Digital Commons Network^™

Threatened By The Outback: Landscape And Ecology In The Australian New Wave, Richard T. Dyer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Scholarship discussing the Australian outback as a cinematic setting often conceives of this space as sharing a “frontier iconography” with the American west. A significant element of this conception is attributed to the natural features of these setting’s respective landscapes, which are said to share an arid climate, rugged geologic formations, and vast open spaces. In this project I instead strive to challenge the associations frequently conjured between these natural spaces by identifying an ecological stance within the Australian “new wave” outback film that is at odds with the presentation of the landscape in both classical Hollywood westerns and the …

How Audiovisual Composition Reveals Gendered Limitations And Possibilities In Lady Bird In The Wake Of #Metoo, Chandler Micah Reeder

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on the film Lady Bird and the historical coincidence of its release one month after the online movement #MeToo began. By giving frame and sound equal importance in my analysis of the film, rather than opposing these elements, I emphasize audiovisual composition and reveal the mutual dependence within what are considered traditional divisions of theory in cinema. These oppositions relate to control and escape, as they are portrayed through the mother and daughter characters, Marion and Lady Bird, as well as through image and sonic elements. My work demonstrates how the audiovisual composition of the film mediates …

Anti-Fascist Aesthetics From Weimar To Moma: Siegfried Kracauer & The Promise Of Abstraction For Critical Theory, Maxximilian Seijo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis re-examines the life's work of German-American critical theorist, Siegfried Kracauer, to recover abstraction from tacit historical associations with modern fascism. Evoked in critical theory more generally, the abstraction-to-fascism-teleology imagines 20th century fascism as the dialectical fulfillment of modern alienation. Rooting such alienation in the flawed Liberal and Marxist conceptions of monetary relations, critical theorists conduct their aesthetic analyses via ambivalent condemnations of abstraction’s assumed primordial alienation. In the thesis, I critique the abstraction-to-fascism-teleology through an affirmation of neochartalist political economy’s conception of money’s essential publicness and abundance. Drawing from this abstract legal mediation, I trace Kracauer’s various condemnations …

Bonding Images: Photography And Film As Acts Of Perpetration, Christophe Busch

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Historical and contemporary cases of collective violence show an incremental use of photography and film to capture and disseminate violent acts. Recording cruelty during conflict seems to be a highly ritualised practice that urges the question what communicative and psychological functions these acts have? Why and how does perpetrator photography shape a binding moral world that divides 'us' versus 'them'? These visualising acts are commonly seen as proof of power that desensitises the perpetrators and dehumanises the victims. This contribution focuses on the imagery of the Holocaust, looks into the functions that capturing and sharing cruelty has on the evolution …

Film Review: First They Killed My Father: A Daughter Of Cambodia Remembers, Timothy Williams

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

La Adaptación Afro-Futurística Y El Placer Como Supervivencia En "Los Pueblos Silenciosos" De Elena Palacios Ramé, Samuel Ginsburg

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

In “The Silent Towns,” from the 1950 collection The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury tells the story of the last man and woman left on Mars. While Walter has romanticized visions of a perfect match, he is ultimately disappointed by Genevieve’s and chooses to live out his life alone. Sixty years later, director Elena Palacios Ramé revived this science fiction classic to ask a simple question with a complex answer: What happens if you move the story to Havana? In the short film Los pueblos silenciosos (2010), Palacios replaces Mars with an abandoned Cuban capital, matching Walter with an extravagant Afro-Cuban …

Digital Integration, Jacob C. Boccio

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Artificial intelligence is an emerging technology; something far beyond smartphones, cloud integration, or surgical microchip implantation. Utilizing the work of Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, and Steven Shaviro, this thesis investigates technology and artificial intelligence through the lens of the cinema. It does this by mapping contemporary concepts and the imagined worlds in film as an intersection of reality and fiction that examines issues of individual identity and alienation. I look at a non-linear timeline of films involving machine advancement, machine intelligence, and stages of post-human development; Elysium (2013) and Surrogates (2009) are about technology as an extension of the self, …

Book Review: Remembering Genocide, Tony Barta

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Genre, Justice & Quentin Tarantino, Eric Michael Blake

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The films of Quentin Tarantino have held a significant influence on modern cinema, and therefore on cinema studies. As such, studies on the social and philosophical implications of his work have appeared over the years, mostly in regards to content. However, with the exception of references to his use of cinematic violence, studies of his technique—i.e., his cinematic style—have been rare, and rarer still have been studies of the social implications that arise from the patterns of his style as well as those his subject matter.

The following thesis seeks to use the concept of Auteur Theory—specifically, that Tarantino …

The Birth Of A Nation: The Case For A Tri-Level Analysis Of Forms Of Racial Vindication, Charles Fred Hearns

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Early American film scholars often critique the relative ineffectiveness of a single literary work, protest movement or silent film to achieve racial vindication following the release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915. Thomas Cripps, for example, examines a relatively ineffective isolated attempt to counter the notions of White supremacy promoted in the film. This study makes the case for applying a non-traditional tri-level analysis when measuring the effectiveness of such attempts. The paper focuses on efforts to redeem the image and the potential of African Americans after 1915 in the Black public sphere in three concurrent vehicles: the …

Collecting Stardust: Matter, Memory, And Trauma In Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia For The Light, Nora Szegvari

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work situates Patricio Guzmàn's Nostalgia for the Light in the broader field of essay documentary film and unveils it as a locus of discursive resistance and the generative crux of diverse conventionally isolated academic dialogues. In doing so, it addresses the challenging and controversial questions of historical meaning-making, remembrance and oblivion, melancholia and mourning. My thesis also endeavors to detect the dynamic and anxiety-inducing threshold between singularity and collectivity, and the human and the cosmic. I lay the historically unprecedented common ground for trauma theory and the essayistic comportment and argue that bearing the clash of time planes, paradoxicality, …

Spectatorial Shock And Carnal Consumption: (Re)Envisaging Historical Trauma In New French Extremity, Christopher Butler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

New French Extremity films are violent, transgressive, and break many social taboos in their narratives. However, this genre's directors are intelligent and construct these films with clues to France's past and how it still has implications in the present. This thesis was written to point out how New French Extremity films offer spectators the potential to reincorporate traumatic moments in French history by juxtaposing them against present day social, political, and economic ideologies. The purpose for this course of study was to investigate historical encounters that are present in New French Extremity filmmaking, something that has yet to be addressed …

Shaping Identity: Male And Female Interactions In Cinema, Jonette Lauren Lagamba

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Since the inception of cinema, women have been portrayed with the typical identities of emotionally and physically weak characters; this portrayal led to their subsequent dependence on men. Men were usually the protagonists and/or the heroes, following their archetypal journey. Thus, women's position in early cinema was to exemplify what men were not, placing the former in the diminutive position of the Other. One may conclude that men were often defined by what women lacked, and the women were defined by their relationships with these heroic men. As time progressed in the history of cinema, women's images retained part …

Out Of Our Depth: Hyper-Extensionality And The Return Of Three-Dimensional Media, Justin Alan Brecese

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work theorizes the contemporary attraction to three-dimensional media. In doing so, it reframes ongoing debates surrounding digital three-dimensional media in order to critique the neoliberal social relations such media engender. I argue that the contemporary interest in dimensionality, especially regarding digital media, is symptomatic of a broad cultural shift, wherein millions of lives are now essentially being lived through two-dimensional, "flat" media, which have consequently generated a lack of spatial relationships and a craving or desire for "depth." This "desire for depth" has arisen in contemporary society because people are being "spread too thin" through a combination of the …

From Night To Dawn: The Cultural Criticism Of George A. Romero, Christopher Paul Wagenheim

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Analyzing George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) in relation to the early works of Marshal McLuhan, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse reveals an ideological parallel that can be explicated using Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony. While McLuhan, Marcuse, and Fromm observe, in order to critique, social manifestations of power in a consumerist system, Romero presents a model of hegemony in his films that he exposes to extreme stress thereby allowing viewers to observe such manifestations of power for themselves. These analyses are significant because although Marcuse, McLuhan, Fromm, and Romero …

Gulliver’S Travels To The Screen, Giant And Tiny, Mark Dekle

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift, has captured readers' imaginations for almost three hundred years, spawning countless adaptations over several different mediums. As different means of communicating and transforming art have been invented, these adaptations have grown to fill the new mediums and make use of the various possibilities each form has created. Film in particular has created an enormous opportunity to re-imagine Gulliver's Travels, since it can directly show the audience the fictional foreign locations in which Gulliver finds himself.

In this study, I examine seven screen adaptations of Swift's novel to determine what our current culture views as …

Cultural Response To Totalitarianism In Select Movies Produced In Czechoslovakia, Hungary And Poland Between 1956 And 1989, Kazimierz Robak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines resistance against totalitarian propaganda in select movies produced in regions subjected to Soviet-imposed totalitarian system. From 1939 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Central-Eastern Europe has experienced two of the most devastating and genocidal political systems in the history of the humankind. Nazism was destroyed with the end of WWII, and met widespread condemnation. Sovietism, commonly known as Communism, survived WWII and the Soviet totalitarian empire rose to the position of the world's second superpower. Effective and organized Soviet propaganda generated a new convincing image of Sovietism as a harmless, friendly and progressive system. …

The Pessimism Of Horror Cinema: A Comparative Study Between Modernist And Postmodernist Horror Cinema, Michael Jeknavorian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative thesis examines levels of pessimism as they relate to modern and postmodern horror cinema. Beyond assumed differences in levels of pessimism between the two genres, the study also examines implicit and explicit moralization of these categories. Specifically, the study questions if postmodern horror cinema's characteristic increase in pessimism is simply a change in the genre's convention, yet a change that is irrespective of either genre's capabilities to moralize. First, the study singularly examines the conventions of each genre as it relates to levels of pessimism. Second, the study discusses works that bridge the two genres. And third, the …

Fantasies Of Metal And Wires: Battling Corporate Hegemony And The Achievement Of Posthuman Masculinity In Recent Superhero Cinema, Joseph J. Cook

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

During the summer of 2008 many movies were released with superhero protagonists. Combining textual readings and theoretical accounts to provide a phenomenological analysis of the representation of the counter-hegemonic struggle against corporate control and the achievement of posthuman masculinity in these recent superhero films, this thesis compares and contrasts specific visual and thematic elements that consistently appear in four of these films: The Dark Knight, Wanted, Iron Man, and Speed Racer. Providing intertextual exploration of the cultural status of specific cinematic superheroes, this project explores possible relationships between culture, society, and cinema, treating popular superhero cinema …