Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Ji Sor (1997): Self-Realization Of Women In Cinema And In History, Tong (Hilary) Lin

CMC Senior Theses

100 years ago, there was a group of women called Zishunu who stood up against the whole society and swore off marriage for life. Zishu offered an escape for many women in the Pearl River Delta area. As forerunners in female independence and liberation, Zishunu never had the chance to be the spokesman of themselves or the recognition they deserved. Ji Sor (1997), a groundbreaking work in lesbian-themed movies, beautifully depicts this special and unparalleled historical phenomenon in detail. Released a few months after the Handover of Hong Kong in 1997, this critically acclaimed movie by Hong Kong New Wave …

Speak, Little Mute Girl: Representations Of Mute Women In Film, Honor Schwartz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I focus my examination of mute women on three mainstream motion pictures spanning from the Hollywood studio to contemporary era times to explore the ways in which film undermines mute women’s attempts to use alternative languages. Johnny Belinda, Children of a Lesser God, and The Piano are films that display mute women and garner popular attention. I argue that the women in these films use alternative languages (such as sign language and touch) to gain representation and resist the masculine order; however, these women cannot obtain autonomy and agency because of their decisions to participate in romantic …

A Terminator, A Transformer, And Job Meet: Creator-Created Relations In Film And Scripture, Edward Allen Jones Iii

Faculty Publications - George Fox Digital

In this essay, I set the book of Job in dialogue with a number of films from the robot science fiction subgenre. It is my intention to show that both sets of literature are deeply engaged with questions related to how creators and created things can interact, and that they deal with these questions in ways that illuminate and complement each other. The study proceeds in three phases. First, I develop a typology of robot science fiction as I see it in Hollywood cinematic presentation. Second, I turn to unpack God’s response to Job’s complaint in Job 38. In this …

Barbie Doesn't Have Bruises: Gendered Images Of Anxiety And Avoidant Attachment Relationships In Film, Claudia G. Chiang-Lopez

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Viewers’ interpretations of romantic relationships portrayed between those with anxious and avoidant attachments can affect their opinions on what constitutes appropriate relationship behavior. I conducted a literature review on media impacts and offer an interpretation of the implications of the language used to describe characters, relationships and characters’ ends. The films studied - Sunset Boulevard, Sid and Nancy, and The Hustler - showed a pattern where in a relationship between an anxious and an avoidant character, the anxious character was punished, absorbed by their relationship, abandoned, trapped in their life, and cut off from the world. Viewers watch films to …

83 Orange Peels, Klara Hammoud

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

83 ORANGE PEELS is a feature-length film written and directed by Klara Hammoud and produced by Biddayat as part of the requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema from the University of Central Florida. The project aims to challenge existing conventions of the documentary filmmaking on multiple levels – aesthetic, narrative, and technical– while also examining growing importance of workflow throughout all aspects of production. 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 the …

Digital Dissonance: Horror Cultures In The Age Of Convergent Technologies, Daniel Powell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first two decades of the new millennium have witnessed an abundance of change in the areas of textual production, digital communication, and our collective engagement with the Internet. This study explores these changes, which have yielded both positive and negative cultural and developmental outcomes, as products of digital dissonance. Dissonance is characterized by the disruptive consequences inherent in technology's incursion into the print publication cultures of the twentieth century, the explosion in social-media interaction that is changing the complexion of human contact, and our expanding reliance on the World Wide Web for negotiating commerce, culture, and communication. This study …

Dialectics Of Microbudget Cinema, Milos Ajdinovic

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Magic Kingdom is a feature-length, microbudget motion picture, produced, "written", directed, and edited by Milos Ajdinovic as a part of the University of Central Florida's Masters in Fine Arts program in Digital Entrepreneurial Cinema. Its narrative is a product of the collective improvisation between a group of collaborators – Chealsea Anagnoson, Henry Gibson, Mikaela Duffy and Marcus Nieves – moderated by Milos Ajdinovic. This written dissertation is an attempt to document the concepts and processes that surrounded the production of this film.

Trying To Fit In With The Weird Parts Of The Internet: Online Subcultures And Content Creation, Isak Fedeler Knivsland

Honors Program Theses

Creating my thesis project has been quite a journey - perhaps a longer and more tedious journey than I anticipated, but rewarding nonetheless. Starting this project in the fall, I simply had the goal of making cool music, producing videos to accompany it, and getting some people to watch it. This is much easier said than done, however.

In my head, this was to be a pretty straightforward project. I had made electronic music before and had been improving at it. I had edited some videos, though not for a few years. And I had experimented with marketing content. The …

การศึกษาวิธีการแสดงในละครเวทีประสาทสัมผัสสำหรับผู้ชมวัยเด็กที่มีภาวะออทิซึม, ชนัตถ์ พงษ์พานิช

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

งานวิจัยชิ้นนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อวิเคราะห์และสังเคราะห์วิธีการแสดงของนักแสดงในละครเวทีประสาทสัมผัสที่เหมาะสมและสามารถเพิ่มปฏิสัมพันธ์เชิงบวกระหว่างผู้ชมวัยเด็กที่มีภาวะออทิซึมกับนักแสดงได้ เนื่องจากละครลักษณะนี้ยังไม่เคยมีผู้ใดพัฒนามาก่อนในประเทศไทย ผู้วิจัยจึงต้องออกแบบและคิดค้นกระบวนการนำเสนอละครเวทีประสาทสัมผัสก่อน จากนั้นจึงคิดค้น พัฒนาวิธีการแสดงในละครเวทีประสาทสัมผัสขึ้นโดยประยุกต์จากเทคนิคการแสดงแบบด้นสดและแนวทางการบำบัดรักษาแบบซันไรส์ ต่อจากนั้นได้นำวิธีการแสดงที่ได้ออกแบบขึ้นมาใช้ทดลองทำงานกับนักแสดง-กระบวนกร 4 คน จัดแสดงจริงกับผู้ชมกลุ่มตัวอย่างที่มีภาวะออทิซึมจำนวน 10 คน ช่วงอายุ 4 – 18 ปี ละครเวทีประสาทสัมผัสในงานวิจัยชิ้นนี้ชื่อว่า "สวนมีสุข" เป็นละครที่ออกแบบให้ผู้ชมที่มีภาวะออทิซึมมีส่วนร่วมในการทำกิจกรรมที่สัมพันธ์กับเรื่องราวและตัวละครในจินตนาการ บทที่ใช้ในการแสดงดัดแปลงมาจากนิทานภาพเรื่องกบแฮรี่ผู้หิวโหย ประกอบกับการเลือกใช้กิจกรรมละครสร้างสรรค์สำหรับเด็ก ผู้วิจัยได้ปรับเปลี่ยนพื้นที่การแสดงให้เป็นสวนเล็กๆที่มีอยู่ในนิทานภาพ ผู้วิจัยได้สร้างเงื่อนไขและจัดลำดับกิจกรรมให้ผู้ชมกลุ่มตัวอย่างได้ปฏิบัติ เล่นเป็นตัวละคร ร้องเพลง และสำรวจประสาทสัมผัสของตนเองผ่านกิจกรรมต่างๆในโรงละครตามความสนใจ กลุ่มตัวอย่างจะได้ชมละครเวที ความยาว 50 – 60 นาที สัปดาห์ละ 1 ครั้ง ต่อเนื่อง 4 – 6 สัปดาห์ ในแต่ละสัปดาห์จะพัฒนาเรื่องราวอย่างค่อยเป็นค่อยไป ในการทดลองจัดแสดงแต่ละสัปดาห์ ผู้วิจัยได้นำปัญหาที่พบและการประเมินจากผู้เชี่ยวชาญมาปรับวิธีการแสดงที่ได้สังเคราะห์ขึ้นให้มีความเหมาะสมยิ่งขึ้น ข้อมูลที่ใช้ในการวิเคราะห์ผลได้แก่ 1) บันทึกการทำงานของผู้วิจัย 2) บันทึกปฏิสัมพันธ์เชิงบวกของผู้ชมขณะชมการแสดง 3) บทสัมภาษณ์เชิงลึกผู้ปกครองของกลุ่มตัวอย่าง 4) บทสัมภาษณ์เชิงลึกผู้เชี่ยวชาญด้านละครบำบัดที่ได้ชมวีดีโอบันทึกภาพการแสดง เมื่อได้พัฒนาและปรับปรุงวิธีการแสดงในแต่ละสัปดาห์แล้ว ผู้วิจัยได้เรียนรู้ว่าการเป็นนักแสดงในละครสำหรับผู้ชมที่มีภาวะออทิซึมนั้น นักแสดงจะต้องเข้าใจวิธีการสื่อสารกับผู้ที่มีภาวะออทิซึม เข้าใจลำดับกิจกรรมต่างๆ และเข้าใจบริบทของผู้ชมเป็นอย่างดี นักแสดงจะต้องมีพลังหรือคลื่นความคิด ความรู้สึกภายในที่เข้มข้นแต่แสดงออกอย่างสงบเพื่อลดการกระตุ้นเร้าผู้ชมและช่วยให้ผู้ชมสามารถจดจ่อกับการแสดงได้ นักแสดงต้องอยู่กับปัจจุบันในขณะแสดงและมีสมาธิในการสื่อสารกับผู้ชมในรายบุคคล นักแสดงจะต้องมองเห็น ได้ยิน และรับรู้ผู้ชมอย่างชัดเจนเพื่อจะสามารถสังเกตการสื่อสารทางกายของผู้ชมและสื่อสารตอบกลับได้อย่างเหมาะสม วิธีการแสดงที่ได้พัฒนาขึ้นทำให้เกิดตัวละครที่ให้อิสระและเป็นมิตรกับผู้ชม สร้างความไว้วางใจและสร้างพื้นที่ปลอดภัยให้กับผู้ชม ตัวละครจะเป็นแกนนำที่พาผู้ชมไปสู่โลกของจินตนาการอย่างค่อยเป็นค่อยไป ผลการสังเกตปฏิสัมพันธ์ในโรงละครพบว่า ผู้ชมกลุ่มตัวอย่างมีปฏิสัมพันธ์และพัฒนาการทางสังคมที่ดีขึ้นในหลายกรณี จากการสัมภาษณ์ผู้ปกครองพบว่ามีหลายกรณีที่ผู้ชมแสดงสัญญาณของความสุขและความต้องการชมละคร

Distant Electric Vision: Cultural Representations Of Television From “Edison’S Telephonoscope” To The Electronic Screen, Ivy Roberts

Theses and Dissertations

Do inventions that exist only on paper have less credibility than functional technologies? How has the meaning and significance of audiovisual media and technology changed over time? This dissertation examines historiography and methodology for media history, arguing for an interdisciplinary approach. It addresses methodological issues in media history—media in transition, media archaeology, and film history—through an examination of television’s speculative era. It tackles moving-image history through an historical investigation of Victorian and Machine age “television”.

Because the concept and terminology of “television” changed dramatically during this period, I use the phrases “distant electric vision” and “seeing by electricity,” to define …

(Re)Mediating The Spirit: Evangelical Christian Young Adult Media, Tamara Watkins

Theses and Dissertations

"We are in the world, but not of the world," a maxim frequently spoken in evangelical Christian culture, provides insight into how these individuals view their relationship with secular culture. They presume to share the same temporal plane with secular culture, but do not participate in it. In this dissertation, I explore whether the division between evangelical Christian culture and secular culture is as clear as this aphorism implies. To facilitate this investigation, I examine media Christian content creators created for an American evangelical Christian young adult audience in the early twenty-first century, specifically focusing on novel-length fiction, comics and …

The Monstrous Self: Negotiating The Boundary Of The Abject, Katya Yakubov

Theses and Dissertations

Through the lens of the horror film and the fairy tale, this thesis explores the notion of the grotesque as a boundary phenomenon—a negotiation of what is self and what is other. As such, it locates the function that the monstrous and the grotesque have in the formation of a personal and social identity. In asking why we take pleasure in the perverse, I explore how permutations of guilt, victimhood, and desire can be actively rewritten, in order to construct a stable sense of self.

Negotiating Desire: Resisting, Reimagining And Reinscribing Normalized Sexuality And Gender In Fan Fiction, Charity A. Fowler

Theses and Dissertations

Fan studies has examined how fan fiction resists heteronormativity by challenging depictions of gender and sexuality, but to date, this inquiry has focused disproportionately on slash, to the exclusion of other genres of fan fiction. Additionally, scholars disagree about slash’s subversive effects by setting up a seemingly stable dichotomy—subversive vs. misogynistic—where one does not necessarily exist.

In this project, I examine multiple genres of fan fiction—namely, slash arising from bromances; femslash from female friendships; incestuous fan fiction from dysfunctional familial relationships; and polyamorous fics. I chose fics from four televisions shows—NBC’s Revolution, MTV’s Teen Wolf, the CW’s The …

The Institute Of New Feelings: Plastic Identities And Imperfect Surfaces, Weijian Zhou

Theses and Dissertations

Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities into …

Open / Close: Assimilating Immersive Spaces In Visual Communication, Anika Sarin

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in two spaces obverse to each other: open and closed. An open space develops organically based on how people inhabit it. Interacting with an open space is a dynamic, sporadic, multisensory, immersive, and subjective experience. In such spaces, we are confronted with an alternative aesthetic, one that is in conflict with the seamlessness of a closed space. A closed space is anchored on definite variables like structure, use and boundaries. While interaction between people and space is important, the space is tightly controlled and interaction is designed. Through this thesis project, I present a method that metaphorically …

"No Innocent Victim"?: Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During The Holocaust As Trope In Zeugin Aus Der Hölle, Kerstin Steitz

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

This essay addresses how in the film Zeugin aus der Hölle, (1965, Witness out of hell) fictional sexualized violence against a female Jewish Holocaust survivor functions as a trope that exposes and rejects patriarchal and misogynist discourses of victimhood, perpetration, survivor shame, and guilt, which reviewers and scholars rightly have critiqued for such discourses’ re-victimizing and re-traumatizing effects upon victims. I argue that as a filmic trope sexualized violence served specific functions for its contemporaneous audience—Germans in the postwar 1960s. By means of the trope of sexualized violence, Zeugin aus der Hölle confronted contemporaneous West German audiences with gender-specific …

"Fragmegration" Of Identity In Laurent Cantet's Ressources Humaines And L'Emploi Du Temps, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

As James Rosenau has written, localization and globalization came crashing together at the turn of the 20^th century in a type of oxymoronic chaos he labels "fragmegration" that characterizes the confusion people have as to their role in society. It is this identity confusion that Laurent Cantet portrays in his landmark films Ressources humaines (1999) and L'emploi du temps (2001). Cantet's protagonists seek their place in society as they cope with the sudden destabilization of their local, national, and globalized identities.

"She's Not A Real Monster": Orphan Black's Helena And The Monstrous-Feminine, Natalie Eisen

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the idea of the “monstrous-feminine,” or the idea that female monsters of television and film are linked to their femininity in a way that male monsters are not linked to their masculinity. Using the work of scholars such as Barbara Creed, Shelley Stamp Lindsey, and Jane M. Ussher, the thesis covers various facets of women’s lives as seen through the distorted lens of the monstrous. The character of Helena from the television show Orphan Black is used as a concrete example of the stages of the monstrous-feminine: the girl-child, menstruation and puberty, sexuality, and motherhood.

Culture As A Tool Of Exclusion: An Analysis Of Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, Abigail Maccumber

Scripps Senior Theses

Using the film La Haine (1995), directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, as an object of analysis, this paper explores culture as a tool of exclusion in France through sociological, architectural, and political contexts. It investigates La Haine as one of the first representations of the banlieue to mainstream French audiences, as well as the ways in which the film reveals how immigrants and children of immigrants struggle to find personal, cultural, and national identity in France.

Understanding The Effects Of Disgust And Political Ideology On Moral Judgment Through Photography, Xijia Yuan

Scripps Senior Theses

Feelings of disgust may have effects on one’s moral judgment; specifically that experience of disgust has linked to increased severity of moral judgments. Additionally, one’s political beliefs may also affect one’s moral judgment, such as conservatives tend to make harsher judgment toward moral situations and behaviors. A 2 x 2 x 2 factorial quasi-experiment has been proposed to study 420 participants, legal adults from both conservative and liberal neighborhoods, randomly assigned to one of two conditions, disgust-eliciting versus neutral. Participants will view either four disgust-eliciting photographs or four neutral photographs, and then complete survey questions on disgust rating, moral judgment, …

Emotional Memory Forever: The Cinematography Of Paul Ewing, Andrew M. Ewing

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Over a period of ten years Paul Ewing documented the life of his family on film – initially using Super 8 film and then converting to VHS with the advent of the new technology. Through the lens of home movies, autoethnography and memory I discuss his approach to amateur image making and its lasting legacy.

Shanghainese Parklife: Cultivating The Taoist Body And Exploring The Traces Of The Absent Figure And Creature In The Landscape, Brenton Rossow

Theses : Honours

This creative Honours project explores Taoist body cultivation practices and the traces of the absent figure and creature in the landscape within Shanghainese parks. This exploration, presented in the form of a documentary and an audiovisual meditation, share a yin and yang relationship. Although they both contain elements of each other, the documentary celebrates body cultivation practices and their relationship to Taoism, while the audiovisual meditation examines the darker side of human relationships with the natural world in Shanghainese parks. Informed by Rod Giblett’s and Brian Eno’s theories concerning the human body’s relationship with the environment and the natural world, …

The Disrupted Screen Production Sector Reveals Patterns Of Consistency, Cathy Henkel, Andrea Michell, Lelia Green

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This article interrogates the impact of digital technologies, including the internet, as disrupters of traditional screen production industries. The privileging of direct links between creators and audiences, as seen in myriad new content delivery platforms, including YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo and Amazon, underpins the foundation of an emerging communication world where access, voice, diversity and engagement are radically altered from what was once thought of of as screen production. Yet in the ensuing chaos, screen content creators from diverse cultures and experience are finding patterns of consistency in their navigation of this emerging production environment. This article focuses on how screen …

Pathos, Winter 2017, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Jessica Moore

Volume 11 No. 2