Film and Media Studies Commons^™

From Counter-Strike To Counterterrorism: How The Cheater Reconfigures Our Understanding Of Asymmetric Warfare, Enya C. Silva

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Around the turn of the century, as the United States increased its military presence in the Middle East in what was widely known as the War on Terror, computer games were also rising in popularity. Military inspired narratives and settings are very common in video games, especially in the genre known as the first person shooter – characterized by a single player, first person point of view. Alexander Galloway provides a vocabulary for understanding the video game, and the first person shooter in particular, derived from the framework of game studies. Scholarship around video games usually either seeks to affirm …

Women's Interracial Friendships: Cultivating Coalitional Possibilities Across Difference Through Dialogue, Akie Fukushige Wenk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, I thread through the macro-structure as well as micro-operations of hegemonic ideologies, namely white-supremacist capitalist cis-hetero patriarchy (hooks, 1995, Valdes, 1996), that has historically plagued the United States, eventually gaining a global reach over time. I center interracial friendship between Black and White cis-women, where I locate coalitional possibilities that begin at the grassroots level. I situate this interracial relationship within the socio-ecological system where the personal meets the social (including racialized backgrounds). I use a series of analogies to equate these ideologies as toxins in the air, water, and soil. Soil is where we can work …

7th Annual Chapman Staff Art Exhibition Program, Chapman University Staff

Library Displays and Bibliographies

The Leatherby Libraries Hall of Art was established to showcase the creativity of the Chapman community. It was dedicated for this purpose in 2014 although the space has been available for staff and student exhibits since 2011. While past staff art exhibits featured work by Leatherby Libraries staff members only, this is our fifth year opening up the exhibit to any interested staff member of Chapman University.

The 21 artists represented here demonstrate the wide variety of talent at our university. From photography to painting, mosaics to film, the works you see here provide a unique opportunity to view and …

Family Dining: Food And Drink In The Sopranos – A Gastrocritical Approach, Lisa Davies

Dissertations

This thesis uses gastrocriticism to explore food and drink in the 86 episodes of the long-form narrative HBO television series The Sopranos. Gastrocriticism is an emerging branch of literary criticism that draws on scholarship from a range of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. A deeper understanding of the series was gained by using a structured framework of enquiry to explore narrative, setting, characterisation and genre through the lens of food and foodways. The Sopranos is a story of an Italian-American crime family and food is abundant in the series and bound up with the identity of …

Book Review Of, K-Pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself On Social Media, Jungmin Kwon

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

Book Review:

Chuyun Oh, K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media, New York, NY: Routledge, 2022, 194 pp., $52.95 (paperback).

The Allegory Of United States Settlers V. Native Americans In Wes Craven's The Hills Haves Eyes (1977), Blue Van Alst

University Honors Theses

The year 1977 saw the release of Wes Craven’s second major production, The Hills Have Eyes. A film that sits within a filmic library of Craven that works to use the horror genre to reflect on and critique the American society that he lived in. The Hills Have Eyes employs the stereotypes that the films of John Ford helped to solidify in U.S. society. He does this in order to explore the tense historical relationships between Indigenous and United States settlers during the time of westward expansion. Using the white middle class Carter family to serve as settlers, and …

A "Misfit" Revision: Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable And Transitional Stardom In Postwar Hollywood, Emily Carman

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

Director John Huston’s The Misfits (1961) was one of the most volatile productions of his career, with its ensemble cast headlined by a trio of screen icons: Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift. Drawing on new archival research, I argue that The Misfits illuminates the transition from old to New Hollywood in terms of its behind-the-scenes star negotiations of Gable and Monroe, who had varying levels of creative control to appear in the film. My analysis of their respective deals underscores how The Misfits anticipates the shift from the female driven star system of Classical Hollywood to the male …

Proletariat Cinema: The Representation Of The Working Class In Egyptian Cinema Over 80 Years, Reham Emam

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the representation of the working class “Proletariat” in Egyptian Cinema. One of the main goals of the thesis is to investigate how the working class were depicted in the Egyptian Cinema and film industry over 80 years (1940-2020). What picture of the working class was conveyed to the mass audience, and what messages were eventually hoarded throughout the years? This is a qualitative descriptive study that conducts in-depth interviews with four categories of stakeholders in the Egyptian film industry including film directors, film critics, and film and media scholars. The study explores what values of working-class people …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

A Meditation On Afrosurrealism, Black Gender, And The Non-Human, Logan K. Shanks

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

Quotidian Black life is characterized by our ability to alchemize violence into generative life-sustaining properties of matter. In this paper, I will measure Black matter based on anything produced and engaged by Black collectives. While Black existence is not tied to white violence, descendants of enslaved Black people enter our worlds of worlds greeted by a white captor. It is not until we consciously recognize that we are in his dream that we can work to escape the white captor’s circadian rhythms. Through this paper, I will tease out the contradictions of our Black living-unliving. I will employ an anti-methodological …

Hemingway In Hollywood: From Page To Screen, Hayden Hendricks

University Honors Theses

Little attention has been paid to how film adaptations affected Hemingway’s popular reputation (and vice versa). This thesis traces Hemingway's celebrity through the case studies A Farewell to Arms (1932), The Killers (1946), and The Old Man and the Sea (1958). It details their production histories, analyzes the changes made from page to screen, and discusses the contextual motivations behind such divergences. Finally, it considers the ways in which the filmmakers adapted texts of different lengths to fit feature length runtimes and, in doing so, found cinematic equivalences of literary form.

“She Was No Taller Than Your Thumb. So She Was Called Thumbelina”: Gender, Disability, And Visual Forms In Hans Christian Andersen’S “Thumbelina” (1835), Hannah J. Helm

Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies

This article explores representations of femininity and disability in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “Thumbelina” (1835) and select examples of his paper art. In this article, I argue that, on one level, the fairy tale and Andersen’s own paper cuttings uphold feminine and ableist norms. However, on another level, these literary and visual forms simultaneously work to destabilise social prejudices and challenge bodily normativity. I explore how characters and themes associated with the fairy tale and paper art can be (re)read in strength-based ways. In the story, Thumbelina experiences the world through her smallness, and key themes including accessibility, physical …

"It's Not The Same Anymore" (2023): A Reflection On The Creative Process Behind My Queer Coming-Of-Age Short Film, Olivia Lee

University Honors Theses

"It's Not The Same Anymore" stands as a poignant queer coming-of-age short film crafted by individuals who share the queer experience, with the intention of resonating deeply with the queer community. The narrative intimately captures the journey of a young queer woman as she navigates the realms of love, heartbreak, and the quest for self-discovery. Amidst a media landscape that frequently falls short in its representation of LGBTQ+ voices and authentic lived experiences, this film aspires to bridge the gap and bring forth a much-needed sense of belonging and recognition.

A link to the short film can be found here: …

In A Condition Of No Light, Alana Perino

Masters Theses

In a Condition of No Light is an autofictional investigation into lineages of familial domesticity. The performances therein circumnavigate one family in one domestic environment, yet are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, literature, theater, film, music, and image; as well as through the otherwise untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma. The methodologies used are primarily photographic but also encompass practices reaching towards sculpture, installation, and performance. The line of questioning reserved for this inquiry is how a home, its objects, and inhabitants generate, spacialize, and embody the conditions of wealth, whiteness, and gender. …

“Come Think With Me”: Finding Communion In The Liberatory Textual Practices Of Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Jehan L. Roberson

Criticism

Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Rasheed’s work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new …

Towards An Experimental Bibliography Of Hemispheric Reconstruction Newspapers, Joshua Ortiz Baco, Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Jim Casey, Sarah H. Salter

Criticism

Digital collections of newspapers have drawn broader attention to the fragmented and scattered print histories of minoritized communities. Attempts to survey these histories through bibliography, however, quickly meet with a fundamental problem: the practice of bibliographic description calls for creating a static record of social affiliations. Given the overwhelming scholarly consensus that categories such as race, ethnicity, and language are socially constructed, this article introduces an experimental bibliographic method for mapping the vast landscape of historical newspapers. This method extends the machine learning affordances of a recent project called Newspaper Navigator to enumerate the newspapers in Chronicling America according to …

New Mapping, Dowon Yoo

Masters Theses

Tools determine the shape of most of the worlds that are manufactured or measured. Taking the Earth as an example, territory is shaped and transformed by the tools of the earth's plate movement, the sea, and humans. A map, a recognized territory, is represented through numerical instruments, mathematical formulas, and visual devices such as lenses.

The instrumental perspective is one of the powerful lenses that will work effectively into the past, present, and future. So I started to apply an instrumental perspective to digital space. Digital space which is Non-physical has become one of the most important worlds for contemporary …

Describe The City You Live In, Jingfei Hu

Masters Theses

I dive into the fields: frequency (sound), wavelengths (light), shapes (conversation): they build connections. What is action without reflection? Now I’m a city drifter. Through art making and dialogue I try to drop the anchor into the futuristic turbulent ocean (of society, speed, and the status quo ). Did I drop it? Not sure. I grew up in the most fast- paced city in China, Shenzhen. I feel pressured there. Do I feel that pressure here? of a precarious, unpredictable future? These questions push me out of the turbulent ocean to grab the present.

There are three stages of time: …

Movement, Mechanization, And Coexistence, Yukyung Chung

Masters Theses

A movement is a tool that expresses the subject I pursue, ‘mechanization of human beings’. There are many technologies that replace humans these days, such as artificial intelligence. This makes me skeptical and afraid of being replaced as an artist in the future. Paradoxically, people, including myself, are enthusiastic about it, indicating that we do embrace the mechanization process as a society.

I will reveal this phenomenon of coexistence by demonstrating the possibility that machines cannot replace us, through motion experiments where rules increase, first starting with the reliance on intuition. I will explore not only the things that machines …

Superbland, Dougal Henken

Masters Theses

"A thin wafer is placed in the mouth of a kneeling woman and becomes flesh. A man masturbates quietly in a darkened room to a 3D model of a popular film actress. A car drives through an abandoned town and decelerates as it approaches a sign reading “Slow Children Playing.” A man fastidiously mows an artificial lawn while watching the sun dip low over a vast desert horizon. Superbland opens up new paths in understanding graphic design within the realm of the hyperreal. It begins with a study of simulation in graphic design contexts, building upon established forms of meaning-making …