Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Lunar Modern Dance, Shruti Shakthivel '20

IMSAloquium Student Investigation Showcase

No abstract provided.

2020 Senior Video, Shruti Shakthivel '20, Danny Bezugliy, Jessica Lyseng, Eliza Apavaloaiei '20

IMSAloquium Student Investigation Showcase

No abstract provided.

The Dawn Of A New Era In Entertainment History, Allissa Williams

Global Tides

This article is a look into where the film industry is heading in the coming years. To gain insight on this topic, it was critical to trace the history of this ever-evolving industry as well as delve into the key trends shaping the industry today and their possible implications. The research compiled on this topic indicates that shorter length content controlled by creators themselves, as opposed to large studios or corporations, and distribution methods that are beneficial to creators are on the horizon for the film and media industry.

Parasite: A Film Review On Capitalism, John K. Kim

Cinesthesia

Bong Joon Ho’s critically acclaimed Parasitebrings a refreshing perspective on capitalist ideology that dominates the Western world today. Its clever and thrilling commentary on the various aspects of capitalist ideology is as vast as it is sophisticated. The aim of this paper is to use Zizek’s ideas on ideology and Foucalt’s work on discourse to unpack some of the main arguments the movie makes about capitalism. I begin by discussing the film’s central commentary on capitalist tenets and move onto the film’s use of “unspoken” or “unassimilable” statements. I close with a brief discussion on the symbolic significance of …

Butts, Blood, And Bombs: The American Occupation’S Effect On Japanese Cinema, Dan Geary

Cinesthesia

An in depth examination of the effects that the American Occupation of Japan after the end of the second World War had on Japanese cinema, both in terms of artistic output and restrictions within the industry itself.

Eighth Grade: Found Footage And Found Story, Kaleb A. Liermann

Cinesthesia

An in-depth examination of Eighth Grade's (Burhnam, 2017) relationships with the concept of Kracauer's Found Story and the Found Footage subgenre.

All That Is Necessary, Jes Martinez

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

Based on Real Events & the New York Times article "Rohingya Recount Atrocities: 'They Threw My Baby Into a Fire'" by Jeffrey Gettleman (Oct. 11, 2017)

Edmund Burke has been attributed the saying, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” I am in my second draft of a screenplay exploring the tangled web of factors which led to the ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya Muslims, a minority group in Myanmar, which began in late 2016. Suu Kyi and her administration deny its occurrence.

A tumultuous history of empires, invasions, and …

A Change In Theatre, Ben Friedman

Cinesthesia

A look at the evolution of war cinema in the United States from the days Classical Hollywood through final years of the New American Cinema.

Outperformed: Exploration And Comparison Of The Tongue-And-Cheek Tragedies Of Women-Animal Relationships In Selected Short Stories By Samanta Schweblin And In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’S Film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Sawnie Smith

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

The unsettling short stories that comprise Samanta Schweblin’s 2008 collection Pájaros en la boca are textured and populated by the flesh of not only humans, but also the skins of species that belong to a wider zoological and mythical scope. Those creatures in Schweblin’s literary output who possess scales, feathers, and wings find themselves variously rubbing up against, crushed under, and orally engulfed by human dermis. This essay seeks to explore the charge of gender politics that courses through interactions between human women and (demi-) animals in two short stories from this collection: “El hombre sirena” and “Olingiris”—animal contact with …

El Quijote En Alcalá De Henares: Graffiti, Arte Urbano Y Autorrepresentación, Juan Fernandez Cantero

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

En el presente trabajo se realizará un estudio de los procesos culturales existentes en la ciudad de Alcalá de Henares en la actualidad a través del arte urbano. Concretamente, se analizarán las representaciones del Quijote, personaje universal de Miguel de Cervantes, en el casco antiguo y en los barrios periféricos de la urbe. Se demostrará cómo la figura del Quijote es un medio para la autorrepresentación de la ciudad. Más allá de las decisiones políticas sobre el arte urbano en el centro histórico de la ciudad, se verá cómo la iconografía del Quijote se consolida como un elemento cohesivo para …

The “Science” Of Story Structure, Diana Witt

Virginias Collegiate Honors Council Conference

Stories are immensely human. They help us learn and understand cultural and social contexts. The stories that we tell, see, and read have profound effects on our ideas and emotions, causing us to have visceral reactions. Stories are truly at the crux of how people relate to each other. In this talk, I will explore the necessary elements of stories and why they are effective. Storytellers across all mediums build plot and characters to make an audience care and draw them in. Authors and screenwriters have theorized about the main structures into which all stories fall. In modern media, story …

Remixing The Archives: Indigenous Interpretations Of History And The Future, Marcella Alexis Ernest

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines how Native art makes critical interventions that are aesthetically and intellectually arranged with the intention of displacing the master narratives. The project tracks how film and photography—historically used by non-Native people as a tool of colonialism—are being reclaimed by the visual and sonic scholarship of contemporary Native artists. The project shows how multidisciplinary artists use technology to remix audiovisual archives from a specific time in American history: portrait photography and ethnographic filmmaking at the turn of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s frontier representations of Indianness in twentieth-century motion pictures, social guidance classroom films from the 1950s, and digital …

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

Night Of The Witch: Alternative Spirituality, Identity And Media, Andreana Tarleton

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis works to understand the relationships witches and conjurors have with the film and television depictions of them. Employing the method of film critique, I argue that the witch stands as a cultural symbol in the US of women and femmes with power, and that their stories serve as lessons to these populations about what it means to be an acceptable woman or femme, while simultaneously creating and perpetuating stereotypes of magic practitioners. Then, using the combination of hashtag ethnography, in-person and video interviewing and internet surveys, I argue that #witchblr and #witchesofcolor, as well as the space of …

Lost Without A Connection: Analyzing Netflix's Maniac In The Digital Streaming Age, Eric Bruce

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the emergence and rise in popularity of streaming services such as Netflix or Hulu, the way in which audiences view and interact with media, as well as each other, has changed drastically. The move to digital streaming impacts how audiences everywhere experience and expect immediacy in media, connecting deeper with what they watch. Along with this transition in spectatorship comes a shift in visual aesthetics, a trend that can be seen across various digitally-streamed series. This thesis serves to address what this transition is and how it affects the cultural landscape of the digital age, continuing the conversation of …

Wait ‘Til You See It From The Back: Twerking As An Expression Of Sexual Agency, Mariah M. Johnson

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper attempts to examine racism, respectability politics, and its relation to twerking. With the use of research by Gilbert Herdt, Stanley Cohen, Marshall McLuhan, Dr. Tamura Lomax, Patricia Hill-Collins, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and many others to put the use of Black women as modern day folk devils into perspective.

Trigger Warning: Racism, Sexual Assault

Discussion Questions For Buying Reality: Political Ads, Money, And Local Television News, Danilo Yanich

Cinema & Media Studies

These discussion questions accompany Buying Reality: Political Ads, Money, and Local Television News.

Shuttling Between Image And Text : A Study On Bilingual Intertitles In Chinese Films, 1922-1931, Chen Wang

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

Almost all extant Chinese film before 1932 were equipped with both English and Chinese intertitles. Who were the writers of intertitles? What traits characterized them? How did intertitles relate to images? Did they simply repeat information provided in images or did they underscore certain messages? Alternatively, did intertitles add new meanings to moving images? Did English intertitles help foreign spectators gain a better understanding of the stories?

To answer these questions, this study investigates the bilingual intertitles in Chinese films from 1922 to 1931 by emphasizing how intertitles and their interactions with images direct spectators’ engagement with and perception of …

Appropriating The Comanche: Hell Or High Water And The New Southwest, Douglas E. Green

Faculty Authored Articles

Hell or High Water (2016) takes the elegiac mode – the wistful lament for the myth of the Old West – and recasts it as a raucous country song on the dismantling of that myth by twenty-first-century capitalism. In the wake of the Great Recession, director David Mackenzie and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan pair off two iconic sets of Western characters: a couple of down-and-out bank-robbing brothers shadowed by an old, White Texas Ranger and his American-Indian/Mex- ican-American deputy. The values of the lawmen and the outlaw brothers are not mutually exclusive – each pair shares more with the other than …

Settler Colonial Disease And Dis-Ease In August: Osage County, M. Elise Marubbio

Faculty Authored Articles

Tracy Letts’s screenplay, August: Osage County (2013), and John Wells’s film adaptation (2013) offer a compelling critique of American racism towards Native Americans which demands that viewers consider their own inculcation into ongoing settler-nation colonialism. The film layers the history of place (Oklahoma) with the Cheyenne character Johnna, whose Indigenous heritage is negotiated throughout by liberal academics, conservative rural matriarchs, and Johnna herself. The role is small but essential to the film’s allegorical analysis of settler-colonialism and racism. The Weston family’s secrets, addictions, and dysfunction starkly contrast with Johnna’s health and stability. Through Johnna, the film questions the toll colonialism …