Film and Media Studies Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …