Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Levee, Keya Vance

LMU Theses and Dissertations

When his absent father comes back into his life with a cancer diagnosis, an arrogant star high school linebacker, hellbent on a college football scholarship, must choose between caring for his dying father and following his dream.

Popular Education Curriculum: An Abolitionist Pedagogy, Savannah Shepherd , '24

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

No abstract provided.

Mending Wounds: A Reparative Feminist Analysis Of The Japanese Film Series Guinea Pig, Mikayla Walker

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Guinea Pig (ギニーピッグ) is an anthology series of six body horror films created and released in Japan from 1985 to 1990, all connected by a common theme of bodily experimentation and destruction. The series has maintained a controversial legacy due to its portrayal of intense misogynistic violence. However, upon closer examination, the films reveal subtle moments of patriarchal critique when viewed as a cohesive unit. Using Cynthia Freeland’s framework for creating feminist readings of horror films and Eve Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading, this research aims to highlight those moments of subversion in order to create a more progressive feminist …

Clear Waters, Joseph Mueller

LMU Theses and Dissertations

While investigating the gruesome death of a marine biologist, a by-the-book biracial detective and a jaded Tribal officer uncover a conspiracy surrounding a sea cucumber poaching ring on the reservation. Inspired by actual events.

Mko, Simon Luedtke

LMU Theses and Dissertations

Seeking vengeance for his mother’s murder, a young Native man becomes corrupted by a pelt that turns him into a bear at night.

The Art Of The Pivot: A Collection Of Animation Techniques, Andrew Cook

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Art of the Pivot:

A Collection of Animation Techniques Abstract

As an artist, my work reflects my experiences, the world around me, and the stories of others. My artist statement is deeply rooted in the belief that my art is a conduit for expressing other's stories through myself. I've always aspired for my animation skills to transcend storytelling and to tell my own stories and those of others. My journey towards my thesis was not without its share of unexpected twists and turns. These challenges, though daunting, were an integral part of my growth. My thesis journey has been …

Smoke & Sons, Will Lebowitz

LMU Theses and Dissertations

A kindhearted sharpshooter and his father, a greedy wild west showman, conspire to rob Flagstaff’s first movie palace. But when the son falls for the owner’s daughter, more than just the heist goes awry.

Boat Dad, Scotty Villhard

LMU Theses and Dissertations

A divorced dad returns home to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter, but there’s one problem: she’s a serial killer who feeds tourists to the local lake monster.

The Tale Of Bunny, The Lamb, Keith Currivean Jr.

LMU Theses and Dissertations

When a lamb named Bunny sees a young boy beaten by the sheep farm’s caretaker, he goes on a killing spree to stop the abuse. But as the body count rises, he grows a taste for human blood and is forced to confront the violence he’s brought into the world or feed on the young boy – the last source of human blood on the farm.

Ang Mapanglasong Dagta Ng Homophobia: Pagsusuri Ng Kasarian At Pagnanasa Sa "Nagmahal Ako [Ng Bakla]" Ng Dagtang Lason (The Toxic Sap Of Homophobia: An Analysis Of Kabaklaan, Masculinity, And Desire In Dagtang Lason’S "Nagmahal Ako [Ng Bakla]"), Johann Vladimir Espiritu

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Gamit ang malapitang pagbabasa, sinusuri ng artikulong ito ang kantang “Nagmahal Ako [ng Bakla]” ng Dagtang Lason (2009) upang tunghayan ang pagkakahulugan nito sa kabaklaan. Isang seksyon ito ng higit na malawakang pag-aaral sa kabaklaan bilang karakter na nilalaman ng kantang bakla—o mga awit na nagmumula sa [personang] bakla, patungo sa [hantungang] bakla, o may pinatutungkulang [kuwento ng] bakla—nitong huling apat na dekada. Ang pagbasa/panunuri ay nakaangkla sa teoryang queer na kombinasyon ng samutsaring kritikang kapwa kanluranin at lokal, at nakatutok sa tatlong pangunahing salik: ang titik [o teksto, lyrics ng kanta], ang tinig [na kinakatawan ng literal na …

More Than Representation Heartstopper: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, Tracyann Josephine Harmer

Communication & Theatre Arts Theses

This thesis is a multimodal critical discourse analysis of Netflix’s Heartstopper, written with the goal of understanding its methods of representation and queer world creation. Through analysis of the ideology of heteronormativity as it relates to masculinity, internalized homophobia, homophobia, and mental health, I expand upon the significance of queer representation for queer audiences, heterosexual audiences, and producers of queer media. Through a nuanced analysis of these themes, I display how and why Heartstopper has had enormous success and expand upon the cultural phenomena surrounding this media. Finally, this thesis places these nuanced analyses into the real-world reaction to …

The Rust Belt Gothic: Charting The Affective Politics Of Deindustrialization And The Emergence Of A Great Lakes Horror Genre In Film, Micheal B. Raines

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Within the past decade, a string of notable horror films set within the Steel Belt has emerged. These works collectively invoke the specter of the ‘Rust Belt’ in their narratives: the industrial Midwest’s derelict urban and suburban sprawls in the wake of the economic decline and white flight of the USA’s once-mighty manufacturing sector. Scholarship has commented upon the subtext of these works individually but fails to observe their collective nature as an emergent subgenre in horror fiction, centered upon directly confronting the Steel Belt’s twentieth-century history of stagnation. In this paper, I examine films which share clear aesthetic and …

Zeros And Ones: Digital Video Aesthetics And Geopolitical Economy In Blackhat, Everett Barnett

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Film and media theory has been fundamentally altered by the advent of digital technology, both in terms of film production and broader aesthetic overtures but also in terms of greater digital mediation. Blackhat (Michael Mann, 2015), although not a commercial or critical success, articulates many of the exact circumstances and broader consequences of digital technology in relation to its digital video aesthetics but also its narratives content involving global telecommunication and data systems. As a wholly digital film, Blackhat is uniquely situated to speak not only developments in digital filmmaking but also, by way of its plot line involving stateless …

Virtual Production, Jonathan Mason

College of Communication & Creative Arts Departmental Research

Introductory slide of a slide presentation called “Virtual Production for ‘Indie’ Filmmaking.”

Unveiling Estrangement: The Ambivalence Of Iranian Cultural Identity In Documentary Films, Vahid Valikhani

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines estrangement within Iranian society as depicted in Iranian documentaries, which, I argue, regularly suppress the complexities of Iranian cultural identity. While Iranian narrative cinema has been studied in this context, documentaries have received less scholarly attention, despite their potential to illuminate the shortcomings of conceiving Iranian cultural identity. I examine three documentaries: Tehran Today (Ahmad Faroughi Ghajar, 1962), Newcomers (Kianoush Ayari, 1979) and Tehran Without Permission (Sepideh Farsi, 2009). Through this analysis, I uncover various forms of estrangement, including those induced by westernization, gender oppression, and the political control of what Hamid Naficy calls “mediawork.” Drawing on …

"We Are Bad Feminists!": Understanding Genre And Rhetoric In (Post)Feminist Dramedy Television, Cailin Rolph

All HCAS Student Capstones, Theses, and Dissertations

Centered on Lena Dunham’s Girls (2012) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (2016) this thesis examines the use of genre conventions in dramedy to facilitate feminist critiques of postfeminist ideals. In conducting a case study of feminist rhetoric present in the shows Girls and Fleabag, this thesis addresses a gap in genre studies concerning the social and political potency of the dramedy genre. The thesis utilizes rhetorical critique, through generic methods, to identify the specific techniques used by Dunham and Waller-Bridge. Through its analyses, this thesis argues that dramedy can uniquely operate as a work of social action and critique, using …

The Boundaries Of Melodramatic Film Music: Redefining Home Through The Score Of Douglas Sirk’S All That Heaven Allows, Meredith Donovan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I analyze the relationship between music and narrative in Douglas Sirk’s 1950 film All That Heaven Allows. Sirk’s melodramas are held in high regard by film scholarship, but their scores, especially those composed by Frank Skinner, are often dismissed as lazy or mere atmospheric mood assistance. I argue, however, that the score of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows builds protagonist Cary both a home—and a “home key”—through its tonal structure, rejecting a rigid boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic music as a whole by offering a fluid musical space to express the conflict between Cary’s emotional home and …

From Displacement To Intersubjectivity: A Phenomenology Of Sound In Classic Film Noir, Thomas Goodchild

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper analyzes the use of sounds displaced from their sources in classic filmsnoir. Noir is often understood as a dark and solipsistic moment in American cinema. Interpretations of noir frequently emphasize isolated individuals who are physically, psychologically, and socially displaced from their environments. Although scholarship on noir has examined this alienation through various sonic motifs such as music and voice-over, I investigate how several noirs draw attention to the act of listening through acousmatic sound—that is, sound heard without a visible source. Far from being an ephemeral auditory experience, I argue that the separation between sound and image invites …

Sauron: Weirdly Sexy, Robert T. Tally Jr.

Journal of Tolkien Research

A popular meme depict Galadriel and Frodo admitting that Sauron is "weirdly sexy," a humorous allusion to The Rings of Power’s Halbrand. The show's controversial revelation of Halbrand as Sauron highlights the differences between Tolkien’s construction of Second and Third Age Sauron as an attractive or admirable leader compared to Peter Jackson’s portrayal of him as a monster or disembodied fiery eyeball. This, in turn, has implications for the geopolitical order of Middle-earth in which many people legitimately might wish to be on Sauron’s side. Acknowledging Sauron's "sexiness" may allow us to see Tolkien's world system in a new …

Fim111.1 Screen Studies & Practice: Scene Analysis Example 1, Sae University College

Exemplars

This scene analysis was completed for 24T1 FIM111.

Grc: A Mustang Quest, Jackson T. Alexander

Graphic Communication

The main purpose of this study is to define the overall effectiveness of visual marketing through animation and storytelling narration. California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo has dozens of potential majors that interest students, thus leading to specific programs such as Graphic Communication (GRC) gaining fewer numbers compared to other College of Liberal Arts (CLA) fields. By analyzing what key elements are necessary for gaining outside attention and intrigue about a college program, I can better understand what information needs to be presented in my video project. This video will focus on defining what Graphic Communication is as a …

Trevor Paglen's Border Abstractions In The Age Of Machine Vision, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

Over the past two decades, machine vision and artificial intelligence (AI) have become integrated into many aspects of daily life, and with machines generating images for other machines, humans are no longer at the centre of the image world. To explore the implications of the age of machine vision, this article focuses on a selection of work by American artist Trevor Paglen made between 2008 and 2018. It examines the significance of the US-Mexico border region as a site of his investigations and the role of abstraction in repositioning machine vision within the human-centred visual language of art. The article …

Producing Digital Reflections Of Reality Through Intercultural Filmmaking And Multisensory Engagement, Trai Thomas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the author’s production of three intercultural, multisensory films situated in New Orleans, encompassing elements both narrative and documentary genres. Intercultural cinema exists in a setting where people of different cultural backgrounds live together in power-inflicted spaces of diaspora, colonialism, and cultural apartheid and the development of the story is centered around exoticism, fetishization, and fascination with the other (Marks 2007, 1). Multisensory media primarily engages through visual perception and auditory input, which create cultural knowledge stored as long-term memory files in the brain (Marks 2007).

Comic Legacies Of The Japanese Silver Screen, Aaron Gerow, Xavi Sawada, David Baasch, Eugene Kwon, Adam Silverman, Anna Tropnikova, Chloe Yan

Film Series Commentaries

Pamphlet created for the film series “Comic Legacies of the Japanese Silver Screen” presented at Yale University from February to April, 2024. Starting with an introduction outlining the history of Japanese film comedy, the pamphlet contains plot summaries and commentaries on the following films:

Buddhist Mass for Goemon Ishikawa (1930, Saitō Torajirō) Fighting Friends (1929, Ozu Yasujirō) Romantic and Crazy (1934, Yamamoto Kajirō) Singing Lovebirds (1939, Makino Masahiro) Akanishi Kakita (1936, Itami Mansaku) Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryō (1935, Yamanaka Sadao) Room for Rent (1959, Kawashima Yūzō) Doctor’s Day Off (1952, Shibuya Minoru) Oh, My Bomb! …

Trust Me: Film + Q&A; (February 22, 2024, 5:30 Pm, Sheldon Museum Of Art) [Poster], Sheldon Museum Of Art, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

Poster for Trust Me: Film + Q&A held February 22, 2024 at 5:30 PM at the Sheldon Museum of Art (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States).

Poster blurb:

In today's information landscape, how do you know whom--and what--you can trust? Watch the award-winning, feature-length documentary Trust Me, which explores how media technology is influencing society and what we can do about it.

A Q&A with Rosemary Smith, filmmaker and managing director of the non-partisan Getting Better Foundation, follows.

More information about the screening is available at https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/trust-me-documentary-to-screen-at-sheldon/.

More information about the film is available at https://www.trustmedocumentary.com/ …

Teaching Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai, Jack Ryan

Cinema & Media Studies Faculty Publications

This paper offers a method for students to connect with and study Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. This approach begins with the final credits, when director Jim Jarmusch’s “personal thanks” list appears onscreen: “Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Mary Shelley, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Seijun Suzuki, Jean-Pierre Melville, Miguel de Cervantes, Akira Kurosawa, and the Wu-Tang Clan.”

Presented at the Third Virtual Joint Conference of the Literature Film Association and the Association of Adaptation Studies (2024).

The Mini Syllabus: Locating And Engaging With Black Women In Popular Culture, Katrina Marie Overby

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Real #Hotgirl Sh*T: Practical Application Of Intersectional Re-Presentation Instruction, Jessica F. Love

Feminist Pedagogy

This critical commentary outlines how the Real #HotGirl Sh*T: Megan Thee Stallion & Mediated Hip Hop, Black Feminist and Communication Pedagogy promotes active learning via popular culture and digital media, and it provides a practical model for employing intersectionality in classroom settings. Previous critical media pedagogy exploring minority media re-presentation primarily focused on the effects of master narratives produced by traditional media. This syllabus's incorporation of social and digital media helps students understand how collective minority groups use and interact with media as a political tool to challenge re-presentational regimes. More importantly, this syllabus employs real-world examples of popular culture …

#Hotgirlsemestersyllabus, Katrina Marie Overby, Gheni Platenburg, Niya Pickett Miller

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

When Language Fails: A Critical Analysis Essay Of Kathryn Stockett’S The Help:, Evan Mccreary

Black Album Mixtape

A critical analysis essay of Kathryn Stockett's New York Times Bestselling book, The Help, and it's subsequent film adaptation, and how in recent years, particularly following the murder of George Floyd, the story has been used as a classroom tool for teaching students about racism and its effects. Written by a Black student in a primarily white school community, this essay was written as an antithesis to the ideology that the book and movie exceed their intended intentions of being a beneficial teaching tool to youth.