Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Wrongful Conviction Documentaries: Influences Of Crime Media Exposure On Mock Juror Decision-Making, Patricia Y. Sanchez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psychology and law researchers have urged colleagues to collaborate with the makers of popular media, such as documentary filmmakers, in efforts to educate the general public about wrongful convictions (Kassin, 2017; Wells et al., 2000). Recently, programs depicting wrongful convictions, such as Making a Murderer (Demos & Ricciardi, 2015) and When They See Us (DuVernay, 2019) have garnered substantial viewership. Research on general and case-specific pretrial publicity (Daftary-Kapur et al., 2014; Kovera, 2002) and the effects of crime media (Baskin & Sommers, 2010; Schweitzer & Saks, 2007) demonstrate that although consuming crime-related media and being exposed to information about a …

Bawdy Tales, Emily R. Collins

Theses and Dissertations

Hansu Siirala is a Finnish-Canadian craftsperson currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Twelve years ago at the age of fifty-five, she suffered two strokes, which paralyzed her left side and required her relocation to a long-term residential care facility. Via writings to her family, Hansu shares hilarious, bitingly sharp observations about life in the assisted care facility in Vancouver. Her stories chip away at social stigmas, make us laugh at ourselves, and celebrate life in unexpected ways. “Bawdy Tales” is a project that utilizes her writing as the foundation of a series of pieces hosted via a website, providing …

Under The Skin, Silvana Silveira

Theses and Dissertations

Under the Skin is an animation depicting the struggles of Laila, a fictional ten-year-old Salvadoran girl child who risks her life crossing the desert to realize her dream of finding a better life in America.

Through Laila's experiences inside the American Immigration system, Under the Skin focuses on the vicissitudes and emotions that unaccompanied migrant children (UMC) arriving in the US across the US-Mexico border encounter.

By combining 2D animation and soundscapes with hand-made textures and paintings, this art film puts a human face to the ongoing immigration crisis. The organic, almost tactile universes created by these textures enhance the …

Television Journalism, Barbara Nevins Taylor

Open Educational Resources

This Television/Video Journalism syllabus provides students with a road map for learning video storytelling. It provides a guide for learning to research and report using video, how to interview, shoot, edit and produce a relevant news story of about two minutes or less. This short form of video journalism easily translates to other platforms and social media.

It also examines the history of TV and the cultural shifts that produced the evolving technology.

De La Novela Picaresca A El Chavo Del 8, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

Los albores de la modernidad[i] coincidieron con la emergencia de la novela picaresca en la que temas como la niñez, la educación, la pobreza agravada por el hambre extrema, y la idea de la movilidad social, aparecieron representados en obras muy populares como El Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), El Buscón (1626), El Periquillo Sarniento (1819) y La vida inútil de Pito Pérez (1938). La popularidad de la novela picaresca emanaba de su novedosos realismo social y urbano, sumados a la disponibilidad de copias hecha posible gracias a la imprenta de Gutenberg. El Chavo del 8 (1971-1980) ha tenido una …

Film/Tv Response & Critique, Janelle Poe

Open Educational Resources

This extra credit assignment was designed for a joint humanities course in English and Black Studies, combining first-year writing and an introductory survey of African American Literature. Throughout the semester, students are encouraged to complete extra credit assignments, such as this film/tv review, to earn additional points (up to 5%).

Combining rhetorical analysis with applied research, students have a list of films or television shows to choose from, as well as the ability to select their own related media, and write a response that includes a synopsis, analysis of plot, character development and themes, and personal response to the text …

Fuitina: Love, Sex, And Rape In Modern Italy, 1945–Present, Antonella Vitale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The term fuitina in Sicilian dialect is a word used to describe a form of abduction, and is a variation of the more formal Italian term fuga, meaning a flight or escape. Fuitina, was essentially a sanctioned bride theft. Often, after the abduction of a woman, the abductor would seek a reparatory or rehabilitating marriage that would restore the woman’s “honor” and absolve the man of bride theft. Until 1981, the Italian legal system supported the practice of fuitina and rarely prosecuted men who kidnapped and raped women under the guise of this tradition. The practice of fuitina and …

Promoting The Consumer Citizen: Seals, Spectacles, And The Gendered Consumer In Depression-Era America, Danielle B. Wetmore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will argue that New Deal legislation accounted for increased importance placed on consumers and the articulation of consumer citizenship as female during the Great Depression. Once New Deal programs and legislation determined and legitimized the consumer citizen, the consumer citizen exercised influence though purchasing power. Analyzing the ways the federal government defined women as consumer citizens through programs like the National Recovery Administration’s Blue Eagle Campaign offers important insight into who was considered to have a voice. Notions of citizenship define groups by who has the necessary attributes and qualifications—in this case the means to purchase goods—to be …

“I’M Real I Thought I Told Ya”: Developing Critical Media Literacy Through U.S. Latinx Digital Media Representations, Solange T. Castellar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how audiences engage with U.S. Latinx media representations through the practice of critical media literacy. I interrogate how media consumers construct critical media literacy through interacting with U.S. Latinx figures on digital media platforms, particularly on the social-media app, Twitter, and the user-generated video content platform, YouTube. Throughout this thesis, I argue that users on these platforms who engage with U.S. Latinx pop culture figures, like Jennifer Lopez and Belcalis Almanzar (Cardi B), read, digest, and comprehend a variety of multimedia images, texts, or videos, and that this engagement becomes an accessible form of critical media literacy, …

Black Skin, White Gaze: The Presence And Function Of The Linchpin Character In Biopics About Black American Protagonists, Nicole N. Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout its existence the American film industry has--through the stories it has chosen to tell as well as discriminatory practices such as whitewashing and the erasure of non-White people--enshrined whiteness as the default American racial identity. In multiracial films, Hollywood productions have historically employed racialized character tropes to further emphasize hegemonic American whiteness. This practice continues to the present day with the introduction of the linchpin, a White character who appears in films with majority non-White casts. Although billed and presented as a supporting character, the linchpin’s centrality to a film’s narrative or emotional arc elevates them to main character …

Inclinaciones Del Yo: Aproximaciones Desde El Afecto Y La Vulnerabilidad A La Literatura Y El Cine Autobiográficos De La España En Crisis (2008–2019), Salvador Gómez Barranco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the autobiographical literature and cinema produced in the context of a Spain in Crisis (between 2008 and 2019), using recent theories on affect (Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed ...) and vulnerability (Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero…). Through comprehensive close reading, it examines three novels (Clavícula by Marta Sanz, Ordesaby Manuel Vilas and El amor del revés by Luisgé Martín) and three films (Mapa by Elías León Siminiani, True Love by Ion de Sosa, both representative of the Other Spanish Cinema, and Dolor y gloria by Pedro Almodóvar) in order to identify the “inclinations of the …

Queer Displacements: Minorities, Mobilities, And Mobilizations In French And Francophone Literature, Thomas Muzart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Focusing on the work of Virginie Despentes, Jean Genet, Guy Hocquenghem, and Abdellah Taïa, this dissertation challenges the antisocial turn taken in queer theory, by means of a parallel study of the authors’ geographical and intellectual itineraries. While critics like Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman have suggested that the revolutionary potential in queer identity lies in its opposition to romanticized forms of community, I argue, along with José Esteban Muñoz, that their praising of singularity and negativity is similarly extreme. Alternatively, my study shows how the geographical displacements both experienced and imagined by my primary authors can illuminate the passage …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

Audio Quality As Content: Everyday Criticism Of The Lo-Fi Format, Elizabeth Newton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the matter of authenticity with respect to audio recordings. In the early 1990s, the term “lo-fi” (“low-fidelity”) emerged as a label used to categorize many different types of popular music, indicating widespread fascination with what I call audio quality, the perceived character of an audio recording. I define audio quality as the relationship between content and mediation, which varies greatly by circumstance. My archival research of zines, press releases, and correspondence examines this relationship in three case studies: Wu-Tang Clan, Bratmobile, and Elliott Smith. I posit the lo-fi format as a critical structure that emerged in …

Aesthetic Redemption: Psychedelia, Film, And Walter Benjamin’S Sensory Revolution, Alexander C. Redlins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This inquiry examines the ways in which the psychedelic nature of film, as posited by Walter Benjamin, has the potential to precipitate class consciousness and lead to humanity’s emancipation from anaesthetizing capitalist forces. We first explore Benjamin’s relationship to, and understanding of, Marxist thought with a particular focus on György Lukács’ theory of reification and Marx’s fetish character of the commodity which Benjamin ultimately believes lead to an erosion of the human sensorium and the destruction of human nature. As such, we explore Benjamin’s revolutionary aesthetic theory which seeks the reversal of these erosive capitalist forces and the redemption of …

Queer Baroque: Sarduy, Perlongher, Lemebel, Huber David Jaramillo Gil

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which queer and trans people have been understood through verbal and visual baroque forms of representation in the social and cultural imaginary of Latin America, despite the various structural forces that have attempted to make them invisible and exclude them from the national narrative. My dissertation analyzes the differences between Severo Sarduy’s Neobaroque, Néstor Perlongher’s Neobarroso, and Pedro Lemebel’s Neobarrocho, while exploring their individual limitations and potentialities for voicing the joys and pains of being queer and trans in an exclusionary society. As I analyze the literary works of each artist, …

Fact And Fiction In Mexican Film: 1970s, 2000s, Lily M. Ryan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to address generic preoccupations between fiction and documentary film, while also providing a historical analysis of two decades in Mexican cinema, the 1970s and the 2000s. It looks at nine Mexican fiction films that rely on the conventions of documentary in both form and content. Whether through a fictionalized historical recreation, a “mockumentary style,” or a clear interest in the reality of everyday life, each one of these films plays with the boundaries of documentary and fiction. While the influence of documentary is quite evident in some, in others, this influence remains subtle. In my examination of …

I Think Of Your Mother, Natalie Elizabeth Conn

Theses and Dissertations

I Think of Your Mother is a short observational film that documents Valentine’s Day weekend at a 131-year old, family-owned-and-operated flower shop in East Elmhurst, Queens. The once thriving business of providing flowers for funerals at the nearby St. Michael’s Cemetery has diminished, but seven days a week the 92-year old owner, Gladys, still answers the phone and takes orders while her family tries to accommodate her way of doing things. As they struggle to keep the store relevant, the film captures a family business that has persevered, if not necessarily triumphed, over the profound changes taking place in the …

All Good, Father, Chieh-Chun Lee

Theses and Dissertations

All Good, Father is a 50-minute documentary film about how my love-bound, intimate relationship with my father is entangled with his social values surrounding my sexual identity and his expectations for me in his old age.

The Life Of Dan, Jeremy S. Levine

Theses and Dissertations

The Life of Dan is a hybrid film about the complications of brotherly love and working through the horrors of the past. The film explores past traumas between brothers Dan and Jeremy through their shared love of horror films. As they work through unsettled moments from their childhoods, building towards Dan’s temporary hospitalization, the documentary transforms into a horror film about mental illness and traumatic memory.

Dear Elsa: 10 Letters + 10 Experiments, Amanda Madden

Theses and Dissertations

Dear Elsa: 10 Letters + 10 Experiments is a short form personal experimental documentary in which filmmaker Amanda Madden attempts to embody and communicate with the ghost of the radical poet, model, performance artist, sculptor, and time traveler, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) about living and creating as a womxn artist.

Time Machine Research And Approach, Tarek Bouraque

Theses and Dissertations

Time Machine is a hybrid documentary that explores the logics of enslavement, colonialism, eurocentrism and their interconnectedness in our globalized world. Mustapha Azemmouri, born in 1502, undertakes a journey to the 21st century to recount his own story of enslavement and exploration, and reflects on a collective puzzle of 500 years of hidden history.

The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

Legend Has It: Tracking The Research Trope In Supernatural Horror Film Franchises, Deirdre M. Flood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study will analyze how information about monsters is conveyed in three horror franchises: Poltergeist (1982-2015), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984-2010), and The Ring (2002- 2018). My analysis centers on the changing role of libraries and research, and how this affects the ways that monsters are portrayed differently across the time periods represented in these films. These franchises, which span a number of decades, and encompass sixteen films in total, offer a good wealth of information to study because they are all films centered around monsters that haunt. These monsters, while aesthetically in opposition to each other, are all …

The Cinematic Treatment Of Tableaux Vivants In D.W. Griffith’S Broken Blossoms, Sheikh Deen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

D.W. Griffith's (January 22, 1875–July 23, 1948), one of the iconic American film directors of early silent cinema, felt his film Broken Blossoms (1919) to be his one art film and is considered to be an exemplary film in Tableaux Vivants[1] usage. When this Tableau skillfully employed, the effect can be dramatic, for it bridges the gap between theatre, sculpture, literature, and poetry. To better understand how Tableau works in Broken Blossoms, this study intends to analyze several scenes by showing how Griffith employs innovative film techniques within scenes through bodily gestures, motifs, and poetic stanzas to skillfully …

Binaural: Trauma And Disability Representation In Cinema, Joshua Grossberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the year 2019, the film business is undergoing profound change. Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have become major distribution outlets, threatening the hegemony of traditional Hollywood studios and altering the kinds of movies that receive a theatrical release. Gone is the middle budget film, replaced by franchises like Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Fast and the Furious and Star Wars based on already popular intellectual property. But that's not all. In the wake of the fallout of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy and the #MeToo Movement, for the first time serious efforts are being made both outside and inside the industry …

Lo Visible, Lo Invisible Y Lo Imaginable: Neoliberalismo Y Ciudad En Las Producciones Culturales De Posguerra En Centroamérica, Maria A. Leon Umana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project researches the radical change that the peace treaty of the 1990s brought to Central American societies in connection with economic models. Specifically, it examines the way in which the implementation of neoliberal policies has transformed the cities concerning the spatial and the social; consequently, resulting in an important urban shift in regard to postwar cultural productions. I build a theoretical model organizes the investigation in three representative examples of Central American urban imaginaries (The Visible, The Invisible, and the Imaginable) so as to enlighten and/or enrich the analysis of the region’s urban social realities—examined in detail in a …

Cinegrafia: Literatura, Espectadores Y Cinefilia Contemporanea En Latinoamerica, Rojo Robles Mejias

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The arrival of cinema in Latin America quickly produced an intermedial cultural landscape. To this day, experimental authors in the Hemisphere and the Caribbean write cinegraphic fiction as a way to deal with film’s socio-cultural repercussions. My work addresses the question of how cinema transforms and subverts the creation of fictional narratives in the last five decades. By considering a corpus of post-1968 literary works in Latin America, I argue that contemporary cinegraphic fiction, a concept I coined, shed light on filmic discourses, platforms, and artifacts and transpose film language into literary texts. Intending to rethink polycentric film production and …

“Something Happened On The Day He Died”: How David Bowie Fans Transformed Brixton, Valerie Gritsch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Following the death of David Bowie on January 10, 2016, his hometown of Brixton, South London, has become a pilgrimage and tourist destination for fans. On the 11^th of January, the world discovered Bowie had succumbed to cancer and fans descended on Brixton to celebrate the life and legacy of their hometown hero, culminating in a spontaneous all-night street party attended by thousands. A mural of Bowie as his iconic character Aladdin Sane, originally painted in 2013, became the hub of memorialization in the wake of his passing and a crucial, enduring site for mourning fans seeking to connect …