Other Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Peripheral Storytelling: Cinematic Structures And Audience Agency, Carlos Tkacz

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

A cultural phenomenon we are all unfortunately familiar with is terrible movies. By terrible movies I mean the kind that lack any semblance of structure, movies in which the characters are flatly drawn, the storylines are predictable, and the writing is especially bad. More specifically, I am interested in why these movies seem to be breeding without end and are no longer relegated to (maybe they never were) the low budget genre films some of us love to hate. I am talking here about the relatively new phenomena of the high-budget, popular-yet-terrible film.

Specifically, I am interested in applying Structuralism, …

How To Make A Monster: The Homosexual Experience In Horror And Thriller Cinema, Mia Lindenburg

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

Horror and thriller’s subtextual stories within cinema have been prominent across many subgenres, creating a wide-spread correlation between the homosexual and the monstruous that grew even noticeable after the start of the AIDS epidemic. Much of horror critique and analysis has been focused on the objectification of the feminine, but the unique role that the male plays in horror and thriller (both as a villain and victim) deserves equal inspection. The research done in this paper demonstrates how horror cinema skews the suggested gender roles and how fear makes us more easily let go of the societal norms held so …

Streaming's Effect On American Media Exports, Aviel Geronimo, Jonathan Swanberg

Undergraduate Research Symposium Lightning Talks

The Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry is largest in the United States with a total value of $660 Billion in 2020. The global M&E industry is valued at approximately $2 Trillion. New technologies have allowed for the advent of streaming services for music, television, film, books, video games, and more. Streaming services allow media exports to be easily accessed by consumers domestically and abroad.

Interwar Weimar Film And Masculinity: Challenging The Presumed Crisis Of Interwar German Gender Discourse From Selected Films From 1925-1931, Brandon Metcalf

Dissertations and Theses

The First World War altered the view of masculinity held by many in Germany and shredded what many regarded as unchangeable fixtures of German life. For German men, much of the interwar period meant dealing with the losses from the war, reconfiguring what it meant to be a man. This reconfiguration of gender took place in a context of change in Germany. Many women entered the workforce to replace the lost men. The economic downturn and reliance on funding from the United States motivated many within Germany to examine gender roles and to reassemble masculinity to meet changing circumstances.

This …

Celebrity Memes, Audioshop, And Participatory Fan Culture: A Case Study On Keanu Reeves Memes, Danielle Nielsen, Diane Sabenacio Nititham

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Contemporary meme culture keeps Keanu Reeves’ image at the forefront of our imagination. Numerous Keanu-related memes circulate on the internet, featuring images of him from on and off screen. In this article, we argue that the rise of user-generated content, such as memes and social media, requires us to reconsider how audiences and fans consume, adapt, and circulate Keanu’s stardom. Specifically, we contend that memes and their attending participatory culture make Keanu familiar by placing him in knowable spaces and perpetuating his extraordinary ordinariness. To do so, we examine the 2019 ‘Keanu Reeves Walking in Slow Motion’ video clip from …

La Pirogue De Moussa Touré: Une Réponse Humanitaire À Une Crise Postcoloniale, Whitney A. Drew

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Le journal examine le film de Moussa Touré La Pirogue et le compare à la conversation actuelle concernant l’immigration du Sénégal vers les îles Canaries. En hommage aux victimes du périple tumultueux, La Pirogue attire l’attention sur l’autre face de l’immigration. Le film analyse les idées à travers le prisme des tropes médiatiques popularisés par le psychologue David Olsen et l’historien Hayden White. Dans le contexte du document, ces tropes explorent le message de Touré sur l’immigration.

Nationless States And Stateless Beings: The Politics Of Identity And Citizenship In Claudio Mir’S Mondongo Scam And Cheech Marin’S Born In East L.A., Rebecca A. Barnes

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

In the colloquial sense of the term, the word citizen refers to an individual who belongs to a nation, either by birthright or by naturalization. Therefore, citizenship denotes a political and a social belonging, an ideological home, and, in most cases, a strong foundation for the development of one’s personal identity. However, since nations are inherently artificial structures, made only tangible in the present day by a few centuries of recorded history, a philosophical approach to the term citizen complicates this definition. Based off critics including Hannah Arendt, Homi Bhabha, Fernando Ortiz, and Jacques Derrida, this essay seeks to explore …

From Stage To Screen: The Art Of The Movie Musical, Vanessa Lopez

Symposium of Student Scholars

In this article I take a deeper look into what it takes to make a successful movie musical. When sound was introduced into the movie industry, it was musicals that stole the show. From 1927’s first talkie, The Jazz Singer, to 2021’s movie rendition of Dear Evan Hansen, movie musicals have been a key component of the movie industry. Throughout this article I will be comparing the success of two different kinds of movie musicals. The first type that I will be analyzing are the movie musicals that were written and produced directly for the screen. This includes movies such …

Ergativity In Na'vi, Jacob Barnett

Liberty University Research Week

Undergraduate

Textual or Investigative

Without A Trace: Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women And Exclusion In The Media, Nellasa Mackenzie Stewart

Honors College Theses

The research in this paper is designed to explore the lack of media coverage of missing and murdered indigenous women through primarily qualitative methods and techniques as well as interpret the significance of the lack of coverage through the lens of a critical analysis. The research will address how the coverage of missing indigenous women qualitatively differs with the coverage received by missing white women in the United States and Canada. The research approaches include the analysis of news sources detailing cases of missing indigenous women and missing white women and how their coverage qualitatively differs, as well as a …

Transforming Leviathan: Job, Hobbes, Zvyagintsev And Philosophical Progression, Graham C. Goff

Journal of Religion & Film

The allegory of Leviathan, the biblical serpent of the seas, has undergone numerous distinct and even antithetical conceptions since its origin in the book of Job. Most prominently, Leviathan was the namesake of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 political treatise and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film of the same name, a damning indictment of Russian corruption. These three iterations underscore the societal transition from the recognition of power as being derived from God to the secularization of power in Hobbes’s philosophy, to the negation of the legitimacy of divine and secular institutional power, in Zvyagintsev’s controversial film. This examination of Leviathan’s three unique …

Seeing And Interpreting Visions Of The Next Age In Interstellar, Nancy Wright

Journal of Religion & Film

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) uses multiple styles of cinematography – documentary, painterly and expressionistic – to guide interpretation of its apocalyptic review of history. Within the prologue and epilogue of the science fiction film, clips from interviews originally filmed for Ken Burns’s The Dust Bowl (2012) invite questions about how to interpret documentary, revisionist and eschatological reviews of history. Cinematography functions as a self-reflexive cue to spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène to engage in eschatological interpretation. The representation of spectatorship and vision reveals the challenge of interpreting prophetic visions of the last things and the next age, which are …

It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. In It Won’t Be Easy, Arkush places and piles her multimedia sculptures throughout the gallery to create installations that overlap ­with her writing and poetry, sometimes layering in (or extending out to) audio and video components. This approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate—though no less lively. Her work meditates on and ‘vendiagrams’ things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic. The exhibition title acknowledges that the …

John Williams: Scoring And Interpreting Emotions In Film Music, Hadlee Lane Hubbard

Senior Honors Theses

This research paper examines how John Williams’s film scores convey an emotional narrative to the audience. First, the literature review will discuss pertinent theories on film music and emotions informing the current research. The paper then establishes Williams’s composing style, and centers on his connection to the classical symphonic composers and to the film music of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The research then analyzes how John Williams’s music influences emotions in prominent scenes from several of his films including Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Empire Strikes Back. Finally, the paper concludes with a …

"What If We're On The Wrong Side?": Police Brutality, Protest, And Player Culpability In Heavy Rain And Detroit: Become Human, Karmann E. Ludwig

All NMU Master's Theses

Choice-based video games have often been called “interactive movies” for their unique position as a genre that lets players craft a unique story by making decisions that alter the game’s narrative. Two well-known examples in this genre, Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, offer a variety of possible story lines and outcomes for players to experience. However, because these two narratives are steeped in themes of police brutality, systemic racism, and protest, the way a player shapes a story does not exist in a relatively “moral-free” vacuum. Rather, the legal and social precedents that are often used to …

The Gay Agenda: Being Accepted In Children’S Media, Tiffany Wells

Honors College Theses

For many LGBTQ+ children, there is a lack of representation of their identities in the television shows they see growing up. We turn to objects, like television characters, to help “find our way,” which becomes limited for individuals who are part of the minority (Ahmed 1). When television shows reflect a variety of lived experiences, they can increase cultural competence in their viewers. While LGBTQ+ representation in children’s media has increased, it is still difficult to implement such representation. This thesis we will discuss three shows, Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, and The Owl House, that have struggled with the implementation …

Pathetic Beauty: Mono No Aware In Hollywood Cinema –To Family And Friends In These Estranged Times–, Aaron Francis Ward

Japanese Society and Culture

Mono no aware is considered to be one of the central-most Japanese aesthetics and distinctive to Japanese identity (Keene 1995; Miller 2011). This aesthetic standpoint finds wistful beauty in the transient, and is most often translated to ‘beauty in pathos’ or ‘the ah-ness of things’ (Hume 1995), as exemplified in the Heian-era classic, The Tale of Genji (Murasaki 1981). To the outside world, mono no aware is most commonly associated with cherry-blossom viewing, where the short-lived existence of the falling cherry blossom is seen as a metonym for contemplation of the beauty in the transience of life itself. Although this …

Creating Tomorrow’S Change-Makers: Using Alternative Media In The 1l Skills Classroom To Connect Students With Real Practice And Enhance Established Methods For Teaching Appellate Advocacy, Marni Goldstein Caputo, Kathleen Luz

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Memorias De Mi Familia, Melissa Z. Montero

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

Memorias de Mi Familia is an hour-long personal documentary through which I explore the meaning of “home.” I was born and raised in New York to a Puerto Rican mother and Ecuadorian father and lived between two worlds—sometimes more. While on a visit to Puerto Rico with my mother, Sylvia, I search for belonging and explore my family’s story of migration between the island and the United States.

Through interviews, family films, home videos and photographs spanning over 60 years, I examine the revolving migration pattern common to many Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora, a …

Ethical-Reparative Reconfigurations Of The Literary Today, André Cechinel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay aims to debate the evidence of an ethical-reparative function for literature and literary studies today. Therefore, it is divided into two fundamental moments, two argumentative channels that, without a totalizing intention, point out the general perspective of the current, changing, stuation. On the one hand, the literature of the 20th century is presented through the image of a supposed negativity or radical intransitivity, capable of “undoing the work” in its “aesthetics of suppression.” On the other hand, from an introductory debate around some of the places of transitivity envisioned for literature at the beginning of the 21th century, …