Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Nick Fury, Will Smith, And Other Black Authority Figures Breaking The Racial Contract In Popular Films Of 2000-2015, Solai N. Wyman

Master's Theses

Film is arguably a model of reflection and reinforcement of cultural, social, and political values of audience members. Therefore, the images and messages displayed in films are of importance. In this study, film is analyzed in order to determine if Charles Mills’ racial contract is depicted in popular films of 2000-2015. The Racial Contract (1997) suggests that only some people, specifically white people, agree to form a state in which their absolute privileges in the political, economic, and social arenas are guaranteed by virtue of being white. This theory was used to understand the role of black people in American …

Immigrant Stories: Exploring The Conflicts That A Filmmaker Must Face In A Documentary, Berenice Saez Briceno

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study attempts to address the personal conflicts that a filmmaker must face in the making of a documentary. It contrasts definitions and theories with the experience of producing the documentary entitled Immigrant Stories and the ethical implications of making it. To conclude, it summarizes the results of the study as final thoughts.

Tuesday In Winter Valley, Nicholas Redding

Honors Projects

Tuesday in Winter Valley is a short student film about a difficult day in the life of a college transgender woman and how she stands up for herself. The film was shot in the Spring 2017 semester and its anticipated premiere is the Fall of 2017. Tuesday is an entirely student-run production with help from the BGSU Department of Theatre and Film.

The Portrayal Of Child Soldiers In Documentaries And Hollywood Film, Jessica Tassava

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

People in the United States are becoming increasingly mindful of child soldiers, with film being a critical means of bringing about awareness. However, awareness can be dependent upon media representation since most individuals in the U.S. do not have direct experiences with child soldiers. The purpose of the present study is to discover how the media has portrayed child soldiers in Hollywood films and documentaries, with an emphasis on the portrayal of violence, the role of women, and the reintegration experiences of child soldiers that are shown. Through a combined qualitative and quantitative content analysis, this study explores the depictions …

Homosociality In Michael Radford’S "The Merchant Of Venice", Eric A. Pitz

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

Understanding Loss Of Self In "My Beautiful Broken Brain", Erika P. Collin

Cinesthesia

No abstract provided.

The Value Of Parental Co-Viewing On Children And Families, Alison Work

Cinesthesia

When we think back to movie watching in the sixties, we typically picture a family sitting around the television and experiencing the film together. Nowadays, it is common for parents to put on a movie for their child to watch while they focus on other tasks. In our modern, fast paced environment, with movies available to stream at all times, the act of watching a movie as a family has become increasingly rare, and there has been a lack of parental monitoring of media. Consequently, films are not being utilized to their full potential. Films can have a tremendous impact …

To Kill A Mockingbird, The Help, And The Regendering Of The White Savior, Brett Seekford

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

Filmmakers continue to use the “White Savior “ archetype to construct racialized messages in the post-Civil Rights era. These protagonists, who resolutely defend the rights of African Americans, ultimately focalize whiteness and marginalize black characters and voices. Though a white savior features prominently in both To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The Help (2011), The Help’s regendering of the archetype invites viewers to imagine a world in which a white savior is no longer necessary. The Help’s update on the white savior trope from Atticus Finch to Skeeter Phelan allows for deeper development of black characters and a …

“To See My Home Before I Die”: The Trip To Bountiful, Memento Mori, And The Experience Of Death, Margaret Sullivan

Journal of Religion & Film

This article analyzes the portrayal of death in Peter Masterson’s 1985 film The Trip to Bountiful. My claim is that the experience of death, in the film, functions as a tool both for the elderly main character’s increased self-understanding and for her conscious, ethical action. I enter this discussion through an examination of late deconstruction’s ethical turn and the argument that aporetic unknowing, if experienced and endured, leads to the chance for real, authentic action. I then demonstrate how the film depicts such an aporetic encounter with death, and do so, in large part, by focusing on the film’s final …

Problem-Based Learning And Two Studies Of The Journal Of Religion And Film: Self-Sacrifice And Music, Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This article offers a case study for using problem-based learning (PBL) in a religion and film course. PBL is an open-ended, experiential approach to teaching, which requires students to engage with a real world problem in groups. While many university classes are based on a lecture format and variations of that format, PBL asks students to take greater ownership of their learning. The problem drives what students will learn, how they will learn it, and what they produce to assess that learning. Students in a fourth-year PBL class at the University of Toronto Mississauga were given the following problem: analyze …

Converging Horror: Analyzing The Importance Of Convergence Culture On A Digital Audience Through An Examination Of The Conventions And Politics Of The Horror Genre, Kelsey M. Fox

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

This thesis draws attention to the genre of horror in new media through a close examination of various digital texts, arguing that these new texts, while built on traditional horror narratives used in cinema, are also examples of Convergence Culture, a mobile, multiplatform, participatory medium that engages professionals and amateur content creators. The thesis begins with a review of scholarly work about horror as a genre, continues with a close analysis of several digital horror texts and their online communities, and ends with the argument that these new texts are good examples of how horror has accommodated Convergence culture, morphing …

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 …

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.

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 …

The Underrepresentation Of African Americans And The Role Of Casting Directors, Chantal Suhling

School of Communications Undergraduate Research

Films are cultural products, which reflect the existing ideologies in a culture. In the American culture the two dominant ideologies are white normativity and patriarchy. With the Oscars right around the corner, the world is anticipating this year's nominees and winners. Hopes are high that this year the Academy Award for best actor will go to someone who is diverse. If films are reconstructions of culture, then can we really expect to see change at the Oscars? Through thorough qualitative research and interviews with industry professionals, a detailed picture of the role of casting directors in the casting process for …

Foreign Film Localization: Japanese Film For American Audiences, Shannon Gerow

Whittier Scholars Program

This study looks at the effects of international marketing on movies and the localizing of films to appeal to the audience of specific cultures. The ‘bending’ of cultures aspects in film for the sake of clarity, appeal, or artistic liberty (particularly in translation) is what I analyzed in this paper. This paper will include the ways in which foreign aspects are rationalized and I will look at two specific cases. These cases include the two Japanese films, "Howls Moving Castle” and “A Letter to Momo". These movies are looked at in terms of their distinctly Japanese characteristics which are present …

Below The Neck, Above The Knees, Desiree Dawn Kapler

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis explores the act of violation in the context of trauma and healing through the use of personal narratives and experimental film. My research allows personal storytelling to transform into a larger and more universal theme of generational trauma and dysfunction. Through a feminist lens, I challenge social norms of body autonomy for the sick and abused, capitalism’s social effects on the poor, and passed down maternal lessons from the women who are doing the best that they can with the lives and opportunities that they have been given.

This work is created in spite of the labels my …

The Final Girl Grown Up: Representations Of Women In Horror Films From 1978-2016, Lauren Cupp

Scripps Senior Theses

Carol Clover defined a Final Girl as a stereotype of the pure, virginal sole survivor in 1980’s slasher films such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween. But does this representation hold up in 2016 films? Because the horror genre is so broad today, it’s almost impossible to nail down a certain stereotype of the genre, if there even is one. Films like the 1996 slasher parody Scream historically subverted the slasher genre, and since then there has been little to no iconic Final Girls. I argue that this trope is one very much set inside the confines of the 1980’s …

The Emergence Of The Feminist Fatale In American Film Noir, Anne Dennon

All Master's Theses

The femme fatale, a quasi-eternal figure of female transgression and retributory violence, has gradually entered popular culture’s symbolic lexicon as representative of mainstream feminism and postmodern femininity. Tracing the development of the femme fatale into a feminist pop culture icon necessitates establishing her sociopolitical status in the late modern era through her presence in Victorian sensational literature. The femme’s translation from the Victorian context to the American mediascape presages her evolving presence in three cinematic eras: classic film noir, neo-conservative retro noir, and millennial neo-noir. Feminist film criticism tends to identify the femme fatale as a protofeminist, a productive transgressor …

Exploring Movie Construction & Production: What’S So Exciting About Movies?, John Reich

Milne Open Textbooks

Exploring Movie Construction & Production contains eight chapters of the major areas of film construction and production. The discussion covers theme, genre, narrative structure, character portrayal, story, plot, directing style, cinematography, and editing. Important terminology is defined and types of analysis are discussed and demonstrated. An extended example of how a movie description reflects the setting, narrative structure, or directing style is used throughout the book to illustrate building blocks of each theme. This approach to film instruction and analysis has proved beneficial to increasing students’ learning, while enhancing the creativity and critical thinking of the student.

Read this text …

"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 …

"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.

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 Post Banishment Films Of Jafar Panahi, Christopher L. Inoa

Capstones

https://medium.com/@ChristopherInoa/the-post-banishment-films-of-jafar-panahi-b039b44c810b#.xcvqp7z07

“Down To The Last:” An Experiment In Comedy, Stunts, And Visual Effects, Margaret Ann Broach

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper will cover the creation of my thesis film, “Down to the Last,” from concept to completion, with a special focus on writing a dark comedy with a strong female lead, and the desire to incorporate visual effects and stunts to enhance the overall story. Details of how my crew and I decided to approach the challenges of my script and vision will be fleshed out along with solutions to problems we faced during preproduction, principle photography, and postproduction. The outcome of the project is a combination of minute deviations from my initial vision and a minimization of visual …

Images Of Sexually Deviant Women In French Film, Lara Fox

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This research explores representations of sexually deviant women in French film beginning with the New Wave film movement of the1960s and continuing to present day. This work examines the extent to which the gender of a film’s director affects the presentation of female nudity, infidelity, homosexuality, BDSM, and pornography onscreen. Through the lens of scholarly articles of film theorists and feminists such as Laura Mulvey, Simone de Beauvoir, and Hélène Cixous; and of both feministic and anti-feministic works of famous French directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Catherine Breillat, and Emmanuelle Bercot, this capstone work identifies filmic triumphs and failures of …

Lin-Manuel Meets Moana, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this article originally published in Public Books, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner wonders whether a Disney musical and a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical want the same thing.

People Power

SIGNED: The Magazine of The Hong Kong Design Institute

A good movie is never the work of just one person, but as Daisy Zhong discovered at a HKDI screening, the team behind the film Iron Sky expanded their collaborative effort to include anybody with an internet connection.

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

Architecture Thesis Prep

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 …