Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Analysis Of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, John Hunter Ray

Symposium of Student Scholars

In this study, I examine the ways in which Christopher Nolan developed the protagonist in Interstellar (2014). The protagonist, Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, is the audience’s window into the world Nolan creates in the film. Though typical Christopher Nolan screenplay structure is more complicated than the average feature film, I argue that it is the character development of the protagonist that engages viewers and ultimately allows us to connect with the story. The central conflict that cooper desires to be the best dad he can be he is forced to abandon his family to save the world. That is …

Godzilla (1954) Research Analysis, Cyrus Aldridge

Symposium of Student Scholars

Cyrus Aldridge

FILM 3105

Prof. Anna Weinstein

10/20/2021

Abstract Research Analysis: Godzilla (1954)

According to Michael Maher, two years after World War 2 the United States’ military presence attempted to control Japanese media including its cinema. Despite this fact, Japanese filmmaker Tomoyuki Tanaka was able to produce Godzilla (1954), symbolizing the horror of nuclear holocaust. In this presentation, I argue that Godzilla is one of the greatest monster movies of all time due to its cultural relevance and its use of musical scoring, set design and costume design. In this study I demonstrate how Tanaka implements its score, set …

The Impact Of Endings, Carolina Solis

Symposium of Student Scholars

This presentation explores the importance of movie endings, and how an ending can impact the audiences’ opinion of a movie. I look at Ronald Bass’ Sleeping with the Enemy, and how he developed Julia Roberts’ character in a way that made the audience believe that not only was she capable of killing her abusive husband, but that she should kill him. I also look at Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption and discuss how Andy’s eventual escape from prison was too much of a surprise to the audience, and how the movie should have ended with Norton’s suicide. Finally, I …

Marriage Story Screenplay Analysis, Kaitlyn Bauer

Symposium of Student Scholars

This presentation examines the story structure of the Oscar-nominated film, Marriage Story (2019), written and directed by Noah Baumbach. The film captures the dissolution of a marriage, following a couple as they navigate life with their son as their marriage unravels. In this analysis, I study how Baumbach crafts the screenplay to explore both subjective viewpoints in the story so the audience does not pick sides in the divorce. This differs from most single-protagonist divorce stories, where the writer tackles the narrative from one character's point of view, favoring one parent over the other. Marriage Story is a dual-protagonist film, …

Gifted Screenplay Analysis, Chloe Ford

Symposium of Student Scholars

Gifted, the film directed by Marc Webb released in 2017, details the story of a single man named Frank (Chris Evans) raising his young niece Mary (McKenna Grace), who just so happens to be a 7-year-old genius. He plans for her to live a normal life; go to public school, make friends, play sports, truly be a kid, but his mother has something else in mind. Mckenna’s grandmother Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan) threatens to rip Mary away from her little life in the suburbs, as well as her beloved Uncle Frank. This study analyzes the complexity of the characters in …

Analyzing The Symbolism Of Modern Racial Tension In Jordan Peele's Get Out, Kyra Hammond

Symposium of Student Scholars

In award-winning films, themes surrounding race and ethnicity are typically avoided unless regarded in a historical context. Though, Jordan Peele’s Get Out(2017) breaks these barriers by taking a satirical approach to comment on modern racial issues and stigmas that are prevalent in American society. Furthermore, the film pushes society to finally see and understand the anxiety and racial trauma that African Americans continue to experience. The hidden symbols and messages throughout the screenplay further add to the film’s theme by metaphorically expressing that racism can be covert. With the intention to analyze these symbolic elements, I will break down …

The Portrayal Of Trial By Jury In American Entertainment, Kimberly Satterfield

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

Numerous American films have portrayed jurors who make difficult decisions together in order to fairly and justly decide a case. Serving on a jury is the main role that an average American plays in the legal system, which helps explain why movies about court cases, and specifically about juries, are popular in America. In this thesis, I will use the film theory of spectatorship, which studies how a spectator comes to view themselves in relation to a film, to look more closely at the portrayal of trial by jury in American cinema. I will also be using the idea of …

Designed For The Camera: Irish Interior Makeover Television 1996–2014, Neville Knott

Dissertations

This thesis examines how television makeover programmes, broadcast in Ireland between 1996 and 2014, mediate the professional practice of interior design. It argues that the programme-makers, in seeking to engage viewers, used a series of strategies—notably the suppression of professional and educational knowledge about interior design—to convey an image of staged coherence that was arrived at unproblematically. In that process, it will be argued, interior design knowledge got lost, and entertainment triumphed. Focusing on these strategies, the thesis considers how the production process used interior design, nonetheless, to attract an audience and generate ratings, focusing on the relationship between amateurs …

Experiencing Cinematic Vr: Where Theory And Practice Converge In The Tribeca Film Festival Cinema360, John V. Pavlik

Proceedings of the New York State Communication Association

Cinematic virtual reality (VR) production has reached enough capacity to support a festival. This paper offers a theoretical framework of VR narrative structure to critically examine one such festival in cinematic VR. The spotlight here is on the fifteen entries in the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival Cinema360. Findings suggest that although the field of cinematic VR has advanced substantially in recent years in terms of narrative design and user experience, there is still a considerable distance for VR storytellers to travel to fully utilize the nature and potential of the developing medium of virtual reality.

The Virtualization Of Schooling During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Jared Brown, Kaila Folk, Jenna Swerdlow

Proceedings of the New York State Communication Association

Schooling is driven by economic, political, societal, and cynical inclinations. Education has no rest, and it is continuous, even outside of the classroom. One thing that interconnects these terms together is a narrative. The narrative gives meaning to the world and exerts an end goal of success and happiness. Yet, the only way to reach this shared goal is through intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships. Undoubtedly, the technological landscape in the 21st century is robust and evolving. When a natural force beyond human control corrupts every aspect of society, such as a pandemic, these technologies are relied upon for human interaction. …

Vhs Archives, Committed Media Praxis, And ‘Queer Cinema', Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Committed media praxis is a doing as much as it is a knowing. Queerness is a manner of being as much as it is a politics, theory, or set of modish objects. This chapter about topics that are also processes—queer, media praxis, cinema—performs these across two acts: “Part 1: A Hesitant or Maybe Just Slightly Defiant Preamble,” is a creative unfolding, in the body of the text and as much so in its footnotes, of the author’s “queer feminist media praxis”: “Part 2: VHS Archives” is a demonstration of VHS Archives, a multi-sited, many-yeared project in experimental pedagogy, web-based archival …

A Politics And Ethics Of Viewing Photographs Of Duterte’S “Drug War”: Towards Reconceptualizing The Political Community, Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This paper proposes a framework for a politics and ethics of viewing photographs of atrocities and suffering through an analysis of photographs of Rodrigo Duterte’s “drug war” in the Philippines and responses to these images. It situates these politics and ethics of viewing in a context of violent othering and Ariella Azoulay’s conceptualization of “regime-made disaster.” This framework is grounded on fellow-feeling and imagined identification as well as on the relationality, powers of mourning, and ethical responsibility that Judith Butler asserts and is operationalized through the “civil contract of photography” called forth by Azoulay. Following Azoulay and Butler, this paper …

The Haunting Power Of Sound In Aswang, Katrina Macapagal

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This paper examines the audibility of Aswang (2019), the first feature-length documentary that tackles Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. I locate the documentary against the audibility of terror produced by the Duterte regime, accentuated by the primary metaphor of the aswang legend where the documentary initially draws its political charge. Inspired by theories of sound and haptic listening, I argue that Aswang, through its composition of key sound elements such as the voice-over, music, and urban noise, configures an overall audibility that amplifies, rather than reduces, the humanity of the documentary’s subjects.

Lost In Adaptation: Antifidelity And/In Mike De Leon’S Bilanggo Sa Dilim And Bayaning 3rd World, Anne Frances N. Sangil

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Following the tenets of auteur criticism that proposes a film auteur to have an autonomous, original, and individual voice despite the nature of filmmaking as an art form that follows the Fordist model, this essay looks at how Mike De Leon’s artistic style has become the ordering agent for his two films: Bilanggo sa Dilim and Bayaning 3rd World. This study puts under the lens De Leon’s signature and confronts the difficulty of assigning authorship and originality within a collaborative, institutionalized medium that aims to adapt for the screen one literary and one historical material. De Leon has his …

Crossings Of Heritage, Memory And Archives: A History Of Moroccan Cinema In The Bouanani Archives, Sarah Dornhof

Regards

This article interrogates archival forms and practices in relation to remembering the “lost archives” of Moroccan cinematographic history.
It presents the Bouanani Archives — a private, fragmented, and still largely uncatalogued collection located in the Bouanani family apartment in Rabat, comprising a variety of texts, visuals, and objects connected to Morocco’s cinematographic and cultural memory.
The archive is the personal legacy of filmmaker, writer, and artist Ahmed Bouanani (1938–2011), his wife Naïma Saoudi (1947–2012), and their daughter Batoul Bouanani (1969-2003), all of whom worked for Moroccan cinema.
Today, it is preserved and cared for by his daughter Touda Bouanani and …

Towards A Decentered History Of Palestinian Revolutionary Cinema? Case Study Of The Film “Tall El Zaatar” In The Audiovisual Archives Of The Italian Communist Party, Hugo Darroman

Regards

The film Tall El Zaatar (1977, Abu Ali, Pino, Chamoun, Palestine/Italy), a co-production between the Palestinian Cinema Institute and the Italian Communist Party’s (PCI) audiovisual company, was considered lost for three decades and finally rediscovered in 2011.
Beyond the dramatic stories surrounding this film, Tall El Zaatar reveals the importance of considering the transnational dimension of Palestinian militant cinema.
In this article about Tall El Zaatar, I approach the history of Palestinian revolutionary cinema through the traces left within the archives of an institution with which the Palestinian filmmakers collaborated.
On the basis of a set of interviews and …

Iraqi Cinema Beyond The Screen And The Archives Of Leisure, Pelle Valentin Olsen

Regards

The emergence of new forms of leisure in Iraqi urban landscapes, such as cinemas, nightclubs, and theaters, unleashed debates about the dangers and potentials of leisure.
The result of this process is a vast, albeit scattered, archive of texts that deal with practices and institutions of leisure.
The archive of leisure, as it pertains to cinema, can be located across a variety of texts including memoirs, short stories, student essays, police records, official discourse, medical texts, and works by Iraqi historians.
Given the limited access to Iraqi film and cinema archives, the archive of leisure can offer an important addendum …

Ciné-Archivistes And The Metaleptic Archive Of Lebanese Cinema, Claire Launchbury, Marilyn Matar, Max Silverman

Regards

The article considers three Lebanese films – Il était une fois, Beyrouth (1995) by Jocelyne Saab, the short Le Liban à travers le cinéma (2003) and the documentary Cinéma de guerre au Liban (2003), both by Hady Zaccak – to explore the archival impulse in their composition.
We suggest that this impulse takes two major forms: the use of a montage of sequences from Lebanese films, or films about Lebanon, and crossovers between narrative thresholds and between fact and fiction.
We draw on Gérard Genette’s version of metalepsis to analyze the nature of these crossovers, and on the notion of …

سيميولوجيا جمالية الفضاء في فيلم: "السنونو لا يموت في القدس" لرضا الباهي, Abdel Salam Shaaban

Regards

In this study, we aim to conduct a perceptual experiment and a semiological reading of the aesthetics of space in the film El Sounounou La Yamoutou Fil Kods by Tunisian director Ridha Behi.
This film, produced in 1994, came as a response to the accusation that Tunisian cinema ignored the Palestinian cause. It also combines three genres of cinematic practice: fiction, documentary, and political.
The film tells the story of the search for a mother who has been lost since 1948. A daily newspaper publishes a recent photo of this mother. The director takes her story as a starting point …

Le Cinéma Maghrébin Entre Traçabilité Coloniale Et Déterminations Nationales, Malika Gueddim

Regards

This article focuses on the beginnings of cinema in the Maghreb countries (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia), which suffered the same process of enculturation in favor of the culture of the French occupier.
From the end of the Second World War, the colonial authorities understood the importance of cinema, through fiction or newsreels, and the urgency of creating cinematographic centers: in Morocco in 1944, and in Tunisia in 1946.
Algeria, considered a French department rather than a protectorate, was provided with a cinematographic service by the Algerian governorate in 1947.
Then comes the period of independence, in which directors from these …