Other 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 …

“87% Missing”: Preserving Video Game History In A Canadian Copyright Context, Amelia Clarkson, Magnus Berg

Digital Initiatives Symposium

In 2020, the University of Toronto Mississauga campus library acquired the largest collection of video games in Canada from prolific collector Syd Bolton, whose vision was for it to not only be preserved but also playable and publicly accessible. Over the past three years, the collections team has been processing the collection to facilitate access onsite, and in 2024 aims to begin the next step of digitally preserving the collection. In the summer of 2023, the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network co-authored a report on the dire state of availability of classic games, with the goal …

The Evolution Of Palestinian Narrative: ‘Mo' As An Illustration, Ihsan Abualrob, Ayman Talal Yousef

An-Najah University Journal for Research - B (Humanities)

The article aims to explore the present-day challenges facing the Palestinian narrative. It delves into the ways in which the narrative has been shaped by historical events namely the Nakba, the Naksa, and the Oslo Accords, and how these events have left a lasting impact on the Palestinian identity. The article then examines the potential for the development of a new form of cultural resistance utilizing personal stories; as demonstrated by the Netflix show ‘Mo’. The show proffers a novel approach incorporating Palestinain political messages onto comedy and drama, and therefore has the potential to reach a wider audience. In …

Mary Magdalene On Film In Twenty-First Century: A Feminist Theological Critique, Mary Ann Beavis

Journal of Religion & Film

Since the turn of the millennium, several films (and one popular TV series) featuring Mary Magdalene as a significant character, or even as the central character, have been produced. A few, specifically Son of God (2104), The Chosen (2017-), and Mary Magdalene (2019), gained a wide audience through some combination of theatrical release, television, and streaming services. Unlike earlier productions that unfailingly portrayed her conventionally as a penitent prostitute, these and other, less well-known films of recent decades have departed from this traditional Magdalene. This is no doubt due, among other things, to the influence of feminist theology and biblical …

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 …

Comic Legacies Of The Japanese Silver Screen, Aaron Gerow, Xavi Sawada, David Baasch, Eugene Kwon, Adam Silverman, Anna Tropnikova, Chloe Yan

Film Series Commentaries

Pamphlet created for the film series “Comic Legacies of the Japanese Silver Screen” presented at Yale University from February to April, 2024. Starting with an introduction outlining the history of Japanese film comedy, the pamphlet contains plot summaries and commentaries on the following films:

Buddhist Mass for Goemon Ishikawa (1930, Saitō Torajirō) Fighting Friends (1929, Ozu Yasujirō) Romantic and Crazy (1934, Yamamoto Kajirō) Singing Lovebirds (1939, Makino Masahiro) Akanishi Kakita (1936, Itami Mansaku) Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryō (1935, Yamanaka Sadao) Room for Rent (1959, Kawashima Yūzō) Doctor’s Day Off (1952, Shibuya Minoru) Oh, My Bomb! …

Trust Me: Film + Q&A; (February 22, 2024, 5:30 Pm, Sheldon Museum Of Art) [Poster], Sheldon Museum Of Art, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

Poster for Trust Me: Film + Q&A held February 22, 2024 at 5:30 PM at the Sheldon Museum of Art (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States).

Poster blurb:

In today's information landscape, how do you know whom--and what--you can trust? Watch the award-winning, feature-length documentary Trust Me, which explores how media technology is influencing society and what we can do about it.

A Q&A with Rosemary Smith, filmmaker and managing director of the non-partisan Getting Better Foundation, follows.

More information about the screening is available at https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/trust-me-documentary-to-screen-at-sheldon/.

More information about the film is available at https://www.trustmedocumentary.com/ …

The Mini Syllabus: Locating And Engaging With Black Women In Popular Culture, Katrina Marie Overby

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Real #Hotgirl Sh*T: Practical Application Of Intersectional Re-Presentation Instruction, Jessica F. Love

Feminist Pedagogy

This critical commentary outlines how the Real #HotGirl Sh*T: Megan Thee Stallion & Mediated Hip Hop, Black Feminist and Communication Pedagogy promotes active learning via popular culture and digital media, and it provides a practical model for employing intersectionality in classroom settings. Previous critical media pedagogy exploring minority media re-presentation primarily focused on the effects of master narratives produced by traditional media. This syllabus's incorporation of social and digital media helps students understand how collective minority groups use and interact with media as a political tool to challenge re-presentational regimes. More importantly, this syllabus employs real-world examples of popular culture …

#Hotgirlsemestersyllabus, Katrina Marie Overby, Gheni Platenburg, Niya Pickett Miller

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

When Language Fails: A Critical Analysis Essay Of Kathryn Stockett’S The Help:, Evan Mccreary

Black Album Mixtape

A critical analysis essay of Kathryn Stockett's New York Times Bestselling book, The Help, and it's subsequent film adaptation, and how in recent years, particularly following the murder of George Floyd, the story has been used as a classroom tool for teaching students about racism and its effects. Written by a Black student in a primarily white school community, this essay was written as an antithesis to the ideology that the book and movie exceed their intended intentions of being a beneficial teaching tool to youth.

Tarot Fabula: Radical Digital Cards, Shuffled Narrative Structures, And Playing The Future In An Era Of Algorithms, Rachel M.L. Dixon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since their earliest recorded use in the 1400s, tarot cards figure as objects for game play, artistic creativity, spiritual divination, and self-discovery. Tarot Fabula (https://tarot-fabula.com) introduces a ludic, interactive website interface that challenges 20th century tarot reading practices as linear narratives. Statistically random reshufflings of tarot decks from archival collections prompt the reader to become a narrative co-creator, drawing them into conversation with traditional reading and interpretive practices as they remix narrative elements portrayed on the cards. Tarot Fabula’s shuffling and reshuffling of cards as historical objects merges contemporary computational methods for generating random results with an interrogation of …

(De)Humanization Of Physically Disabled Bodies In Borderlands 3, Natasha Talitha Anindya, Lastiko Endi Rahmantyo

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

The video game industry has played a role in both affirming and erasing stereotypes surrounding minorities, especially those with disabilities. This study aims to analyse Borderlands 3’s in-game narrative that represents physically disabled characters through their characterization, visualization, and individual character development in the main plot campaign, illustrating how positive representation helps fight common stigmas and negative stereotypes. By using Shakespeare’s social model of disability as a theoretical framework, the analysis will view the game as text to identify physically disabled characters and determine if they face discrimination in the in-game universe. Results show that characters with prosthetics are considered …

Recontextualization Of Sun Wukong’S Heroism In The Monkey King Film Trilogy 2014–2018, Adi Kristina Wulandari, Manneke Budiman, Nurni Wahyu Wuryandari, Suma Riella Rusdiarti

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

The classic Chinese novel, Journey to the West, written by Wú Chéng’ēn in the 16th century of the Ming Dynasty, is an influential work in Chinese culture. The main character of the novel, the Monkey King Sun Wukong, has become a highly popular character and been adapted into various cultural products. Sun Wukong’s popularity was adapted into three films directed by Cheang Pou-soi, namely Monkey King 1 (2014), Monkey King 2 (2016), and Monkey King 3 (2018). This article analyzes the reconfiguration of Sun Wukong in the films based on the monomyth schemes by Joseph Campbell, focusing on the construction …

Sharp Stick Grasps At Autistic Women’S Liminal Vulnerability, Meaghan Krazinski

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

This film analysis of Sharp Stick by Lena Dunham critically explores how the film uptakes representations of the ideas around the vulnerabilities of Autistic women in popular culture, and yet does not explicitly name them as such. This liminality is critical and plays into the intersectional analysis that the author engages around the way vulnerability and Autistic identity is interpreted and read. The author draws upon McDermott's (2022) "neurotypical gaze" in an analysis that shows how traditional tropes around Autistic women’s vulnerability are social constructions that are brought into relief by stereotypes around race, gender, and ability. The author uses …

Pop And Indie: What Do They Mean And Why Does It Matter? Genre And Marketing From Within The Uk Music Scene, Maggie Malin

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

This paper aims to explore the evolution of “pop” and “indie” as words and as genres from within the London music scene, and to suggest the most appropriate or effective marketing techniques based on a standard understanding of each genre and its implications. For each of these genres, I establish two definitions: a semantic definition, based on the etymology of the word and the cultural implications of the genre’s origins and history, and a sonic definition, based on any overarching standards of how the genre’s music sounds. In defining each genre’s sound, its history and evolution are considered, as well …

Sounding Ethics: Musical Signification Of Moral Choices In Video Games, Hayden Mesnick

Honors Projects

Interactivity is what distinguishes video games as a medium. In “moral choice video games,” or games in which the moral alignment of player choices affects plot and gameplay, the music often reflects the branching storylines. While scholarship exists that explores musical signifiers in video games, and scholarship alike exists that investigates moral choice video games, a gap in literature exists at the juncture of these two topics. This paper explores two moral choice video games—Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, 2018)—in order to identify musical signifiers used by each game’s composer to represent these levels …

Disney Princess Films: Feminist Movements And The Changing Of Gender Roles, Mckinley M. Frees

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Big Screen Heroes With Paper Voices: A Superhero Adaptation Research Essay, Zachary Green

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Superheroes may have taken over your phone, tablet, and television screens through the endless adaptations that pelt us from upon high mouse-shaped ears, but their rich history goes back much further than that; they have gripped the public imagination since their creation in comic strips published in newspapers almost one-hundred years ago. But, why exactly has their effect on popular culture, and their subsequent adaptations in various forms of media been so pervasive in the last twenty-five years? What makes these stories and comic book characters, and particularly Marvel comic book characters, so interesting to modern audiences? This essay demonstrates …

Revenge Of The Nerds: Tech Masculinity And Digital Hegemony, Benjamin M. Latini

Doctoral Dissertations

Revenge of the Nerds provides a cultural history of the evolution of white nerd masculinities in American culture through interpretations of a wide variety of texts and representations using the methods of literary studies and American studies. The dissertation is organized around four overlapping stages of nerd masculinity based on changes in technology and their effects on culture, as well as white male nerds’ efforts to remain culturally relevant and gain the benefits of being close to hegemonic masculinity. The four nerd types are the computer nerd, the gamer, the gatekeeper nerd, and the maladaptive nerd which reflect the following …