Film and Media Studies Commons^™

"Die Mauer Im Kopf": Aesthetic Resistance Against West-German Take-Over, Arwen Puteri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Even 24 years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, modern day Germans are still preoccupied with the contentious dynamics of the post-Wall unification process. Concern with geo-political fractiousness is deeply rooted in German history and the reason for Germany's desire to become a unified nation. The Fall of the Wall, and the subsequent rejection of socialism, was a chance to recover and unify what was perceived to be an "incomplete" nation. Yet, despite these actions, social unity between East and West Germans has never occurred and the Wall still persists as a metaphorical barrier in the minds of German …

P-22 Te Amo Mujer, Ivan Ruiz

Honors Scholars & Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium Programs

Te Amo Mujer is a documentary film project exploring the story of Don Gustavo Jiménez, an old man who lives in a small village in the south of Mexico, and the grandfather of the filmmaker. The film seeks to use the narrative of Don Gustavo to explore the question of why we live where we live. The thesis of the film, or more accurately the suggestion, as the film is a very personal work, is that we live where we do, and how we do, out of love for the people that are closest to us.

The Proto-Pixel Art Of Malevich And Kandinsky: Black Square, Its Digital Descendant And Neo- Vitalist Impulse, Irina Lyubchenko

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

In the beginning of the 20th century Kazimir Malevich, an important Russian avant-garde artist and thinker, created his iconic painting Black Square, which represented what he believed to be the basic unit of visual reality. Around the same time Wassily Kandinsky, another important Russian artist renown for his experiments in purely abstract art, discovered his own unit of representation – the point. This paper examines how the visual and philosophical aspects of contemporary digital reality, reflected in the aesthetic of the pixel, could have sprung from the early 20th century experiments in assembling the visible world from its basic units, …

Rave Culture- A Tale Of Two Scenes, Christopher Mohr

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

This article compares two iterations of rave culture through the perspective on scenes as outlined by Geoff Stahl in his essay "'It's Like Canada Reduced': Setting the Scene in Montreal." By applying both communication and sociopolitical theory to the comparison of the original rave scene to that of today's, a vivid understanding of how scenes and subcultures construct themselves- both within and around the cultural environments from which they are born- will become apparent.

Researching The Avant-Garde: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Bohn And Sell, Blaž Zabel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Subjectivity In 'Attār's Shaykh Of San'Ān Story In The Conference Of The Birds, Claudia Yaghoobi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Subjectivity in 'Attār’s Shaykh of San'ān Story in The Conference of the Birds" Claudia Yaghoobi discusses intersections of transgression, law, inclusion and exclusion, self and Other in Farīd al-Dīn 'Attār's (1142?-ca.1220) treatment of religion with regard to Shaykh San'ān and the Christian girl's love story in The Conference of the Birds. San'ān is an ascetic master who has never transgressed any of the Islamic laws until he embarks on a journey from Mecca to Rome after a dream only to fall in love with a Christian girl, convert to Christianity, and begin drinking wine and …

Art And Politics In Latin America: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Van Delden And Grenier, Sánchez, And Cohn, Nicole L. Sparling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Intertextuality In Beckett's And Ağaoğlu's Work, Elmas Şahín

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intertextuality in Beckett's and Ağaoğlu's Work" Elmas Şahín discusses Adalet Ağaoğlu's 1973 novel Ölmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die) and Samuel Beckett's 1950 Malone Dies in terms of intertextuality. Şahín employs tenets of comparative literature in order to analyze the two texts with regard to form and content and focuses on the on protagonists' worlds. In Şahín's interpretation, Ağaoğlu's protagonist Aysel is narrated in postmodern intertextuality as an individual of our days alienated from society, searching for her self/selves as she cannot succeed in dying. Both Beckett's and Ağaoğlu's protagonists attempt to "escape" from their selves and …

History And Identity In Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing In Romanian, Nicoleta D. Ifrim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "History and Identity in Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing in Romanian" Nicoleta D. Ifrim analyzes Virgil Tănase's confessional and ego-graphic writing in his 2011 Leapșa pe murite (Playing Fetch with Death). Tănase's text is about the individual caught in history and re-writes it post-traumatically from a double perspective: that of the collective memory of totalitarianism and the personal thus functioning as a filtering mechanism for the creation of meta-historical identity. For Tănase, the experience of exile and post-exile, as well as the confrontation with the West legitimizes identity dilemmas and the construction of the individual. The book is representative …

Electronic Journals, Prestige, And The Economics Of Academic Journal Publishing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Joshua Jia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Electronic Journals, Prestige, and the Economics of Academic Journal Publishing" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Joshua Jia discuss the current state of the academic journal publishing industry. The current state of the industry is an oligopoly based on a double appropriation model where academics produce work for at no cost only to have publishers earn significant profit margins by selling the work back to academics. Publishers are able to do this given the price inelasticity and weak bargaining power of its main consumer, university libraries. Publishers' ability to increase prices is also supported by what the authors …

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 …

"Punk-Ass Book Jockeys": Library Anxiety In The Television Programs Community And Parks And Recreation, Eamon Tewell

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Library anxiety, defined as the fear of using libraries, is a psychological barrier that impedes academic achievement and the development of information literacy. Using key episodes and protagonists from Community and Parks and Recreation, this paper will demonstrate how library anxiety is represented in these series. From the infamously manipulative public librarian Tammy Swanson in Parks and Recreation to the library as pillow fight battlefield in Community, these indications of anxiety towards libraries will be evaluated with the intent of illuminating current discourse in popular television regarding library use.

The Theology Of Battlestar Galactica: American Christianity In The 2004-2009 Television Series, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.

Faculty Pub Night

No abstract provided.

Silent Film Online, Julie Decesare Cicilline

Library Faculty and Staff papers

Alexander Street Press (ASP) has become a leader in providing libraries and institutions access to streaming video and multimedia content. Since 2006, their offerings of online and streaming video databases have grown quickly. Recently, they released Silent Film Online (SFO), a collection of silent films, clips, trailers, and documentaries about filmmaking during the silent film era. ASP pricing is average for this content, and flexible, based on type of institution, budget, and FTE. Annual subscription or one time purchase of perpetual rights are options. Like other ASP online video databases, functionality is high. ASP is currently in beta with a …

What’S Queer About Remy, Ratatouille, And French Cuisine?, Laure Murat

Cinema & Media Studies

This chapter appears from the book, What’s Queer about Europe: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms, Edited by Mireille Rosello, and Sudeep Dasgupta.

"What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine?" focuses on Ratatouille (2007), the story of Remy, a rat who becomes a chef. This spectacular animated movie could be read as a coming-out story, where the rat embodies the symbolic lonely gay, refined as an object of disgust, excluded and successful. Ratatouille is also a story about race, species and nationality in contemporary France. In this context, Queer studies is an appropriate tool to address a series of …

Savage Messiah: Ken Russell's Forgotten Masterpiece, John A. Duvall

Collected Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents an analysis of Savage Messiah, Ken Russell’s filmic biography of WWI-era artist and sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, evaluating its various aesthetic codes of meaning, and demonstrating how these codes contribute to a unified narrative structure. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenological elements of the cinematic narrative – image composition, art direction, color, motion, editing and sound – in order to reveal the sensuous core of the film as its method of thematic expression. We offer observations on the narrative’s deep structure in terms of symbolic references, on Russell’s visual techniques of characterization, and on how these elements …

Narratives Of Violence: The White Imagination And The Making Of Black Masculinity In “City Of God”, Jaime Alves

Publications and Research

The article explores the representation of young-black men in the 2002 film City of God. The film deploys “pathological scripts” of Black masculinity in Brazil as criminal and deviant. The controlling image of Black men’s bodies as a source of danger and impurity sustains Brazilian regime of racial domination, and the narratives of violence make explicit the ways in which the Brazilian nation is imagined though a racial underpinning. Blackness is consumed as an exotic commodity, yet is also understood as a threat to national harmony. The nation is, then, written and re-imagined as a racial paradise, but mostly by …

Rover, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Rover (or Beyond Human: The Venusian Future and the Return of the Next Level) (2013), directed by Tony Blahd.

Pink & Baby Blue, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Pink & Baby Blue (2013), directed by Catrin Hedström.

Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism On Screen By Kathleen Rowe Karlyn; African American Actresses: The Struggle For Visibility, 1900-1960 By Charlene Regester; Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World On Film By Corinn Columpar: A Review By Mantra Roy, Mantra Roy

Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Pratfalls, Seduction And The Farce Of Marriage: How The Screwball Comedy Redefined American Preconceptions Of Traditional Feminine Morality, Fletcher Parrott Thornton Iv

History

No abstract provided.

Working Women: Contemporary Cinematic Costumes In "Desk Set" And "Working Girl", Karen Hummel Kinsley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The contemporary cinematic costume designer is a visual storyteller. Through the dressing, or undressing of the actor's body, the costume designer narrates the cinematic character's physical and psychological journey from the first frame to the final credits. The costume designer creates the character's image by selecting specific garments and accessories that will inform the audience about the character's relationship with his cinematic environment.

The focus of this thesis is to examine how the contemporary cinematic costume designer unifies contemporary clothing with the actor's body to narrate a cinematic character's story. In order to understand how the costume designer creates a …

"The Last Of The Great Bohemians": Film Poetry, Myth, And Sexuality In Greenwich Village And The Atlantic, 1930-1975, Thomas Winfield Hafer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Greenwich Village, a final generation of bohemians contested the rise and trajectory of gay liberation. During the 1930s, this generation blended modernist poetry and sexuality to develop a new manifestation of bohemia. In the postwar period, they transformed modern poetry into the new artistic medium of film that was critical to shaping postwar American art and culture. This wave of bohemia was built on certain modernist principles, including a universalist understanding of sexuality and identity that was different from, and incompatible with, the growth of identity politics in the 1960s. This dissertation argues that this was a last gasp …

Exploring Time And Space In Frame By Frame Animation, Daniel L. Ketchum

Cinesthesia

No abstract provided.

Postmodern Funhouse: The Sly Underpinnings Of Hitchcock’S Psycho, Jacob T. Bart

Cinesthesia

Although his filmography is studded with gems, no other Hitchcock film has lodged itself in the popular consciousness as firmly as Psycho. It provides chills as a ripped-from-the-headlines slasher flick, but the macabre surfaces conceal its deeper, mordant cultural resonances. In Psycho, many of Hitchcock’s major tactics fall under the umbrella of postmodernism. These methods include, but are not limited to, Hitch’s specific focus on developing a playful mood, his exploration of levels of audience participation within the confines of a film, and his preoccupation with surfaces. Although made within the confines of the last vestiges of the classic Hollywood …

The Realism Of Space In Black Swan, Raquel Bordin

Cinesthesia

The camera pans from the shattered pieces of a mirror to blood pouring from under the bathroom door. The sight of blood comes as no surprise to the audience, who has just witnessed Nina murder Lily in that very dressing room. It is later revealed that there is no blood and that the murder never occurred. Yet, the audience believes these scenes from Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010) to be real because director Darren Aronofsky effectively evokes the story's illusions out of reality itself. An analytical study of Andre Bazin's realist theory demonstrates how Aronofsky is able to consciously manipulate mise-en-scene, …

The Cinematic Power Of Night And Fog, James M. Christie

Cinesthesia

A contemplative camera glides fluidly through a vacant field, one that appears like any other. As it glides, somber images of barbed wire, dilapidated barracks, and rusted railroad tracks beckon the audience to witness the ruins of the Aushwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. “Going slowly along the tracks, seeking what?” asks narrator Michel Bouquet. These questions are more rhetorical than anything, allowing the audience to question their own moral and social obligations to the unfathomable. For the sake of humanity, it is crucial to remember the events of the Holocaust and deny them from happening again. Released only ten years after the …

Animando Al Dibujo: Del Guión A La Pantalla, José García Moreno

Faculty Pub Night

No abstract provided.

Foreword To 'Memoir' By Journalist And Writer Tomás Bairéad, Ian Kilroy

Books/Book Chapters

Foreword to A Memoir of Ireland’s Nascent Years, by Irish language journalist and writer Tomás Bairéad (translated and edited by Mícheál Ó hAodha). Forthcoming from The Edwin Mellen Press, New York. Tomás Bairéad (1893-1973) is well known for a number of collections of short stories in Irish. He invented a version of short-hand for the Irish language. From Moycullen, Co Galway, he was involved in the Irish War of Independence and covered the Irish Civil War as a journalist. He edited the Irish language page in the Irish Independent for a number of years.

The Great Mirror Of Fandom: Reflections Of (And On) Otaku And Fujoshi In Anime And Manga, Clarissa Graffeo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this thesis is to examine representations of otaku and fujoshi (i.e., dedicated fans of pop culture) in Japanese anime and manga from 1991 until the present. I analyze how these fictional images of fans participate in larger mass media and academic discourses about otaku and fujoshi, and how even self-produced reflections of fan identity are defined by the combination of larger normative discourses and market demands. Although many scholars have addressed fan practices and identities through surveys and participant observation, many of these studies work with Western groups of fans whose identities may not be consistent with …