Film and Media Studies Commons^™

"Pa'l Norte," "Sueño Americano" E "Ice El Hielo": Un Análisis Del Video Musical En El Desmontaje De La Retórica Anti-Inmigrante En Los Estados Unidos, Aida M. Villarreal-Licona

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis is an analytical case study of three music videos, "Pa'l Norte" by Calle 13, "Sueño Americano" by Los Rakas, and "Ice El Hielo" by La Santa Cecilia. It explores the visual and lyric narratives of these works and their role in critiquing anti-immigration rhetoric towards Latino immigrants in the United States in a post-9/11 context. Through critical analysis, this thesis argues that their work is vital in dismantling the dehumanizing and criminalizing language prevalent in legal and popular discourse, as well as challenging the manifestations of everyday "illegality."

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.

Prancing Shadow Connecting Worlds, Tiffany D. Randle

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

The practice of being conscious about the environment and how shadows, light, and movement create an intellectual space for different interpretations allows the viewer to make their own associations. Concrete, the ground that people of different shades walk on, to one person can look and seem like an ethereal and unknown environment, but to another may seem like a moving body of liquid. When artists stop and look at the simple things such a concrete, and water, or passersby they can capture a moment in time that transcends the mundane and suddenly the artist is in a position to present …

Crafting A Compelling Action Hero Movie: A Psychological Inquiry Into The Identification Of Key Elements In Successful Storytelling Through Film, Adrian Sai Hay Lam

CMC Senior Theses

Since the time humans have developed speech, storytelling has been a crucial part of society. Its values lie in the ability to communicate potential dangers about the world to generating laughter and tears as a form of entertainment. A central theme in stories that continues to reoccur over the course of history is the story of the hero. Carl Jung theorizes that the hero is an archetype in the collective unconscious, which explains humans’ innate inclinations towards heroes. Throughout history, the forms of storytelling have evolved due to technological and intellectual advancements. In modern times, film has risen as the …

The World According To Frank Underwood: Politics And Power In "House Of Cards", Lindsey E. Davidson

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis, argues that House of Cards portrays an embellished reality of our government through a Machiavellian lens, particularly looking at the politics of scandal through the 25^th Amendment and impeachment, as well as the role of political spouses. It also address the underlying question of appointing someone as controversial as Frank Underwood to the vice presidential position knowing his manipulative nature, and will analyze his schemes from a realistic perspective.

John Berger, Paris Hilton, And The Rich Kids Of Instagram: The Social And Economic Inequality Of Image Sharing And Production Of Power Through Self-Promotion, Meghan M. Gallagher

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis updates John Berger's work of critical visual theory, Ways of Seeing, to accommodate emerging web 2.0 technologies and new social media platforms. It analyzes the symbols of wealth and status encoded in both 15th century oil paintings and contemporary Instagram posts and attempts to dissect how American celebrity culture complicates methods of self-promotion and upscale emulation.

Explicit Content: A Discussion Of The Mpaa Film Rating System And The Nc-17 Rating, Caroline H. Miller

Scripps Senior Theses

The United States film industry is controlled by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its six signatories--the major productions studios (Sony, Warner Brothers, Universal, Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, Time Warner), and through this joint-partnership they have monopolized prime production, distribution, exhibition and classification of the U.S film market.

The objective of this project is to shed light on biases present in the MPAA rating system's treatment of sex and violence under the X/NC-17 rating in order to demonstrate the lack of viability of the system in today's world.

My Way Or The Highway And A Correspondence: Visual Representations Of The City, Larkin J. Sheldon

Scripps Senior Theses

This Capstone Project encompasses two videos, each representing different ways to visually structure the experience of “the city”.

The first video, "My Way or the Highway", is a 5 minute piece examining Los Angeles Transportation systems. Through observational footage and a poetic editing style, I compare and contrast the experience of traveling via public and private transportation. Through this video I aim to encourage the viewer to consider their own transportation options whether it is in Los Angeles or anywhere else around the world.

The second is a 12 minute video, titled "A Correspondence" structured as a …

Being "Like A Girl" In The Twenty-First Century: Branding And Identity Through Cultural Conversation, Jane A. Condon

Scripps Senior Theses

Branding exists at the intersection of culture and economics and is an increasingly important tool in distinguishing commodities. Over the past few years, more and more companies have started to use discourses of female empowerment, celebrating femininity, womanhood, and all things “girly” to sell their products - spiking sales, racking up millions of online views, and starting important conversations in the process. Procter & Gamble's “Like A Girl” campaign for Always creates a productive tension and way of thinking about both brand and buyer. The “Like A Girl” campaign is unique because it presents a feminist message to and about …

Beneath Still Waters: An Exploration Of Transmedia Narratives And Twitter Fiction, Anjali Gupta

Scripps Senior Theses

Beneath Still Waters is an original transmedia mystery narrative that explores the possibilities of an interconnected media landscape as a unique platform for creative use and audience engagement. Transmedia storytelling refers to the building of a fictional world comprised of multiple parts across different platforms, where each component makes a valuable contribution to the whole. This project uses the tools and strategies of social media to tell a complex and interactive multi-platform story.

Hamlet #Princeofdenmark: Exploring Gender And Technology Through A Contemporary Feminist Re-Interpretation Of Hamlet, Allegra B. Breedlove

Scripps Senior Theses

Exploring the process of designing, producing, directing and starring in a multimedia feminist re-interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet set in a contemporary social media landscape.

Queer Content In Science Fiction Allegory And Analogue: Is It In Disguise?, Anna C. Marburger

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis performs a textual analysis of two for-profit science fiction texts in which the authors implanted queer content: Bryan Singer's X-Men films and James Robert's Transformers comic series, "More Than Meets the Eye". The argument incorporates queer (referring to attraction and gender variance) media representation and western identity politics lenses into its critique.

By interrogating reality through the masquerade of an impossible universe, science fiction affects how subversive a text can be. When authors designate the natural and the unnatural in a strange universe, they designate what and who belongs in our society. Whatever they imagine has an effect …

The Genre Formerly Known As Punk: A Queer Person Of Color's Perspective On The Scene, Shane M. Zackery

Scripps Senior Theses

This video is a visual representation of the frustrations that I suffered from when I, a queer, gender non-conforming, person of color, went to “pasty normals” (a term defined by Jose Esteban Munoz to describe normative, non-exotic individuals) to get a definition of what Punk meant and where I fit into it. In this video, I personify the Punk music movement. Through my actions, I depart from the grainy, low-quality, amateur aesthetics of the Punk film and music genres and create a new world where the Queer Person of Color defines Punk. In the piece, Punk definitively says, “Don’t try …

It’S Better To Have Loved And Lost: Exploring The Creation Of Emotional Connections Between Inanimate Film Characters And The Spectator In “The Window Display”, Kamyn Asher

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis project examines the way that cinematography can create an emotional connection between the film’s characters and the audience. The main component of the project is a film I wrote, directed, and shot, about a stool that falls in love with a pair of pants, titled “The Window Display.” While it is clear that the typical film relies on the emotional impact of the fictional story, this film attempts to create the same effect but with inanimate objects. Thus, “The Window Display” illustrates the ways in which different visual language, especially images from the silent film era, work together …

Musical Missteps: The Severity Of The Sophomore Slump In The Music Industry, Shane M. Zackery

Scripps Senior Theses

This study looks at alternative models of follow-up album success in order to determine if there is a relationship between the decrease in Metascore ratings (assigned by Metacritic.com) between the first and second album for a musician or band and the 1) music genre or 2) the number of years between the first and second album release. The results support the dominant thought, which suggests that neither belonging to a certain genre of music nor waiting more or less time to drop the second album makes an artist more susceptible to the Sophomore Slump. This finding is important because it …

Images For A Nation: The Role Of Conservation Photography In American Environmentalism, Nathaniel W. Yale

Pomona Senior Theses

Photographs have long been integral in revealing American values, ideals, and identity. Accordingly, a study of environmental, or "conservation," imagery offers insight into America’s relationship with the natural world. In an examination of key figures and their conservation photography work, this thesis explores how the national conservation dialogue has been shaped by powerful images that, in some cases, even led to crucial acts of federal conservation. The first section highlights four photographers and their context and influence in this dialogue: W.H. Jackson’s photographs from Hayden’s 1871 survey of Yellowstone, Carleton Watkins’ work at Yosemite and Mariposa Grove in the 1860s, …

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 …

Disidentified Masculinities, Jacqueline Hope Freedman

Scripps Senior Theses

My capstone project is a multimedia audio and photography project that creates a conversation about the Millennial Generation’s views of individual identity and masculinity, with the hopes of deconstructing the socially constructed and exclusive notions of masculinity by defining a generation’s common sense.

My piece is inspired by the portraiture of Chad States in Masculinities (2011) as well as Loren Cameron’s work in Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (1996). The theoretical basis of my project relies heavily on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of common sense as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification. Common sense refers to an instinctual, uncritical and largely …

Troika Of Fortune Tellers, Sophia D. Kalin

Scripps Senior Theses

This film is an oral history about the intergenerational relationship between three women: my grandmother, my mother, and I. Through our connection I explore the Russian traditions that my grandmother has cultivated and shared among the three of us, in particular, the tradition of fortune telling. I also explore my grandmother's struggle with dementia. Although her memory is fading, she can still remember the practice of reading fortunes and that tradition has preserved our bond and her legacy.

Beauty And The Body: Gendered Representations Of The Digitally Altered Image, Lauren Prince

Scripps Senior Theses

This work aims to explore how normalized gender representations in images are heightened through the use of digital manipulation technologies and how that influences a spectator’s relationship both to the image and to their own body. After constructing a theoretical understanding of the ways in which images influence and create a normative beauty ideology, a critical case study analysis of the ways celebrities are photographed and digitally altered provides for a grounding of theoretical material.

Analysis Of Character Translations In Film Adaptations Of Popular Literature, Emmanuel Camarillo

CMC Senior Theses

A brief look at the history of film adaptation studies and its terminology. Character differences between a piece of literature and it's film version are compared in three separate case studies. The film adaptations of a graphic novel, a classic novel, and a play are analyzed on the basis of the changes made to specific characters within their respective stories and the effects of those changes on the overall outcome of the film.

The Rainbow Effect: Exploring The Implications Of Queer Representation In Film And Television On Social Change, Maya S. Reddy

CMC Senior Theses

In this thesis, I explore how specific films and television shows use the preexisting structure and mechanics of narrative film in order to create queer characters and stories that defy their otherness and stereotypes, thus creating a profound cinematic experience. Not only does the manipulation of these structures and mechanics heighten the realism and depth of the narrative at hand, it also enhances audience identification by allowing queer viewers to find themselves and straight viewers to understand the “other.” In this manner, the New New Queer Cinema and television have had lasting effects on the modern gay rights movement, changing …

Magical Me: Self-Insertion Fanfiction As Literary Critique, Melody Strmel

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the traditions of textual interaction that impact the forms of reading engaged in with fanfiction. This thesis continues by exploring how self-insertion fanfiction functions as a medium through which authors express their reading of the text primary through the emotional impact of the text through wish fulfillment, and the interaction of their cultural moment and the text. Furthermore, it argues that self-insertion fanfiction is a mode of literary critique in which the author acknowledges the effect of a mediated world on their perception of self and reality. Through this recognition of a constructed self, the author rejects …

Women At Work: Working Girl, Disclosure And The Evolution Of Professional Female Stereotypes, Hayley A. Strickland

Scripps Senior Theses

In this analysis, I examine how stereotypes of working women function in some of the most popular film and television shows made in past thirty years. A study of films such as Working Girl and Disclosure and television shows such Ally McBeal and Sex and the City within a second-wave and postfeminist framework ultimately reveals that Hollywood stereotypes of working women have evolved very little and simply become more creatively disguised.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Times, Brendan Gillett

Pomona Senior Theses

Bryan Lee O'Malley's "Scott Pilgrim" series is, arguably, one of the most important American literary works of the early twenty-first century. Evaluating this work w/r/t multimediality and simultaneous multiliteracy, emotions and affective states, friends and their informal economies, and the role of active fandoms in current artistic production, this thesis seeks to explain why "Scott Pilgrim" has found such deep resonance with a generation of kids growing up at the time of publication.

Disidentified Masculinities, Jacqueline Hope Freedman

Scripps Senior Theses

My capstone is a conversation of the Millennial Generation’s views of individual identity and masculinity, with the hopes of deconstructing the socially constructed and exclusive notions of masculinity by defining a generation’s “common sense.”

My piece is inspired by the portraiture of Chad States in Masculinities (2011) as well as Loren Cameron’s work in Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (1996). The theoretical basis of my project relies heavily on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “common sense” as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification. Common sense refers to an instinctual, “uncritical and largely unconscious way of perceiving and understanding.” It “is a collective …

Bidi Bidi Bom Bom: The Audiotopias Of Selena Across The Americas, Janet Muniz

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

Using Josh Kun’s Audiotopia as a framework, this paper will explore the role of Selena’s music as audiotopias, the concept that music functions like a possible utopia for immigrant communities on both sides of the United States and Mexico border in imagining an ideal borderless America. Music serves as a disruption to the oppressive reality of immigrant communities and makes the struggles of marginalized communities audible for those who have been traditionally silenced. This paper will fill in gaps in existing literature of Selena's remembrance by applying Kun’s audiotopia theory for an understanding of the places her music takes …

The Bollywood Item Number: From Mujra To Modern Day Ramifications, Avantika Saraogi

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis deals with the “item number” genre of Bollywood song and dance sequences. I argue that the item song has evolved from a combination of the historically rich culture of prostitution in old India and the western influence of modern times; and that it contributes highly to the male dominated patriarchal society perpetuated by Hindi films by means of the voyeuristic male gaze and objectification of the female body. In conjunction with this research I choreographed a dance called Item No. 3 that was performed in Scripps Dances 2013. A discussion of the significance and decisions behind the …

The Beautiful Corpse: Violence Against Women In Fashion Photography, Susan C. Bryant

Scripps Senior Theses

My senior thesis deals with contemporary depictions of sexualized violence against women in fashion photography. Images of bloodied, bruised, and dead-looking models have proliferated in fashion magazine editorials and advertisements since the 1970s and I want to explore why sexualized violence is seen as sexy and compelling advertising, in light of the fact that domestic violence is the greatest cause of injury to women in America. I produced my own fashion photographs in locations of actual female homicides in Los Angeles County, particularly those nearest to Claremont, with the use of The Los Angeles Times online homicide database, which pinpoints …

Danger In Deviance: Colonial Imagery And The Power Of Indigenous Female Sexuality In New Spain, Mariel Frechette

Scripps Senior Theses

The primary objective of this work is to understand the importance of the indigenous, female body in early New Spain through the study of visual media from the first two centuries of colonization: specifically looking at illustrations from Book 10 (of 15) in the Florentine Codex and images of indigenous Christian wedding ceremonies such as the painted folding screen Indian Wedding and a Flying Pole (c.1690). I argue through visual, theoretical and historical analysis that regulating indigenous female sexuality was a critical component to in the creation of colonial New Spain and that imagery played an essential role in this …