Film and Media Studies Commons^™

The Dawn Of A New Era In Entertainment History, Allissa Williams

Global Tides

This article is a look into where the film industry is heading in the coming years. To gain insight on this topic, it was critical to trace the history of this ever-evolving industry as well as delve into the key trends shaping the industry today and their possible implications. The research compiled on this topic indicates that shorter length content controlled by creators themselves, as opposed to large studios or corporations, and distribution methods that are beneficial to creators are on the horizon for the film and media industry.

Parasite: A Film Review On Capitalism, John K. Kim

Cinesthesia

Bong Joon Ho’s critically acclaimed Parasitebrings a refreshing perspective on capitalist ideology that dominates the Western world today. Its clever and thrilling commentary on the various aspects of capitalist ideology is as vast as it is sophisticated. The aim of this paper is to use Zizek’s ideas on ideology and Foucalt’s work on discourse to unpack some of the main arguments the movie makes about capitalism. I begin by discussing the film’s central commentary on capitalist tenets and move onto the film’s use of “unspoken” or “unassimilable” statements. I close with a brief discussion on the symbolic significance of …

Butts, Blood, And Bombs: The American Occupation’S Effect On Japanese Cinema, Dan Geary

Cinesthesia

An in depth examination of the effects that the American Occupation of Japan after the end of the second World War had on Japanese cinema, both in terms of artistic output and restrictions within the industry itself.

Eighth Grade: Found Footage And Found Story, Kaleb A. Liermann

Cinesthesia

An in-depth examination of Eighth Grade's (Burhnam, 2017) relationships with the concept of Kracauer's Found Story and the Found Footage subgenre.

All That Is Necessary, Jes Martinez

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

Based on Real Events & the New York Times article "Rohingya Recount Atrocities: 'They Threw My Baby Into a Fire'" by Jeffrey Gettleman (Oct. 11, 2017)

Edmund Burke has been attributed the saying, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” I am in my second draft of a screenplay exploring the tangled web of factors which led to the ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya Muslims, a minority group in Myanmar, which began in late 2016. Suu Kyi and her administration deny its occurrence.

A tumultuous history of empires, invasions, and …

A Change In Theatre, Ben Friedman

Cinesthesia

A look at the evolution of war cinema in the United States from the days Classical Hollywood through final years of the New American Cinema.

Outperformed: Exploration And Comparison Of The Tongue-And-Cheek Tragedies Of Women-Animal Relationships In Selected Short Stories By Samanta Schweblin And In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’S Film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Sawnie Smith

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

The unsettling short stories that comprise Samanta Schweblin’s 2008 collection Pájaros en la boca are textured and populated by the flesh of not only humans, but also the skins of species that belong to a wider zoological and mythical scope. Those creatures in Schweblin’s literary output who possess scales, feathers, and wings find themselves variously rubbing up against, crushed under, and orally engulfed by human dermis. This essay seeks to explore the charge of gender politics that courses through interactions between human women and (demi-) animals in two short stories from this collection: “El hombre sirena” and “Olingiris”—animal contact with …

El Quijote En Alcalá De Henares: Graffiti, Arte Urbano Y Autorrepresentación, Juan Fernandez Cantero

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

En el presente trabajo se realizará un estudio de los procesos culturales existentes en la ciudad de Alcalá de Henares en la actualidad a través del arte urbano. Concretamente, se analizarán las representaciones del Quijote, personaje universal de Miguel de Cervantes, en el casco antiguo y en los barrios periféricos de la urbe. Se demostrará cómo la figura del Quijote es un medio para la autorrepresentación de la ciudad. Más allá de las decisiones políticas sobre el arte urbano en el centro histórico de la ciudad, se verá cómo la iconografía del Quijote se consolida como un elemento cohesivo para …

The “Science” Of Story Structure, Diana Witt

Virginias Collegiate Honors Council Conference

Stories are immensely human. They help us learn and understand cultural and social contexts. The stories that we tell, see, and read have profound effects on our ideas and emotions, causing us to have visceral reactions. Stories are truly at the crux of how people relate to each other. In this talk, I will explore the necessary elements of stories and why they are effective. Storytellers across all mediums build plot and characters to make an audience care and draw them in. Authors and screenwriters have theorized about the main structures into which all stories fall. In modern media, story …

Remixing The Archives: Indigenous Interpretations Of History And The Future, Marcella Alexis Ernest

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines how Native art makes critical interventions that are aesthetically and intellectually arranged with the intention of displacing the master narratives. The project tracks how film and photography—historically used by non-Native people as a tool of colonialism—are being reclaimed by the visual and sonic scholarship of contemporary Native artists. The project shows how multidisciplinary artists use technology to remix audiovisual archives from a specific time in American history: portrait photography and ethnographic filmmaking at the turn of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s frontier representations of Indianness in twentieth-century motion pictures, social guidance classroom films from the 1950s, and digital …

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

Night Of The Witch: Alternative Spirituality, Identity And Media, Andreana Tarleton

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis works to understand the relationships witches and conjurors have with the film and television depictions of them. Employing the method of film critique, I argue that the witch stands as a cultural symbol in the US of women and femmes with power, and that their stories serve as lessons to these populations about what it means to be an acceptable woman or femme, while simultaneously creating and perpetuating stereotypes of magic practitioners. Then, using the combination of hashtag ethnography, in-person and video interviewing and internet surveys, I argue that #witchblr and #witchesofcolor, as well as the space of …

Lost Without A Connection: Analyzing Netflix's Maniac In The Digital Streaming Age, Eric Bruce

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the emergence and rise in popularity of streaming services such as Netflix or Hulu, the way in which audiences view and interact with media, as well as each other, has changed drastically. The move to digital streaming impacts how audiences everywhere experience and expect immediacy in media, connecting deeper with what they watch. Along with this transition in spectatorship comes a shift in visual aesthetics, a trend that can be seen across various digitally-streamed series. This thesis serves to address what this transition is and how it affects the cultural landscape of the digital age, continuing the conversation of …

Wait ‘Til You See It From The Back: Twerking As An Expression Of Sexual Agency, Mariah M. Johnson

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper attempts to examine racism, respectability politics, and its relation to twerking. With the use of research by Gilbert Herdt, Stanley Cohen, Marshall McLuhan, Dr. Tamura Lomax, Patricia Hill-Collins, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and many others to put the use of Black women as modern day folk devils into perspective.

Trigger Warning: Racism, Sexual Assault

Discussion Questions For Buying Reality: Political Ads, Money, And Local Television News, Danilo Yanich

Cinema & Media Studies

These discussion questions accompany Buying Reality: Political Ads, Money, and Local Television News.

Shuttling Between Image And Text : A Study On Bilingual Intertitles In Chinese Films, 1922-1931, Chen Wang

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

Almost all extant Chinese film before 1932 were equipped with both English and Chinese intertitles. Who were the writers of intertitles? What traits characterized them? How did intertitles relate to images? Did they simply repeat information provided in images or did they underscore certain messages? Alternatively, did intertitles add new meanings to moving images? Did English intertitles help foreign spectators gain a better understanding of the stories?

To answer these questions, this study investigates the bilingual intertitles in Chinese films from 1922 to 1931 by emphasizing how intertitles and their interactions with images direct spectators’ engagement with and perception of …

Appropriating The Comanche: Hell Or High Water And The New Southwest, Douglas E. Green

Faculty Authored Articles

Hell or High Water (2016) takes the elegiac mode – the wistful lament for the myth of the Old West – and recasts it as a raucous country song on the dismantling of that myth by twenty-first-century capitalism. In the wake of the Great Recession, director David Mackenzie and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan pair off two iconic sets of Western characters: a couple of down-and-out bank-robbing brothers shadowed by an old, White Texas Ranger and his American-Indian/Mex- ican-American deputy. The values of the lawmen and the outlaw brothers are not mutually exclusive – each pair shares more with the other than …

Settler Colonial Disease And Dis-Ease In August: Osage County, M. Elise Marubbio

Faculty Authored Articles

Tracy Letts’s screenplay, August: Osage County (2013), and John Wells’s film adaptation (2013) offer a compelling critique of American racism towards Native Americans which demands that viewers consider their own inculcation into ongoing settler-nation colonialism. The film layers the history of place (Oklahoma) with the Cheyenne character Johnna, whose Indigenous heritage is negotiated throughout by liberal academics, conservative rural matriarchs, and Johnna herself. The role is small but essential to the film’s allegorical analysis of settler-colonialism and racism. The Weston family’s secrets, addictions, and dysfunction starkly contrast with Johnna’s health and stability. Through Johnna, the film questions the toll colonialism …

Degeneration Of Settler Colonialism In Contemporary Cinematic Depictions Of The U.S. West: Introduction, M. Elise Marubbio, Marek Paryż, Matthew Carter

Faculty Authored Articles

The settler’s situation is underpinned by the fear of having been caught in a process of endless transition, hence the determination to define the parameters of collective sovereignty and to establish a satisfactory existential basis. The sense of uncertainty that underlies the settler’s situation accounts for the necessity of developing power structures that sustain the settler collective’s striving to complete its design, and this triggers a range of conflicts. Repeatedly addressing the eponymous region’s legacy of settler colonialism, film depictions of the American West re-inscribe oppression of racial minorities, sexual abuse, and class exploitation in order to validate the foundational …

Old Man Young Man Snake, Bradley Hathaway

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

A young man in rural and frigid North Dakota is on the run for committing a crime. He finds refuge at a secluded bible camp from a mysterious old man that may or may not have his best interests in mind, and the young man must decide if the old man’s protection is worth the cost. Exploring ideas of free will, God, nature, and visions, Old Man Young Man Snake, a screenplay, quietly tells their story.

Diasporic Communion And Textual Exchange In Beyoncé’S Lemonade And Julie Dash’S Daughters Of The Dust, Jamie Ann Rogers

Publications

No abstract provided.

Drawing Under Construction, Nathalie V. Alfonso

Art Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

The thesis, Drawing Under Construction navigates notions of invisible labor, repetition, and endurance. I explore aspects of labor and movement through the use of drawing, installation, performance, and video. Unseen work, an exercise of emotional control, is central to this investigation, transforming notions of invisibility and visibility into tools to explore three concepts; "Unfolding the Line,", "The Line Under Construction," and "Locating the Line." It is through these three areas of study that I further analyze “my hand” versus “the universal hand” and “my body” versus “the universal body” and create a system where my body and work live …

The Exchange Happens Here: Net Art's Alternative Currencies, April Riddle

Art History Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three installation pieces from the New Museum and Rhizome’s 2019 exhibition “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics.” Throughout, I question if net art can act as an alternative currency itself, if different projects can interfere with existing economic systems, and, if so, what they can reveal about changing economic structures.

Ultimately, I explore how Cory Arcangel’s Arcangel Surfware, a lifestyle brand offering products for web-surfing, is representative of works that play with accessibility and inaccessibility and alternative patronage systems in relation to social currency; how Shu Lea Cheang’s Garlic=Rich Air, a browser-based and physical garlic …

Living Stillness, Nunzio Paci

Artists-in-Residence Programme : Exhibition Catalogues

The artist-in-residence in the Fall of 2019-2020 was Mr Nunzio Paci, an Italian artist whose paintings and drawings bring out unexpected connections between human or animal anatomy on the one hand, and plants and flowers on the other hand. The intertwining of the human form with other natural forms is a motif in Art Nouveau art, but Paci’s drawing style seems to owe more to Renaissance anatomical and botanical drawings such as Leonardo da Vinci’s.

Moreover, like Leonardo, Paci relies on close observation, for example, of anatomical wax models and even genuine human corpses. In other words, he draws from …

Entertainment Media Perceptions Of Minorities In Young Adult Adaptations, Kynnadie Bennett

Honors College Theses

This is an exploration of stereotypical and racist portrayals of minorities, specifically African-American, Latinx, and Native American communities, in film and television in the past and how that has affected representation in film adaptations of young adult literature. Young adult literature is one of the highest-selling genres in literature, purchased by both young adults and actual adults. In recent years, young adult literature has been adapted into film and television series and while representation has improved since the early years of entertainment history, there are still problems in the industry: many of the stereotypes remain, some minorities lack representation, and …

The Art Of The Game: Issues In Adapting Video Games, Sydney K. Baty

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

On the face of things, movies and video games are similar mediums. Both engage extensively in visuals and audio, both can indulge in speculative fiction, and there is a healthy amount of sharing of inspiration and content. However, this does not guarantee successful adaptations from one form to another. Movies adapted from video games are notorious for being simply terrible, but little academic attention has been paid as to why these adaptations in particular seem so unsuccessful in every way, from audience reception, critical response, and monetary returns. This issue is based on fundamental differences in the medium. Games are, …

A Friend Of Robyn, Megan Fay Raveneau

LMU Theses and Dissertations

An arrogant, but brilliant pediatric psychiatrist accidentally exorcises a demon from a young girl during an experimental procedure – only to discover she wants her demon back.

Subversive Christian Allegory In In The Heat Of The Night (1967), Geert Heetebrij

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Censorship And Banned Books From A Christian Perspective, Sarah D. Jenkins

Selected Honors Theses

Removing material due to controversial content has been a common practice for much of recorded history. This action is often done in concern for the psychological and emotional well-being of viewers, especially if these viewers include children. However, this does not necessarily mean this practice is always warranted. Many researchers have studied this topic as well as its effects, expanses, and connections to religion. Research shows that exposure to certain material can potentially cause changed behavior in individuals who do not possess the maturity needed to process them effectively. Individuals who are more mature or emotionally stable show no lasting …

“Un-American” Hollywood: Politics And Film In The Blacklist Era, Natalie Jarosz

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

This is a review of “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, a 2007 volume edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield. It argues that the American Left was involved with creating films of true significance in the Hollywood system, in the context of post-war House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) blacklisting. There is also an examination of the Popular Front between liberals and communists before post-war tensions drew them further apart. There is a chapter about the “new” and “old” waves of the left in the context of 1960s and 1970s American cinema. …