Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Illusionary Strength: An Analysis Of Female Empowerment In Science Fiction And Horror Films In Fatal Attraction, Aliens, And The Stepford Wives, Jennifer Lynn Ruben

Master of Humanities Capstone Projects

An expanded notion of empowerment along with three specific theories – Beauvoir’s concept of the Other, Speciesism, Cyborg Feminism – is used to analyze the female protagonists and antagonists in the following 1970’s and 1980’s science fiction and horror films: Fatal Attraction, Aliens, and The Stepford Wives. The female protagonists are allowed more access to power as human beings pitted against nonhuman antagonists, but these characters are ultimately not empowering for women because they reinforce rather than undermine the patriarchal structure. Implications for further research encourage a critique of female empowerment based on both gender and species.

The Happiest Place On Earth - The Microbudget Model As A Means To An American National Cinema, John Goshorn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Happiest Place on Earth is a feature-length film written, directed, and produced by John Goshorn as part of the requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in Film & Digital Media from the University of Central Florida. The project aims to challenge existing conventions of the American fiction film on multiple levels – aesthetic, narrative, technical, and industrial – while dealing with a distinctly American subject and target audience. These challenges were both facilitated and necessitated by the limited resources available to the production team and the academic context of the production. This thesis is a record of …

A Blue Flower: The Development Of A Personal Documentary, Nils Taranger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A Blue Flower is a feature-length documentary film by Nils Taranger, made as part of the requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema from the University of Central Florida. The film focuses on the director’s journey to find healing, both physically and emotionally. Following the guidelines of UCF’s program, Nils produced the film on a microbudget (under $50,000) level. The majority of filming took place in Florida with only a one or two person crew. This thesis is a record of the film’s progression from development to picture lock, in preparation for distribution

Language, Reality And Fiction In The Island Inside (Lenguaje, Realidad Y Ficción En La Isla Interior), Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

La isla interior, la sexta película dirigida por el duo Dunia Ayaso y Félix Sabroso, directores y guionistas canarios, se estrenó en el 2009 y se alzó con el premio Julio Vernes del Festival de Nantes, con el premio al Mejor Actor (para Alberto San Juan, Martín) en el Festival de Valladolid y con reconocimiento en el Festival Internacional de Las Palmas. La película se centra en una familia desequilibrada española y en la reacción de todos sus miembros al suicidio del patriarca. La muerte repentina del padre obliga a todos, a su mujer francesa, a sus dos hijas y …

Live From New York, It's The Fake News! Saturday Night Live And The (Non)Politics Of Parody, Amber Day, Ethan Thompson

English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles

Though Saturday Night Live's “Weekend Update” has become one of the most iconic of fake news programs, it is remarkably unfocused on either satiric critique or parody of particular news conventions. Instead, the segment has been shaped by a series of hosts who made a name for themselves by developing distinctive comic personalities. In contrast to more politically invested contemporary programs, the genre of fake news on Saturday Night Live has been largely emptied to serve the needs of the larger show, maintaining its status as just topical, hip, and unthreatening enough to attract celebrities and politicians, as well …

Rebekah & Aliya, Mark Hirsch

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Rebekah & Aliya is a multimedia ballet for two dancers, ten musicians, and film based on a story of love, timelessness, and transcendence. Drawing inspiration from literary themes of Jorge Luis Borges as well as composers of the Renaissance and Avant-garde alike, this collaboration with choreographer Madeline Bunke is a four-scene work, alternating between film and live dance, with live music throughout.

Mediums Change, Fears Stay The Same, Lucy Wilhelms

Honors Theses

Although generally dismissed by scholars as being overly sentimental or superstitious, the gothic genre has survived for over four centuries and maintained significant cultural appeal, outlasting the sentimental novel and the travelogue as popular literature. What, then, makes this genre different? What is so special about the gothic?

In my thesis, I examine the evolving cultural appeal of the gothic genre that keeps it attractive and relevant for readers by tracing the gothic text, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, through its initial inception and its subsequent adaptations. As a novel, The Woman in Black both repeats and revises …

Framing Jane: Film Adaptation And Jane Eyre, 1934-2006, Joy Wohlman Boyce

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

História E Documentário No Cinema De Andrei Tarkóvski, Cassio De Oliveira

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the article, the author discuses the Cinematic history and documentary of Andrei Tarkóvski.

From Playground To Fetish: The Identity Of (The) Mary Jane, Georgina Ruff

Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2012 Digital Publications

Cartoon characters Buster Brown and his sister Mary Jane both wore Mary Jane shoes in 1905. The style was practical for active children – easy to don and securely fastened to busy feet. Yet by the turn of the 21^st century, Mary Jane styles have been adopted by the high fashion industry and fetish culture in forms that are considerably less practical for certain forms of activity. This research traces the transition of the Mary Jane through the twentieth century, from the feet of children to the pages of Vogue and ultimately the couch of Freud. Along the way, …

Boys And Brokeback: American Attitudes Towards Gays, Todd Bruns

Faculty & Staff Research & Creative Activity

Movies, like television, literature and music, reflect a society’s standards, values, trends, and anxieties. The wave of alien invasion movies of the 1950s (Attack of the Flying Saucers, The Atomic Submarine, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and more) revealed the American psychological paranoia of the Cold War, just as numerous movies of the late 1970s/1980s that dwelt on Vietnam (Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, etc.) demonstrated a collective attempt to come to psychological grips with the loss of that war. As standards shift movies can become embarrassing reminders of past social norms that make contemporary viewers justifiably uneasy: …

Boys And Brokeback: American Attitudes Towards Gays, Todd Bruns

Faculty & Staff Research & Creative Activity

Movies, like television, literature and music, reflect a society’s standards, values, trends, and anxieties. The wave of alien invasion movies of the 1950s (Attack of the Flying Saucers, The Atomic Submarine, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and more) revealed the American psychological paranoia of the Cold War, just as numerous movies of the late 1970s/1980s that dwelt on Vietnam (Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, etc.) demonstrated a collective attempt to come to psychological grips with the loss of that war. As standards shift movies can become embarrassing reminders of past social norms that make contemporary viewers justifiably uneasy: …

The Creation Of The Sympathetic Villain In Fritz Lang's M, Laura Hardt (Class Of 2014)

Writing Across the Curriculum

No abstract provided.

Study Guide For United In Anger: A History Of Act Up, Matt Brim

Open Educational Resources

The United in Anger Study Guide facilitates classroom and activist engagement with Jim Hubbard’s 2012 documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The Study Guide contains discussion sections, projects and exercises, and resources for further research about the activism of the New York chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The Study Guide is a free, interactive, multimedia resource for understanding the legacy of ACT UP, the film’s role in preserving that legacy, and its meaning for viewers' lives.

The Sabatoge Of Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" : Hitchcock Reads Conrad, Robert Benton Preslar

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This paper traces the ways in which Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent and Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 film Sabotage each comment on their respective mediums. Taking the object which is left behind in the wake of Stevie's death as its starting point, the triangular piece of cloth, this thesis examines the ways in which the figure of the delta alerts the reader to a commentary on language and text that echoes throughout the novel. As that triangular piece of cloth becomes a film tin bearing the title "Bartholomew the Strangler," this paper then traces the resonances that film and the …

"Only A Girl Like This Can Know What's Happened To You" : Traumatic Subjects In Contemporary American Narratives, Allison Virginia Craig

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project is primarily concerned with the difficulty of representing traumatic experience and the problem of seeing violence and exploitation as natural and inevitable functions of social life. It argues that texts attempting to expose exploitive hierarchies and structural injustices often risk having their stories subsumed and commodified by the profuseness and proliferation of countervailing messages about individual choice and personal freedom. This struggle is highlighted through historicizing five contemporary American narratives--Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm, the films Boys Don't Cry and Monster, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms--with and against critical concerns and popular texts. Furthermore, by employing …

Sacrificio, Violencia Y Nación En Lituma En Los Andes De Mario Vargas Llosa, Cesar Valverde

Scholarship

No abstract provided.

How One Writes, Makes, Markets A Movie And How An Audience Reads The Movie: Two Biographical Films Of Hitler As A Case Study, Nick Chi-Shu J. Yeh

CGU Theses & Dissertations

According to John Lukacs, German people's views on Hitler and Nazism once got examined right after the fall the Third Reich in the 1950s but this subject has lost its appeal since then. How do Germans nowadays, specifically those young ones raised in the "New Germany" after the fall of the Berlin Wall, think of Hitler and their country's Nazi legacy? This dissertation is to explore how six young Germans growing up in the new "unified Germany" interpret two films' representations of Hitler and Nazism.

Accelerated Culture: Exploring Time And Space In Cinema, Television And New Media In The Digital Age, Thomas J. Connelly

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to understand the impact of speed on the interrelation and the overlapping of the production and consumption of cinematic and televisual texts. It explores the immediacy of digital media and new economic processes, and how they are informing structures of perception, as well as lending themselves to new and different ways of seeing the moving image in the digital age. These visual expressions are evident in the changing perception of the long take; the increasing use of video gaming aesthetics and database narratives; new and variant forms of narrative and visual styles in television; and the speed …

A Narrative In One Scene, Aliyah C. Anglin

Theses and Dissertations

Filmmakers are visual storytellers, thus it is important to understand basic film theory as well as the elements of a narrative, such as voice, look, and feel. It is just as important for filmmakers to understand how film theory and the elements of a narrative work together to effectively convey stories to the people viewing the film. In this thesis, I researched basic film theory and analyzed three personally influential movies and directors including Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible (2012), and Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954). I chose one technique from each of the …

"We Should Have Brought The Tank": Hypermediated Interactivity In Red Vs. Blue, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Machinima, the practice of adapting recorded video game play into short films, highlights an often unacknowledged but significant shift in the consumption of video games and represents a key and underexplored intersection between the two leading theoretical camps. Considering the landmark series Red vs. Blue through the lens of Bolter and Grusin's propositions about "new" media's relationships with other forms offers an entry point for theorizing not only machinima but also the intersections between the ludology and narratology positions in games studies.

Editor's Introduction: Playing For Keeps: Games And Cultural Resistance [Special Issue], Marc A. Ouellette, Jason Thompson

English Faculty Publications

This edition is as much about Game Studies as it about the games being studied. At its heart there are really two impulses behind the collection of critical thought we have been fortunate enough to gather for this issue of Reconstruction. First, there is the sense that games can’t do anything. Second, there is the sense that games don’t do anything. Their origin (and the underlying biases) makes these sentiments particularly intriguing. In the simplest terms, these premises delineate competing camps, as well. Roger Ebert notoriously asserts that video games will never be art (Ebert). Similarly, and yet quite differently, …

The Sword And The Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960, Aaron Gerow, Rea Amit, Ryan Cook, Samuel Good, Samuel Malissa, Stephen Poland, Grace Ting, Takuya Tsunoda, David Dresser, Fumiaki Itakura

Film Series Commentaries

“The Sword And The Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960” was a groundbreaking collaboration between the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, marking the first time Japan’s national film archive had co-sponsored an event with a foreign university. The film series presented rare Japanese samurai films from the collection of the National Film Center, highlighting the abundant variety of Japan's most famous film genre. There are social critiques, melodramas, comedies, ghost films and even musicals, directed by some of the masters of Japanese cinema who, …

Teaching Queer Cinema With Independent Media, Patricia White

Film & Media Studies Faculty Works

In lieu of an abstract, this is the article's introductory paragraph:

One of the most exciting dimensions of teaching film (and popular culture) is learning what students already know and then generating an informed and critical epistemology from the familiar. Teaching LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) representation in film and media presents rich opportunities to build on student familiarity — with such mainstream breakthroughs as Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2006) and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003-07) — and to formalize the knowledge and challenge the assumptions that students have about LGBT history, lives, and struggles for representation. …

Design And Production Aspects Of An Electroluminescent Segment Display, Veronica Kopp, Chris Nixon

Graphic Communication

The purpose of this study was to get a better understanding of the different ways printed circuits could be constructed and then implemented into creative, visual designs for printed electroluminescent displays. A variety of circuit design variables, such as area and length, were tested that will help create solutions for printed electronics.

This study tested different variables of circuit design, such as length of silver traces and the size of the image area, to help optimize ways to build a printed circuit. Then, findings were implemented into a segmented graphic display in order to analyze innovative ways to utilize multiple …

Lloyd Alexander: A Film By Jared Crossley, Jared Crossley

Student Works

A 9:04 film about Lloyd Alexander "American Author, Pioneer, and the High King of Fantasy."

Rhetorics Of Empire: The Falangist Discourse Of War (1939-1943), M. Elena Aldea Agudo

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) a mix of right-wing ideologies existed among the Francoist forces. In sharp contrast with the Republican forces, the Francoist insurgents were successful in banding together despite their ideological differences. However, in the postwar era, this relative unity gave way to a struggle among the different ideological positions, each striving to impose its agenda for the new State. The party Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (FET y de las JONS) assumed power, but was not entirely successful in advancing its totalitarian project, which it had inherited from the prewar …

Historical Realism And Imperialist Nostalgia In Terrence Malick’S The New World, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

The promotional materials for Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005) devote considerable time to detailing the extraordinary effort of the production crew to recreate Werowocomoco, the capital of the Powhatan’s paramount chiefdom, and Fort James, the first surviving English settlement in Virginia, in the period from 1607 to 1617. The hour-long documentary on “The Making of The New World” accompanying the DVD release of the film, for example, chronicles the shared work of a research team of historians, archeologists, linguists, anthropologists, and members of Virginia tribes to represent as faithfully as possible Powhatan and English agriculture, architecture, language, and …

“All Girls Are Barbies”: A Feminist Critique Of Nicki Minaj’S Barbie Persona, Camellia Sarmadi

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

Opera And The Modern Culture Of Film: The Genesis Of Cinemopera, Its Intertextuality And Expansion Of Operatic Source Material, Yuell "Chuck" E. Chandler Iv

Theses and Dissertations--Music

The boundaries of opera, as in all art forms, are constantly being re-evaluated. This analysis examines one of the most recent developments in opera-the use of film as source material, and connections to the film world- through analyzing three operas: Austrian composer, Olga Neuwirth’s opera, Lost Highway, Chinese-American composer, Tan Dun’s opera, The First Emperor, and acclaimed American film composer, Rachel Portman’s opera, The Little Prince. Each of these works exemplifies the modern relationship of opera and film in different ways. To classify these newly film-influenced works, the term cinemopera is used in describing operas connected to …