Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Aguaaaa!!!, Cory Villegas

Theses and Dissertations

“AGUA” is a call for new models of learning and sharing, celebrating the diasporic as a place of global revolution. Salsa, rooted in Latin American and Afro-Caribbean histories, is choreographer Cory Villegas’s expression of cultural legacy. As an Afro-diasporic dance, Salsa carries the wealth and variety of African and Indigenous roots. Villegas contextualizes her thesis event “Las Leyendas: An Afro Cuban Suite,” presenting herself and her troupe Soul Dance Co. as evidence that contradicts the erasure of Latin & Caribbean Culture in US dance history. The paper uses English and Spanish, written, visual, and oral materials with an accompanying webpage.

Luca (Last Universal Common Ancestor), Tansy Xiao

Theses and Dissertations

LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) is a non-linear virtual environment with a non-anthropocentric approach. Streaming real-time biometric data from performers' movements, brain activities, and bioprocess data from living microbiomes such as slime mold and yeast into the virtual ecosystem, LUCA explores the collective agency and interconnectivity among diverse living entities.

Oblique, Edward Kijowski

Theses and Dissertations

Oblique is a multi-sensory art installation that provides a story of fragmentation in sound and light rendered by an obtuse hexagon arrangement of speakers and associated lighting prompts. The oblique direction of the soundwaves creates sonic sculpturing that propels listeners into an active state.

Chemical Meadows, Nate Dorr

Theses and Dissertations

Chemical Meadows correlates water chemistry and photochemistry in New Jersey’s Meadowlands. A vast marshland transformed by industry and environmental contamination, the Meadowlands today are home to seven Superfund sites. By bathing 16mm film in contaminated waterways, sensitive photochemistry reveals hidden histories.

The Routes, Wei-Ta Chen

Theses and Dissertations

The Routes is a 30-minute documentary that explores the filmmaker's reflection on the ties to family and homeland, as well as the nature of non-fiction filmmaking itself, all the while portraying in parallel the story of immigrant artist Hung-Ju as he delicately balances creative challenges with nostalgia.

Time's Radiant Keepers, Tara Aliya Kesavan

Theses and Dissertations

Time’s Radiant Keepers is a body of work comprising paintings, ceramic sculptures and video. Through these materials, my work emphasizes a tactile, embodied relationship between people and the virtual worlds they inhabit. I build on the idea of contending with the screen as a sculptural surface - one whose texture, form and objecthood we may look at, rather than simply look through. My formal inquiries are anchored in a rich narrative world. Drawing from state sponsored documentary films, feature films, and familial anecdotes from the 1950’s-1970’s in India, my paintings chronicle the emergence of the image of the urban, working …

Container Film, Dena Kopolovich

Theses and Dissertations

Container Film is an experimental nonfiction short film that explores the theme of carrying. Drawing inspiration from a blend of anthropological, religious, and artistic sources, the film is guided by an unknown narrator who contemplates the origins of humanity. Unlike conventional storytelling, the narrator’s uncertainty and inner dialogue punctuate the narrative, challenging a traditional linear structure. Jumping between diverse thoughts, she resists depicting human history with a singular hero or linear trajectory. Visually, the film unfolds through vivid tableaux vivants, dance sequences, and curious object arrangements, illustrating the subtle relationship between human cognition and materiality. Through its nuanced, tactile approach, …

Pricks And Pills, Anna A. Charles

Theses and Dissertations

"Pricks and Pills" is a collection of audio pieces designed for an online platform where individuals with diabetes can listen to and find emotional support from others who share their experiences. This audio project provides an intimate look into the lives of people navigating the challenges of diabetes. Through heartfelt interviews with individuals and their families, the podcast highlights their journeys, showcasing both their struggles and triumphs.

Blurring The Boundaries: The Filmmaking Approach Toward Remission, John M. Mastriano

Theses and Dissertations

Remission explores the filmmaker’s personal experience with grief and fatherhood as well as the importance of a shared connection with the natural world that transcends life and death. Though primarily a first-person, reflexive short documentary film, Remission draws from other documentary models and modes, blurring the boundaries of documentary filmmaking.

Reflections Of Little Red Dot: An Interactive Mixed Reality Archival Experience, Chloé Lee

Theses and Dissertations

It has been nearly a decade since I last visited Singapore, a place I am connected to yet an outsider. Reflections of Little Red Dot is a mixed-reality experience that animates my archive of drawings, videos, and 3D imagery from everyday Singaporeans in 2015, the year their country celebrated its 50th birthday.

Walking through this liminal mixed reality space, we hear how citizens are personally affected by the rapidly developing landscape and erasure of personal and historical sites of significance while reflecting on our collective agency to shape the future of our environments. We are invited into homes where loved …

Rgb Root Matriz Color Dance, Danielle E. Gauthier

Theses and Dissertations

RGB Root Matriz Color Dance (Color Dance) is an immersive, interactive experience that combines poetic phrases and color filters to create a womb-like environment. Designed by Danielle Gauthier, this artistic piece uses a webcam to respond to users’ movements in real time, allowing them to confront and express their emotions through metaphor and dance. Color Dance creates a unique platform for self-discovery and empowerment by fostering a connection between the body and discomforting emotions.

Erase The Record, Anne Sofie Noerskov

Theses and Dissertations

Erase the Record follows a young immigrant as she embarks on a magical journey to unearth her vanished memories and elusive cultural identity.
The film delves into the malleable nature of memory in an allegorical universe in which myth, dream, and magic coexist. Slowly unfolding themes of immigration and the imagination, the film sprung from a personal desire to approach immigration as a psychological experience. Erase the Record explores how the physical landscapes we inhabit affect us, and how memory, language, and time are stored in a body and in a landscape.

間, Lele Dai

Theses and Dissertations

LeLe Dai makes contingent participatory public interventions using sensory materials such as sound, flickering light, and water. This paper examines their works through the lens of Chinese character Jian (間), meaning “gap/slit/incision,” to investigate the concept of “in-betweenness.”

Bengal Memory, Fahim Hamid

Theses and Dissertations

Bengal Memory is a documentary short film, told through an expository and personal lens, about a forgotten genocide that occurred in Bangladesh during its Liberation War, the controversial role that the U.S. government played in it, and how the lives of Bengali people in both the homeland and in the American diaspora were shaped by these events. As a Bangladeshi American and narrator of this story, I traveled to my native country to investigate. My father, Mohammed, had lived through the 1971 war and recounts his memories of the atrocities committed by West Pakistan, which claimed the lives of a …

Feminism And Female Identity In Adaptations Of Pride And Prejudice Throughout The 20th And 21st Centuries, Emily Suh, Emily Suh

Honors Theses

To many of her fans in the world, Austen is undeniably a feminist author, especially for her time in the nineteenth century. In a time where women were dependent upon male family members for their livelihoods, most of Austen’s heroines exhibit a sort of independence and strong will with a mind of their own, including in Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth is the model for what an independent woman is, a woman who is not so concerned with the monetary value of matrimony and only falls in love because she wants to. Furthermore, female audiences tend to like Elizabeth more than …

Representations Of Gender In Math-Related Films, Jacob Gathje

CSB and SJU Distinguished Thesis

This project analyzes how four popular math-related films - Hidden Figures, Mean Girls, Good Will Hunting, and A Beautiful Mind - either follow, resist, or reconfigure gender stereotypes in mathematics. It includes close readings of specific scenes in each of the films, along with broader analysis of the effects of how women and men are represented differently. It concludes forward-looking focus, providing suggestions for how future math-related movies can depict a more realistic and inclusive version of the field of mathematics. Ideally, this will help improve one part of the larger issue of gender disparities in math.

Imaginative Acts, Environmental Futurity: Re-Envisioning The Heroic White Male Savior In Snowpiercer, Michelle Yates

Green Humanities: A Journal of Ecological Thought in Literature, Philosophy & the Arts

In contrast to many Hollywood climate fiction films, Snowpiercer (2013) offers a more complex representation of the white male savior. In contrast to films like WALL-E (2008) and Interstellar (2014) that recuperate and invest in white masculine privilege, Snowpiercer highlights the more destructive aspects of a patriarchal capitalist system that privileges hegemonic white masculinity. While the ending of Snowpiercer may seem bleak, it also points to the possibility of a new system, an environmental futurity that centers indigenous knowledge and the experiences of women and people of color. Though Snowpiercer is not formally an American film, its casting of recognizable …

Student Film Festival 2024 Playbill, Providence College

Playbill and Promotion

Providence College Department of Theatre, Dance & Film

John Bowab Studio Theatre

Student Film Festival 2024

Thursday, May 2, 2024, 7pm

Festival Director: Ben Sweeney

Managing Director: Erin Schmidt

Department Chair: David Cabral

Technical Director: Trevor Elliott

Assistant Technical Director: Gabriel Luxton

Academic Administrative Coordinator: Ali Boyd

Production Administrative Coordinator: Barry Dejasu

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Father Kenneth Gumbert

COMPETING FILMS

Arnaldo Castro ’25, “Manny X” (8:37)

Colin Prancl '24, “The Transportation Revolution: Beta Cloth” (4:46)

Patrick Solosky '25, “Perspectives: Remembering 9/11" (10:20)

Jack Wilmott '24, “REMINISCE” (10:35)

Colin Prancl '24, “Swell” (7:27)

John Zygiel '24, “Evil at 11” (12:37)

JURY DELIBERATIONS …

Student Film Festival 2024 Poster, Providence College

Playbill and Promotion

Providence College Department of Theatre, Dance & Film

John Bowab Studio Theatre

Student Film Festival 2024

Thursday, May 2, 2024, 7pm

“Elegy For A Flower” - Remote Orchestral Session/Score-Focused Film, Logyn Okuda

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Within the many aspects of a film exists the epicenter that is visual storytelling. Music production within film always becomes a point of discussion after the fact, as composers will use their musical expertise to aid the established vision of the filmmaker. Despite music technology having evolved to recreate the sound of an orchestra, the role of music remains the same. However, what if the roles were reversed? Through this endeavor, I sought out to find the impact of a multimedia work when music becomes the primary focus of storytelling. Explored in the past by Disney's "Fantasia" and Phillip Glass' …