Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Media Effects In Context, Brian O'Neill

Books/Book chapters

The media effects tradition occupies a hugely influential and dominant role within mainstream communications research. It is unquestionably the longest running tradition within the field of audience studies, spanning nearly its entire history, yet it continues to divide opinion, both methodologically and with regard to its fundamental approach towards the study of media audiences.  Its influence extends well beyond the academy, and the powerful influence exerted by its research agenda on public and political understanding of the impact of media is perhaps one of its most significant achievements.

The Hero Soldier: Portrayals Of Soldiers In War Films, Gavin Davie

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The mythos of the hero has existed within the stories of humanity for as long as we can remember. Within the last hundred years film has become one of the dominant storytelling media of our culture and numerous films, especially war films, about heroes and their inspirational actions have been made. This study focuses on war films and the hero soldiers and their actions portrayed in those films. It uses a narrative analysis of five war films to accomplish this. The findings suggest that the hero soldier has become more human and fallible over time and that heroes are a …

Sexuality, Exoticism, And Iconoclasm In The Media Age: The Strange Case Of The Buddha Bikini, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Audience Research, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

ECREA roundtable The future of audience research IAMCR conference @ BRAGA July 21 14:30-16:00 Convenor: Nico Carpentier Institutional and critical perspectives on audience representation This contribution focuses on institutional and critical perspectives on audience representation, i.e., how audience experience is formally accounted for through institutional processes of research (media literacy indices for instance) or through representative bodies such as Audience Councils. In other words, an area of overlap between audience studies and public policy debates, advocating that researchers should try to make their findings more widely available and understood in professional media environments.

The World’S Most Perfectly Developed Man: Charles Atlas, Physical Culture, And The Inscription Of American Masculinity, Jacqueline Reich

CMS Faculty Publications

The major wave of Italian immigration between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries coincided with the growth of the physical culture movement in the United States. A principal participant in both phenomena was the Italian male, with a particularly fascinating case being that of the bodybuilder and fitness guru Charles Atlas. Born Angelo Siciliano in Calabria, Italy, Atlas provides an interesting window into how the Southern immigrant became American and how that Americanization was written on the muscled, male body. This article examines how Siciliano/Atlas transformed himself into the world’s most perfect white man at a time when Italians’ whiteness was …

A Systemic Functional Multimodal Analysis Of Business Brochures., Fauziah Taib

Student Works (2010-2019)

The study is a multimodal analysis of Malaysian business-to-business brochures (b2b) that advertise training programmes for human resource development in local and multinational companies. The multimodal analysis is within the framework of systemic functional theory as the theory has resources to analyse verbal as well as visual elements in texts. The aims of the study are to identify the verbal and visual components that make up the genre, ascertain how the functions of the business brochures are realized in the components and establish how these various semiotic components cohere such that the brochures are seen as a unified whole.  The …

Selling True Stories: A Cultural Analysis Of Manufactured Realism In The Docudrama Crime Film, Jamie Schleser

College of Communication Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the cultural function of docudrama crime films. The docudrama is a hybrid of the conventional Hollywood fiction film and the documentary. Blurring fact and fiction, these films manufacture an illusion of realism around the framework of the standard feature film using visual and narrative appeals to real life and real events. By asserting that they are "based on a true story," these films are able to shape and enhance a desired reading of the text in order to convey a particular social message to audiences. To understand the initial development of the docudrama crime form and how …

A History Of The American Film Institute, Deborah Jae Alexander

Dissertations

The American Film Institute (AFI) is a highly politicized, powerful organization. To date, most historical documentation and recording of AFI events and activities has been disseminated to the mass media from within the organization through its own publications or in other historical documentation as incidental history in relation to another topic. This dissertation, written as an overview, is the first comprehensive, independent historical examination of the AFI. The examination begins with an exploration of the development, activities and decline of the American Council on Education‟s original AFI and other film organizations that existed prior to the present day AFI. It …

The Evolution Of Revolution: The Dilemma Of Censorship And Fifth Generation Filmmakers, Elizabeth C. Urban

Honors College Theses

China’s Fifth Generation Filmmakers brought forth a burst of transformative cinema, but it could not be done without the strong historical antecedents of cultural turmoil and official censorship steered by the singular political course of the Chinese Communist Party. This group of filmmakers, particularly Chen Kaige (b. 1952), Tian Zhuangzhuang (b. 1952), and Zhang Yimou (b. 1951), produced a national cinema that was defined by censorship. It became their dilemma to define a course within the confines of censorship that not only absorbed the duality of censorship, which serves to both condemn and to promote, but also defied and altered …

New England Patriots Vs The Carolina Panthers At The Super Boob?: A Deeper Look At The Media Surrounding Janet Jackson And Justin Timberlake's Wardrobe Malfunction At The 2004 Super Bowl, Philip Michael Ortez

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

A Political Economy Of Formatted Pleasures, Edward Brennan

Books/Book chapters

This chapter argues that, by promoting audience pleasures based in the pursuit of individual and materialistic goals, most television formats are consonant with a dominant orthodoxy which sees markets as the only way to organise society . This elective affinity between format pleasures and free market ideology, however, does not come about through deliberate design. Rather it is an unintended consequence of television production’s response to economic and practical necessity. In their form, content and production practices formats are pre-adapted to the demands of a globalised media market place. This commercial logic has given formats a peculiar signature in terms …

Review: Karen Ward Mahar (2008): Women Filmmakers In Early Hollywood, Sara Ross

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

Book review

Mahar, Karen Ward. Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

This book will be a useful reference for feminist and film historians looking to expand their understanding of how film and business history can help to explain the gendering of filmmaking.

Remember The Titans, Historical Fact Or Fiction?, Amy S. Tate

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

In the late 1990s, screen writer Gregory A. Howard wrote a screen play called Remember the Titans, based on the true story of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. Jerry Bruckheimer and Walt Disney Pictures bought the script based on the fact that it is a true story, but much of the film‟s content is fictional. Gregory Howard admitted to ESPN writer Jeff Merron that “he made some big assumptions when writing his script” (qtd. in Merron 5). Though the film is not entirely historically accurate, it is successful because it appeals to Americans through its intense emotional …

Sounding The Future: Digital Radio And Cd-Quality Audio, Brian O'Neill

Books/Book chapters

Central to the early effort to win acceptance for DAB in the early 1990s was an extensive process of promotion of the many claimed advantages of the new broadcasting technology. Digital radio broadcasting under the Eureka 147 DAB project offered many technical enhancements – more efficient use of the spectrum, improved transmission methods, and lower running costs – features that were attractive to industry professionals, broadcasting organisations, regulators and spectrum planners. But digital radio was also designed as a consumer proposition offering audiences a new and improved listening experience with ease of tuning, reliable reception, text and data services, interactive …

Radio Broadcasting In Europe: The Search For A Common Digital Future, Brian O'Neill, Helen Shaw

Books/Book chapters

Europe’s radio is also characterised by a long history of being defined and driven by the state, in highly centralized fashion in the case of countries such as France (Meadel 1994), or indeed in former totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe (Paulu 1974), and along more federal or devolved lines in countries such as Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands (Kuhn 1985). The development of state broadcasting monopolies in most European countries, established in the early years of the twentieth century following the invention of sound broadcasting, has ensured that there is an enduring shared common ideological approach to radio broadcasting, which …

The Corporeal Idea, Brian A. Shaw

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The act of transforming the ever elusive idea to the glorified art that appears on the “silver screen” is neither glamorous nor easy. I find the process often misrepresented in the eyes of the common viewer, and until the last four years of my undergraduate career, I saw through those same skewed eyes. The art of filmmaking is in its very essence a battle of wills and a test of endurance. It takes more than a great idea to breathe life into a project. It takes perseverance, preparation, cooperation, and most of all, a lot of luck! My experiences as …

Literary Devices And Vocabulary Frequency Use In Malaysian Radio Advertisements., Jeyanthi Evelyn J. L. Christy

Student Works (2010-2019)

Radio advertisements are very much part and parcel of our daily lives. Radio is ubiquitous and free. Technology has come a long way as radio is also available to its listeners via the Internet and even on television. Owing to the flexibility and availability of radio, radio advertisements increase the selling power of products, services and so on. Literary devices are not restricted to literary materials. They can be found in non literary materials such as advertisements. For the purpose of this research, two radio stations, hitz.fm and mix fm were identified as they share similar target audiences. Advertisements from …

Chronotope And Regional Chinese Independent Films, Jingya Liu

Lingnan Theses

This thesis aims to re-categorize Chinese independent films from a region-based perspective as a critical response to existing literature on Chinese independent films. This thesis analyzes three independent films made in three different regions of China in order to investigate regional Chinese independent cinema as a recently rising phenomenon: respectively, Jia Zhangke’s Xiaowu (1997) made in Shanxi Province, Ying Liang’s Taking Father Home (Bei yazi de nanhai, 2006) in Sichuan Province, and Robin Weng’s Fujian Blue (Jinbi huihuang, 2007) in Fujian Province.

By using Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope (literally time-space) as the fundamental framework and exploring the many aspects of …

Mr. Monk And The Emotion-Reason Dilemma, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Communications: Faculty Publications

Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub) belongs to a tradition of brilliant but personally flawed detectives. Like others in this tradition, including his television colleague, Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), Monk’s genius resides in his exceptional, even excessive, rationality. Both Monk and House embody near-perfect detection or diagnostic skills. And, in both cases, the cause of their damaged personalities is excessive emotionality, represented by their respective emotional disorders. In their internal dynamics, emotion is almost always the ‘problem,’ and both shows suggest that troubled emotionality is the price Monk and House must pay for their intense brilliance.

Beyond Europe: Launching Digital Radio In Canada And Australia, Brian O'Neill

Books/Book chapters

Eureka 147 was, as we have argued throughout this volume, a European technology designed within the very particular context of European public service broadcasting (see also Rudin 2006; O'Neill 2009). At the same time, the consortitum behind DAB technology had the ambition that Eureka 147 would become the world standard for digital radio. DAB was indeed the first such technological system to achieve standardisation at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and be recommended as a global standard for digital terrestrial sound broadcasting by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

Political Cartoons And Graphic Novels: A Study Of Political And Social Commentary In Comics, Daniella Orihuela-Gruber

Journalism

No abstract provided.

Simpler Packaging, Tomiko Oden

Graphic Communication

This project explains how product packaging is become more "green", and thus more simple. Packaging needs to go beyond just simplifying materials and graphics - it needs to create a simpler process in order to reduce wasted time, energy, and resources.

Color Correction For Underwater Photography, Vanessa Pateman

Graphic Communication

The purpose of this study was to develop knowledge of the practice of underwater photography and determine how color correction leads to the success of an underwater photograph. Color is one of the photographer's greatest assets. When light travels through water instead of air, different techniques and equipment are necessary for correct color capture.

Human perception of color changes with depth underwater, which is due to the decrease in natural light. The scientific method, elite and specialized interviewing, and content analysis were used in this study to determine useful tools in color capture and reproduction in underwater photographs.

An experiment …

Impact Of Mad Money Stock Recommendations: Merging Financial And Marketing Perspectives, Ekaterina Karniouchina, William L. Moore, Kevin J. Cooney

Business Faculty Articles and Research

This article relies on advertising and persuasive communications theories to uncover persistent variations in investor response to television stock recommendations targeting naive investors. The authors use an event study methodology to determine the size of the next-day abnormal market reaction to recommendations on Mad Money with Jim Cramer. Although viewers are actively looking for recommendations, the results show that any individual recommendation is still subject to many of the same communication challenges as traditional advertisements. A regression analysis finds that traditional advertising variables, such as message length, recency-primacy effects, information clutter, and source credibility, influence the size of the market …

Know Your Enemy: Tibetan Perceptions Of And Approaches To Chinese Studies In Exile, Katherine Mechling

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Achieving peaceful dialogue between Chinese and Tibetans is the crux of the Tibetan community in exile’s strategy to regain its homeland. Yet despite the recognized importance of cross-cultural communication the Tibetans, ideologically unwilling to separate “China the Oppressor” from “China the Neighbor” or even, potentially, “China the Co-Collaborator,” have largely avoided studying their adversary. Although increased literacy in Chinese language, knowledge of Chinese history and understanding of Chinese culture would enable the Tibetans to engage with China more effectively and productively, few initiatives exist in exile that facilitate the spread of such information. Receiving only a basic overview of Chinese …

Making A Story Move: The Art Of Film Editing, Daniel Gross

Honors Scholar Theses

An in-depth treatise on the process of film editing, featuring 16 original interviews from renowned editors. These editors share insight and anecdotes about the daily joys and difficulties of their careers (and the professional principles they subscribe to), as well as the creative, interpersonal, and technical challenges they constantly face. Discussion of the “MTV influence” behind modern film editing is offered, and this influence is explored in filmmaking history. Advice and inspiration is also shared for the benefit of future film editors; Hollywood editors tell their own stories about how they thrived in a notoriously-difficult field, and what it would …

Torturing Terrorists For National Security Imperatives: Mediated Violence On "24", Michael D. Sears

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study analyzed mediated violent content as seen on the FOX television program 24. The study covered a seven year period, or six seasons, of 24 , with a sample set of 43 episodes and 445 individual acts ofviolence. Three research questions guided this study. The first research question sought to determine if a relation exists between heroic characters inflicting torturous violence and justifying the act with a national security imperative. The second research question examined the prevailing mode of violence and the use of nonlethal and lethal weapons. The third research question examined the portrayed efficiency of violence on …

Is Disney Surfing The Third Wave? A Study Of The Pervasiveness Of The Third Wave Of Feminism In Disney's Female Protagonists, Emily S. Ellington

Senior Honors Theses

It is important to understand factors that have influenced Generation Y’s view of womanhood. One way to do this is to analyze third wave feminist messages portrayed by Disney, the media powerhouse. In order to determine if Disney reflects feminist values, the third wave themes portrayed in The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Pocahontas (1995), and Mulan (1999) are examined. It is concluded that Disney portrays the feminist values of independence and multiculturalism; however, the films are set within patriarchal societies and portray women to be domestic. Ultimately, Disney portrays four messages about womanhood: Women are equal …

Troubled Waters: Mid-Twentieth Century American Society On "Trial" In The Films Of John Waters, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article Professor Banks argues that what makes many of filmmaker John Waters early films so subversive is his use of the “white-trash” body—people marginalized by and excluded from conventional white America—as countercultural heroes. He uses the white trash body as a surrogate for talk about race and sexuality in the early 1960s. I argue that in many ways Waters’ critiques of mid-twentieth century American society reflect the societal changes that occurred in the last forty years of that century. These societal changes resulted from the civil rights, gay pride, student, anti-war and women’s movements, all of which used …

Marketing Under Feminist Scrutiny, Andrew Harris

XULAneXUS

At first glance, an ad in a magazine may appear harmless when left critically unexamined, but when studied closely, patterns start to arise that express male dominance which habitually goes unnoticed because male dominance has long been taken for granted. Laura Mulvey writes on phallocentrism in her essay entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and explains how to recognize the distinction between men and women in popular media. The most dominant theme in her essay is that marketers depict female characters so they seem like man’s opposite, suggesting that women only exist when defined by their “castration” or penislessness. This …