Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Vhs Archives, Committed Media Praxis, And ‘Queer Cinema', Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Committed media praxis is a doing as much as it is a knowing. Queerness is a manner of being as much as it is a politics, theory, or set of modish objects. This chapter about topics that are also processes—queer, media praxis, cinema—performs these across two acts: “Part 1: A Hesitant or Maybe Just Slightly Defiant Preamble,” is a creative unfolding, in the body of the text and as much so in its footnotes, of the author’s “queer feminist media praxis”: “Part 2: VHS Archives” is a demonstration of VHS Archives, a multi-sited, many-yeared project in experimental pedagogy, web-based archival …

"Writing Unspeakable Things: Speechlessness, Abjection, And The Ethics/Aesthetics Of (Not) Representing Sexual Violence In Three Korean American "Comfort Women' Novels", M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

This article analyzes “comfort women” novels by the Korean American authors Therese Park, Nora Okja Keller, and Chang-rae Lee in terms of the ethics and aesthetics of representing sexual violence through language. I specifically look at these authors’ stylistic strategies to describe rape in writing and how they (more or less successfully) avoid voyeuristic portrayals of the “comfort women” by controlling the narrative point of view and relying on traumatic “speechlessness” and abjection. Building on relevant notions from the fields of photography, cinematography, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, this analysis suggests that in-progress representations of rape in language become a futile project …

Analog Video In The Age Of Digital Data: A Case Study Of Shigeko Kubota's "Social Practice", Helena Shaskevich, Lia Robinson

Publications and Research

If Nam June Paik truly is the “father of video art,” as so many scholars claim, then Shigeko Kubota is in many ways its mother, performing the unacknowledged and undervalued labor of managing the “house” of video and taking care of its inhabitants. My digital art history project for Panorama, which performs a data-driven deep dive into Kubota’s networks, argues that Kubota’s legacy must be understood as a lived, “social practice” of care for video art and its communities.

Desde El Fuego Que En Mí Arde: Performance, Literatura Y Cine Afro-Latinoamericano Producidos Por Mujeres Afrodescendientes En Perú, Cuba Y Brasil (1960–2000), Elena Ekatherina Chavez Goycochea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines different films, literary, and performance art pieces created by contemporary afro-descendant women from Peru, Cuba, and Brazil after the sixties with emphasis on the most relevant works of Conceição Evaristo, Sara Gómez, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Lucía Charún-Illescas. I focus my research on the crucial role these artists played in the cultural identity formation of Latin America when inserting ‘race’ as a category of socio-political analysis and cultural production. How did their films, performances, and texts challenge national narratives and imaginaries after 1960? Although in the sixties, women improved their civil rights in different countries, the ‘mujer …

Some Notes On Birds: Language And Attention In The Age Of Social Media, Aimee Lamoureux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology, social media, and its affiliated distractions are now an ever-present part of our daily lives. Attention is a commodity, one which tech companies value because it delivers them bigger and bigger profits. Their products are intentionally designed to be additive, to demand more and more of our time and attention throughout our day. However, attention is not simply a commodity, but the way in which we connect with the external world and attend to our everyday experience. The world that we create in the mind is the world that ends up forming the reality of our everyday lives. Complex …

Towards A Decolonial Feminist Aesthetics: Gender, Race, And Empire In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’S Dictee, Juwon Jun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Defining revolutionary struggle as a struggle between fictions, Trinh T. Minh-ha asserts that art in revolution is a spiritual presence which widens the conception of freedom. Political struggle is constituted by clashes in differently written and conceived realities—hinged on the creation and realization of multiple liberatory fictions. Liberation then requires us to attend to creating new myths and conceptions of freedom which can free us from the current structures of domination that produce current subjects and realities. If culture is indeed an “essential element in the history of a people,” mapping decoloniality in cultural and aesthetic fields may be essential …

Disrupting Paradise: A Pan-Caribbean Film Series, Dessane L. Cassell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As one of the regions most economically dependent on tourism in the world, the Caribbean is a place where the impacts of colonial myth-making remain viscerally felt. Long framed as a tropical “paradise,” the Caribbean has been marked by campaigns to package and promote the region as idyllic, picturesque, and available for (primarily Western) consumption. Building upon the writings of Krista Thompson, Ian Gregory Strachan, and Angelique V. Nixon, Disrupting Paradise connects the myth of “paradise” and the modern tourism industry to the long, extractive history of colonialism in the region. Taking shape as a film series, this project examines …

Put Yourself First (In A Sexy Way): Postfeminist Beauty Messaging And Resistant Media Texts, Margarita Artoglou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The makeover montage trope is one of the most recognizable in media content aimed at young women, sending the message that social status and acceptance are only a new outfit and face of makeup away. While this trope and its message have been heavily critiqued by scholars, the message that beauty—and all its social benefits—can be achieved through consumerism has not disappeared, though the means by which this message is conveyed has changed. As a result of companies co-opting feminist rhetoric, conforming to standards of beauty has been recast as a “choice” one makes for herself, often wrapped in the …

When Saeed Betrays Fuad: Laughing At The Mechanized Occupation, Ezgi Demirors

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis comparatively explores the emergence of the comic in the novel The Secret Life of Saeed The Pessoptimist by Emile Habibi and the film The Time That Remains directed by Elia Suleiman, by building on Bergson’s theory of mechanization. By tracing Bergson’s idea that comic effect is created through the creeping up of the mechanical on the living, the establishment of the “mechanical occupation” as a source of the comic will be elucidated. The comic will be explored in terms of the ways in which both texts offer a new historicizing operation, being works that focus on the narration …

Listen Like This: Audiovisual Argument In Rockumentary, Lindsey Eckenroth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rockumentaries are commodities that construct authoritative interpretations of popular music history, shaping how we come to know, value, hear, consume, and identify with popular music and those who create it. The arguments rockumentaries make, and the ways they make them, are the subject of this dissertation. Rather than position rockumentary as a genre, I investigate it as a set of representational tendencies to be examined in relation to stardom, authenticity, fandom, the culture industry, and the music(ians) these films represent. My introduction argues that rockumentaries operate according to what I call the offstage pattern, a dialectical structure in which …

Interview, Elizabeth Naiden

Theses and Dissertations

An exploration of work by Liz Naiden in the form of a conversation discussing light and dark, attention and proprioception, and design and architectural theories of space in installation works. Addresses the role of voice, speech, and reading and speaking aloud, performing for oneself, and performing for others.

Introduction To Video Technology, Ent 1190, Course Outline, Steven Olswang

Open Educational Resources

An introduction to the basic components and practices of preproduction and production methodologies for content creation in commercial video and film production. Through lectures, reading assignments, screenings and practice, students will learn the basics of all stages of production and working together, creating effective production aesthetics in pre-production, production and post-production, script-writing and story-boarding, cinematography aesthetics (lighting and camera), and design and graphics functions in editing.

Lightning Design, Ent 4450, Course Outline, Miguel A. Valderrama

Open Educational Resources

This course supports the aesthetics of lighting as a visual art, students analyze theater, concert, and film/video scripts for lighting requirements and develop a workable design concept. Students then generate complete lighting paperwork common to the job of an assistant lighting designer. Requires use of CAD (Vectorworks) software to develop renders. Students should be able to develop sophisticated responses to a set’s architectural problems and a common stage for live performances.

Mother Monsters And Monster Mothers From Dracula To Stranger Things, Melissa Dinsman

Publications and Research

Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things is an homage to 1970s and 1980s sci-fi and horror, including Alien and Aliens, Carrie, the Star Wars trilogy, and Poltergeist, as well as buddy adventure films like Goonies and Stand by Me. But it is also, in its obsessive presentation of monsters as mothers and mothers as monsters, a show that takes its 1980s mothering cues straight out of Bram Stoker’s 1890s. Despite its 2016 production date, the Duffer Brother’s Stranger Things presents viewers with very old fashioned ideas of mothering, with Joyce Byers (Wynona Ryder) as the single, but exceedingly pro-active mom from …

Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia, Alaina Claire Feldman, Clayton Press, Solange Farkas, Gabriel Bogossian

Publications and Research

Bilingual catalogue for the exhibition "Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia" presented at Baruch College's Mishkin Gallery.

New Representations Of Difference: Mexican Filmmakers In New York City., Luis B. Quesada Nieto

CUNY Mexican Studies Institute

This essay comments on recent cinematographic productions that explore the complex links between Mexico and New York as part of the ʻMexico on the Hudsonʼ Online Film and Conversational Series, organized by the Mexican Studies Institute at City University of New York and the New York based non-profit media arts organization Cinema Tropical. The reflection takes the films I’m leaving now (Lindsey Cordero and Armando Croda 2019), On the Seventh Day (Jim Mackay 2018), and La Ciudad (David Riker 1998) as a sample that exemplifies a cultural and political phenomenon in which the mediated representation of contemporary minorities has been …

Gay For English: Postcolonial In(Queer)Ies Into Contemporary Hindi Cinema, Hardik R. Yadav

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I study four recent Hindi-language Indian films for what I see as their queering of the English language, and, in turn, putting the Indian entity at a distance from both language and sexual orientation. The nation-making project of the Hindu political right in India today seeks an identity in distance from the English language: closer to the age-old conception of India as Hindustan (place of the Hindus). In Part I, I explore how such a resistance to English allows for the “Indian” within male protagonists of Rajat Kapoor’s Ankhon Dekhi (2013) and Aanand L. Rai’s Raanjhanaa (2013) …

Sartorial Semiotics: Constructs Of Gender And Female Sexuality In Post Wwii American And European Cinema, Patricia Cabral

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cinematic costume design functions as a system of visually-perceived, material and indexical signifiers, an effective and compelling language further informed by styling and embodiment. Sartorial semiotics support and inflect role characterization, while equally underpinning or subverting tropes generated by ideological paradigms. The following methodological approaches were adopted in scrutinizing this topic: Roland Barthes’ application of semiotic theories to the domain of fashion in The Language of Fashion, and Laura Marks’ discussion of the dialectics of optical and haptic visualities in apprehending film images in The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses.

By examining the costume …

Writing Not Writing: Transdisciplinary Poetics, Institutional Critique, Miriam L. Atkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of transdisciplinary creative practice as a means of institutional critique. The artists I have chosen as my primary focus—Robert Kocik, Eleni Stecopoulos, Zora Neale Hurston, Jimmie Durham, Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian—employ multiple mediums and fields of discourse to address the presumptions and exclusions that are structurally integral to the institutions that house them. They enact “architextural” interventions through their use of forms that move between the page and three dimensional space, incorporating architecture, sculpture, drawing, painting, film, performance, poetry and prose. My work aims at a renewed understanding of critique as such, and therefore—though …

Europ: Expanded Cinema, Projection And The Film Co-Op In Western Europe, 1966–1979, Drew E. Bucilla

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation reconstructs “Europ”—an informal network of artists interconnected through the film cooperative movement who propagated expanded cinema throughout Western Europe in a series of artist-organized screenings, festivals and exhibitions in the late 1960s and 1970s. While Europ was never actually realized as a project, I deploy the name as a retrospective device for bringing together experimental filmmakers from Austria, Germany and the U.K. Expanded cinema was an experimental art form that stretched the definition of film by incorporating diverse media, including multiple screens and projectors, live performance, and installation. It thus resisted the confines of traditional cinemas, as it …

Our House, Alina Mogollon-Volk

Theses and Dissertations

Our House is a documentary short film about the role personal archives play in our lives and how they are used to remember lost loved ones. Kevin Volk lost his father, Ernest, when he was just three years old. For years, his questions about Ernest were greeted with platitudes such as, “He would give the shirt off his back,” but very little substance. The film explores how family artifacts have given a window into the man who died of a heart attack at 46 years old and how it helped his son deal with the grief. The things we collect …

Starless Nights, Deepak Rauniyar

Theses and Dissertations

A film about the filmmaking process and the life of a filmmaker. But it's also a story about immigration, home, and negotiation. We constantly negotiate in our lives to maintain our relationships, opportunities, and dreams.

Be The Hammer, Jonathan M. Novick

Theses and Dissertations

John Young is an accomplished athlete, he has run marathons, long distance triathlons and other impressive feats all at the height of 4 feet 3 inches tall. Jon Novick, a fellow little person athlete, journeys into Young’s story sidestepping played out themes of inspiration and plunging into something deeper.

Fractured Selves, Gearoid Dolan

Theses and Dissertations

Fractured Selves is a self-portrait that examines the histories and points of conflation and diversion of my four public personas. In the style of a Zoom meeting, they chat with a host against animated backgrounds. Interactivity creates non-linear consuming of the content and user directed navigation through four timelines

Signal To Noise: Harmonic Temperaments And Patterns Of Interference, Dylan A. Marcheschi

Theses and Dissertations

An audio/visual exploration of historical tuning systems. Most contemporary Western audiences will seldom if ever encounter harmony outside of post-Renaissance tuning conventions. This presentation highlights some of those pre-orthodox harmonic relationships which existed throughout most of history. The corresponding paper documents correlates in recent advances of acoustic ecology.

Appropriation Of The Highest Order: A Study Of Harry Smith’S Master Work, Film No. 18 Mahagonny In Relation To The Brecht-Weill Opera The Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny And Duchamp’S The Large Glass, Rose V. Marcus

Theses and Dissertations

Harry Smith’s Film No. 18, Mahagonny, 1970 – 1980, is a transmutation of the original Brecht-Weill opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a 1930, into a feature-length experimental film. This paper shows how the original opera and Duchamp's The Large Glass prove inherent to Smith’s double-pronged homage to both original works of art. The failure in the opera narrative and the chance shattering of The Large Glass inform Smith’s complex methodology to approach and spatialize cinema. Harry Smith’s use of the tools of the screening apparatus are traced in order to study Mahagonny in detail. The …

Errantry, Simon A. Benjamin

Theses and Dissertations

Errantry, Simon Benjamin's current body of work, named after Édouard Glissant’s theory, is comprised of a series of multi-channel video installations and related works. Errantry is centered on the polyphonic rhythms of coastal space, the Caribbean sea, and the life sustained by it in a non-linear narrative that raises questions about time, labor, environmental degradation and the ongoingness of colonialism.

Structures Of Time: Expressions Of Subjectivity And Social Politics In Works By Silvia Gruner, 1986–2014, Silvia Sampaio De Alencar

Theses and Dissertations

The works of Silvia Gruner (born 1959) illustrate the use of time registers as strategies to express contemporary subjectivity’s experiences with globalized environments between 1986-2014. Through this approach, the artist connects her production to the social politics of Mexico to critique the effects of globalization on Mexican society and culture.

Guía Básica De Análisis Del Documental "Rigoberta Menchú: Daughter Of The Maya" (Dawn Gifford Engle, 2016), Álvaro Baquero-Pecino

Open Educational Resources

Guía básica de análisis del documental Rigoberta Menchú: Daughter of the Maya (Dawn Gifford Engle, 2016). La guía está destinada, principalmente, a estudiantes de español. Se compone de una breve serie de preguntas para antes, durante y después del visionado. El objetivo es ayudar a la comprensión del documental por parte de los estudiantes y fomentar la discusión en clase.

Com 101 (21471) Media Literacy, Rachel Kovacs

Open Educational Resources

This course emphasizes the critical need for media literacy and an informed understanding of media industries. It is essential to select credible information when we are inundated with messages on a daily basis. It is also crucial to identify when stories and issues of importance are not reported or inadequately reported in the media and when it is up to us, as consumers of media, to create those stories and issues and bring them into the public domain.