Film and Media Studies Commons^™

“After Hollywood And Its Ever-Blue Skies, How Beautiful Paris Looks!”: Jacques Feyder Between France And America, 1928-1934, Barry Nevin

Articles

Although generally relegated by present-day historians to the footnotes of film history, Belgian director Jacques Feyder (1885–1948) strove to elevate the artistic standards of French film production throughout the 1920s and 1930s. His departure for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios on the cusp of the transition to sound in France was viewed as a crisis, and his return was hailed as an event. Drawing on contemporary periodicals, this article answers two fundamental questions: Why did France's leading am bassador leave his adoptive homeland? And what factors motivated his return to France despite the country's notoriously anarchic mode of production? Core concerns include Feyder's …

Storms Named After People, Sarah E. Ballard

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Storms Named After People is a coming-of-age film about loneliness, Florida's disposition during holidays, freedom within abandonment, and how one translates time and space when alone.

I intend for this film to capture a unique and authentic representation of young women that I find difficult to come by in mainstream cinema. Some other things I plan to accomplish with Storms Named After people include subverting the audience's expectations, challenging tired stereotypes of women and various relationships among them, capturing loneliness from an optimistic point of view and embracing availability within a micro-budget filmmaking process. A final product that accomplishes all …

Pathos, Winter 2017-2018, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Sadie Jordan

Volume 12 No. 2

More Than Meets The Eye: Special Effects And The Fantastic Transmedia Franchise, Bob Rehak

Film & Media Studies Faculty Works

From comic book universes crowded with soaring superheroes and shattering skyscrapers to cosmic empires set in far-off galaxies, today’s fantasy blockbusters depend on visual effects. Bringing science fiction from the studio to your screen, through film, television, or video games, these special effects power our entertainment industry. More Than Meets the Eye delves into the world of fantastic media franchises to trace the ways in which special effects over the last 50 years have become central not just to transmedia storytelling but to worldbuilding, performance, and genre in contemporary blockbuster entertainment. More Than Meets the Eye maps the ways in …

The Abcs Of Top Hat (1935), Allison Witcofski

Undergraduate Research Journal

Speaking about the kind of filmmaking now known as classic Hollywood, the most popular and influential cinema ever invented, Vincente Minnelli gave away its secret: “I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They’re things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate” (qtd. in Schickel 257). The ABC method provides a way for finding those “hidden things” Minelli spoke about. Starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Top Hat (1935) is a musical masterpiece from the classic Hollywood period that portrays the struggles of love in a …

“‘The Most Fabricated Exception’: Islam, Immigration And The White-Saviour Narrative In Laurent Cantet’S The Class.”, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

This article suggests that the acclaim director Laurent Cantet received for his 2008 award winning film “The Class” obscures the way this film reinforces the very undercurrents in French culture he sets out to critique. Rather than unearthing or mirroring the racial dynamics of twenty-first-century Paris, Cantet brings to the film a set of fascinations and anxieties latent in the French imagination about blackness, Islam and Arab culture. His preoccupations and preconceptions with race, religion and nationality appear first in the portrayal of Muslim immigrants as threatening; next, in his image of a ‘white saviour’ bent on rescuing racial minorities; …

Who Are The Stewards Of The Aids Archive?, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

How are returns to AIDS cultural production whitewashed, and how can we return, attending with care to the earlier video work of women and people of color. How can we practice decent stewardship of this vulerbale archive?

#Cut/Paste+Bleed: Entangling Feminist Affect, Action And Production On And Offline, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

I consider my media praxis project to be labs, encounters, theory-making and scholarly output where doing and thinking in community (often the classroom and its linked spaces) in the sites or technologies under consideration is the “scholarly” product. That is to say, the doing and the process is the product, and what remains can also be shared and/or evaluated, as needed. This sharing of process is what I model now. I describe my most recent project, Ev-Ent-Anglement, engaging again critically with social media networks from inside them, share some of my lessons learned about production and action-based New Media/DH research, …

Rodcon, Program, 2018, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Inside This Program:
--Welcome to RodCon
--Locations
--Schedule
--What's That? Event Descriptions
--Artist Alley
--Sponsors
--Autographs

Whatever Happened To Blackwater Rd.?: A Visual Documentary Concerning Achievement In The Face Of Failure, Michael Stephenson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Whatever happened to Blackwater RD.? is a feature length documentary thesis film created and cultivated by Michael E. Stephenson to fulfill the requirements of the Master of Fine Arts degree in Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema while attending the University of Central Florida. Whatever happened to Blackwater RD.? has met these criteria of the School of Visual Arts and Design, in the College of Arts and Humanities, by being a feature length digital film with a budget no larger than $50,000. This film is the efforts of the filmmaker to trace the failure of his original narrative thesis film Blackwater RD., attempting …

Making Implicit Methods Explicit: Trade Press Analysis In The Political Economy Of Communication, Thomas F. Corrigan

Communication Studies Faculty Publications

The political economy of communication (PEC) situates media systems and practices in their structural and historical contexts; however, PEC scholars rarely articulate or justify their research methods. To address this oversight, this article explains how PEC scholars use trade publications to study media industries, practices, policy making, and discourses thereof. Following a critical realist approach, PEC researchers “burrow down” in trade press advertisements and reports and “listen in” to the frank, insider discussions therein. This article evaluates the trade press against Scott’s four “quality control criteria” for documentary sources—authenticity, credibility, representativeness, and meaning. Trade publications employ daunting industry jargon, and …

Breaking Chains Of Oppression: Popular Culture And The Plundering Of Blackness, Corina Sacajawea Ambrose

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis focuses on the ways in which white supremacy created mass incarceration, specifically mass incarceration of black individuals, and how this continues to perpetuate a racial caste system in the United States. First, I examine contemporary novelist Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad to provide a historical background of white supremacy and slavery. Then, I argue that pop culture is one area in which artists are focused on the abolition of the prison-industrial complex and ending mass incarceration. Finally, I focus on JAY-Z‘s music video “The Story of O.J.“ and Beyoncé‘s visual album Lemonade and her 2018 Coachella performance to …

Why Katniss Everdeen Is Our Favorite Feminist – An Analysis Of The Heroine Of The Hunger Games Film Saga And Her Reception By Young Female Spectators, Paula Talero Álvarez

Theses and Dissertations

THROUGH THE FIGURE OF FICTIONAL CHARACTER KATNISS EVERDEEN, THIS DISSERTATION STUDIES HOW THE FILM INDUSTRY SIMULTANEOUSLY ENTRENCHES AND DISRUPTS GENDER, SEXUAL, AND RACIAL NORMATIVITIES. THE PROJECT USES TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND PARTICIPANT RESEARCH TO ANALYZE HOW THE FILMS AND NOVELS OF THE HUNGER GAMES SAGA ENCAPSULATE BOTH DOMINANT AND ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS RELATED TO FEMININITY, MASCULINITY, WOMANHOOD, AND MOTHERHOOD. IT ALSO EXPLORES IF AND HOW THE FEMALE HEROINE CAN BE READ AS FEMINIST AND PRODUCES A SENSE OF EMPOWERMENT. I CONCLUDE THAT ALTHOUGH THE INDUSTRY IS PRODUCING NEW MODELS OF WOMANHOOD THAT CHALLENGE TRADITIONAL GENDER ROLES, IT STILL PERPETUATES ROMANTIC IDEALS AND …

Female Agency In Fantasy Films Of The 1980s., Tara C. Rowland

Liberal Studies (MA) Final Essays

"Female Agency in Fantasy Films of the 1980s"

This study looks at female character roles in six of the major fantasy films produced during the 1980s. This research draws mostly on primary resources, the films, but includes commentary from research in the same vein. The purpose of this study was to show how certain fantasy films gave more agency and power to female characters in a genre often plagued with women who needed saving. Upon examination of these films, it becomes clear that not only is representation is an important part of film, especially for young children, but that it …

Against Expertise: The Current Case For Breadth Over Depth, Jennifer Malkowski

Film & Media Studies: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Fantasy Versus Reality: A Twenty-First Century Film Series To Explore How The Absurdity Of Alternate Realities Affects The Individual In The Audience, Courtney Wunderwald

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The purpose of this study was to understand how film viewers contextualize on-screen alternate realities with their personal perspectives, and if that is accurately represented by scholarly film critique. I then compared my findings with filmmaker interviews, which discuss their reasons for including specific imagery, symbols, and characters to evoke certain emotions or reactions from their audiences. My project aspired to offer a method that might redefine how viewers reflect on films and to open a discussion to gather data from audiences before assuming their reactions in film critique. I was always fascinated by the power of cinema, particularly how …

Now, Tomorrow, Forever The Persistence Of School Segregation In America, Dustin Connors

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision has long been heralded as a landmark ruling and as evidence of America's progress toward a more accepting and equitable society. What is less widely known outside of academic circles is the extent to which that ruling failed to provide the equality its supporters were seeking. Today, America is still wrestling with a crisis most of us thought long solved: the racial segregation within our school districts. In my documentary film entitled Now, Tomorrow, Forever: The Persistence of School Segregation in America, I will set out to explore the state …

When Popular Culture And The Nfl Collide: Fan Responsibility In Ending The Concussion Crisis, Taylor Simpson-Wood, Robert H. Wood

Marquette Sports Law Review

None

Frankenstein’S Migratory Subject : Under The Dome And Formosa Vs. Formosa, Chia-Ju Chang

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

News Literacy, Sissel W. Mccarthy

Open Educational Resources

"The digital age has created the need for a new kind of literacy-a literacy that empowers news consumers to determine whether information is credible, reliable and truthful. This is not just a skill; it is a new core competency for the 21st century. So-called “fake news” is hard to spot and spreads easily, leading to disagreements over basic facts. The antidote to the growing challenges posed by this digital revolution is news literacy. This mini news literacy course includes two three-hour sessions that will teach anyone to become a more critical consumer of news. "

The News Literacy course package …