Film and Media Studies Commons^™

The Ecology Of American Noir, Katrina Younes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In The Ecology of American Noir, I investigate the relationship between the conventions of noir fiction and film and its sub-types in relation to environmental crises. Specifically, I address questions that not only allow us to (re)read early hardboiled literature and neo-noir films, but that also help us identify a new sub-genre of noir and develop an ecocritical methodology: I call this contemporary sub-genre and methodology “eco-noir.” I trace the development of strategies of mapping urban blight and environmental deterioration in classic hardboiled fiction of the 1940s, neo-noir films of the 1970s, and eco-noir texts of the post millennial …

The Sense Of Waste, Sean Sokolov

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis begins with the observation that waste is to an outsized degree subject to the modal verbs; we might say that waste gives way to the sense of waste. As a result, waste appears as an unusually animate–and animating–actant, producing in those who apprehend it the impulse to put that which is wasted to use. The introductory chapter establishes this fact and provides a brief overview of scholarly approaches to the study of waste, asserting that in order to transcend mere description of the phenomenon it is necessary to establish how waste as an actant entered into its present …

Witnessing Conspiracy Theories: Developing An Intersectional Approach To Conspiracy Theory Research, David Guignion

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation proposes an intersectional approach to conspiracy theory research that engages conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists by considering their proximity and affiliations with hegemonic power structures. Against challenges to conspiracy theories based on their lack of empirical legitimacy (Rosenblum and Muirhead 2019) and building on arguments that propound their status as “subjugated knowledges” (Bratich 2008), this dissertation argues that conspiracy theories can be vectors of anti-oppressive resistance against systemic forces that disenfranchise racial, gender, and class minorities. Conspiracy theories are not a homogenous phenomenon; they are particular instances of potentially generative suspicion against powerful forces. The dissertation deploys Kelly …

The Digital Extreme: Cinema's Reality Crisis In A Nostalgic Age, Lucas J. Dvorsky

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the trajectory and legacy of two streams of filmmaking born in the 1990s: extreme film and the digital film, which eventually fuse into the digital extreme film, a watershed moment of postmodern filmmaking. I analyze the rise of the digital extreme, probing its disturbing aesthetic, its grainy, blurry glitches, dark, mundane reality and connections to fear, surveillance and nostalgia. Looking at filmmakers as disparate as pop-culture mainstays like Martin Scorsese, breakout directors like Jane Schoenbrun, avant-garde artists like Michael Snow, and arthouse auteurs such as Catherine Breillat and Olivier Assayas, I consider what the moment of …

Influencer Engagement Pods And The Struggle Over Measure In Instagram Platform Labour, Victoria J. O'Meara

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of Instagram influencer engagement pods to explore the dynamics of antagonism, resistance, and struggle unique to the structuring conditions and valorization processes of platform capitalism. I argue that beneath the seemingly frictionless data-driven accumulation strategies of social media platforms like Instagram lies a familiar struggle between the subjects of labour and capital, the “struggle over measure” (de Angelis & Harvie, 2009).

Instagram influencers are native-to-online, professional content producers who have amassed an online following that they monetize in various ways. These digital producers are the unique progeny of platform capitalism; they operate as independent “entrepreneurs-of-the-self,” …

Futures Of Film Criticism: Aesthetics, Cinephilia, Philosophy, And Politics, Christina Elle Burke

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This is an “integrated-article” dissertation that examines new approaches to academic film criticism following what has been called the “philosophical turn” in Film Studies. By arguing that philosophical research has as much to offer film analysis as films can contribute to philosophy, each chapter proposes a method of film criticism influenced by debates in Continental Philosophy. Chapters one, two, and four put prominent thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Jacques Rancière, and Theodor Adorno into a dialogue with films by directors such as Claire Denis, Staub-Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, and Terrence Malick to account for various creative choices and critical interpretations. Chapters …

Timely Representations: The Queer Elder Figure In Canadian And U.S. American Film And Television, Jami L. Mcfarland

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Since the release of Mike Mills’s Beginners (2010), a critically acclaimed film about the late life coming out story of a 75-year-old father, representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or trans (LGBT) characters in their sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties have multiplied in U.S. American and Canadian film and television. Instances of what I call the ‘queer elder figure', these contemporary representations comment on the intersections of aging and queerness. Evident in popular award-winning series, such as Grace and Frankie (2015-2022) and Transparent (2014-2017; 2019), the queer elder figure has emerged as a rather trendy subject in the second decade of …

“Fashionable To Be Ethnic”: Malka Marom, Yorkville Reimagined, And The Cbc’S A World Of Music, Maureen Chow

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 1999, looking back at her 1960s career as a folk performer, Malka Marom commented that she and her former singing partner, Joso Spralja, had reached mainstream success in Canada when it was considered “fashionable to be ethnic.” Here, Malka is referring to the mid-1960s, when she was classified as an ethnic folk singer in Toronto’s Yorkville Village folk scene. She performed alongside Canadian folk “greats” such as Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, and Ian and Sylvia. Malka and Joso released four studio albums through Capitol Records of Canada and were later chosen to host their own CBC television show, A …

Toward A Fluid Cinematic Spectatorship And Desire: Revisiting Laura Mulvey’S Psychoanalytic Film Theories, Taylor Ashton Mcgoey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis project re-evaluates Laura Mulvey’s film theories regarding psychoanalysis and the “male gaze,” first found in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). By re-evaluating the limitations of Mulvey’s use of the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic model this project seeks to understand the desires and processes of identification of cinematic spectators who reject the ideological imperative of the “male gaze”. As many critics have noted, Mulvey’s initial examination of cinema does not account for LGBTQ+ spectators and/or black spectators who occupy looking relations that reject cis-normative and heteronormative white Hollywood cinematic conventions. From this standpoint, we begin the …

Exquisite Corpses: Markedness, Gender, And Death In Video Games, Meghan Blythe Adams

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation analyzes gendered death animations in video games and the way games thematize death to remarginalize marked characters, including women. This project combines Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s work on the human subjection to death and Georges Bataille’s characterization of sacrifice to explore how death in games stages markedness. Markedness articulates how a culture treats normative identities as unproblematic while marking non-normative identities as deviant.

Chapter One characterizes play as a form of death-deferral, which culminates in the spectacle of player-character death. I argue that death in games can facilitate what Hegel calls tarrying with death, embracing our subjection to …

“Born Of A Spirit That Knows No Conquering:” Innovation, Contestation, And Representation In The Pcha, 1911-1924., Taylor Mckee

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) was a professional North American hockey league that operated from 1911 to 1924. With markets in Victoria, Vancouver, New Westminster, Seattle, and Portland, the bourgeoning league was a viable competitor to the NHA and offered a distinctive approach to the developing sport. Through innovations and rule changes, the PCHA made significant strides in player safety, in line with the vision of “clean” hockey promoted by the league’s founders, Frank and Lester Patrick. In turn, these innovations were represented through newspaper accounts from the period, which helped promote a modern, scientific, and highly-marketable brand of …

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 …

The Networked Fictional Narrative: Seriality And Adaptations In Popular Television And New Media., Nandita Dutta

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

From creating elaborate fan-worlds to driving large amounts of revenue into the economy, popular culture has proved to be the motivation behind, as well a reflection of, large scale acquisitions of conglomerates that have governed popular interests since the mid-20th Century. If its movements across geographic space, time, and media can be traced, popular culture production is an apt subject of research into how a cultural entity is conceptualised, transported and appropriated within another. In this study, adaptations of fictional products in the 20th and 21st Centuries are considered as manifestations of neobaroque forms of culture production and consumption. Some …

Narratives Of Canadian Identity At The Ultimate Fighting Championship, Jared V. Walters

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the use of representations and symbols of Canadian identity within the event coverage produced by the Ultimate Fighting Championship Corporation, in the context of its two key events, Ultimate Fighting Championship, and Fight Night, produced in Canada. To establish the historical context in which the sport developed in Canada, a narrative historiography of the political and legal struggles that led to the legalization and increasing popularity of Mixed Martial Arts, and the UFCC’s version of the sport, in particular. This first major part of the dissertation is contained in Study 1. The …

Critiquing The New Autonomy Of Immaterial Labour: An Analysis Of Work In The Artificial Intelligence Industry, James Steinhoff

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Karl Marx theorized capitalism as a relation between labour, capital and machines. For Marx, capital, the process of self-augmenting value appropriated from human labour, is inherently driven by competition to replace labour in production with machines. Marx goes as far as to describe machines as capital’s “most powerful weapon” for suppressing working class revolt. Marx, however, could not have predicted the computing machines – such as artificial intelligence – which now form the basis for an increasingly cybernetic capital. Since Marx’s time, many Marxist thinkers have sought to apply or update his approach to the cybernetic era. The influential post-operaismo …

The Amphibian, Melioristic Agenda For Dividuals: Tropological Oscillations Versus Tropological Settlements, Donatas Sinkunas

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Some people often identify themselves too strongly with one particular belief system. Others, throughout their lives, travel from one belief system to another without necessarily weaving their experiences and gained bodies of knowledge in a complementary manner. This thesis discusses different frequencies and principles of this sort of settlements or oscillations. I argue that it is impossible to believe in perfectly purist ideologies that would not deviate from their putative, pre-established, holistic inner order. Through multiple literary, cinematic, and philosophical examples it is shown that people are of dividual (not individual) nature. That is to say, potentially we contain multiple …

Imaginaire De La Fin, Icônes, Esthétique. (Ir)Représenter La Post-Apocalypse Dans La Bande Dessinée Et Le Cinéma Du Génocide Tutsi., Alain Agnessan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cette étude sur la bande dessinée et le cinéma du génocide tutsi s’écarte de l’analyse désormais canonique des politiques mémorielles et pratiques testimoniales pour en investir le parti pris post-apocalyptique . Elle s’agence en deux volets, ou, plutôt, en deux lieux de regard. Envisageant l’imaginaire de la fin qui s’est constitué autour du génocide tutsi, le premier volet de l’étude s’attelle à décrire une scène « cross-traumatic » ou transtraumatique, appelée génoscape, sur laquelle la pensée, les images et les discours critiques lient le destin éthique, esthétique et épistémique du génocide tutsi à celui de la Shoah. Cette démarche …

Dead Men Walking: An Analysis Of Working-Class Masculinity In Post-2008 Hollywood Film, Ryan Schroeder

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Working-class masculinity has lost its steam. Since 2008, a sub-genre of Hollywood films has emerged that depicts the current crisis, and imminent demise, of working-class masculinity in the United States. The 2008 financial crisis has had devastating effects on the American economy, and particularly the working-class, whose precarious economic position has only been exacerbated under neoliberalism. These effects have become the thematic focus of a fringe genre of films, which show how the destabilization of the American economy has incited greater instability in gender relations, and has had an acute impact on working-class men. This thesis proceeds by analyzing how …

Trauma, Creativity, And Bearing Witness Through Art: Marian Kołodziej's Labyrinth, Alyssa Logie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The mid-2000s brought rise to significant shifts in the field of trauma studies, most notably the suggestion that a survivor’s trauma can have meaning when it is shared with others through creative representation and storytelling. Despite these critical changes in the field, there is a dearth of research outside of clinical art therapy that examines the role of creativity in the processes of working through past traumas for survivors, and in the processes of bearing witness to the trauma of others.

In an effort to address these issues, I use a framework of relational psychoanalysis and feminist philosophy to explore …

'Calling Out From Some Old Familiar Shrine': Living Archivism And Age Performativity In Bob Dylan's Late Period, Matthew Lipson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The release of Bob Dylan’s 30^th studio album in 1997, Time Out of Mind, marked an unlikely and triumphant return to critical acclaim following years of personal and creative decline. From this point onward, Dylan would maintain a quality of output comparable to his 1960s catalogue and unprecedented among artists in the twilight of their career. The proceeding albums, from “Love and Theft” (2001) to Triplicate (2017) would present Dylan as a living archive of traditional American genres – an intersection through which rock and roll, blues, bluegrass, and vocal jazz would pass. The notion of Dylan as …

Resistant Vulnerability In The Marvel Cinematic Universe's Captain America, Kristen Allison

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Established in 2008 with the release of Iron Man, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become a ubiquitous transmedia sensation. Its uniquely interwoven narrative provides auspicious grounds for scholarly consideration. The franchise conscientiously presents larger-than-life superheroes as complex and incredibly emotional individuals who form profound interpersonal relationships with one another. This thesis explores Sarah Hagelin’s concept of resistant vulnerability, which she defines as a “shared human experience,” as it manifests in the substantial relationships that Steve Rogers (Captain America) cultivates throughout the Captain America narrative (11). This project focuses on Steve’s relationships with the following characters: Agent Peggy Carter, Natasha …

Romance, Politics And Minor Art: A Nomadology Of Inamoramento De Orlando And Star Wars, Andrea Privitera

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

While existing theories of romance (in particular, those formulated by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson) accurately characterize this literary mode as a highly politicized example of art, this thesis contends that the political nature of romance is broader and more complex than discussed so far. In order to offer a new and comprehensive political theory of romance, this work proposes a comparison between two historically and culturally diverse examples of romance, that is Matteo Maria Boiardo’s chivalric poem Inamoramento de Orlando and George Lucas’ space opera film Star Wars. By reading Boiardo and Lucas’ texts via Gilles Deleuze and …

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

Cultural Hybridity In The Contemporary Korean Popular Culture Through The Practice Of Genre Transformation, Kyunghee Kim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The focus of this dissertation is to show how the media of contemporary Korean popular culture, specifically films, are transformed into “hybrid cultural forms” through the practice of genre transformation. Since the early 21st century, South Korean popular culture has been increasingly spreading across the globe. Despite its growing attention and popularity, Korean pop culture has been criticized for its explicit copying of Western culture with no unique cultural identity. Others view the success of Korean media, both its creative mimicry and its critique of the West, as a new hybrid form that offers the opportunity for reassertion of local …

Hone The Means Of Production: Craft Antagonism And Domination In The Journalistic Labour Process Of Freelance Writers, Robert Bertuzzi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The works of Karl Marx have been central to the formation of a body of critical communication scholarship in Canada. But as Nicole S. Cohen adeptly shows, the influence of Marx’s thought has been absent, mostly, as it relates to questions involving cultural labourers. Of particular interest to her is Marx’s formulation concerning exploitation and its relationship to the field of journalism as it affects freelance writers.

This dissertation extends the notion of a “missing Marx” by incorporating other concepts from his oeuvre. His writings on alienation help to address one of two major research questions posed in this dissertation. …

Representation Of Settler Colonial Violence In Palestine, A Thesis In Support Of The Multi-Media Exhibition Choreographies Of Resistance, Rehab Nazzal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project-based dissertation emerges from my engagement with theories of representation, settler colonialism, and genocide, as well as involvement with direct engagement through embodied experience of the Palestinian reality in the colonized West Bank during 2015–2017. The artworks and written components of this project seek to represent shards of the multilayered Western-Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine through a focus on the struggle and resilience of the Palestinian people and the endurance of their land. Land seizing as the aim of settler colonialism and the colonised bodies as sites of oppression and sites of resistance are central to the various …

Invisible Labour: Support-Service Workers In India’S Information Technology Industry, Indranil Chakraborty

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The dissertation investigates the life, working conditions and urban experience of support-service workers in the Information Technology (IT) sector of India: the janitors, security guards, fast food delivery service professionals and car pool drivers who work in and around technology parks that develop software applications for a world-market. The common experiences of these employees are migration from rural contexts to a radically modern employment setting, where they work long hours with minimal benefits in informal conditions that often violate basic labour laws. The thesis draws on quantitative and qualitative research, and in particular on analysis and interpretation of hundred and …

Supernova: Performing Race, Hybridity And Expanding The Geographical Imagination, Raheleh Saneie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis attempts to explore the many socio-political, temporal and spatial factors that contribute to the formation of cultural identity. Through my video work, SuperNova, I examine how race is performed and the discursive structures that contribute to the process of racialization. The core question that is central to this thesis is how race is performed and the potential benefits and drawbacks of this performance. In chapter one, I explore how whiteness is performed and how racial hierarchies are maintained through performance. I critique the Aryan race discourse that is a part pf Iranian nationalist discourse of identity. In …

Industrial Stagecraft: Tooling And Cultural Production, Jennifer A. Hambleton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The tooling of theatrical spectacle requires collaboration between stagecraft technicians and designers in an increasingly globalized and standardized manufacturing process. While hand skills are still used and remain useful, digital fabrication and other tools are now incorporated in labour processes in scenery manufacturing workshops, altering collaborative work in complex ways. This thesis is an inquiry into the epistemological role of software and digital fabrication tools in stagecraft practices and explores how the politics of craft labour intersect with material practices in media production labour. The technical aspects of the fabrication of theatrical spectacles and display environments, the way objects are …

Pitching The Feminist Voice: A Critique Of Contemporary Consumer Feminism, Kate Hoad-Reddick

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation’s object of study is the contemporary trend of femvertising, where seemingly pro-women sentiments are used to sell products. I argue that this commodified version of feminism is highly curated, superficial, and docile. The core question at the centre of this research is how commercial feminism—epitomized by the trend of femvertising—influences the feminist discursive field. Initially, I situate femvertising within the wider trend of consumer feminism and consider the implications of a marketplace that speaks the language of feminism. Then, through detailed content analysis of advertising by brands like Dove, Secret, CoverGirl, and Barbie, examples of this trend …