Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Framing The Future: Imagining The City Through The Lens Of Film, Sofia Zavala Ferreira

Architecture Senior Theses

With a great interest in the relationship between film and architecture, this project establishes its subject matter on the possibilities presented in science fiction cinema and speculative design. By extracting attributes from these that would influence design and architectural concerns, a bridge between the disconnected imagined and real, current and future, can be created through the creation of a speculative scenario and a narrative.

It seeks to utilize cinematic design and storytelling conventions to successfully convey the desired atmosphere, architectural realities, and life conditions of a fictional city. By utilizing advanced digital techniques often used in cinema itself, including but …

Sight And Song Augmented, Robert P. Fletcher

Sight and Song Augmented: Painting and Poetry in Mixed Reality

This file is an Android application built in the Unity 3D game engine with the Vuforia Augmented Reality extension. It remediates Sight and Song (1892) by Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), a collection of ekphrastic poetry about paintings by the Old Masters.

From The Margins To The Frame: Social Identities And A “Pan-Pacific” Moana, Keara Sternberg

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper investigates the implications of Pacific representation and regional identity in Disney’s film, Moana. It evaluates if the film successfully represented a broad range of Pacific cultures and peoples. It weaves together 20 secondary sources, 8 interviews and 56 surveys. The sample population involved college-aged students from universities throughout the Pacific along with academic professionals and involved members of the Oceanic Story Trust. Overall, the study found that Moana successfully captured a pan-Pacific identity on several indicators, while it also found dissenting reactions toward the film by some respondents on measures of cultural representation. To Pacific students, Moana appears …

“What About Hal?”: Imagining A Queer Physicality In Stanley Kubrick’S 2001: A Space Odyssey, Camille E.B. Boechler

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

"We Control It On Our End, And Now It's Up To You" -- Exploitation, Empowerment, And Ethical Portrayals Of The Pornography Industry, Julie E. Davin

Student Publications

Documentaries about pornography are beginning to constitute an entirely new subgenre of film. Big Hollywood names like James Franco and Rashida Jones are jumping on the bandwagon, using their influence and resources to invest in a type of audiovisual knowledge production far less mainstream than that in which they usually participate. The films that have resulted from this new movement are undoubtedly persuasive, no matter which side of the debate over pornography these directors have respectively chosen to represent. Moreover, regardless of the side(s) that audience members may have taken in the so-called “feminist porn debates,” one cannot ignore the …

Performer And Writer Biographies, University Of Dayton

Season 1: The Crossroads

Names and descriptions of the performers and writers involved with this podcast series.

Bodies That Matter: Black Girlhood In "The Fits", Patricia White

Film & Media Studies Faculty Works

In fall 2011, in one of the most widely publicized recent incidents of MPI (mass psychogenic illness), fifteen students—all but one of them girls—in the town of Le Roy in upstate New York started displaying tics, twitches, involuntary vocalizations, and other uncontrollable symptoms. It began, not incidentally, with the cheerleaders, but soon spread, capturing wide media attention. Erin Brockovich was called in to investigate environmental toxicity. Soon others, including adult women, were affected. Many remained symptomatic for months. The girls’ appearances on daytime talk shows and their own use of social media were thought to have spread the “mental infection” …

“She Brought It On Herself”: A Discourse Analysis Of Sexual Assault In Teen Comedy Film, Claire Halffield 17

Honor Scholar Theses

This thesis examines messages that teen comedy films send to audiences surrounding the topic of sexual assault. Sexual assault is arguably one of the largest issues on college campuses today, and while colleges, non-profits, and government offices have sponsored numerous sexual assault prevention efforts, across the United States, sexual assaults still occur. While watching comedy film, viewers often excuse mixed messages about sexual assault because comedy films are made for entertainment purposes, however, teenagers normalize messages in film. In fact, many viewers do not notice the negative messages about sexual assault in film because a film’s humorous aspects may overshadow …

Anime And War, Carol Sun

Honors Papers and Posters

This poster examines the growth and development of anime in Japan in post-World War II Japan, particularly its ability to make audiences question the trajectory of humanity and society and to "critique the society that relies on technology...as a means to prevent or discourage war and conflict".

Analysis Of The Female Presence In The Male-Dominated Comic Book Industry, Nicole Choy

Honors Papers and Posters

This poster examines the female presence in the male-dominated world of comics, both in terms of representation of female characters and creation by female artists and writers.

All Hail Helix: The Internet’S Role In The Creation Of Culture And Narrative, Margaret Furtner 17

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

Recording Angels: Examining Female Narrators In Vampire Fiction And Film, Jacqueline T. Bashaw

College Honors Program

Authors of vampire fiction often grapple with the shifting gender norms of the late nineteenth century. They explore these shifting tensions through the creation of complex narrative structures, some of which incorporate female narrators. By making these women narrators, these authors carefully consider female perspectives and the authority women can wield, both as narrators in their respective texts, and as women in late nineteenth-century British society who were confined to rigid gender roles. The narrative tension that arises between the narrator and the text then allows these authors to use literature to explore and theorize about broader societal tensions.

This …

Taiwanese Cinema, James N. Udden

Cinema & Media Studies Faculty Publications

Like the island itself, the cinema of Taiwan has always been in a perpetual state of liminality. Taiwan was a Japanese colony for fifty years (1895–1945) and during that time no cinema that could be labeled as distinctively “Taiwanese” emerged. After World War II, Taiwanese cinema was still caught between a political rock and an economic hard place. Despite allowing some low-budget films to be made in the Taiwanese dialect, the Kuomintang (KMT, aka “Nationalist”) government made sure its cinema did not violate its core ideological tenets of a “Greater China.” This came largely at the expense of anything specifically …

Hollywood, The Media, And The Alteration Of Image In The 1940s, Sean M. Conrad

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

I am currently writing a feature-length screenplay entitled Klara based on true events and people surrounding the rise of Nazi Germany and the exile of Jewish-German intellectuals to America during 1933-1945. The narrative is grounded in the work of the European Film Fund (1938-1948), the Paul Kohner Talent Agency, and the various agents of propaganda at work both in Nazi Germany and America during this time period. Through my research I hope to explicate how Jewish-German exile in America influenced not only those exiled, but also the burgeoning American film industry and how the cross-cultural intersection of media propaganda, both …

Good Game Well Played: An Esports Documentary, Gabriella Clare Devia-Allen

Theses and Dissertations

This film explores the operations and cultural practices of the esports community with an emphasis on Twitch as the dominant community platform. Explored sub-communities include Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Duelyst, and League of Legends. A focus on Duelyst allows us to explore the characteristics of an accessible esports culture while also referencing League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive offers an objective look at two of the industry’s most developed esports scenes. This documentary tracks the production of broadcast content, the lifestyles of professional players, and the narratives of the industry’s most involved employees. In doing so, the research draws conclusions …

The Dislocated Spectator's Relationship To Enchanted Objects In Early Film And Modernist Poetry, Rachel Christine Ekblad

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the early 1900s, industry and new technologies dislocated our sense of selfhood. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world had become increasingly crammed with material objects, leading up to when the invention of radio and the rise of electricity perpetuated and evidenced an interest in the immaterial. A similar fascination with magic as expressed in cultural forms such as the traveling show and the séance pointed to our new relationship to the object world: the self, dislocated from the body, could relocate in objects, forming a circuitous relationship akin to electricity. This phenomenon is encapsulated by the representation of enchanted …

"You Want It All To Happen Now!": The Jinx, The Imposter, And Re-Enacting The Digital Thriller In True Crime Documentaries, Brett Michael Phillips

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I outline the changing shape of the reenactment in the contemporary true crime documentary to illustrate a burgeoning crisis of epistemology and anxieties about the authority of evidence in the Digital Age. I examine two works—The Jinx and The Imposter—that deal with evidence in formally similar but ideologically opposite ways.

Logic in the Digital Age prioritizes an ever-widening collection of increasingly more precise artifacts and details, which supposedly paint a more complete picture but end up highlighting what is unknown more often. Key to this examination is the adoption of classic Hollywood thriller techniques (e.g., non-traditional narrative …

Playing-With The World: Toy Story's Aesthetics And Metaphysics Of Play, Jonathan Hendricks

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Pixar’s Toy Story (John Lassiter, 1995) is not just a story about toys and the children that play with them, but a demonstration of how we interact with the world. This thesis looks at the way in which both main children, Andy and Sid, interact with their toys and how this interaction is one that is structured by way of what Martin Heidegger calls “Enframing.” In this modality of playing, toys and other things and entities in the world, and the world itself, appear to the children as on-hand resources for use at any time and can be molded, as …

The Image Of Rebirth In Literature, Media, And Society: 2017 Sassi Conference Proceedings, Society For The Academic Study Of Social Imagery, Thomas G. Endres

Society for the Academic Study of Social Imagery

These papers have been selected from among those presented at the spring 2017 conference of the Society for the Academic Study of Social Imagery (SASSI), devoted to the theme of THE IMAGE OF REBIRTH in Literature, Media, and Society. As the following papers demonstrate, this is a rich and provocative topic with interesting and surprising implications.

Identity And Scene: Alterity And Authenticity In Taxicab Confessions, Steven W. Schoen

Faculty Publications

This essay examines the visual rhetoric of HBOs reality TV program Taxicab Confessions, New York, New York (2005). Drawing on Burke’s rhetorical understanding of scene and Straw’s approach to scene as a category for the analysis of urban culture, I argue that the taxicab interior and nighttime street images of New York City structure a scene of indeterminacy, intimacy, and “reality,” thus framing the passengers’ self-presentations within a context of “authenticity.” The program’s visual structure locates passengers simultaneously outside of and within social norms and reinforces hegemonic notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Passengers are situated within a scene that …

Sexy Robots: A Perpetuation Of Patriarchy, Ashlyn Des Roches

Communication Studies

This feminist critique looks into the way that gender, specifically females, are portrayed in some of Hollywood's top films involving Artificial Intelligence: Blade Runner, Her, and Ex Machina. These movies work as a perpetuation of patriarchal ideologies while maintaining the objectification and hypersexuality of women as normalized behaviors. Additionally, while some forms of empowerment are conveyed, the features illustrate women merely on a spectrum of extreme behavior; due to Heuristics and Cultivation Theory, these misrepresentations can be associated with women outside the surrealist realm of the depicted artificially intelligent worlds.

Ted Talks As An Emergent Genre, Julia Ludewig

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "TED Talks as an Emergent Genre" Julia Ludewig analyzes TED talks—short, informational, and entertaining presentations that are given during TED conferences in North America and abroad—as a hybrid and emerging genre. Based on a qualitative interpretation of 14 such talks, she offers a list of recurring thematic, argumentative, and rhetorical features, which she aligns with three parent genres—the sales pitch, the memoir, and the academic lecture. Comparing recent versions of TED talks with three older talks from the 1980s and 1990s, she suggests an historical trajectory, which emphasizes the professional performance character of recent talks and their …

The Dramatization Of Cultural Hybridity And The "In-Between" Turkey In Fazıl's Künye, Önder Çakırtaş

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Dramatization of Cultural Hybridity and the "In-Between" Turkey in Fazıl's Künye" Önder Çakırtaş addresses Turkey's historical context and exposes how political, social and cultural changes were expressed in Turkey's public sphere. Using Niyazi Berkes's theory of secularism as proceeding of modernism Çakırtaş discusses different examples of stylistic strategies of cultural hybridity in the playwright's historical-based play, Künye. He investigates how political changes in pre-Turkey times signify Turkey's national striving, and how the Ottoman-conservative past metamorphoses into Turkic-secular. The study juxtaposes the perceptions of 'introduction to Westernization' and 'departure from Islamic past' in a period …

Anarcho-Feminist Melodrama And The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Claire T. Solomon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Anarcho-Feminist Melodrama and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (1929-2016)" Claire Solomon analyzes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope as an apparatus of capture (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand). More precisely, her article models how such tropes imply modes of reading anachronistically and metafictionally that decontextualize gestures of resistance and conflate female writers, performers, and characters across time and place. Solomon offers a situated formalist reading of Argentine playwright Salvadora Medina Onrubia's 1929 drama, Las descentradas, revealing an avant-garde counterpoint of melodrama and metafiction as an ambiguous alternative to capture.

Approaching The Value And The Future Of The Novel: A Book Review Article On Boxall's Scholarship, Yili Tang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Animated Landscapes: History, Form And Function, "Evoking The Oracle", Tom Klein

Faculty Pub Night

No abstract provided.

The Subject Librarian Newsletter, Film, Spring 2017, Richard Harrison

Libraries' Newsletters

No abstract provided.

“The Robocop We Deserve”: Post-Human Transformations And Social Critique In Paul Verhoeven’S And Jose Padilha’S Robocop, Mynt Marsellus

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

Papa’S Got A Brand New Kino German Wartime Memory In Edgar Reitz’S Heimat: A Chronicle Of Germany, Nathan Maclean

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

I Love Dick, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of I Love Dick (2017), directed by Jill Soloway.