Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Realizing The Witch: Science, Cinema, And The Mastery Of The Invisible [Table Of Contents], Richard Baxstrom, Todd Meyers

Cinema & Media Studies

Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of cinema. Deftly weaving contemporary scientific analysis and powerfully staged historical scenes of satanic initiation, confession under torture, possession, and persecution, Häxan creatively blends spectacle and argument to provoke a humanist re-evaluation of witchcraft in European history as well as the contemporary treatment of female “hysterics” and the mentally ill.

In Realizing the Witch, Baxstrom and Meyers show how Häxan opens a window onto wider debates in the 1920s regarding the relationship of film to scientific evidence, the evolving study of religion from historical and …

Exploring The Role Of Identification And Moral Disengagement In The Enjoyment Of An Antihero Television Series, Sophie Janicke, Arthur A. Raney

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

Affective disposition theory explains well the process of enjoying hero narratives but not the appeal of narratives featuring antiheroes. Recent antihero studies suggest that character identification and moral disengagement might be important factors in the enjoyment of such fare. The current study builds on this work. A sample of 101 self-identified fans and nonfans of the television series 24 viewed a condensed version of Season 1, providing evaluation of various protagonist perceptions, moral judgments, and emotional responses to the narrative, as well as overall enjoyment. As expected, fans reported greater liking of the protagonist and greater enjoyment. But more importantly, …

Human Trafficking And Film: How Popular Portrayals Influence Law And Public Perception, Jonathan Todres

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Praxis With Self-Advocates: Exploring Participatory Video As Radical Incrementalism, Kathleen C. Sitter, Amy C. Burke

Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum

In this article, the authors report selected findings from a larger study where self-advocates from the disability rights movement created a series of short videos as part of a participatory research project. Self-advocates subsequently integrated these videos into a greater community organizing initiative. While the research process of this study has been published elsewhere, this piece will explore the idea of bridging participatory video, a collaborative research methodology, with community-based advocacy initiatives. The authors contend that this presents an opportunity for radical incrementalism in which to create a praxis driven predominantly by the voices on the margins versus the academic …

Audience Vs. Art: The Plight Of The Contemporary Bengali Filmmaker, Gabriel Doss

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This document is a 2015 survey of contemporary Bengali Cinema, which is primarily composed of (1) a brief history of the industry from its origins to the present day and (2) a survey of the careers of six prominent, active Bengali directors: Goutam Ghose, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Aparna Sen, Sekhar Das, Srijit Murkerji, and Kamaleshwar Mukerjee. The guiding question for the research was "How does a Bengali director express him/herself honestly within the economic restrictions serving the Bengali audience?" Research was conducting by watching 71 films, conducting 11 interviews, including 7 interviews with directors, including each director mentioned above. The conclusion …

On A Particularly Patriotic Day, Laila M. Mufty

SURGE

I stare at myself in disgust before turning away and beginning to apply skin creams and makeup that promise a lighter complexion. I straighten my naturally thick, curly hair, methodically going over the same strand multiple times while wishing for straight hair like the other perfect blond girls in my grade. I put on a modest all black ensemble in an effort to avoid unwanted attention and pull on a large jacket with a hood to hide my face. [excerpt]

The Role Of Critical Thinking In Reader Perceptions Of Leadership In Comic Books, Renee Krusemark Edd

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This study qualitatively explored how readers use critical thinking to perceive leadership in The Walking Dead comic books. Sixty-nine participants gave responses regarding their thoughts about leadership in the comic via an online survey. A majority of the participants indicated a wide range of values for comics as a learning experience. Most participants perceived leadership in the comic books as an individual who protects others and makes decisions. After completing the online survey, 22 participants gave acceptable and relevant responses about their perceptions of leadership and how they form these perceptions. Information was collected through email interviewing. The study concluded …

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article outlines two graphic novels and an accompanying activity designed to unpack complicated intersections between racism, poverty, and (d)evolving criminal-legal policy. Over 2 million adults are held in U.S. prison facilities, and several million more are under custodial supervision, and it has become clearly unsustainable. In the last decade, there has been a shift in media conversations about criminality, yet only a few suggest decreasing our reliance upon incarceration. In meaningfully different ways, the two novels trace the development of incarceration from its roots in slavery to its contemporary anti-democratic iteration and offer an underpublicized alternative.

Critical and community …

On The Convergence Of Cinema And Theme Parks: Developing A Predictable Model For Creative Design, Ryan Luke Terry

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this research study is to develop a model of information that will enable media conglomerates and other companies, with theme park investments, to make informed and effective decisions based on scholarly and empirical evidences. In order to do this, the following research study uses historic, scholarly, journalistic, and focus group evidences to consolidate the information necessary to create a model to support concepts and designs. The paper begins with establishing why it is important for media conglomerates, with theme park investments, to integrate cinema into the park’s design. Then it looks back through the history of cinema …

Providing Objective Metrics Of Team Communication Skills Via Interpersonal Coordination Mechanisms, Celine De Looze, Brian Vaughan, Finnian Kelly, Alison Kay

Conference Papers

Being able to communicate efficiently has been acknowledged as a vital skill in many different domains. In particular, team communication skills are of key importance in the operation of complex machinery such as aircrafts, maritime vessels and such other, highly-specialized, civilian or military vehicles, as well as the performance of complex tasks in the medical domain. In this paper, we propose to use prosodic accommodation and turn- taking organisation to provide objective metrics of communica- tion skills. To do this, human-factors evaluations, via a coordi- nation Demand Analysis (CDA), were used in conjunction with a dynamic model of prosodic accommodation …

The Actor: An Emotional Science, Jake Lane Bassi

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Acting is a form of storytelling through the given circumstances in the story. A truly good actor unleashes very controlled energy into a powerful emotional roller coaster that takes physical and mental tolls on the body much how real emotions can affect our behavior and drain our energy; such as being exhausted after a strong verbal disagreement with a loved one or dealing with grief from losing someone close.

Introduction To And Bibliography For The Study Of Alimentary Life Writing And Recipe Writing As War Literature, Louise O. Vasvari

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Introduction to and Bibliography for the Study of Alimentary Life Writing and Recipe Writing as War Literature" Louise O. Vasvári defines the concept of "alimentary life writing" and locates it in the broader multidisciplinary context of alimentary history, the history of everyday life, gender studies, trauma, and war and holocaust studies. She also underlines and exemplifies the cultural and gendered significance of alimentary life writing in particular in grounding personal and collective identity formation in the female immigrant and ethnic and multicultural writing. Vasvári also compares and contrasts such life writing to wartime food memoirs, as well …

Genocidal Rape, Enforced Impregnation, And The Discourse Of Serbian National Identity, Tatjana Takševa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Genocidal Rape, Enforced Impregnation, and the Discourse of Serbian National Identity" Tatjana Takševa analyzes two main processes which contributed to the systematic rape and enforced impregnation of Bosniak women during the Balkan conflict: the discourse of Serbian nationalism articulated in response to the sexual violence that took place in Kosovo preceding the war and the simultaneous diminishing and downgrading of women's political and social autonomy on all territories of the former Yugoslavia. Based on statements in narratives of Bosniak women rape survivors, Takševa argues that these ideologically motivated processes combined to revive, inflame, and militarize long-standing Serbian …

Kaffka's (1880-1918) Life Writing And Objection To The War, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Kaffka's (1880-1918) Life Writing and Objection to the War" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses the Hungarian author's poems, diary entries, and fictional texts. While Kaffka's importance as one of the most influential writers in modern Hungarian literature is recognized, her oeuvre as proto-feminist writing has only been studied only since the 1990s. Further, Kaffka's anti-war writing has not been explored except in a few isolated instances. Tötösy de Zepetnek elaborates Kaffka's objection to the war as seen in her poetry published in 1914 and in her diaries and correspondence and argues that Kaffka's objection to the war …

The War Memoirs Of Rachel Maccabi, Ilana Rosen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The War Memoirs of Rachel Maccabi" Ilana Rosen analyzes the memoirs of Rachel Maccabi (1915-2003) about her sacrifices to fulfill the Zionist creed. Raised in a well-off Zionist family, Maccabi moved to Israel/Palestine in the mid-1930s, served in the Haganah pre-State military organization, and later became an army officer. Her first husband fell in the 1948 War of Independence and her son in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Between 1964 and 1992 Maccabi published five memoirs. Rosen focuses on Maccabi's last three memoirs, in which she responds to the deaths of her husband and son in Israel's …

Women's Wartime Life Writing In Early Twentieth-Century China, Li Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Women's Wartime Life Writing in Early Twentieth-Century China" Li Guo discusses military diaries, prison memoirs, and autobiographical reportages. These documents offer rich insights into the political endeavors and military mobility of women. Guo analyzes Bingying Xie's 1928 war diary about the Chinese nationalists' northern expedition, Langi Hu's 1937 book about anti-Japanese activism, and Lang Bai's 1939 reportage about the Sino-Japanese War and argues that these texts allow women to reconfigure the discourse of nation through experimental life writing in order to develop the genre with tales of valor, hope, struggle, and heroism. Guo argues that contrary to …

"Being Singular Plural" In Chi's 巨流河 (The Great-Flowing River), Tsu-Chung Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "'Being Singular Plural' in Chi's巨流河 (The Great-Flowing River)" Tsu-Chung Su explores the way Pang-yuan Chi organizes her life stories in her 2009 autobiography. Born in Mainland China, Chi is a renowned Taiwanese editor, scholar, and writer who started her autobiographical novel at age 81. In her text Chi describes life stories in a war-torn era, features her migration from the north to the south (1930 to 1950), her experiences in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and the Chinese Civil War (1927-1950) culminating in her successful academic career in Taiwan (1950-). Chi's life stories are infiltrated with …

En-Gendering Memory Through Holocaust Alimentary Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "En-gendering Memory through Holocaust Alimentary Life Writing" Louise O. Vasvári aims to underline the cultural and gendered significance of the sharing of recipes as a survival tool by starving women in concentration camps during the Holocaust and the continuing role of food memories in the writing of Holocaust survivor women she considers a genealogy of intergenerational remembrance and transmission into the postmemory writing of their second generation daughters and occasionally their sons. Vasvári argues that the study of multigenerational Holocaust alimentary life writing becomes important today because as direct survivors of the Holocaust disappear there is a …

Introduction To Life Writing And The Trauma Of War, Louise O. Vasvári, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Book Review: (Re)Thinking Orientalism: Using Graphic Narratives To Teach Critical Visual Literacy, Antonio Lopez

Journal of Media Literacy Education

(Re)Thinking Orientalism’s primary aim is to offer a pedagogical model for using graphic narratives in the classroom to explore and contest what Jones calls a dominant “visual Orientalist” discourse in Western media. Graphic narratives are fiction and nonfiction stories told in comic form, and can range from graphic novels to comic journalism. The book also examines news media, photography, comic books and television in post-9/11 USA. In particular Jones focuses on several works that deal with the representation of the Islamic Other, especially Muslim women and their primary sign of difference in Western culture, the veil. As the title …

Media Literacy, Education & (Civic) Capability: A Transferable Methodology, Julian Mcdougall, Richard Berger, Pete Fraser, Marketa Zezulkova

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This article shares research into the relationship between a formal media educational encounter in the UK and the broad objectives for media and information literacy education circulating in mainland Europe and the US.

A pilot study, developed with a special interest group of the United Kingdom Literacy Association, applied a three part methodology for comparing the media literacy levels of young people who have studied media in school against peers who at the same educational level, who have not engaged with media education of any kind. The approach ‘hones in’ on Mihailidis’ (2014) framework for media literacy and civic engagement.

African American Masculinity In The Wartime Diaries Of Two Vietnam Soldiers, Sharon D. Raynor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "African American Masculinity in the Wartime Diaries of Two Vietnam Soldiers" Sharon D. Raynor discusses an unpublished diary (1967-68) written by her father, Louis Raynor with the diary (1965-66) of David Parks that was revised and published as a memoir. By contextualizing the traditions of African American autographical writing and wartime diaries, Raynor analyzes how African American masculinity permeates the autobiographical structure in the Raynor and Parks diaries as each soldier interweaves a collective experience with a unique personal experience in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam experience challenged their ideologies about racial politics, but affirmed their masculine …

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvari, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Collaboration And Feedback In Advancing Student Learning In Media Literacy And Video Production, Carl M. Casinghino

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Educators can learn many lessons as they implement collaborative project strategies, manage appropriate feedback, and measure communicative skill development in the media literacy classroom. This article examines case studies and learning outcomes in a high school digital production classroom taught by a veteran media literacy educator.

Soviet Cineclubs: Baranov’S Film/Media Education Model, Alexander Fedorov, Elizaveta Friesem

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In this paper we discuss a historical form of media literacy education that is still insufficiently explored in English-language literature: Soviet cineclubs. We focus on one particular cineclub that was created by a Soviet educator Oleg Baranov in the 1950s. We admit that Baranov’s teaching practices might have been rooted in and shaped by ideological requirements of the time. However, we believe that the structure of his model can be used as an inspiration for a media literacy club in today’s schools.

The Fire This Time: Ta-Nehisi Coates’S “Between The World And Me”, Bill Yousman

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

In 1963, James Baldwin published his seminal The Fire Next Time. The first half of this foundational work was a letter to his nephew regarding America and race. In 2015 the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates published a letter to his son, also about America and race. The literary device employed is no coincidence. Toni Morrison has anointed Coates as the successor to James Baldwin, and while that is a heavy burden for any 40 year old to bear, it is one that he just might manage to handle with grace.

The Crisis Of Identity In Post-Revolutionary Cuban Film: A Sociological Analysis Of Strawberry And Chocolate, Andrew Zachary Shultz

Kaleidoscope

This paper analyzes Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío´s Strawberry and Chocolate (1993) from the sociological perspective of film as a cultural text informed by the political, historical, and social world in which it is produced. A symbolic interactionist/cultural studies model is used as a guide for the interpretive and qualitative methods utilized in approaching the film. Of particular interest to the sociological analysis of the film is the changing political context of the Cuban Revolution during the “special period” of the early 1990s, the use of stereotypes in the characterization of the actors, and finally its representation of …

Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, And Film Edited By Alexa Weik Von Mossner, Ted Geier

The Goose

Ted Geier reviews Completely Affecting: The Cinematics of Environmental Concern and Real Change, edited by Alexa Weik von Mossner.

Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary In The 21st Century By Helen Hughes, David M. Lawrence

The Goose

David M. Lawrence reviews Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the 21st Century by Helen Hughes.

Introduction: A Legacy Of Raised Expectations, Leif Stenberg, Christa Salamandra

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.