Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Long May She Reign: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Gender Expectations In Disney's Tangled And Disney/Pixar's Brave, Caitlin J. Saladino

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project addresses messages about gender expectations in Disney princess narratives. The two films included are Tangled (2010) and Brave (2012), which feature the most recently inducted princesses to the marketed Disney Princess line (Rapunzel and Merida, respectively). Using genre as an organizing principle, I argue that Rapunzel and Merida are different from the past Disney princesses (Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, Jasmine, etc.) because their narratives reflect new ideas about gender expectations in modern society. The central tension appearing in both films is the opposition between the image of woman as traditional, domestic, and dependent and woman as progressive, industrious, …

Not Dead At All, Martin Becerra

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Not Dead At All is a nontraditional thesis, a creative product, the result of a combination of media production and social research. This paper is an attempt to explain the creative and production process behind the creation of an original media content, using the social research as a tool to increase the likeability of our characters and therefore increase the show’s chances of success.

Deconstructing The Digital Divide: Critical Media Literacy Implementation In The Classroom, Evelyn C. Obamos

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

In this presentation I explore the complexity of the digital divide and propose to use the framework of critical praxis put forth by Paolo Freire in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Using Freire we are able to build on existing research on the digital divide, contextualize the multi-dimensional issue of the divide, and respond to the social, cultural, and political issues within and beyond the classroom environment.

Tapestry Of Space: Domestic Architecture And Underground Communities In Margaret Morton’S Photography Of A Forgotten New York, Irina Nersessova

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

This article addresses the impact urban space has on individuals through the use of Situationist International theory and psychogeography. Representations of homelessness in New York in Margaret Morton's photography are used to demonstrate the interconnectedness among space, people, and social issues. Social issues manifest themselves in urban decay, and the inhabitants react to this phenomenon emotionally and artistically. Some inhabitants demonstrate their relationship with space by responding with material production of housing and art, which they accomplish by building without exploiting the environment the way the manufacturing of commodities often does.

Walt Disney And The Propaganda Complex: Government Funded Animation And Hollywood Complicity During Wwii, Amanda Cunningham

Graduate Research Symposium (2010 - 2017)

Walt Disney’s work as an animator during World War II had a measurable impact on culture and in the development of government produced messages. It is important to examine this understudied area of Disney’s life and his studio’s efforts to produce wartime training and propaganda films during WWII. Government agencies, including the U.S. Treasury, contracted Disney to produce 32 animated shorts between 1941 and 1945 (Gabler, 2007).

Employing a semiotic approach of cinema, this study focuses on the cartoons The New Spirit (1942), Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943) and Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi (1943). While American wartime …

Long May She Reign: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Gender Expectations In Disney’S Tangled And Disney/Pixar’S Brave, Caitlin J. Saladino

Graduate Research Symposium (2010 - 2017)

This project addresses messages about gender expectations in Disney princess narratives. The two films included in my project are Tangled (2010) and Brave (2012), which feature the most recently inducted princesses to the marketed Disney Princess line (Rapunzel and Merida, respectively). Using genre as an organizing principle, I argue that Rapunzel and Merida are different from the past Disney princesses (Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, Jasmine, etc.) because their narratives reflect new ideas about gender expectations in modern society. The central tension appearing in both films is the opposition between the image of woman as traditional, domestic, and dependent and woman …

Gilded Age Visual Media As The Impetus For Social Change: Jacob Riis’S Reform Photography And The Antecedents Of Documentary Film, Denitsa Yotova

Graduate Research Symposium (2010 - 2017)

This study examines the birth and evolution of the social documentary genre in visual media. It suggests that a mixture of ideology, technology, and social awareness are necessary for a successful social reform. It finds that despite the limitations of technology during the nineteenth century, social documentaries were produced long before they were part of the genres of photography and film. By focusing on the work of Danish photographer Jacob Riis and tracing the emergence of film, this study demonstrates a connection between documentary film and Riis’s social documentary photography and public slide exhibitions. The study concludes that in order …

The Notebook: An Accidental Alzheimer's Awareness Campaign, Danielle Waldron

Annual Undergraduate Conference on Health and Society

My paper examines and critiques the portrayal of Alzheimer¹s disease in the popular film, The Notebook. Based off of a Nicholas Sparks novel, The Notebook uses Alzheimer¹s disease as a vehicle to relay a love story, but in doing so, presents a distorted picture of Alzheimer¹s disease to its audience. My paper compares the responsibilities of family caregivers of Alzheimer¹s patients in today¹s world with the unrealistic family caregiver, Noah, depicted on screen. My paper also explores and exposes inconsistencies between the attractive nursing home experience presented on screen and the less than ideal treatment patients experience in long term …

The Lifestyle Of The "Urban Tribe", Nichelle D. Mcnabb, Rachel Friedman

Communications Faculty Scholarship

It was once the norm for people to get married in their early twenties,

perhaps right after college or maybe during college. Once married, there was

the need to start a family as soon as possible. However, nowadays, people

appear to be substituting (at least for this period of time after college) the

traditional family structure with a new one – the “urban tribe.” This paper

takes a critical approach to examining portrayals of rituals in “urban tribes”

in two television shows – Will & Grace and Friends in which we argue that

the progressive elements of these shows counter …

College Students' Lingering Negative Emotional Reponses To Movies Viewed During College, Brianna M. Kuck

Selected Honors Theses

Although much research has been conducted on children’s negative emotional responses to movies, and even negative emotional responses to the media in general, limited research has been conducted on college students’ lingering negative emotional responses to movies they have viewed during their college years. Through a qualitative analysis using a focus group at a Florida Christian college, this thesis will examine what kinds of disturbing movie content and elements cause these lingering negative emotional responses in college students. The lingering negative emotional responses these students have will also be discussed in detail, as well as what triggers the reemergence of …

The Effect Of Color On Emotions In Animated Films, Andrew Kennedy

Open Access Theses

Lighting color in animated films is usually chosen very carefully in order to portray a specific mood or emotion. Artists follow conventional techniques with color choices with the intention to create a greater emotional response in the viewer. This study examined the relationship between color variations in videos and emotional arousal as indicated by physiological response. Subjects wore a galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor and watched two different videos: one portraying love and one portraying sadness. The videos were watched multiple times, each with variations in the lighting color. No significant effects on emotion for either hue or saturation were …

Fallen Sports Heroes, Media, & Celebrity Culture, Lawrence A. Wenner

Faculty Pub Night

No abstract provided.

Rave Culture- A Tale Of Two Scenes, Christopher Mohr

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

This article compares two iterations of rave culture through the perspective on scenes as outlined by Geoff Stahl in his essay "'It's Like Canada Reduced': Setting the Scene in Montreal." By applying both communication and sociopolitical theory to the comparison of the original rave scene to that of today's, a vivid understanding of how scenes and subcultures construct themselves- both within and around the cultural environments from which they are born- will become apparent.

Researching The Avant-Garde: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Bohn And Sell, Blaž Zabel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Subjectivity In 'Attār's Shaykh Of San'Ān Story In The Conference Of The Birds, Claudia Yaghoobi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Subjectivity in 'Attār’s Shaykh of San'ān Story in The Conference of the Birds" Claudia Yaghoobi discusses intersections of transgression, law, inclusion and exclusion, self and Other in Farīd al-Dīn 'Attār's (1142?-ca.1220) treatment of religion with regard to Shaykh San'ān and the Christian girl's love story in The Conference of the Birds. San'ān is an ascetic master who has never transgressed any of the Islamic laws until he embarks on a journey from Mecca to Rome after a dream only to fall in love with a Christian girl, convert to Christianity, and begin drinking wine and …

Art And Politics In Latin America: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Van Delden And Grenier, Sánchez, And Cohn, Nicole L. Sparling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Intertextuality In Beckett's And Ağaoğlu's Work, Elmas Şahín

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intertextuality in Beckett's and Ağaoğlu's Work" Elmas Şahín discusses Adalet Ağaoğlu's 1973 novel Ölmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die) and Samuel Beckett's 1950 Malone Dies in terms of intertextuality. Şahín employs tenets of comparative literature in order to analyze the two texts with regard to form and content and focuses on the on protagonists' worlds. In Şahín's interpretation, Ağaoğlu's protagonist Aysel is narrated in postmodern intertextuality as an individual of our days alienated from society, searching for her self/selves as she cannot succeed in dying. Both Beckett's and Ağaoğlu's protagonists attempt to "escape" from their selves and …

History And Identity In Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing In Romanian, Nicoleta D. Ifrim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "History and Identity in Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing in Romanian" Nicoleta D. Ifrim analyzes Virgil Tănase's confessional and ego-graphic writing in his 2011 Leapșa pe murite (Playing Fetch with Death). Tănase's text is about the individual caught in history and re-writes it post-traumatically from a double perspective: that of the collective memory of totalitarianism and the personal thus functioning as a filtering mechanism for the creation of meta-historical identity. For Tănase, the experience of exile and post-exile, as well as the confrontation with the West legitimizes identity dilemmas and the construction of the individual. The book is representative …

Electronic Journals, Prestige, And The Economics Of Academic Journal Publishing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Joshua Jia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Electronic Journals, Prestige, and the Economics of Academic Journal Publishing" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Joshua Jia discuss the current state of the academic journal publishing industry. The current state of the industry is an oligopoly based on a double appropriation model where academics produce work for at no cost only to have publishers earn significant profit margins by selling the work back to academics. Publishers are able to do this given the price inelasticity and weak bargaining power of its main consumer, university libraries. Publishers' ability to increase prices is also supported by what the authors …

The Art / Crime Archive: An Anti-Boredom Space, Paul Kaplan, Brian Goeltzenleuchter, Dan Salmonson

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This paper reports on an ongoing web-based project devoted to the study of deviant art and creative crime called the Art / Crime Archive: www.artcrimearchive.org. The Art / Crime Archive (ACA) is a collaborative laboratory, teaching center, and web-based platform devoted to the study of this space. The ACA is organized by an artist, a criminologist, and a computer engineer. The working process of the ACA involves locating, archiving, and discussing visual, audio, and text artifacts that support this shadow space. The work product is a dynamic archive which can be configured for a multiplicity of contexts—art exhibitions, academic …

"Punk-Ass Book Jockeys": Library Anxiety In The Television Programs Community And Parks And Recreation, Eamon Tewell

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Library anxiety, defined as the fear of using libraries, is a psychological barrier that impedes academic achievement and the development of information literacy. Using key episodes and protagonists from Community and Parks and Recreation, this paper will demonstrate how library anxiety is represented in these series. From the infamously manipulative public librarian Tammy Swanson in Parks and Recreation to the library as pillow fight battlefield in Community, these indications of anxiety towards libraries will be evaluated with the intent of illuminating current discourse in popular television regarding library use.

Silent Film Online, Julie Decesare Cicilline

Library Faculty and Staff papers

Alexander Street Press (ASP) has become a leader in providing libraries and institutions access to streaming video and multimedia content. Since 2006, their offerings of online and streaming video databases have grown quickly. Recently, they released Silent Film Online (SFO), a collection of silent films, clips, trailers, and documentaries about filmmaking during the silent film era. ASP pricing is average for this content, and flexible, based on type of institution, budget, and FTE. Annual subscription or one time purchase of perpetual rights are options. Like other ASP online video databases, functionality is high. ASP is currently in beta with a …

What’S Queer About Remy, Ratatouille, And French Cuisine?, Laure Murat

Cinema & Media Studies

This chapter appears from the book, What’s Queer about Europe: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms, Edited by Mireille Rosello, and Sudeep Dasgupta.

"What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine?" focuses on Ratatouille (2007), the story of Remy, a rat who becomes a chef. This spectacular animated movie could be read as a coming-out story, where the rat embodies the symbolic lonely gay, refined as an object of disgust, excluded and successful. Ratatouille is also a story about race, species and nationality in contemporary France. In this context, Queer studies is an appropriate tool to address a series of …

Narratives Of Violence: The White Imagination And The Making Of Black Masculinity In “City Of God”, Jaime Alves

Publications and Research

The article explores the representation of young-black men in the 2002 film City of God. The film deploys “pathological scripts” of Black masculinity in Brazil as criminal and deviant. The controlling image of Black men’s bodies as a source of danger and impurity sustains Brazilian regime of racial domination, and the narratives of violence make explicit the ways in which the Brazilian nation is imagined though a racial underpinning. Blackness is consumed as an exotic commodity, yet is also understood as a threat to national harmony. The nation is, then, written and re-imagined as a racial paradise, but mostly by …

Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism On Screen By Kathleen Rowe Karlyn; African American Actresses: The Struggle For Visibility, 1900-1960 By Charlene Regester; Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World On Film By Corinn Columpar: A Review By Mantra Roy, Mantra Roy

Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

A Prison For Others—A Burden To One's Self, Anne Collins Smith, Owen M. Smith

Faculty Publications

Women have come a long way since the mid-1960's, both in the real world and in the world of philosophy. Given the advances in society and the developments within feminism that took place between that decade and the first decade of the 21st century, we might reasonably expect the new Prisonerseries to present a more contemporary perspective on women than the original. Such is most emphatically not the case. If we compare the original Village to the new one, it looks as if those pennyfarthing wheels are spinning backwards instead of forwards.

Carlos Saura Y La Relativización De La Historia Y La Memoria Antes De La Transición, Luis Guadaño

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) La idea principal del presente trabajo es la de intentar darle una nueva perspectiva a tres películas de Saura- El jardín de las delicias (1970), La prima Angélica (1973) y Cría cuervos (1975)- que las pondría en relación con el espíritu de la transición y no solamente con la oposición política al regimen de Franco. La crítica ha analizado estas películas principalmente desde una perspectiva que hace referencia al context histórico-político específico de su aparición dentro de la dictadura de Franco. Así, por ejemplo, se han interpretado como los últimos coletazos críticos al Régimen poco antes de su …

The Pit Bull's Discourse: An Examination Of Discursive Construction, Karen Jennings

Bridges: A Journal of Student Research

Since the early 1980s, news reporters have used the pit bull as a scapegoat to get media attention by plastering the frightening image of a snarling, bloody dog across all news outlets. Over the years, the pit bull's image has suffered major blows to its already battered reputation with every new "dog attack" news story published. Each reporter's word choice, in both past and present news stories, has an effect on the reader's perception of the topic. By analyzing several unrelated stories about pit bulls, both good and bad, I reveal how word choice alone shapes a reader's perception while …

Feminine Purity And Masculine Revenge-Seeking In Taken (2008), Casey R. Kelly

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

The 2008 film Taken depicts the murderous rampage of an ex-CIA agent seeking to recover his teenage daughter from foreign sex traffickers. I argue that Taken articulates a demand for a white male protector to serve as both guardian and avenger of white women's “purity” against the purportedly violent and sexual impulses of third world men. A neocolonial narrative retold through film, Taken infers that the protection of white feminine purity legitimates both male conquest abroad and overbearing protection of young women at home. I contend that popular films such as Taken are a part of the broader cultural system …

American Indians In Feature Films: Beyond The Big Screen, Daisy V. Domínguez

Publications and Research

This article examines whether library collections represent the breadth of portrayals of American Indians in feature film and provides collection development resources for developing and strengthening feature film collections by and about American Indians.