Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Sundance Film Festival 2017, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

Introduction to our coverage of the Sundance Film Festival 2017.

Blowing Off Ste(A)M: The Value Of The Creative Arts For Gifted Stem Students (Iagc 2017), Tracy A. Townsend, Michael W. Hancock, Michael P. Dean

Faculty Publications & Research

The following is a collection of teaching documents, including classroom activities and assignment prompts, used in the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy’s Graphic Novels, Creative Writing, and Modern Theater classes. These materials are easily included in courses with broader topical focuses, however, either as single-day activities or units of study. The specific materials included here are especially beneficial as means of encouraging student creativity, building up a variety of communication skills, rewarding experimental work, and providing new outlets for critical thinking and social-emotional development.

The Modern Jungle, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Modern Jungle (2017) directed by Charles Fairbanks and Saul Kak.

Thirteen Washington University Students And Their Deep Dive Into The Study Of The Holocaust: Reflections From A Trip To Germany, Poland, And Lithuania And A Year Of Intensive Study, Brian Vetruba, Cecily Hibbs, Talia Wazana, Abigail Wippel

WashU Libraries Presentations

This poster exhibit offers reflections and images from Washington University (WU) students, faculty, and staff who traveled across Germany, Poland, and Lithuania in May 2016. The trip took place after a year of intensive study in 2015-2016 as part of the FOCUS program “The History, Memory, and Representation of the Holocaust.” The exhibit encompasses critical perspectives on the history, memory, and representation of the Holocaust alongside students’ first-person reflections. The exhibit is being held at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center from Feb. 2 to Marcy 15, 2017. A video recording of interviews with students and faculty accompanies …

Dehumanization: A Case Study, Regina Varthi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The capstone “Dehumanization” is divided into three main parts.

The first part contains a brief presentation on the UN family (or UN system), showing its role through its organizational and managerial structures. All data are derived from UN corresponding websites.

The second part, “Homelessness,” focuses on the SDG 11 of the 2030 GA Agenda. In 2014 the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed Leilani Farha Special Rapporteur on adequate housing in order to conduct research on the subject of homelessness as a violation of human rights. In her report, presented at the Human Rights Council in March 2016, Farha claims …

Tandem 2.0: Image And Text Data Generation Application, Christopher J. Vitale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

First created as part of the Digital Humanities Praxis course in the spring of 2012 at the CUNY Graduate Center, Tandem explores the generation of datasets comprised of text and image data by leveraging Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). This project builds upon that earlier work in a new programming framework. While other developers and digital humanities scholars have created similar tools specifically geared toward NLP (e.g. Voyant-Tools), as well as algorithms for image processing and feature extraction on the CV side, Tandem explores the process of developing a more robust and user-friendly …

Secret And Divine Signs: A Cinematic Ode To The Art Of Cruising, Terrence T. Hunt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cruising is a practice that connects people looking for casual sex through a series of gestures, behaviors and codes that signal one’s sexual orientation and interest. These cruising behaviors and codes are changing because of advances in technology, because of cruising’s sudden exposure to the wider community through media, and evolving cultural values that no longer demand gay sex be kept secret. Cruising is in the public consciousness like never before. This project, a short film entitled Secret and Divine Signs: A Cinematic Ode to the Art of Cruising, investigates, records and pays homage to the cultural practices of …

Dancing Silhouettes: Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures Of Prince Achmed: A Critical Study, Maria N. Rhodes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed has been relegated to a curiosity in film history textbooks for some time. Known as the first surviving feature length animated film, it is talked about but rarely seen. However, it is more than just a point in a film history timeline. The film is a beautiful piece of art that engages with the time period in which it was made in a critical and political way. The subject matter, silhouettes as animation, the political atmosphere of Weimar Republic Era Berlin and the role of the spectator are all explored in this thesis …

Open Works: Between The Programmed And The Free, Art In Italy 1962 To 1972, Lindsay A. Caplan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation historicizes and theorizes a group of Italian artists who were among the first to use computers and cybernetics to make artworks, developing the genre of Arte Programmata, or Programmed Art. It argues that the artists of Arte Programmata (Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, and collectives Gruppo T and Gruppo N) turned to the generative, interactive, and probabilistic aspects of early computers not simply as new media for making art but as platforms for radically altering what it means to be a participant in an increasingly mediated and networked world. This is apparent in how each of their works deploys …

The Short Story And The Photographic: Twentieth-Century Imagetexts In And Of The Americas, Lucienne Muller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the visuality of the short story from an intermedial point of view, that is, with a focus on the relationship between the short story and the photographic visual. This analysis draws from photographic theory and from the writings of photographer and writer Julio Cortazar whose philosophy puts forward the idea of a reader who becomes the inventive co-creator of the fictional work.

The Fat Female Bodies Of Saturday Night Live: Uncovering The Normative Cultural Power Of A Countercultural Comedy Institution, Katharine Cacace

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite its reputation as one of the most countercultural and anti-establishment voices in mainstream television comedy, Saturday Night Live helps produce and reproduces cultural norms. Using weight and gender as a lens, this paper investigates Saturday Night Live’s methods of creating, imitating, and evoking the fat female body in order to limit female agency and police unruly female power. It contends that even the inclusion of nonnormative female bodies—fat bodies, queer bodies, and bodies of color—is merely a reiteration of the techniques of neoliberal multiculturalism for the television audience.

"La Dolce Vita" Today: Fashion And Media, Nicola Certo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita is a cinematic masterpiece that has inspired nationally and internationally generations of creative people and artists because of the extent of its themes and because of the mastery in the choice of its costumes. The actuality of the director’s criticism towards the decadent society of his years, the originality of his stylistic choices, and his sophisticated taste for beauty and fashion, brought him to influence media and contemporary fashion then and now. There are numerous examples of television commercials that Fellini directs and produces for purely commercial purposes. They are all critique of his society, …

The Fantastic Manifesto: Monstrosity Of Memory And Epiphany Of Selfhood In The Spirit Of The Beehive (1973), Layla Blodgett Carrillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spanish culture of storytelling suffered under the nearly forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The government-regulated cinema welcomed propaganda and melodrama, and denied the fantastic, the legendary, and the magical. These carefully manipulated histories, which served to romanticize the ideologies of the regime, also served to eulogize the delinquent and the depraved. In the early 1970s, at the heels of the collapse of Franco’s reign, the people of Spain bore witness to a new national cinema. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), the feature debut from Victor Erice, exists at the threshold between a storied history of Spanish dictatorship and …

Merchandise, Promotion, And Accessibility: Keith Haring’S Pop Shop, Amy L. Raffel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the peak of his career in New York, Keith Haring took his highly recognizable artistic style and distributed it in the form of merchandise in his Pop Shop, established in 1986. Stemming from his early work displayed on the New York streets, directly within public space, and his explorations into mass media strategies, he learned he could make his work accessible to new audiences outside contemporary art institutions and art circles. He translated his work across several surfaces: from subways or canvases, to everyday functional merchandise, such as buttons, t-shirts, and bags sold in his shop. Responding to a …

Divinity, Incarnation, And The Strange Body Of Jesus In Horror Films, Mike Kugler

Northwestern Review

Through an analysis of a number of horror films or films with horror-infused aspects, such as The Last Temptation Christ, Passion of the Christ, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, Jesus, and Fist of Jesus, the author uses theology to reflect not only on the horror genre but also on the doctrine of the Incarnation.

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (2017), directed by Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana.

The Discovery, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Discovery (2017), directed by Charlie McDowell.

Interview With Jessie Auritt, Director Of Supergirl, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is an interview with Jessie Auritt, the director of Supergirl (2017), conducted by Bill Blizek.

Supergirl, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Supergirl (2017), directed by Jessie Auritt.

Slamdance Film Festival 2017, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is the Introduction to the Slamdance Film Festival 2017.

I Dream In Another Language, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of I Dream in Another Language (2017), directed by Ernesto Contreras.

Aerotropolis, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Aerotropolis (2017), directed by Jheng-Neng Li.

Automatic At Sea, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Automatic at Sea (2017) directed by Matthew Lessner.

To The Bone, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of To the Bone (2017), directed by Marti Noxon.

Menashe, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Menashe (2017), directed by Joshua Weinstein.

The Hero, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Hero (2017) directed by Brett Haley.

The Wound, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Wound (2016), directed by John Trengove.

Colossal, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Colossal (2017) directed by Nacho Vigalondo.

Cries From Syria, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Cries from Syria (2017), directed by Evgeny Afineevsky.

Winnie, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Winnie (2017), directed by Pascale Lamchi.