Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Film Finance: Teaching/Research, Collaborative Project

Dyson College- Seidenberg School of CSIS : Collaborative Projects and Presentations

This entry adheres to the use of the quad chart template to provide a succinct description only of the current research project undertaken by the participants. It provides for the following information

1. Participants and Affiliations
2. Overall Project Goals
3. Illustrative picture
4. Specific research/artistic/pedagogic foci

The Spirit Of Stuff: What I Learned When I Sold (Almost) Everything, Rachel Tamsen Perry Schrank

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following document is a report submitted in conjunction with a video project. The video is a personal documentary, filmed in Denver, Colorado and Mexico City, Mexico, which explores the spiritual connection that people have with their material objects. The report is comprised of a project proposal and a post-production report. The proposal discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the project, and offers a plan for the film's production. The post-production report discusses my filmmaking process in retrospect, reviews production problems and solutions, and includes a final schedule and budget.

Please visit my website at http://www.upupintothesky.com, or contact the author at …

German Film And The Frankfurt School (Spring 2009), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

This course is an introduction to German cinema. We will study masterpieces of German film, important critical and theoretical discussions of them, and the contexts in which they were produced and received. As a critical lens, we will rely heavily on psychoanalytic and Frankfurt School criticism, focusing on writings by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno. By the end of the semester, students should know the history of German film, have a better understanding of German culture, and have developed a critical understanding that is useful for their appreciation of all cinematic form.

A photo of this Spring 2009 …

The Orphan As Mirror: Postmodern Alienation And Societal Crisis In Japanese Film, Leann Wolley

Global Tides

This paper discusses the cultural significance of orphans in the post-modern media, using as a case study two Japanese films: Grave of the Fireflies and Nobody Knows. Through comparing the films and examining their approach to the orphan storytelling this paper attempts to gain insight into post-modern Japanese attitudes about social issues. By analyzing the appeal of the films to Japanese and international audiences, it also attempts to explain their popularity by drawing parallels between the main characters of each motion picture and the average postmodern citizen.

Professors On Film: Is Perception Reality? Study Of American Comedic Film Treatment Of University Faculty From 1925 To 1951, Brian A. Thomas

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Pugnacité Et Pouvoir: La Représentation Des Femmes Dans Les Fi Lms D’Ousmane Sembène, Sheila Petty

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

As a pioneer of African fi lmmaking, Ousmane Sembène has demonstrated a remarkable dedication to exploring the importance of women in African society. From the struggle against colonial oppression by Diouana in La Noire de… (1966) at the beginning of his career, to the character of Kiné and her struggle to build a life for her children in postcolonial Senegal in Faat Kiné (2000), Sembène has portrayed African women as agents of change and courage in their societies. This essay explores women’s representations in two fi lms from Sembène’s oeuvre, including Black Girl (1966) and Faat Kine (2000). Using narrative …

Cowboys And Shoguns: The American Western, Japanese Jidaigeki, And Cross-Cultural Exchange, Kyle Keough

Senior Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

What Documentary Films Teach Us About The Criminal Justice System - Introduction, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

Film . . . has been used effectively to shape public perceptions about the criminal justice system. . . . [and] the documentary form has power to convict or release a defendant, as well as to disclose the positive and negative aspects of the criminal justice system. . . . Three articles on this subject appear in this issue of the UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND LAW JOURNAL OF RACE, RELIGION, GENDER AND CLASS and add to this body of scholarship. . . .Our goal was to foster a series of dialogues among and between a number of individuals: filmmakers....

Baker:The Making Of An Independent Thriller, Laura Lopez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Baker is an independently financed low budget film that examines the ambiguous nature of compassion in the day-to-day life of hospice care personnel. The creation of the film entailed three stages: pre-production, production and post-production in which numerous artistic, financial and logistic challenges arose and threatened the completion of the picture. The complex nature of the subject matter required particular attention to the structure of the script. The budgetary restrictions enforced a minimalist approach to locations as well as other creative considerations such as the size of the cast and period setting. The shooting location dictated the framework of the …

The Development Of Loop-Based Cinematic Techniques In Twentieth Century Motion Pictures And Their Application In Early Digital C, David Scoma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For centuries, repetition in one form or another has been seen as a significant element in the artistic palette. In numerous formats of expression, duplication and looping became a significant tool utilized by artisans in a multitude of creative formats. Yet within the realm of film, the Griffith and Eisenstein models of cinematic editing techniques (as the most popular-- and near-monolithic--narrative aesthetic criteria) effectively disregarded most other approaches, including looping. Despite the evidence for the consistent use of repetition and looping in multiple ways throughout the course of cinematic history, some theorists and practitioners maintain that the influx of the …

The Attic Door: A Feature Length Motion Picture, Daniel Daneau

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

THE ATTIC DOOR is the feature-length film co-written and directed by Danny Daneau while pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Central Florida. Many challenges had to be met to produce a feature-length motion picture utilizing digital technology on an ultra-low budget as part of a graduate education. Beyond gaining a profound understanding of the physical, financial, and emotional strength it takes to complete a feature-length motion picture, Daneau experienced the creative challenges that all filmmakers must meet when applying the principles of filmmaking theory to an actual work of self-expression. The production process for an original …

Hope For A Thorn: The Making Of A Microbudget Digital Feature Film, Leslie Kitzinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper provides a look at the making of a microbudget feature film. It seeks to explain my growth as a filmmaker and an artist, through the challenges, both narrative and practical, that I encountered, as well as provide documentation following the process. Hope for a Thorn: The Making of a Microbudget Digital Feature Film includes elements from each phase of filmmaking, from script and preproduction to the marketing plan. This document shows the tremendous amount of preparation and planning that goes into the making of a microbudget digital feature film.

Gutter King, Keith Morris

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gutter King had a threefold purpose: to create a feature film using limited resources, to make the film bridge the gap between a defined artistic aesthetic and its broader distribution goals, and to make the film entertaining to its target market of 14-24 year old males. The methods used: exploiting new digital technology, using a limited workforce (crew), and implementing a planned improvisational structure.

Bent Familia De Nouri Bouzid : Enjeux De L’Amitié, De La Clairvoyance Féminine Et Du Questionnement, Hélène Tissières

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Bent Familia by the Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid breaks down silences by questioning norms and power structures, including patriarchal authority. Centered on an exceptional friendship between three women and examining their preoccupations as well as their needs, the film reveals the empowering forces of sharing, insightfulness and engagement. Through the character of Aïda and the intertwinement of arts – in particular music and painting – the film dismantles absolutes and illusions. It encourages deep questioning in order to trace new paths, valuing the clear-sighted contributions of women in a continuously changing society.

Filming Eugenics: Teaching The History Of Eugenics Through Film, Melissa Ooten, Sarah Trembanis

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

In teaching eugenics to undergraduate students and general public audiences, film should be considered as a provocative and fruitful medium that can generate important discussions about the intersections among eugenics, gender, class, race, and sexuality. This paper considers the use of two films, A Bill of Divorcement and The Lynchburg Story, as pedagogical tools for the history of eugenics. The authors provide background information on the films and suggestions for using the films to foster an active engagement with the historical eugenics movement.

Lasser Voir: Experimental Film Revealing The Dichotomy Of The Mind, Valerie Kitchin

Senior Honors Projects

Lasser voir is a French term meaning to show; to allow to be seen. The film is meant to interpret the internal genesis from dual perspectives. Absolute Good and absolute Evil coexist fighting each other eternally. The challenge is to create a vision of the form of good and the form of evil, thus showing the interior and exterior struggle between the two. Good and Evil appear as the same individual: each opposing one another in ethereal battle through the channel of artistic interpretation. The concept originates from the writhing movement within the mind. It cannot live without Good, but …

Filming Theater: The Audiovisual Documentation As A Substitute Of The Performance, Nestor Fernando Bravo

Theses and Dissertations

Theatre is not a thermometer of society; it is the fever. The archive is the aftermath that recalls that fever. In this thesis I theorize about the status of audiovisual documentation, its functionality, and its ontological relation with the performance. I argue that the film of a performance does not constitute evidence per se, but it acquires such status through the concurrence of other documents and archival artifacts existentially related to the theatrical production. I also propose that the audiovisual document becomes a substitute for the performance when it has disappeared from the historical world, becoming the new referent for …

Frankenstein: Man Or Monster?, Leigh P. Mackintosh

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Since its first publication in 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein has left a lasting impression upon the world speaking to a multitude of audiences including artists, scientists, philosophers, and society as a whole. Considering the impact of Frankenstein through its evolution as a cultural myth in various plays and films, this thesis will provide a way to gauge the relevance of Shelley’s story as an adaptation. Only by knowing what has been done in the past and how the materials have been used by other playwrights and screenwriters can one understand how to handle them as an original work. The …

The Body Of The Terrorist In Contemporary Cinema, Robert Duggan, Páraic Finnerty

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This article will explore the presentation of the body of the terrorist in a range of British and American films with a particular emphasis on how these films combine political and romantic plotlines. As part of a broad consideration of how the terrorist is presented, this essay will concentrate in particular on Cal (1984), The Crying Game (1992), The Dancer Upstairs (2002) and The Quiet American (2002). Rather than fully engage with the more complex discourse of politics, often these films ask audiences to conceptualize the transgressive figure of the terrorist through the very familiar vocabulary of love and sexual …

Filmed Architecture: The Nature Of Vision, Theodore C. Grothe

Architecture Thesis Prep

"By researching the methods, technologies, theories, and criticism of motion film, one can begin to gain an understanding of these phenomena. Tha language of film becomes apparent, and can then be used in architectural discourse.

How can these methods and techniques begin to translate into the discipline of architecture? What can the discipline gain from them In what capacity can we begin to augment their affects on our perception of architecture, form, reality, and space?"

Too Many Options Dilute Shared Experience, David E. Drew, Hedley Burrell

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Despite the red carpet glitter of the Oscars, it is no secret that Hollywood has had a far from perfect year at the box office.

And unfortunately for Tinsel Town, its problems go beyond the obvious need for more successful films.

The way we experience both movies and television has evolved. We don't do things together the way we once did. We rent movies and watch them at home rather than going to a local movie theater with family and friends. Box office returns suffer and the centrality of film in our lives is weakened.

The same fragmentation is true …

Film And Television After 9/11 [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

One of the necessary compromises a book such as Film and TV After 9/11 must make is the amount and variety of examples it can provide. In order to be the first book to cover the subject, the book sacrifices the types of materials covered and the variety of themes they depict. Although the editor, Wheeler Winston Dixon, does not do so, the book’s twelve essays slot into four basic categories: analogies, productions altered to suit the "post-9/11" mindset, post-9/11 productions with metaphorical rather than literal linkages to the event and pre-9/11 productions whose viewing must now take that day …

Allusion As Form: The Waste Land And Moulin Rouge!, Stacy Magedanz

Library Faculty Publications & Presentations

Allusion is usually considered a literary technique, but relatively little attention has been paid to the notion of allusion as a literary form. In this essay, I attempt to describe the allusive form based on two prominent examples, T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! Though radically different, the two works embody distinguishing characteristics of the allusive form. These are intertextuality, or a dependence upon outside sources for sense and significance; heightened and self-conscious artificiality; a confrontational attitude toward the audience; elitism, based on the exclusivity of allusions; appropriation of multiple cultures; and pervasive anachronism. Though prone …

Entre Intertextualité Et Réécriture, Alexie Tcheuyap

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Aesthetic practices have become more and more diversified in contemporary cultures. Although rewritings and adaptations are most common from literature to film, from myth/epic to novels, African filmmakers have recently been inaugurating novelization, that is the literary rewriting of a film. This essay examines the case of the Algerian filmmaker Merzac Allouache, who has written Bab el-Oued City, based on his film Bab el-Oued, in order to escape the technical and practical limitations of cinema. In doing so, he best expresses the challenges of contemporary Algeria, which is permanently threatened by violence and Islamic fundamentalism.

Désir Et Impuissance Dans Halfaouine Et Bye-Bye, Scott Homler

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The experience of adolescence and the trials of Arab and Beur masculinity are explored in the films of Férid Boughédir and Karim Dridi in order to reveal the psychology and the politics of masculinity in evolution. Studying two films, Halfaouine and Bye-Bye, as well as the autobiography of Abdelkébir Khatibi entitled La mémoire tatouée, we see that they reflect a number of discursive stages of an emergent identity of protest that is based on flight and self-destruction.

Out Of The Blue: Re-Evaluating Electra-Glide In Blue, William Blick

Publications and Research

The 1970s was a time of moral ambiguity for the cinema. The cult- favorite, Electra Glide in Blue demonstrates the polarization of ideologies in America at the time. In this film, there are several conflicting views of the Vietnam War, "Hippies", drugs, conservatism, communes, and the mistrust of authority that made up a zeitgeist of the time. This short article defines the film as a examination of the ambiguity of the 1970s.

Images And Voices From The Cumberland Mountains: Surface Coal Mining And The Evolution Of Appalshop's Documentary Activism., Katherine Elisabeth Schram

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the early 1970s, Appalshop, a regional film workshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, has been examining social, economic, and environmental issues important to the people of Appalachia. Appalshop’s goal has always been to give a voice to a community that is often stereotyped and misunderstood by the media. Since its creation, Appalshop has devoted ample attention to the practice of surface mining, its potential consequences to the region, and most importantly, local opposition to the practice. While Appalshop’s early surface mining documentaries are focused on educating the general public about the issue, its later documentaries appeal to viewers’ emotions and develop …

Capturing The Dance: Producing The Live Dance Performance Of '128' For Video, James E. Clements

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

This paper is a companion to the video presentation of Shari and Ben Schwendener’s dance suite, “128” and a reflection of the production processes involved in capturing the live performance. I have used the three production phases, pre-production, production and post-production, to organize my paper. My style is narrative with diary-like sections added to give the sequential order of events the importance they deserve. This paper is not a “how-to” manual for this type of television production; it is a guide through the complicated decision making processes involved in this type of creative endeavor. It is my desire to have …

A Conversation With Todd Solondz: "My Movies Aren't For Everybody", 2005, Todd Solondz, Ronald Falzone

Conversation With...

March 21, film director Todd Solondz spoke at Columbia College Chicago as an artist in the Visiting Director Program of the Directing Concentration, Film and Video Department, Columbia College Chicago. This program was co-sponsored by the Chicago International Film Festival. Ron Falzone served as moderator and editor of this work. 33 pages.

Women And Power In Hollywood: Comparing The Female Position Of Power In The Film Industry In The 1920s & 1970s, Caitlin Mcfarland

Whittier Scholars Program

This project is a research paper on the history of women in the film industry. The author begins by pointing out that women have established narrative film, started the first American studios and tried inventive new camera angles among other accomplishments that are not talked about. During the early 1990s, women were in the center of the film industry and well represented. The return of men from the war, socio-economic status, the creation of the Code of Decency, and more sophisticated technology were some of the theories as to why women became marginalized in the industry. The paper then discusses …