Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Screening Male Crisis: A Comparative Analysis Of The Alternative Coming-Of-Age Motion Picture, Matthew J. Tesoro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will identify how the principle male character in select film narratives transforms from childhood through his adolescence in multiple locations and historical eras. The primary film narratives include Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy: Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and Apur Sansar (1959), François Truffaut’s "Antoine Doinel" cycle: Les Quatre cents coups (1959), Antoine et Colette (1962), Baisers volés (1968), Domicile conjugal (1970), and L’Amour en fuite (1979), and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014). These images of experience/maturation in motion are all intended to exemplify how the boy physically and psychologically changes over an extended period of time. The concept of …

Masculinidades En Crisis Y Prácticas De Resistencia Feminista En La Literatura Y El Cine Españoles De Autoría Femenina, Carmen Sanchis-Sinisterra

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the representation of masculinity in crisis in films and novels by contemporary female authors of Spain. The films are El último viaje de Robert Rylands by Gracia Querejeta, Te doy mis ojos by Iciar Bollaín and La vida sin mí by Isabel Coixet. The novels are Amado amo by Rosa Montero, Los aires difíciles by Almudena Grandes and La conquista del aire by Belén Gopegui. The question this dissertation asks is if by introducing male characters that lack power, control and success the works promote practices of feminist resistance. The answer is that they do but, as …

Youtube As A Net"Work": A Media Analysis Of The Youtube Beauty Community, Barbara Casabianca

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper looks at the YouTube beauty community and how this presentation of beauty gurus and subscribers expresses ideas about femininity and work family balance. Through a media analysis of YouTube videos and commentary, the content of this online community space is discussed to further explore the representations of women in various working roles as YouTubers. The ways select women including Anna Saccone, Michelle Phan, Jewel Sha’ree, and Dani Meza-Hung portray their lives through YouTube videos and speak about their YouTube experience is analyzed to express potential meaning within this unique media presentation. Following the content analysis of these specific …

Life Experience: Freddy Got Fingered As Neo-Surrealist Masterpiece, Frank Koshel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The late Roger Ebert was known for his entertainingly harsh reviews. The review he wrote of the 2001 film Freddy Got Fingered is one notable example. "The day may come when 'Freddy Got Fingered' is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny," wrote Ebert in his April 20, 2001 review of the film. Humor is subjective and there is no accounting for taste but this thesis will prove that the much-maligned film Freddy Got Fingered is a milestone of neo-surrealism. Freddy Got Fingered director Tom Green has a …

Centralized, Decentralized, Distributed: Disruptive Technology In Distance Education From "Sunrise Semester" To Present-Day Moocs, Rosanna Flouty

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lessons from early academic television courses from the 1950s guide an assessment of current disruptive technologies that shape Massive Open Online Courses (known as MOOCs) and other informal online learning opportunities today. This dissertation explores some of the unique contributing factors that led to the creation of Sunrise Semester (1957-1982), a popular network television program co-produced by New York University and CBS that offered college credit to viewers. Despite the fact that the show aired at dawn and rarely included one-on-one interactions with professors, Sunrise Semester aired for nearly twenty-five years and attracted a devoted viewership of over two million …

Broadcasting The Crisis: Spanish Television As Critique, Eva Velasco Pena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Television is often thought of as monolithic and totalizing, controlling viewers and upholding the status quo. This project will propose different understandings of the mass-medium. In order to historically contextualize my study, I will begin with a brief discussion of the role of television in democratic Spain (from c.1978-present). The thesis will primarily consist of an analysis of two sides of contemporary Spanish TV: fiction and politics; and will explore the way that certain programs, alternately catalyze critical thought and actions or enable spectators to, following John Ellis, “work through” traumatic events. I furthermore propose that imaging a concept might …

Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual …

Art As Display, Frank M. Boardman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Art is essentially a type of display. As an activity, art is what we do when we display objects with certain intentions. As a set of objects, art is all of those things that are displayed for those purposes. The artworld is the social atmosphere that surrounds this particular activity of display. And a history of art is an evolving narrative of change in the practice of this sort of display.

Specifically, to focus for convenience on art as a set of objects, this is what we can call the “displayed-object thesis”:

x is a work of art iff: (a) …

Christ The Queer: Gender And Sexuality In Scorsese's "The Last Temptation Of Christ", Stephen Barnett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although great strides have been made since the landmark 1969 Stonewall Riots in liberating queer equal rights, both politically and societally, there are still prevalent belief systems in strong opposition to those human rights of gender and sexuality. Biblical religion, through its various monotheistic faiths and denominations, continues to condemn queer as a sin against God because, they argue, God, (through the text of the Bible written solely by men), defines queer as an abomination. Yet, the Book of Genesis queers human gender and sexuality through its narrative of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Nevertheless, the first …

Media Representation Of Asian Americans And Asian Native New Yorkers’ Hybrid Persona, Min Huh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Asian Americans, having been degraded in the realm of popular media and neglected in the consumer market, have been unable to obtain a voice or leave a trace in American pop culture. The meager representation that Asian Americans rarely have is highly controlled through a distorted lens, inclined to paint them in a grotesquely exaggerated light for comic relief. The absence of Asian Americans in the media has compelled the Asian American youth to adapt the personas of different cultures in their desires for social and cultural mobility. These factors have given birth to a hybrid persona among Asian Native …

Both Into And Out Of The Cage: New Media, Transgression, And The Remaking Of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999, Casey Henry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation addresses an absent history of late twentieth-century postmodern literature. Namely, I trace the shifts between 1980s postmodernism, described by Fredric Jameson as encapsulating a “wan[ed]”“affect,” and the emergence of 1990s post-postmodernism, marked by an exaggeration of affect. My dissertation posits that this reinvention of feeling was due to shifts in communication technologies and new media art during the 1970s and 1980s competing with, and eventually rendering obsolete, avant-garde literary techniques for “connection.” These latter strategies were encapsulated in the postmodern “encyclopedic” novel, a form miming the logic of new media, yet incapable of fully addressing new programmatic shifts, …

Straddling Feminisms: Post-Wave Pop Politics And Experimental Performance, Jessica Del Vecchio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Straddling Feminisms,” is the first academic study of a new movement in feminist theatre. Examining experimental performances from 2008 to today, I argue that this resurgence of explicitly feminist work in New York City represents the rise of what I call “post-wave pop feminism”—an intergenerational politics that engages French feminist philosophy, 1980s U.S. feminist ideologies, queer and trans theory, and Third Wave feminist thought. Unlike performances of previous decades, in which feminist politics arose from a conscious presentation of “gender as a construction,” today’s work embodies a kind of woman-centricity that expands upon the definition of woman—to include queer cohorts …

Windows On The World: The Aesthetics Of Difference In Neoliberal New York, Nicholas Gamso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to refine critical methods for interpreting global cities and their cultures, charting an aesthetic history of neoliberal New York — from the 1929 regional plan to the present. Surveying a range of literature, art criticism, and planning discourse, I argue that the global has served as the dominant motif of spatial production and political power during this watershed era. I trace this argument through analyses of midcentury planning’s global spatial imaginings, gentrification and imperial metaphor, transnational encounter in World literature, and the city’s contemporary waste and recourse imaginaries. While I follow the Marxist account of the New …

The Moving Image In Public Art: U.S. And U.K., 1980–Present, Annie Dell'aria

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the work of artists who use moving images in contemporary public art. Specifically, these works are understood through their interactions with spectators and the practices of media consumption and public interaction these passersby negotiate when they encounter a work of moving image-based public art. To this end, I argue, through an analysis of public art, that screen spectatorship is an inherently situated experience.

The project of this dissertation is two-fold. First, I outline a typology of moving image-based public art by dividing significant practices into three categories—the enchanting spectacle, the ludic interface, and the illumination of place. …

Developments In Television Viewership, Lucile E. Hecht

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years the ways in which we watch television has changed, and so has the television we watch. “Binge watching,” almost the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2013, has taken a firm hold on the American television audience who now watches television not according to the broadcast schedule but on its own terms. So, too, has the practice of engaging with other audience members, be they friends, family, or strangers, while watching a show by using a secondary device – a “second screen.” These practices have been developing for some time, and as technology adapts to …

Shadows And Light. Ernie Gehr Exhibitions At The Museum Of Modern Art, Sean M. Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines exhibitions and media installations of Ernie Gehr’s work at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), beginning with the pivotal 1970 show Information, which presented four films by Gehr. Wait (1968), Transparency (1969), Reverberation (1969), and History (1970) were screened alongside work by other avant-garde filmmakers and video artists in a circular viewing booth in the gallery space, in a show featuring works now considered masterpieces of conceptual art. It also considers the two site-specific video works, MoMA on Wheels (2002) and Navigation (2002), which Gehr created for the lobby space at MoMA QNS, …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …