Lesly Velez Montenegro, Saulo Velez Montenegro, Matthew Vigil, Sergio Zamora, Marylou Alvarez, Roxanna Cervantes, Tenaya Fuentes, Wendy Moreno, David Valenzuela, Philip Colunga, Augustine "Auggie" Fuentes, Nadia Fuentes, Olive Fuentes, Sophia Fuentes, Miraya Martinez, Diego Mercado, Iker Valenzuela, Roma Valenzuela

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

SCIPP redefines and expands the existing notions about what makes for a vibrant and robust community of practice by partnering CSUSB students and professors with K-12 students, parents, and educators, along with committed community partners. SCIPP encourages curiosity in ways that leads to critical thinking, exploration, "risk taking", confidence building, open-mindedness, and other personal traits that equip them with the softskills to be active, critical, and creative contributors to our communities. SCIPP pedagogy embraces our students' collective wisdom and focuses on relational building where multi-directional communication is promoted and students are viewed as equal stakeholders in their own educations. SCIPP …

Course Syllabus (W19 Online) Coli 331t--Television Culture: "Lens, Mirror, Screen: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

Or a conjuncture of three moments in the dialectic of television as technical apparatus and cultural practice. In this course, we will read George Orwell’s 1984, view Michael Radford’s filmic adaptation of the novel, and consider a number of critical texts in order to think the psychological and social implications of television as an instrument of control, manipulation, and knowledge production. What, we ask, are the implications, in both 1984 and concrete experience, of light-speed communication capabilities for sense perception, consciousness, language, and awareness? In its dissemination of images and information, how does television impede and/or facilitate politics …

Musical “Covers” And The Culture Industry: From Antiquity To The Age Of Digital Reproducibility, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This essay foregrounds “covers” of popular recorded songs as well as male and female desire, in addition to Nietzsche’s interest in composition, together with his rhythmic analysis of Ancient Greek as the basis of what he called the “spirit of music” with respect to tragedy. The language of “sonic branding” allows a discussion of what Günther Anders described as the self-creation of the mass consumer but also a reflection on the ghostly time-space of music in the broadcast world. A brief allusion to Rilke complements a similarly brief reference to Jankelevitch’s “ineffable.”

Heidegger And Hölderlin On Aether And Life, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Making Implicit Methods Explicit: Trade Press Analysis In The Political Economy Of Communication, Thomas F. Corrigan

Communication Studies Faculty Publications

The political economy of communication (PEC) situates media systems and practices in their structural and historical contexts; however, PEC scholars rarely articulate or justify their research methods. To address this oversight, this article explains how PEC scholars use trade publications to study media industries, practices, policy making, and discourses thereof. Following a critical realist approach, PEC researchers “burrow down” in trade press advertisements and reports and “listen in” to the frank, insider discussions therein. This article evaluates the trade press against Scott’s four “quality control criteria” for documentary sources—authenticity, credibility, representativeness, and meaning. Trade publications employ daunting industry jargon, and …

On Guenther Anders, Political Media Theory, And Nuclear Violence, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

• Guenther Anders was a philosopher concerned with the political and social implications of power, both as expressed in the media and its tendency to elide the citizenry and thus the very possibility of democracy and the political implications of our participation in our own subjugation in the image of modern social media beginning with radio and television. Anders was particularly concerned with two bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II, and he was just as concerned with the so-called ‘peaceful’ uses of nuclear power, i.e., what he named our apocalypse-blindness and the urgency of violence. To …

The Fluid Gaze In Virtual Reality, Soudhamini

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

"In 2006, in the course of an Artists Residency in Munich I made a video triptych titled Meditations on the Tiger, in which a story unfolds over three adjacent screens... The story is as linear as it can get, but working with three screens I found I could move laterally as well... There were multiple tracks of time running together on that train - the real time of action and event, the hurtling projected time of anticipation and expectation, and the deep, reflective time of memory, thought and speech. 3 video timelines synchronized so we begin to approach image, just …

Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

“Don’T You Have Anything Better To Do?” : A Care-Focused Feminist Analysis Of Undertale, Evan Marzahn

Women's and Gender Studies: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

This paper explores the feminist ethic of care in Undertale's "meta" narrative and gameplay from the perspective of an avid gamer. Using Nel Noddings' ethical framework to analyze the actions and attitudes of the characters (including the player) and their consequences, I argue that Undertale provides distinctively feminist ethical gameplay that not only criticizes the frequent violence in role-playing games, but also encourages the player to always approach any interaction with a character (or a real person) as an encounter between individuals whose unique circumstances and needs must be considered.

Course Syllabus (W17 Online) Coli 211m: "Superhero Film And Contemporary Culture", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

What might the current popularity and ubiquity of superhero film say about contemporary culture? This course will explore three possible implications of this question: (1) that the superhero genre reflects a moment in our species’ history of reconciling the human being-technology relation, which we shall view as a complex system constituted by our productive relations to material and ideological tools and their ensembles, the needs and aspirations that determine how we conceptualize and activate these relations, and the technically rationalized social reality that is their result, (2) that this ongoing process of reconciliation evinces, at once, the …

“Why (Not) Philosophy Of Stand-Up Comedy?”, Sheila Lintott

Faculty Contributions to Books

Stand-up comedy has been largely ignored by analytic philosophers of art, including those interested in comedy and humor. This is somewhat surprising, given the immense popularity of stand-up comedy and the rock star status enjoyed by some comedians today. I suspect that philosophers are just as likely to enjoy stand-up comedy as anyone else; in some cases (i.e. for some philosophers and some comedians), probably more likely. Here I offer some reasons philosophers of art should take the time to consider stand-up comedy and possible explanation for why philosophers of art have paid far less attention to stand-up comedy than …

Play This Paper: Forms Of Time In The Open World, Branching Narrative, Roleplaying Game, Jimmy Evans

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This paper is an analysis of chronotopes in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that reveals how the procedurality of video games might suggest a refined heteroglossic form. Synthesizing contemporary american philosopher Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric with the materialist linguistic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, this ultimately hypertextual and interactive article reflects on language as Bakhtin once did: as "agent and agency” (MPL 146). After detailing how the three major processes of the game coordinate spacetime, it is necessary to conclude that its kaleidoscopic nature provides new opportunities for the rendering of the geometry of thought in what is a …

Nietzsche’S Digital Alexandrians: Greek As Musical Code For Nietzsche And Kittler, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Lost In Adaptation, Caitlin S. Manocchio

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

philosophical societies that send us here as their representatives- can no longer, in this case, allow itself [the philosophical idea] to be enclosed in a single idiom, at the risk of floating, neutral and disembodied, remote from every body of language

(Derrida 1994: 14)

Introduction

In Sending: on representation (1994), Jacques Derrida questions the function of representation that we can use to offer a challenge to the experience and structure of representation as a practice in visual culture and for contemporary spectatorship. When the function of representation is being questioned, rather than its subject, the practice of representation is seen …

Lovecidal: Walking With The Disappeared [Table Of Contents], Trinh T. Minh-Ha

Cinema & Media Studies

“Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared is filled with provocation and guided by evocation. Encompassing various forms (poetry, treatise, memoir, and historiography) and capaciously conceived, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s contemplation of war, state-authorized violence, state-sanctioned ‘security,’ and international amnesia is skillfully tempered by observations of beauty, humanity, and resistance. To say that this is an important book is in many ways an understatement; rather, Lovecidal is transformative.” —Cathy Schlund-Vials, author of War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work

Off The Lip Conference - Transdisciplinary Approaches To Cognitive Innovation. Conference Proceedings, Sue Denham, Michael Punt, Edith Doove, Martha Blassnigg, Raluca Briazu, Kathryn Francis, Agi Haynes, Guy Edmonds, Adam Benjamin, Matthew Emmett, Iris Garrelfs, Christopher B. Germann, Joanna Griffin, Diane Humphrey, Bryanna Lucyk, Christie Purchase, Rachel Sansone, Emily Baxter, Amy Ione, Frank Loesche, Abigail Jackson, Alexis Kirke, Eduardo Miranda, Luke Rendell, Simon Ingram, Yutaka Nakamura, Gi Taek Ryoo, Eugenia Stamboliev, Michael Straeubig, Chun-Wei Hsu, Pinar Oztop, Mihaela Taranu, Sundar Sarukkai, James Sweeting, Minami Hirayama

Off the Lip Conference - Transdisciplinary Approaches to Cognitive Innovation

The promise of cognitive innovation as a collaborative project in the sciences, arts and humanities is that we can approach creativity as a bootstrapping cognitive process in which the energies that shape the poem are necessarily indistinguishable from those that shape the poet. For the purposes of this conference the exploration of the idea of cognitive innovation concerns an understanding of creativity that is not exclusively concerned with conscious human thought and action but also as intrinsic to our cognitive development. As a consequence, we see the possibility for cognitive innovation to provide a theoretical and practical platform from which …

Course Syllabus (W16 Online) Coli 331: "Pulp Fiction And Quentin Tarantino", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes:

Rejecting the standpoint of the passively entertained consumer, our shared objectives in this course will be (1) to bring our selected cinematic and written texts into interaction in such ways as to produce high-quality scholarly writing. It is hoped that, by the end of the semester, each student’s active engagement with our course material should have enabled him/her, (2) to deepen and broaden his/her knowledge base concerning the social problematics we will have treated in such ways as to inform and encourage constructive social action.

We will view Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Reservoir …

All The World Is Shining, And Love Is Smiling Through All Things: The Collapse Of The "Two Ways" In 'The Tree Of Life', Vernon W. Cisney

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Chapter Summary: From the blackness emerges a subtly scripted epigraph from the biblical book of Job, silently posing a question to the viewer on behalf of the almighty: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation...while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Following thirty-five chapters of Job's story, filled with relentless criticism on the part of Job's "friends" in response to Job's ongoing poetically formulated and impassioned lamentations, and the demands he places before God - demands for justice and an explanation for his suffering - at last the voice of …