Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Obsessed With The Image: Vulgar Auteurism And Post-Cinematic Affect In The Late Films Of Tony Scott, Ethan Cartwright

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Beginning in the mid-2000s and carrying through the next several years, a small, dedicated group of critics and cinephiles worked at reevaluating certain contemporary Hollywood genre filmmakers whose work had been largely maligned or ignored by both critics and mainstream audiences. This group, termed as “vulgar auteurism,” distinguished directors like Michael Mann and Paul W.S. Anderson for their audacious and unique formal styles, often using digital technologies and imagery. This thesis proposes that the films and filmmakers associated with vulgar auteurism are connected through how they uniquely portray life in the early 21^st century using three of Tony Scott’s …

Cinematic Palimpsests: Polysemy And In(Ter)Dependency In The Spectator Experience, Lyric Luedke

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The model of the cinematic palimpsest helps us to critically reevaluate formal aspects of film language, relationships between film texts, and the construction of cinematic meaning in conversation with the spectator. Originating in Medieval Europe, a palimpsest is traditionally defined as a book or similar physical text “created by a process of layering whereby the existing text was erased, using various chemical methods, and the new text was written over the old one” again and again (Dillon 2005). Palimpsests rely on the core principle of in(ter)dependency, wherein each element or layer is both independent and interdependent, inherently affecting the significance …

Re-Animating Post-Digital Cinema: [Animated] Fluidity And Hybrid Aesthetics In Tomm Moore’S Celtic Trilogy, Tom James Mclaughlin

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Tomm Moore’s Celtic Trilogy, consisting of The Secret of Kells (2009), Song of the Sea (2014), and WolfWalkers (2020), displays an inter-medial hybridity and synergy of commercial and experimental elements that encourage a redefinition of animation with a focus on the innate qualities of fluidity in animated aesthetics. This fluidity in visual aesthetics and narratology honors the legacy of studio animation over the past century, while reintroducing technological and creative experimentation. This freedom further allows for authentic cultural (self-)representation of Celtic traditions in film.

Paralleling a history of cinematic theories by Arnheim, Cholodenko and Manovich projects a shared space for …

Layer Cake: Post-Cinematic Aesthetics And The “Social Justice Impulse” In Kaneza Schaal's Jack &, Amber M. Power

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Kaneza Schaal is a New York City-based theater artist who consistently utilizes a collaborative and hybrid approach to performance making, privileging demographic diversity alongside formal diversity. Drawing on intermedial performance discourse, early television scholarship, and social practice theory, I argue that Schaal’s citation of 1950s sitcom aesthetics in her 2018 theatrical work Jack & self-consciously stages a critique of the cultural hegemony that structured twentieth century television in order to contest the contemporary US media-incarceration nexus.

As a critical second layer to my analysis, I look at the ways Schaal utilizes the tools of the avant- garde (intermediality, collaboration and …

Pennies From Heaven: Death And The Afterlife In World War Ii Fantasy Films, Elise Williamson

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Wartime fantasy films produced by major Hollywood studios during World War II integrate the supernatural (i.e., ghosts, angels, and the afterlife) into wartime settings with relevant protagonists and themes to address the psychological trauma of wartime death and loss. Three case studies – The Human Comedy (Clarence Brown, 1943), A Guy Named Joe (Victor Fleming, 1943), and Between Two Worlds (Edward A. Blatt, 1944) – explore fantasy narratives and conventions unconventionally blended with the war film genre, and illustrate how the war film setting (home front vs. combat front vs. war zone) influences character focus (civilians vs. military), the …

(De/Re)Constructing Chicanx/A/O Cinema: Liminality, Cultural Hyphenation, And Psychic Borderlands In Real Women Have Curves And Mosquita Y Mari, Diana Alanis

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

When discussing ChicanX/a/o cinema, as situated in the United States, its relationship to “American” cinema is one of decoloniality that interrogates the contradictions of a diverse yet homogenous national identity. The formation of cultural identity in conjunction with national identity is inherently contradictory when nationalism requires allegiance that negates differences among communities. ChicanX/a/o identity is one of hybridization that rejects a fixed category of meaning in favor of a liminal landscape of potentiality— a psychic Borderland of identity. Contemporary ChicanX/a voices in Real Women Have Curves (Patricia Cardoso, 2002) and Mosquita y Mari (Aurora Guerrero, 2012) use feminist and feminine …

Beyond The Image: Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, And The Method, Emily K. Oliver

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Sexist gossip for women and professional celebration for men is a longstanding, detrimental trend within popular culture, society, and film studies scholarship. While this tendency can be traced consistently throughout film history, it is particularly apparent within the discourse surrounding the transitional period of postwar Hollywood (1945 - 1960). Though frequently disassociated from one another for their seemingly oppositional contemporary legacies, Marilyn Monroe and Shelley Winters began their careers synonymously as studio- created ’blonde bombshell’ archetypes. Monroe’s and Winters’ early acting credits represent severe industry illustrations of objectification and sexist tactics to utilize female bodies to sell performances. Following variable …

The Ben-Hur Franchise And The Rise Of Blockbuster Hollywood, Michael Chian

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The Ben-Hur films were some of the most popular, controversial, and financially successful films of the 20^th century. As a result, Hollywood mindset and practices were heavily influenced by the marketing strategies and discourse surrounding these films, as many studios and filmmakers wanted to achieve the same, if not a higher, level of success. Thus, the current state of the blockbuster oriented American film industry owes a great debt to the Ben-Hur films for helping to popularize blockbuster filmmaking. While the blockbuster marketing, fandom, and discussions of today are more profuse and sophisticated than that of the past, the …

Curation Of The Video Art Exhibition In The Museum, Kamla Thurtle

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The goal of this thesis is to illustrate the importance of video art through a spatial and aesthetic phenomenological framework, revealing the critical nature of aesthetic experiences for forming meaning between art-objects and viewers facilitated through acts of curation. Video art, emerging in the 1960s and heavily intertwined with the museum, marks a unique, novel, and profound disruption of the representative regime of aesthetic experiences and objects through its nature to question cultural systems of the world as a radical medium. By evolving from anti-art movements in tandem with technological innovations, video was distant from art history, discourse, and tradition, …

Futurs Utopiques Et Dystopiques : Comment La Fiction Aide À Penser L’Évolution, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau

Presidential Fellows Articles and Research

Cet article aborde le thème des futurs utopiques et dystopiques tel qu’il nous est transmis à travers la philosophie et la fiction (littérature et cinéma), et montre comment ces notions nous aident à penser l’évolution. Il propose une exploration historique des termes « utopie » et « dystopie », agrémentée d’exemples appartenant à la littérature, à la philosophie et au cinéma. L’article souligne aussi l’importance de réhabiliter l’utopie comme moyen d’inventer un futur radicalement différent.

Mulan: An Exploration Of Culture And Representation In Hollywood, Annie Okuhara, Bernadine Cortina, Hung Le, Ryan Nakahara, Jerry Zou

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

'Mulan: An Exploration of Culture and Representation in Hollywood' is a presentation and detailed analysis of various representational, cultural, and minority-related issues in the context of Hollywood and western media. The presentation will focalize specifically around the recent live-action remake of the 1998 film "Mulan". The remake, premiered in March 2020, received critical backlash from various audiences (mostly from the BIPOC community), bashing the film for its misrepresentation of Ancient China and Ancient Chinese culture. Through this misrepresentation, the Hollywood film ultimately reflects views of cultural appropriation, misogyny, and overall minority underrepresentation in the United States. The research presents the …

Bong Joon-Ho’S Transnational Challenge To Eurocentrism, Lisa - Marie Spaethen

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Through a narrative analysis of three of Bong Joon-ho’s films: The Host (2006), Snowpiercer (2013), and Okja (2017), this thesis explores the impact of global media flow of transnational cinema, foregrounding its potential to convey broader (but more effective) social and ecological political messages through its wider reach to audiences. Each film selected highlights a specific aspect of transnational cinema – postcolonial transnationalism (Shohat and Stam, 1994), transnational odor (Koichi Iwabuchi, 2002), and ecocinema transnationalism (Kääpä Pietari, 2013) - illustrating the fluidity of cinema in the 21st century and further, the unique position Netflix holds in our contemporary mediascape as …

Empty Time As Traumatic Duration: Towards A Cinematic Aevum, Kelli Fuery

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

Frank Kermode uses the term aevum to question the links between origin, order, and time, associating experience with spatial form. Without end or beginning, aevum identifies an intersubjective order of time where we participate in the “relation between the fictions by which we order our world and the increasing complexity of what we take to be the ‘real’ history of that world”; being “in-between” time is a primary quality of the aevum. Regarding cinema, aevum identifies this third duration as emotional experience, occuring as traumatic time. It facilitates thinking beyond lived temporal experience of everyday life to a philosophy …

Unreal Reality: Post-Socialist China's Massive Infrastructural Agenda In Jia Zhangke's "Three Gorges Films", Weiting Liu

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis focuses on Chinese Six-Generation film director Jia Zhangke’s “Three Gorges films” Still Life (2006) and Ash Is Purest White (2018) to demonstrate the impact of post-socialist China's massive infrastructural agenda on Chinese citizens’ lives and psyches in contemporary Chinese society. Starting with the analysis of Still Life, this thesis first examines Jia’s experimentation with the computerized UFO imagery incorporated into the film’s realist narratives and themes to deliver the sense of unreality people feel towards the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric power station and post-socialist China’s largest infrastructural project. Revisiting the subject …

Revitalizing Hollywood Stardom: Classical Star Power And Enduring Marketability At Warner Bros. In The Beginning Of New Hollywood, Tham Singpatanakul

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

New Hollywood was foundationally a debatable period in the course of American film history, with distinctive characteristics of new directorial emergence and innovative film style. However, the contemporary industrial context suggested a prominent power of stardom to effectively sustain the business in the new wave of new youth and counterculture. In the inception of the period, Warner Bros., one of the major film studios since the classical Hollywood era, exemplified a star-driven marketing approach using classical glamour and the narrative of nonconformity to attract the target audience. Proven by the studio’s archival evidence, major Hollywood stars in the 1960s made …

Smell As Self-Identity: Capitalist Ideology And Olfactory Imagination In Das Parfum’S Multimedia Storytelling, Xinrong Liu

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis explores smell as a cultural signifier in Perfume’s multimedia storytelling. By establishing the theoretical ground upon the historical importance of scent, the thesis focuses particularly on its close interrelationships with the politics of identity, an issue elaborated in Patrick Süskind’s novel Das Parfum–Die Geschichte Eines Mörders (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 1985) as well as its two screen adaptations--the film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (dir. Tom Tykwer, 2006) and the television series Parfum (Netflix, 2018). In virtue of textual analysis and cultural studies on Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s discussion …

Review Of Aesthetics, Ethics And Trauma In The Cinema Of Pedro Almodóvar, Kelli Fuery

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

A book review of Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla's Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar.

La Strada, Federico Pacchioni

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Released in 1954, La strada was the third solo directorial work of Federico Fellini and followed the critical and commercial success of I vitelloni (1953). Together with the films that preceded La dolce vita (1960), La strada represented a more traditional narrative and sober visual style that contrasted with Fellini's later experimental work. It is also an important film for understanding Fellini's reputation and evolution as an auteur director, especially in the light of the debate that it triggered among the Italian and French critics of the time regarding the true 'calling' of Italian neorealism. The idea for La strada …

"In The Sentimental Past": Cultural Identity Through Film Music Before And After The Hong Kong Handover, Kasady Liu

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Hong Kong: a city characterized by Jackie Chan, kung fu, and its surprising “in-betweenness.” Not quite Eastern and not quite Western, Hong Kong has been placed in a unique position due to its recent handover from Great Britain to China. As a result of this handover, the people of Hong Kong have displayed various attitudes towards their previous, foreign system of democratic government and their new, Communist system of government. Hong Kong’s cultural identity is closely tied with the handover, and in this paper, I analyze how the film music of Hong Kong movies have conveyed ideas about their cultural …

Here To Win, Not Here To Settle, Sarah Kaino

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Ethnic representation goes beyond color blind casting, the diversity of actors, or non-stereotypical casting choices. It is not just a matter of minorities being included in mainstream storylines, but minorities being able to tell their own stories as well. The relevance and relatability of storytelling in film and theatre transcends culture, which is in part the beauty of these mediums. But the impact of Asian Americans seeing stories from their own culture cannot be exchanged for anything less because there is no substitute for visibility. Movies are the source of inspiration for many. Movies can also reinforce a transparent ceiling …

The Media, Education, And The State: Arts-Based Research And A Marxist Analysis Of The Syrian Refugee Crisis, Meng Zhao

Education (PhD) Dissertations

By 2019, the Syrian civil war has lasted for nearly eight years and it has created the largest humanitarian crisis since WWII (Achlume, 2015). Using the siege of Aleppo in 2016 as a case study, the author applied a Marxist-humanist theoretical framework and incorporated arts-based research methodology to examine how US news media supports capitalist social relations. The research question for this study was: how do the US media depictions of the siege of Aleppo, Syria in 2016 reflect capitalist social relations? There were three sub-questions that followed: (1) Which elements of the siege of Aleppo in 2016 get the …

Representative Biodiversity: The Ecosystem Of Cartoon Network, Carl Suby

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

As a capitalist organism the television program, as explained by Todd Gitlin, uses its slant to sell itself to advertisers with similar leanings on contemporary social issues to maintain its flow of revenue. However, this concept of slant does not account for the broader network, which, like the singular program, cultivates a catalog of programming into a singular slanted message becoming an ecosystem of shows relying on each other to maintain viewership. The successful televised ecosystem will then be home to programs who enjoy long runs and display an easily recognized shared slant. As an example of the televised ecosystem, …

Bending Family Friendly Into Fear: Nostalgia, Minstrelsy And Horror In Bendy And The Ink Machine, Isabelle Williams

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

When one thinks of Disney’s Mickey Mouse, fear and horror are not terms normally associated with this iconic American cartoon character; however, the video game Bendy and the Ink Machine turns animated bodies (cartoons) into bodies the player fears. In this game family friendly cartoon characters are transformed into figures of fear. Furthermore, Bendy and the Ink Machine does this by making the bending of Black bodies visible through what I call the gameic gaze. The transformation from family friendly into fear happens through the resistive gaze, the gameic gaze, which lingers on the bending of the diegetic cartoons. Bendy …

Inflicted Viewing: Examining Moral Masochism, Empathy, And The Frustration Of Trauma Cinema, Kira Smith

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The contemporary turn of psychoanalytic film analysis has opened a new mode of understanding cinematic language. However, rejecting classical psychoanalysis would be premature. This thesis will place the two in conjunction, specifically through Sigmund Freud’s conceptualization of moral masochism and Wilfred Bion’s theory of thinking. Through four films: Una, The Tale, The Tribe, and Son of Saul I explore the affective nature of films that depict trauma and why one would gravitate towards such upsetting material. The spectator who seeks to be frustrated is not looking to harm oneself but to process this frustration in order to expand their …

A Cauldron Of Chaos And Cultivation: Rediscovering Disney Animation Of The 1980s, Thomas Price

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis examines the four transitional Disney animated features of the 1980s The Fox and the Hound (1981), The Black Cauldron (1985), The Great Mouse Detective (1986), and Oliver and Company (1988)— in order to reassess the significance of this period in Disney history. The Walt Disney Studio is internationally hailed for its animated features produced over the last eight decades, however, the animated films released in the 1980s have been ignored and neglected due to the negative evaluations of scholars and historians who favor Walt’s era and the 1990s renaissance period. A closer examination of the films reveals that …

Diversity And Democracy At War: Analyzing Race And Ethnicity In Squad Films From 1940-1960, Lara K. Jacobson

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

Both the Second World War and the Korean War presented Hollywood with the opportunity to produce combat films that roused patriotic spirit amongst the American people. The obvious choice was to continue making the popular squad films that portrayed a group of soldiers working together to overcome a common challenge posed by the war. However, in the wake of various racial and ethnic tensions consistently unfolding in the United States from 1940 to 1960, it became apparent to Hollywood that the nation needed pictures of unity more than ever, especially if America was going to win its wars. Using combat …

Ai Film Aesthetics: A Construction Of A New Media Identity For Ai Films, Priya Parikh

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Recognized as the fourth industrial revolution, Artificial Intelligence is poised to take the film industry by storm. While the current applications of it help streamline production practices, its escalating employment in the generation of film scripts and visuals complicates notions and functions of authorship and new media aesthetics. This thesis examines the unique junction of Cinema and Artificial Intelligence, where experimentation is not only celebrated, but also necessary in order to re-evaluate the conditions of new media. By analyzing the ways in which three films co-written by Oscar Sharp, Ross Goodwin and an AI negotiate with Foucault’s theory of the …

Stardom, Spectacle, Show, And Salability: United Artists And The Founding Of The Hollywood Blockbuster Model, Jessica Johnson

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

United Artists was an independent film distribution company that Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Mary Pickford jointly formed in 1919 to maintain creative autonomy over their work. Without the benefit of block booking practices through studio-owned theater houses, each founding artist established specific economic and aesthetic practices within their respective oeuvres in order to maintain company solvency. The resulting films produced during the company’s formative years (1919-1931) saw increased emphasis and innovation in regard to stardom, spectacle, show, and salability, features which ultimately innovated the model for the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. Attributing the formation of the blockbuster to …

Iranian Cinema In Transition: Relative Truth And Morality In Asghar Farhadi’S Films, Mazyar Mahdavifar

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

In addition to box office success, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s films have achieved national and international critical acclaims. However, it is not only this rare achievement of critical and commercial success that sets Farhadi apart from other Iranian filmmakers, but also, his new approach to the issues of truth and morality which have been age-long themes in the history of Iranian art, literature, and cinema. Compared to his predecessors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Jafar Panahi, Farhadi’s viewpoint on these themes is distinctly secular. This thesis focuses on the significance of the change Farhadi’s approach has brought on …

1st Place Contest Entry: Countering The Current: The Function Of Cinematic Waves In Communist Vs. Capitalist Societies, Maddie Gwinn

Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize

This is Maddie Gwinn's submission for the 2019 Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize, which won first place. It contains her essay on using library resources, a three-page sample of her research project on how the Czech New Wave and New Hollywood cinema are defined by their agency in preserving and prescribing cultural meaning across their societies while being bound to their economic systems, and her works cited list.

Maddie is a senior at Chapman University, majoring in Film Production. Her faculty mentor is Dr. Carmichael Peters.