Film and Media Studies Commons^™

The Beholder, Allan Lake

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

A poem on the effect of landscape on the emotions.

Shifting Rurality American Gothic, Iowa Nice, Biotech And Political Expectations In Rural America, William D. Nichols 890252

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This paper traces the linkage between heritage landscape within the context of the election of Donal Trump. Trump's invocations of heritage riled certain regions of the US which had a distinct connection to Regionalism, both as a political idea and as an aesthetic practice. Focusing on Iowa, home to the quintessential American painting, American Gothic, the paper looks at modernity and agriculture, and how the two categories seem to rely on (but also negate) heritage. By examining what a genetically modified landscape might mean in relation to the historical image of the pastoral/provincial farmer, a network of frictions and …

Poetry Of Roe 8, Nandi Chinna

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Poetry of Roe 8

The occasion for the writing of these poems was activism surrounding the controversial highway known as the Roe 8 extension in the areas of Cockburn and Fremantle in Western Australia. Planned in the 1950s, Roe 8 is contentious for a number of reasons, including extraordinary political deals over funding, undue process regarding environmental reporting, lack of a business case, inadequate noise and traffic modelling, erasure of Indigenous heritage sites, and clearing of the sensitive Beeliar wetlands and Coolbellup banksia woodlands which were designated a Threatened Ecological Community in 2016. During the summer of 2016/2017 contractors started …

Imaginative Geographies: Visualising The Poetics Of History And Space, Clive Barstow

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This essay presents a visual dialogue about our relationship to place. I adopt Henri Lefebvre’s model of cumulative trialectics (1991) as a new thirdspace that more accurately represents the complexities of modern day geographies and hybrid communities by extending the binary analysis of the past and present and beyond the real and the imagined. Trialectics expand our understanding beyond physical geographies by suggesting a cerebral space that searches for new meaning and is therefore more radically open to additional otherness and toward a continuing expansion of [human] spatial knowledge and imagination.

Julia Lossau describes thirdspace as a space that ‘…tends …

Empathizing With “The Other”: Visualization And Perspective Taking, Lisa Spitz, Liv Cummins

Lesley University Community of Scholars Day

As today’s youth blossom into adulthood, they will simultaneously be challenged to develop their sense of self/identity and to cultivate their ability to embrace differences, all while being bombarded by visual media and messaging. Research literature on perspective taking provides a framework by which students can develop an understanding of their own perspective, imagine the world from an “other” perspective, and make connections that link to productive actions (Selman, 1971). Perspective taking as a concept has been linked to greater empathy, compassion, and prosocial behavior (Hardwood and Farrar, 2006). Yet the mechanism for enabling productive perspective taking is unclear. In …

Visual Influence And Youth Empowerment, Rebecca A. Cote

Lesley University Community of Scholars Day

During adolescence, youth start to look outside of their spheres of family to explore the greater world and they are often left with visual media as the go-to source of information. Media images are contrived to provoke meaning through the use of signs and how they are presented and they manipulate images to impart messages. Youth need to be literate in visual language in order to discern the implied influence.

Motherhood Makes A Matriarchy, Lily Mann

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

This analysis will discuss the topic of matriarchies, how they created, and how they are sustained. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: Coven are used as examples of matriarchies, wherein Hawthorne’s matriarchy is at its start, whereas Murphy’s matriarchy is coming to a potential end. This will be examined through a comparative analysis between the characters in Hawthorne’s early American work with the characters in Murphy’s contemporary work. Ultimately, Hawthorne’s matriarchy is much more insidious and potentially damaging to a patriarchal norm than Murphy’s reclusive patriarchy. Hawthorne’s matriarchy has the option to disrupt a patriarchal …

Tangos Before Sunrise, Sunset And Midnight: A Conversational Journey With Jesse And Celine, Randy Rasmussen

Librarian Publications

Stripping the story of a romantic relationship down to its essentials, then fiercely delving into the details and potential variations of those essentials, director Richard Linklater and his collaborators created a unique trilogy of films spanning eighteen years in both real and fictional time. In Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), two appealing yet flawed characters meet by chance on a train headed for Vienna, risk extending their acquaintance during a one-night tour of the city, then spend the next two decades either brooding about or deeply engaged with each other.

The journey of Jesse (Ethan …

Tangling With Dragons: Growing Up Fairy Tale Style In Tangled And How To Train Your Dragon, Randy Rasmussen

Librarian Publications

Animated movies are often, though not always, the modem equivalent of literary fairy tales. In the mid-1970's Bruno Bettelheim published a fascinating study of classic fairy tales entitled The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. I thought it might be interesting to apply a few of his theories to three of my favorite animated films: Tangled, How to Train Your Dragon and How to Train Your Dragon 2.

The inclusion of one Disney Studios movie with two from Dreamworks is not entirely arbitrary. Tangled is an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Rapunzel," …

Alien Lands, Carissa Mosley

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Alien Lands has been an academic year-long study and cross-media art endeavor, researching the history of palm trees in Los Angeles and documenting their current presence. I photographed and made videos of the palm trees in Los Angeles and ended the project with a ceremonial installation/performance, grieving the colonial history and unsustainability of palm trees by ironically commemorating them. This body of work is meant to provoke discussion of palm trees' iconicization, their ubiquitous invisibility in our environment, their colonial history, and their likely nonexistent future.

"He Didn't Mean It": What Kubrick's The Shining Can Teach Us About Domestic Violence, Kelley O'Brien

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With Second Wave Feminism and the Women’s Rights Movement, 1970’s Americans began to see a shift in gender norms affecting how we relate to one another, particularly within a family structure. Scholars have noted an anxiety permeating the decade over the potential negative ramifications of such a drastic cultural shift. We see these issues of gender politics played out in numerous popular films from the 1970s and into the 1980s. Kubrick’s The Shining, like many horror films of the time, preys upon the societal fear for the family, due to these shifting gender norms, by featuring a crumbling patriarch (Jack), …

Cool Moms & Cool Media: Returning To, Morgan Wallace

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I posit that contemporary fears about the effect electronic media has on us and our children is anything but new. Therefore, reminiscing about the "good ole days" and wanting to go back would not actually solve the problem. However, looking back to a time when there was also anxiety about electronic media and the shifting field of public and private may reveal new possibilities for relating to and with these media. Rather than flatly blame media as an apparently new cause of harm, it is essential to reveal media's historical and political conditions, only in this way can we better …

Eliminating The Uncertainty Of Hong Kong In 1990s: Tsui Hark’S Once Upon A Time In China (1, 2, 3), Zhanwen Peng

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My argument is that the Wong Fei-hung film series, Once Upon a Time in China (Tsui Hark, Chapters 1, 2, 3), not only affirms the ideas of Confucianism but also criticizes them. Tsui Hark’s film series express Hong Kong’s tension of selecting eastern tradition and western modernity before it returned to mainland China in 1997, which represents the selection of entirely different values between East and West. Though the film series was made from 1991 to 1993, Hark started considering how to eliminate the uncertainty in selecting ideology after Hong Kong’s return. He provides his answer by combining eastern Confucianism …

The Revival Western And, Kevin Thomas Mckenna

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I create a dialogue between films credited with reviving the Western film genre in the early 1990’s. I examine spatial representations in a group of films I label “the revival westerns”: Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990), Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), and George P. Cosmatos’ Tombstone (1993). Through the use of extreme long shots, characters demonstrating a confined sense of place, and continuity editing, the revival westerns erect a concentrically scaled conception of space and place and maintain a linear temporality. However, I offer Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) as an intervention that reassembles these spatial and temporal notions. Dead …

Failing To Move Forward: Journalism, Media, And Affect In David Fincher's, Nicholas Orlando

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007) offers a critique of the mass media’s efforts to restore American valiance with heroic narratives of ordinary people in the aftermath of 9/11. Amending prior scholarly readings of Zodiac as a serial killer narrative, I reconfigure my analysis by taking Fincher at his word and treating it as a journalism film. Borrowing a term from political theorist Elisabeth Anker, I argue that, unlike other contemporary journalism films, Zodiac is constructed as a “melodrama of failure” that, rather than seeking mastery, unveils the instability of evidence and the obsessive uncertainty of procedure.

With his film sitting between …

History Of Television Ii Flm 215, Joanna Burkhardt

Library Impact Statements

No abstract provided.

A Reason To Daydream, Corinne Schipull

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Sexism in American culture comes as no surprise. In 2017, the film industry saw an increasing number of powerful men within its ranks exposed and exiled for allegations of sexually predatory behavior. Many see this purging as a sign of changing times, but this view is optimistic: the tides of change ebb in and out, and this problem far exceeds the movie industry. Well before the onslaught of articles on the likes of Harvey Weinstein, my classmates and I resolved to craft our senior thesis film with a crew made up entirely of women: we simply saw the pool of …

A Conversation With Luis Argueta, Francesca Soans

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Synopsis: An interview with filmmaker Luis Argueta during his visit to UNI on October 13, 2017. Students from the Digital Media Production II class, taught by Professor Francesca Soans, planned, recorded, and edited the interview, as part of a 30-minute television show on immigration. Luis Argueta directed a trilogy on immigration in Iowa: AbUSed: The Postville Raid (2010); ABRAZOS (2014); and The U-Turn (2017).

Interview With Beatriz Gallardo, Stephen J. Gaies, Polly Alfano Translator, Jennifer Cooley Translator

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Film has been a powerful tool in documenting and raising awareness about (im)migration. It can reveal the root causes of population movement, both voluntary and involuntary, and it can open our eyes to the economic, social, legal and psychological challenges of newcomers.

Beatriz (Bea) Gallardo Shaul has been involved as a film producer in bringing these issues of (im)migration to the attention of the general public and in preserving a record of the impact of these issues on the people of Guatemala. Gallardo earned a Masters in Communications from San Carlos University in Guatemala (cum laude). Her credits as a …

Disoriented Nationalist Discourse Of The Wenxuan Group Amidst Manchukuo’S Anti-Modern Chorus, Chao Liu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Disoriented Nationalist Discourse of the Wenxuan Group amidst Manchukuo's Anti-Modern Chorus" Chao Liu analyzes the proposal of "native-land literature" made by left-wing Chinese writers in occupied northeast China. As it turns out, inheriting the nationalist discourse of the May Fourth Movement and further radicalizing it via a "new romanticism," those writers over-emphasized the socio-political function of literary production and took native-land literature as the most effective tool for nationalist mobilization. Accordingly, they repelled modern civilization as it was associated with the colonists, relying instead on natural wilderness and primitive force and thus adopting subject matters as well …

Pantheism And Escapism In Abu Madi's 'Enigmas' And 'The Evening' From English Romanticism Perspectives, Yasser K. R. Aman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Pantheism and Escapism in Abu Madi's 'Enigmas' and 'The Evening' From English Romanticism Perspectives" Yasser K. R. Aman investigates and analyses the possibilities of pantheism's encirclement of escapism in Elia Abu Madi's two poems from English Romanticism perspective. The article compares Abu Madi's fluctuating attitude towards escapism and pantheism to William Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour July 13, 1798," Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," highlighting the affinities and differences. The …

Film Review: The Cut, Anna Batori

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Lives In Motion: Depaul's All-Star Cinema Arts Faculty Teach The Art Of Documenting Life On Film

DePaul Magazine

This article highlights the award-winning female documentarians on faculty at DePaul University's School of Cinematic Arts and their various projects with students, including a program for female high school students living in Chicago Housing Authority housing. Sidebar by DePaul Law School graduate Chaz Ebert.

Introduction: (Re)Presenting (Im)Migration, Jennifer Cooley

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

This edition of UNIversitas is devoted to the study of Luis Argueta’s trilogy of documentary films about immigration, and, more broadly, the quest to faithfully represent the personal impact of immigration policies in the 21st century. Starting with abUSed: The Postville Raid (2010), followed by ABRAZOS (2014) and most recently The U Turn (2017), Argueta’s films invite us to reflect upon the ongoing injustices faced by Guatemalan migrants living in the Midwest and broader societal issues surrounding immigration as well. They do this by bringing individual stories to the forefront, by giving voice to those who are typically silenced, …

New Zealand Film Industry: Building Culture And Identity, Victoria Swart

The Kabod

Below Australia, as close to the bottom of the populated world as one can go, lies the small country of New Zealand, the true “land down-under.” New Zealand offers close to 103,500 square miles of picturesque and varied landscape, along with a population of less than 5 million, as of the 2016 census. Despite its isolated geography and small population, the country has made a large international presence, especially in the film industry. The development of the New Zealand film industry is unique, beginning soon after the birth of film itself but refraining from substantial growth until recent years. The …

Grabbing Back: An Analysis Of Womanism And Cinematic Representation In These Hands, Taija Walker

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

Flora M’mbugu-Schelling’s 1992 documentary These Hands is a 45-minute film depicting the crushing and processing of rocks by women working at a site in Tanzania. Unlike a typical documentary, there are no interviews conducted nor narrator to provide context for the viewer, so the film is heavily reliant on visuals and diegetic sound in conveying information and themes to the audience. Although These Hands, lacking in plot and narration, seems like a simple film with little substance, it is clear that there is an underlying agenda and an extremely powerful message, both being womanist in nature, that M’mbugu-Schelling reveals …

Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, And Environmental Narrative By Alexa Weik Von Mossner, David Tagnani

The Goose

Review of Alexa Weik von Mossner's Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative.

Throwing Our Voices: Ventriloquism As New Media Activism, Amber Day

English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles

In the fall of 2010, Chevron released an ad campaign designed to respond to consumer worries about the conduct of oil companies. Each ad depicted “customers” voicing rather nonspecific concerns about oil companies, answered by the “We Agree” slogan and information about something positive the company is doing in particular communities. Just before the campaign’s official roll-out, the anti-corporate activist group known as the Yes Men produced a series of sophisticated parody ads that spoke in more detail about the damage the company has done in specific countries. Designed to be mistaken for the real, the dummy campaign was distributed …

Beast, Rubina Ramji

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Beast (2018), directed by Michael Pearce.

Women Are Speaking Up At Sundance, Rubina Ramji

Journal of Religion & Film

Women speak up at Sundance 2018.