Film and Media Studies Commons^™

The Search For Agency: Female Sexual Desire In U.S. Sex Education And Coming-Of-Age Cinema, Mckenzi A. Vanderberg

Honors Program Theses

The following essay provides an analysis of the gendered ideologies present in coming-of-age cinema, as well as a critique of heteronormative, patriarchal concepts that hinder female sexual agency and adolescent empowerment. More specifically, this essay will critique the harmful portrayal of female puberty as romantic, passive, and emotional in comedic coming-of-age cinema. This essay will be split into three primary segments. The first segment will consist of a literature review discussing the correlation between sexual desire and autonomy, as well as the importance of portraying female sexual agency rather than passivity in media and sex education curricula, in order to …

Post-9/11 New York On Screen: Mourning, Surveillance And The Arab Other In Tom Mccarthy’S 'The Visitor', Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

New York, as a capital of finance and culture, has been one of Hollywood’s favorite settings, often functioning as a glamorous character itself. Yet in the wake of 9/11, escalating government surveillance prompted filmmakers to call this image into question. Tom McCarthy’s 2007 film "The Visitor" marks a turning point. Set in the aftermath of the towers’ collapse, support-the-troops signs and flags haunt the city, saturating it with reminders of 9/11’s political repercussions. In this article, I explore McCarthy’s portrayal of New York and its Muslim immigrants, who overturn stereotypes of (male) terrorists or (female) victims. Their displacement instead creates …

Rodcon, Flier, 2016, University Of Northern Iowa

RodCon Documents

RodCon 2016 at the Rod Library
Saturday, April 2
10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Flier used in promotion of the event.

2017 Call For Submissions, Regennia N. Williams

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

New Media Configurations And Socio-Cultural Dynamics In Asia And The Arab World, Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Acoustic Screen: The Dynamics Of The Female Look And Voice In Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin, Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the representation of women in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has been one of the main concerns of Iranian officials. This concern caused the enforcement of cinematic restrictions on Iranian cinema in 1982, known as the Islamic Codes of Modesty. The prohibition of the close-ups of women’s faces was one of these cinematic limitations. Since then, Iranian filmmakers have used a great amount of creativity in their films to not only represent Iranian women on the screen, but also to criticize the gender-segregated laws of Iran. Their creativity and efforts have gradually challenged and changed …

East Meets West, Elaine Lo

Whittier Scholars Program

The aim of this thesis is to compare the different Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon film reviews from Chinese and American reviewers respectively, and to see how they evaluate and understand the film in different ways. The reception theory will be the framework and hermeneutics will be the methodology of this thesis to analyze and explain the phenomenon behind the Chinese reception on the film. This film is critically acclaimed globally and yet is was rejected by its domestic audience, however, the phenomenon that this is will be exploring is how and why the Chinese audience, who initially disapproved of the …

Henry J. Leir Annual Report, 2015-2016, Robert D. Tobin

Henry J. Leir Chair Annual Reports

Henry J. Leir Annual Report for the 2015-2016 academic year, covering Henry J. Leir Chair holder Robert Tobin's scholarship work, publications, programming, teaching, and more.

Transnationalism And Nostalgia: Gianfranco Pannone’S ‘Trilogy Of America’, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

The article examines Gianfranco Pannone’s ‘American Trilogy’ – Piccola America. Gente del Nord a Sud di Roma/‘Little America. People from the North to the South of Rome’ (1991), Lettere dall’America/‘Letters from America’ (1995) and L’America a Roma/‘America in Rome’ (1998) – showing how the trilogy employs the documentary genre not only as a way to inform the audience, but to question the way in which imagination shapes reality and vice versa. First, Lettere dall’America is examined in light of the topos of letter writing in other literary and cinematic works featuring the Italian emigration to the United States. Second, the …

Female Anti-Heroes In Contemporary Literature, Film, And Television, Sara A. Amato

Masters Theses

The anti-hero character has steadily become more popular in contemporary literature, film, and television. Part of this popularity is due to the character's appeal to the audience. This character type often commits acts that challenge the regulations of society. These acts, however, can become wish fulfillment for some audience members, making the acts of the character a vicarious experience as well as making the character more relatable because of the character's flawed nature.

This study will trace some of the evolution of the female anti-hero by discussing an ancestral character of the female anti-hero—Hester Prynne the protagonist of Nathanial Hawthorne's …

Sticking To The Script: Sexual Scripts In The Slasher Sub-Genre, Jennifer L. Clay

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

The “slasher” sub-genre has been immensely popular, even spawning television shows that invoke the familiar slasher conventions. This sub-genre has simultaneously become vilified by media researchers over the years. The slasher has received particular criticism for allegedly reinforcing regressive attitudes regarding female sexuality. This study applies sexual script theory to better understand the messages about sex found throughout the sub-genre. This study utilizes content analysis to study the more recent iterations of the slasher sub-genre including the re-make, the modern slasher film and the slasher television show. This analysis uncovered that the slasher sub-genre has evolved over time. While slasher …

Use Of Student Created Video Podcasts To Promote Foreign Language Grammar Acquisition In Middle School, Sergio Parra

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The use of video podcasts in education has emerged as a phenomenon that has gained a considerable amount of attention over the last few years. Although video podcasting is becoming a well-established technology in higher education, new multimedia instructional strategies such as student-created video podcasts in grades K-12 are under-researched.

The study investigated the effects of video podcasts created by students to promote foreign language grammar acquisition at the middle school level and find how students described such experience. The current investigation was conducted by using the explanatory sequential design, which is a mixed methods research design that occurs in …

Apportioned Commodity Fetishism And The Transformative Power Of Game Studies, Ken S. Mcallister, Chris Hanson, Judd Ethan Ruggill, Carly A. Kocurek, Tobias Conradi, Kevin A. Moberly, Steven Conway, Randy Nichols, Jennifer Dewinter, Marc A. Oullette

English Faculty Publications

This chapter explores the ways in which the field of Game Studies helps shape popular understandings of player, play, and game, and specifically how the field alters the conceptual, linguistic, and discursive apparatuses that gamers use to contextualize, describe, and make sense of their experiences. The chapter deploys the concept of apportioned commodity fetishism to analyze the phenomena of discourse as practice, persona, and vagaries of game design, recursion, lexical formation, institutionalization, systems of self-effectiveness, theory as anti-theory, and commodification.

Reseña: El Aura De Fabián Bielinsky, Miguel A. Albújar Escuredo

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Bielinsky narra una historia amparada en dos esferas contrapuestas: el mundo mental y el entorno físico de Esteban. En el primero tal que una consagración platónica al ideal del pensamiento humano, todos los planes encajan, tienen su sentido y tempo correcto, llegando a una resolución armónica, sensata y racional; el segundo mundo es caótico, responde a las coordenadas ajenas de un entorno que Esteban no puede controlar.

Reseña: La Ciudad Sin Límites De Antonio Hernández, Miguel A. Albújar Escuredo

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

La película ofrece el retrato de una familia de clase alta disfuncional. Sin embargo, lo que en un principio se anticipaba como melodrama familiar con tintes cómicos, cambia sutilmente en una exploración dramática sobre el amor, la culpa y el rencor. Este triple ejercicio se fundamenta en una nefasta herencia tardo-franquista que hasta el final parece estar latente por invisible, pero que por último se revela esencial para entender la psique torturada del padre. El personaje de Leonardo Sbaraglia es el conductor a través de un entramado de mentiras presentes y pasadas, que permiten cubrir la fealdad de una familia …

Reseña: Que Se Mueran Los Feos De Nacho G. Velilla, Miguel A. Albújar Escuredo

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

La película recurre al recurso del locus amoenus, un lugar paradisíaco donde por su especial enclave metafórico el universo es cerrado y todos los personajes adquieren significado en el interior de la comunidad. El personaje protagonista, Eliseo, es una figura insatisfecha que se muestra inconforme con su posición social, soltero y desgraciado por ello. El hecho de que tenga muchos amigos y todos en el pueblo le tengan cariño y lo valoren, choca con la certeza de que nadie del mismo lo acepta debido a su aspecto físico.

Course Syllabus (W16 Online) Coli 331: "Pulp Fiction And Quentin Tarantino", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes:

Rejecting the standpoint of the passively entertained consumer, our shared objectives in this course will be (1) to bring our selected cinematic and written texts into interaction in such ways as to produce high-quality scholarly writing. It is hoped that, by the end of the semester, each student’s active engagement with our course material should have enabled him/her, (2) to deepen and broaden his/her knowledge base concerning the social problematics we will have treated in such ways as to inform and encourage constructive social action.

We will view Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Reservoir …

A Revolution In Favor Of Television: Wcvb-Tv And Robert Gardner's Screening Room, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In the 1970’s, WCVB-TV in Boston produced many innovative and unusual programs. Among them was Robert Gardner’s Screening Room, one of the most delightfully unlikely programs ever aired on a network television station. Essentially, Screening Room was a talk show about independent filmmaking. Once a week, Gardner invited an independent filmmaker to show and discuss a selection of films or film clips. But Screening Room wasn’t just a showcase for independent film. It also introduced a network television audience to intellectual film critics like Rudolf Arnheim and Stanley Cavell, in a uniquely accessible and entertaining way. In any case, …

Off The Road: Imperialism And Exploration In The American Road Movie, Andy Wright

Pitzer Senior Theses

This essay explores the imperialist nature of the American road movie as it is defined by the film’s era of release, specifically through the lens of how road movies abuse the lands that are travelled through. To accomplish this, my essay analyzes a classic road movie, Easy Rider, a more contemporary parody, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, and the futuristic film, The Martian. All of these films treat everything that which is not the metropolitan traveller in a distinctly oppressive sense, and each time a new generation of filmmakers makes a road movie, it becomes …

Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey

Theses and Dissertations--English

Since September 11, 2001 a substantial number of English-language, post-apocalyptic films have been released. This renewed interest in the genre has prompted scholars to examine the circumstances within western society that make post-apocalyptic films appealing to audiences. The popularity of these films derives from a narrative structure that reinforces conservative notions of good and bad and moral absolutism. The post-9/11, post-apocalyptic film typically features a white male hero who, in one way or another, reestablishes the pre-apocalyptic social order through proclamations of mandatory and prohibitive laws that must be adhered to by the survivors. The hero of post-apocalyptic film does …