Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Infinity Wars: Post 9/11 Superhero Films And American Empire, Peter J. Bruno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the last two decades, superhero films have accounted for some of the most popular and financially lucrative films of all time. This thesis analyzes some of the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of various superhero films following their post 9/11 boom. Beginning with America’s response to the events of 9/11 and a subsequent retreat into a Manichean world of good versus evil, I introduce the term “empirical reality” in order to account for the ways daily American life is shielded from the worst effects of U.S. foreign policy. On screen this manifests by perpetuating the myth of the “clean war” …

Gendered Subjectivity And Resistance: Brazilian Women’S Performance-For-Camera, 1973–1982, Gillian Sneed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers the work of a group of women artists in Brazil during the period of the military dictatorship (1964–1985), working in the genre of “performance-for-camera” (i.e., performance for film and video, rather than for a live audience). The artists are Lygia Pape (1927–2004), Letícia Parente (1930–1991), Anna Bella Geiger (b. 1933), Sonia Andrade (b. 1935), Anna Maria Maiolino (b. 1942), and Regina Vater (b. 1943). Some of these women were friends and colleagues who collaborated with each other; all of them contributed significantly to the development of film and video art in Brazil. Their works share an impulse …

Getting Located: Queer Semiotics In Dress, Callen Zimmerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The body, a long contested site of identity construction, has been used by historically by queers to convey desire, build affinity and transgress norms. Looking at the fashioned queer body, this capstone takes the form of a proposal for an art exhibition at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Seeking to engage with objects, performance and film which approximate, provide proxy for or depart from the body as a site, it explores the social and political quagmire of getting dressed. Comprised of contemporary art that looks at the rupture of legible bodily semiotics, this show wonders what …

Presenciar El Pasado: Witnessing The Spanish And Argentine Dictatorships Through Film And Television, Kristina L. Jacobs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the ways in which recent (1999–2017) films and television series ask today’s spectators to witness the 20^th-century Spanish and Argentine dictatorships by analyzing these texts on both a narrative and technical level. I examine torture in the Argentine films Garage Olimpo (Marco Bechis, 1999), Crónica de una fuga (Andrés Caetano, 2006), and, from Spain, La voz dormida (Benito Zambrano, 2011). I also investigate the theme of disappearance as seen in two Spain-Argentina joint ventures, Pasaje de vida (Diego Corsini, 2015) and Los pasos perdidos (Manane Rodríguez, 2001), both of which portray how parental absence affects …

The Sigh Of Triple Consciousness: Blacks Who Blurred The Color Line In Films From The 1930s Through The 1950s, Audrey Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will identify an over looked subset of racial identity as seen through film narratives from the 1930’s through the 1950’s pre-Civil Rights era. The subcategory of racial identity is the necessity of passing for Black people then identified as Negro. The primary film narratives include Veiled Aristocrats (1932), Lost Boundaries (1949), Pinky (1949) and Imitation of Life (1934). These images will deploy the troupe of passing as a racialized historical image. These films depict the pain and anguish Passers endured while escaping their racial identity. Through these stories we identify, sympathize and understand the needs of Black …

Women And Their Struggle To Be Considered Funny As Told Through The Study Of Female Standup Comics, Jean Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the history of comedy in America, women standup comics have taken a backseat to their male counterparts. Females have struggled against an inherent societal and male bias alleging that women cannot be funny. Even Sigmund Freud offered a medical explanation of this phenomenon in his 1905 book titled Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious stating that it was physiologically impossible for women to be funny because of the way their brains were structured. In 2007, intellectual British journalist Christopher Hitchens reinforced this theory in a Vanity Fair article titled “Why Women Can’t Be Funny,” claiming that women did …

Art And War: Republican Propaganda Of The Spanish Civil War, Jason Manrique

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis focuses on propaganda used by the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) to gain support for their cause and win the war. It focuses on three forms of media: cinema, posters and photography, and it is divided into an introduction, three separate chapters, and a conclusion. In them I provide a historical context on the II Republic and the Civil War and analyze the effectiveness of concrete artworks to propagate the Republican message.

Refusing White Privacy, Olivia Dunbar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In “Refusing White Privacy” I look at theories in White Data and Surveillance Studies around what data is, how it is made to exist, and for whom, in order to intervene in the conceptualization of data as an inevitable residue of human life and relationship. Through this intervention, I show that the alleged crises of privacy ushered in by allegedly non-racial smart technologies (a preoccupation in WDSS) is underwritten by racializing technologies from the Antebellum era to the present.

Framing The City: Photography And The Construction Of São Paulo, 1930–1955, Danielle J. Stewart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1930 and 1955 São Paulo, Brazil experienced a period of accelerated growth as the population nearly quadrupled from 550,000 to two million. In response, the municipal government undertook an aggressive public works program and commercial building boomed. Photographic representations of the cityscape were essential in directing modern São Paulo’s physical evolution because they reflected both the real—a chaotically growing megacity—and the ideal—a literally new, modernized space. This dissertation centers on four case studies of artists practicing different photographic modalities in order to analyze the symbiotic relationship between São Paulo's urban development and its photographic representation.

Construction sites, scaffolding, and …

İbne, Gey, Lubunya: A Queer Critique Of Lgbti+ Discourses In The New Cinema Of Turkey, Azmi Mert Erdem

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my thesis, I examine the intersections between liberalism, neoliberal globalism, and LGBTI+ visibility and identity politics, through films that present “openly” non-normative sexualities through cis/transgender male, female, or non-binary characters in the new cinema of Turkey. First, I survey existing scholarship on how liberal capitalism impacts the formation of LGBTI+ subjectivities and identity politics. Furthermore, I trace how non-normative sexualities, practices, and discourses evolved along with socioeconomic and political shifts in the Turkish Republic following the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, I review Turkey’s adoption of neoliberal ideologies in the 1980s and how these ideologies engage with its local, heterogenous gender …

Auditory Spaces And Sonic Narratives Of Gender: The Queer Phenomenology Of Sound In Girls Lost And Tangerine, Mira Vuorinen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the phenomenological aspects of sound in the Swedish film Girls Lost (2015) and the American film Tangerine (2015), which are both stories of transgender identities. The thesis considers sound through its affective characteristics and materiality in the films; that sound has an agency in a story-telling and that sounds actively create the world and spaces the characters and the listener-viewer inhabit. By utilizing Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology as a theoretical lens and bringing it together with phenomenology of sound, the thesis focuses on what is in the background and usually left behind in film analysis of gender …

Dance Of Exile: The Sakharoffs’ Visual Performances In Montevideo (1935–1948), Pablo Munoz Ponzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the life-work chronology of the dancers and choreographers Clotilde von Derp (whose surname then was Sakharoff) and Alexander Sakharoff, who were exiled in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1941 and 1948. During their stay in the Rio de la Plata region, the Sakharoffs stirred up the art scene by performing extremely detailed dances with great attention to costume design. This thesis begins with a review of the reception of the dancers’ performances by the artistic and cultural circles in Montevideo, arguing that the Sakharoffs’ “queer” trajectory resonated with the Uruguayan artistic community, influencing the creation …

Mechanical Kingdoms: Sound Technologies And The Avant-Garde, 1928–1933, Lauren Rosati

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Against accepted histories of the historical avant-garde, which have elevated artistic production in traditional media while suppressing sonic practices, this dissertation argues that artist-engineers working across Europe and the United States independently, if simultaneously, turned their attention to emerging sound technologies as new media for creative experimentation by the early 1930s. This spectrum of activity demonstrates the significance of sound in avant-garde practice, and indicates a wide-ranging artistic engagement with technological devices intended for mass audiences. While the common understanding of the relation between art and technology in this period amounts to one of mere enthusiasm for the novel formal …

Existentialmd.Com: Building Towards An Embodied Internet Aesthetic, Natasha Ochshorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ExistentialMD.com is a website that aims to treat the body as an emotional and social subject in an online space that is purposefully bodied and fleshy. The website contrasts original creative nonfiction essays with a formal structure that alludes to the medical website WebMD. Mimicking WebMD’s symptom checker, which asks users to locate their discomfort with increasing specificity before suggesting conditions they might be suffering from, ExistentialMD uses a similar structure to yield results that are more exploratory than diagnostic, and which envision the body as a site of experience and emotionality. Form and content combine to create an …

The Past Is Never Dead: Amorphous Time In Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique, Anthony E. Dominguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Jean-Luc Godard is undoubtedly one of the most central figures to cinema. A pioneer of the French New Wave, Godard’s style would go on to influence all realms of the artform. Despite continuing to make films beyond the French New Wave, however, Godard would eventually succumb to his own myth. Godard studies have largely remained focused on these early portions of his career that are so well remembered, ranging from 1960 to 1968. While in more recent times, Godard’s post-68 filmography has received more scholarly notice, there still exists a discrepancy of attention between Godard’s latest films and his earlier …

Raised On Tv: A Queer Teen's Guide To Syndicated Sexualities, Francesca Petronio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the contemporary landscape of LGBTQ adolescent television programming over the past decade. Applying a three-pronged approach to media content analysis—emphasizing a textual reading of the series, the networks’ political economy of production, and audience reception among scholars, culture critics and fans—the author provides both surface and symptomatic readings of Freeform’s Pretty Little Liars (2010-2017), MTV’s Faking It (2014-2016), and ABC’s The Real O’Neals (2016-2017). Thematically and chronologically, this period of programming spans the end of what has been called the gay-positive era, characterized by the politics of anti-bullying campaigns, and the emerging post-gay genre, born after the …

Rituals Of Remaindered Life In The Films Of Kidlat Tahimik, Alison R. Boldero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Kidlat Tahimik, who achieved international renown during the Marcos regime for his film Perfumed Nightmare (Mababangong Bangungot, 1976), is relatively unknown outside of international film circles. Considered a pioneer of Third Cinema in the Philippines, a radical film movement from Latin America that has since inspired similar movements globally, Tahimik challenged cultural hegemony in a postcolonial, post-World War II Philippines through the production of imperfect films. This paper looks to three of Tahimik's films - Perfumed Nightmare, Turumba (1983), and Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow? (Bakit Dilaw Ang Kulay ng Bahaghari, 1994) …