Film and Media Studies Commons^™

The Devil In The Details: Popular Demonology, Addiction And Criminology, Kyra Ann Martinez

Online Theses and Dissertations

Theories of diabolism have, since antiquity, made manifest societal fears of the unknown. Demonology, as discipline, flourished within the West accordingly; to function, at the inception of early modern science and during the "transition" to capitalism, as a device to translate alterity. At this juncture, theories of the demonic were occulted under scientific methodologies and institutionalized across the structures of modernity. "Evil", as discursive paradigm, was politically incarnated, canonized, and absorbed under the auspices of the state towards the consummation of socio-political "diabolic" enemies of society. In continuity with the past, "evil" continues to operate in the contemporary as a …

The Justified Lawman: Cowboy Killings In The Modern Era, Joel Franklin Harman

Online Theses and Dissertations

Stereotypes advanced by the popular media, do not necessarily have the power to directly determine an individual's ways of thinking, but do help frame and reinforce already existing cultural beliefs, particularly within the context of the seemingly innocuous narrative fictions of cable television. These narratives not only simplify complex ideas, but also can further entrench or justify harmful social relations. My contention here, is that the popular television program Justified does precisely this by normalizing police violence and the ways that the police underpin and reproduce profoundly disparate class and racialized social order. While in many ways a typical police …

The Institute Of New Feelings: Plastic Identities And Imperfect Surfaces, Weijian Zhou

Theses and Dissertations

Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities into …

Open / Close: Assimilating Immersive Spaces In Visual Communication, Anika Sarin

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in two spaces obverse to each other: open and closed. An open space develops organically based on how people inhabit it. Interacting with an open space is a dynamic, sporadic, multisensory, immersive, and subjective experience. In such spaces, we are confronted with an alternative aesthetic, one that is in conflict with the seamlessness of a closed space. A closed space is anchored on definite variables like structure, use and boundaries. While interaction between people and space is important, the space is tightly controlled and interaction is designed. Through this thesis project, I present a method that metaphorically …

Distant Electric Vision: Cultural Representations Of Television From “Edison’S Telephonoscope” To The Electronic Screen, Ivy Roberts

Theses and Dissertations

Do inventions that exist only on paper have less credibility than functional technologies? How has the meaning and significance of audiovisual media and technology changed over time? This dissertation examines historiography and methodology for media history, arguing for an interdisciplinary approach. It addresses methodological issues in media history—media in transition, media archaeology, and film history—through an examination of television’s speculative era. It tackles moving-image history through an historical investigation of Victorian and Machine age “television”.

Because the concept and terminology of “television” changed dramatically during this period, I use the phrases “distant electric vision” and “seeing by electricity,” to define …

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 …

Ji Sor (1997): Self-Realization Of Women In Cinema And In History, Tong (Hilary) Lin

CMC Senior Theses

100 years ago, there was a group of women called Zishunu who stood up against the whole society and swore off marriage for life. Zishu offered an escape for many women in the Pearl River Delta area. As forerunners in female independence and liberation, Zishunu never had the chance to be the spokesman of themselves or the recognition they deserved. Ji Sor (1997), a groundbreaking work in lesbian-themed movies, beautifully depicts this special and unparalleled historical phenomenon in detail. Released a few months after the Handover of Hong Kong in 1997, this critically acclaimed movie by Hong Kong New Wave …

(Re)Mediating The Spirit: Evangelical Christian Young Adult Media, Tamara Watkins

Theses and Dissertations

"We are in the world, but not of the world," a maxim frequently spoken in evangelical Christian culture, provides insight into how these individuals view their relationship with secular culture. They presume to share the same temporal plane with secular culture, but do not participate in it. In this dissertation, I explore whether the division between evangelical Christian culture and secular culture is as clear as this aphorism implies. To facilitate this investigation, I examine media Christian content creators created for an American evangelical Christian young adult audience in the early twenty-first century, specifically focusing on novel-length fiction, comics and …

Yi, Observational Documentary Aesthetics, And The Identity Politics Of Transcultural Migrancy, Jiacheng Xu 4159187

Theses and Dissertations

There is a moment in Edward Yang’s acclaimed film Yi Yi (2000) in which a young boy in a conversation with his father observes that he cannot see what his father sees and that his father cannot see what he sees, prompting two questions: “How can I know what you see?” and “Can we only know half of the truth?” Unable to provide adequate answers, his father instead offers his son a camera. Later in the film, the same boy presents his uncle with a picture he took of the back of his head. When asked why, the boy responds …

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 Monstrous Self: Negotiating The Boundary Of The Abject, Katya Yakubov

Theses and Dissertations

Through the lens of the horror film and the fairy tale, this thesis explores the notion of the grotesque as a boundary phenomenon—a negotiation of what is self and what is other. As such, it locates the function that the monstrous and the grotesque have in the formation of a personal and social identity. In asking why we take pleasure in the perverse, I explore how permutations of guilt, victimhood, and desire can be actively rewritten, in order to construct a stable sense of self.

83 Orange Peels, Klara Hammoud

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

83 ORANGE PEELS is a feature-length film written and directed by Klara Hammoud and produced by Biddayat as part of the requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema from the University of Central Florida. The project aims to challenge existing conventions of the documentary filmmaking on multiple levels – aesthetic, narrative, and technical– while also examining growing importance of workflow throughout all aspects of production. These challenges were both facilitated and necessitated by the limited resources available to the production team and the academic context of the production. This thesis is a record of the …

Digital Dissonance: Horror Cultures In The Age Of Convergent Technologies, Daniel Powell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first two decades of the new millennium have witnessed an abundance of change in the areas of textual production, digital communication, and our collective engagement with the Internet. This study explores these changes, which have yielded both positive and negative cultural and developmental outcomes, as products of digital dissonance. Dissonance is characterized by the disruptive consequences inherent in technology's incursion into the print publication cultures of the twentieth century, the explosion in social-media interaction that is changing the complexion of human contact, and our expanding reliance on the World Wide Web for negotiating commerce, culture, and communication. This study …

Dialectics Of Microbudget Cinema, Milos Ajdinovic

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Magic Kingdom is a feature-length, microbudget motion picture, produced, "written", directed, and edited by Milos Ajdinovic as a part of the University of Central Florida's Masters in Fine Arts program in Digital Entrepreneurial Cinema. Its narrative is a product of the collective improvisation between a group of collaborators – Chealsea Anagnoson, Henry Gibson, Mikaela Duffy and Marcus Nieves – moderated by Milos Ajdinovic. This written dissertation is an attempt to document the concepts and processes that surrounded the production of this film.

การศึกษาวิธีการแสดงในละครเวทีประสาทสัมผัสสำหรับผู้ชมวัยเด็กที่มีภาวะออทิซึม, ชนัตถ์ พงษ์พานิช

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

งานวิจัยชิ้นนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อวิเคราะห์และสังเคราะห์วิธีการแสดงของนักแสดงในละครเวทีประสาทสัมผัสที่เหมาะสมและสามารถเพิ่มปฏิสัมพันธ์เชิงบวกระหว่างผู้ชมวัยเด็กที่มีภาวะออทิซึมกับนักแสดงได้ เนื่องจากละครลักษณะนี้ยังไม่เคยมีผู้ใดพัฒนามาก่อนในประเทศไทย ผู้วิจัยจึงต้องออกแบบและคิดค้นกระบวนการนำเสนอละครเวทีประสาทสัมผัสก่อน จากนั้นจึงคิดค้น พัฒนาวิธีการแสดงในละครเวทีประสาทสัมผัสขึ้นโดยประยุกต์จากเทคนิคการแสดงแบบด้นสดและแนวทางการบำบัดรักษาแบบซันไรส์ ต่อจากนั้นได้นำวิธีการแสดงที่ได้ออกแบบขึ้นมาใช้ทดลองทำงานกับนักแสดง-กระบวนกร 4 คน จัดแสดงจริงกับผู้ชมกลุ่มตัวอย่างที่มีภาวะออทิซึมจำนวน 10 คน ช่วงอายุ 4 – 18 ปี ละครเวทีประสาทสัมผัสในงานวิจัยชิ้นนี้ชื่อว่า "สวนมีสุข" เป็นละครที่ออกแบบให้ผู้ชมที่มีภาวะออทิซึมมีส่วนร่วมในการทำกิจกรรมที่สัมพันธ์กับเรื่องราวและตัวละครในจินตนาการ บทที่ใช้ในการแสดงดัดแปลงมาจากนิทานภาพเรื่องกบแฮรี่ผู้หิวโหย ประกอบกับการเลือกใช้กิจกรรมละครสร้างสรรค์สำหรับเด็ก ผู้วิจัยได้ปรับเปลี่ยนพื้นที่การแสดงให้เป็นสวนเล็กๆที่มีอยู่ในนิทานภาพ ผู้วิจัยได้สร้างเงื่อนไขและจัดลำดับกิจกรรมให้ผู้ชมกลุ่มตัวอย่างได้ปฏิบัติ เล่นเป็นตัวละคร ร้องเพลง และสำรวจประสาทสัมผัสของตนเองผ่านกิจกรรมต่างๆในโรงละครตามความสนใจ กลุ่มตัวอย่างจะได้ชมละครเวที ความยาว 50 – 60 นาที สัปดาห์ละ 1 ครั้ง ต่อเนื่อง 4 – 6 สัปดาห์ ในแต่ละสัปดาห์จะพัฒนาเรื่องราวอย่างค่อยเป็นค่อยไป ในการทดลองจัดแสดงแต่ละสัปดาห์ ผู้วิจัยได้นำปัญหาที่พบและการประเมินจากผู้เชี่ยวชาญมาปรับวิธีการแสดงที่ได้สังเคราะห์ขึ้นให้มีความเหมาะสมยิ่งขึ้น ข้อมูลที่ใช้ในการวิเคราะห์ผลได้แก่ 1) บันทึกการทำงานของผู้วิจัย 2) บันทึกปฏิสัมพันธ์เชิงบวกของผู้ชมขณะชมการแสดง 3) บทสัมภาษณ์เชิงลึกผู้ปกครองของกลุ่มตัวอย่าง 4) บทสัมภาษณ์เชิงลึกผู้เชี่ยวชาญด้านละครบำบัดที่ได้ชมวีดีโอบันทึกภาพการแสดง เมื่อได้พัฒนาและปรับปรุงวิธีการแสดงในแต่ละสัปดาห์แล้ว ผู้วิจัยได้เรียนรู้ว่าการเป็นนักแสดงในละครสำหรับผู้ชมที่มีภาวะออทิซึมนั้น นักแสดงจะต้องเข้าใจวิธีการสื่อสารกับผู้ที่มีภาวะออทิซึม เข้าใจลำดับกิจกรรมต่างๆ และเข้าใจบริบทของผู้ชมเป็นอย่างดี นักแสดงจะต้องมีพลังหรือคลื่นความคิด ความรู้สึกภายในที่เข้มข้นแต่แสดงออกอย่างสงบเพื่อลดการกระตุ้นเร้าผู้ชมและช่วยให้ผู้ชมสามารถจดจ่อกับการแสดงได้ นักแสดงต้องอยู่กับปัจจุบันในขณะแสดงและมีสมาธิในการสื่อสารกับผู้ชมในรายบุคคล นักแสดงจะต้องมองเห็น ได้ยิน และรับรู้ผู้ชมอย่างชัดเจนเพื่อจะสามารถสังเกตการสื่อสารทางกายของผู้ชมและสื่อสารตอบกลับได้อย่างเหมาะสม วิธีการแสดงที่ได้พัฒนาขึ้นทำให้เกิดตัวละครที่ให้อิสระและเป็นมิตรกับผู้ชม สร้างความไว้วางใจและสร้างพื้นที่ปลอดภัยให้กับผู้ชม ตัวละครจะเป็นแกนนำที่พาผู้ชมไปสู่โลกของจินตนาการอย่างค่อยเป็นค่อยไป ผลการสังเกตปฏิสัมพันธ์ในโรงละครพบว่า ผู้ชมกลุ่มตัวอย่างมีปฏิสัมพันธ์และพัฒนาการทางสังคมที่ดีขึ้นในหลายกรณี จากการสัมภาษณ์ผู้ปกครองพบว่ามีหลายกรณีที่ผู้ชมแสดงสัญญาณของความสุขและความต้องการชมละคร

The Power Of Queer Representation In The Media, Jack Harris

Tredway Library Prize for First-Year Research

This paper examines the lack of representation of the queer community in today's film and television productions. Recent work such as The CW's The 100 and Nickelodeon's The Legend of Korra are used to create an intersectional analysis of the tropes associated with queer characters and the effect that queer representation has on viewers. The intersectionality of queer rights and feminism is mapped out in an effort to understand the root of the issue and, in that discovery, find solutions for the future.

In Search Of Lost Selves: Memory And Subjectivity In Transnational Art Cinema, Anders J. Bergstrom

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation begins from the position that cinema’s ongoing persistence as a specific operation of subjective perception is intimately related to the questions of self and memory it raises. Even as digitization and global capitalism have ostensibly led to the creation of a “post-cinematic” culture, cinematic forms and practices remain inextricably related to the larger (often unacknowledged) metaphysical concerns of the cultures and social contexts in which they continue to signify. These concerns—which include beliefs in perceptual realism, the relations between images and the past, and notions of selfhood—shape both the production and consumption of cinema as a tool which …

Based On Actual Events: Surveillance, Fear And Crime Control In Found-Footage Horror Films, Cassandra Persaud

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In recent years, found-footage horror films have reappeared with increasing popularity, leading to its recognition as the current horror subgenre du jour. Its amateur style of filmmaking has allowed the subgenre to explore public concerns around the growth of technology, the use of surveillance, and crime control. Found-footage horror films offer a unique platform for analysis as they are framed around presenting the ‘footage’ in the film as factual or reality. In this research study, themes and narratives around the use of surveillance and the production of the docile body in found-footage horror films were examined. The study involved an …

A Station In Motion: Termini As Heterotopia, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s definition of heterotopia, the article analyses the filmic and literary representation of Stazione Termini, Rome’s main train station. The Fascist architectural project, which mirrors an idea of the nation as homogeneous, monolithic, and white, begins to be challenged in the post-World War II representations of Termini which depict the station as the place where liminal and unexpected experiences can occur and accepted moral codes of behaviour are put into question. The article then focuses on the recent representation of Termini as a key place of contact with and among immigrants. While migration literature describes the station …

Educating Collegiate Journalists To Cover And Cope With Traumatic Events, Stephanie Elder Anderson

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

STEPHANIE LYNN ELDER ANDERSON. How to Educate Collegiate Journalists to Cover and Cope with Traumatic Events (under the direction of DR. TERESA CLARK.)

This research study applied the qualitative method of open coding of data from professional journalists and journalism faculty members to determine whether trauma journalism should be incorporated into existing journalism curriculum. Trauma journalism emerged in the early 1990s but has not been integrated in most journalism programs. Prior research indicated the reasons trauma journalism is not included in most curriculum is because it is not an ACEJMC accreditation standard, there’s limited qualified faculty members to teach such …

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 …

Negotiating Desire: Resisting, Reimagining And Reinscribing Normalized Sexuality And Gender In Fan Fiction, Charity A. Fowler

Theses and Dissertations

Fan studies has examined how fan fiction resists heteronormativity by challenging depictions of gender and sexuality, but to date, this inquiry has focused disproportionately on slash, to the exclusion of other genres of fan fiction. Additionally, scholars disagree about slash’s subversive effects by setting up a seemingly stable dichotomy—subversive vs. misogynistic—where one does not necessarily exist.

In this project, I examine multiple genres of fan fiction—namely, slash arising from bromances; femslash from female friendships; incestuous fan fiction from dysfunctional familial relationships; and polyamorous fics. I chose fics from four televisions shows—NBC’s Revolution, MTV’s Teen Wolf, the CW’s The …

"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.

Culture As A Tool Of Exclusion: An Analysis Of Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, Abigail Maccumber

Scripps Senior Theses

Using the film La Haine (1995), directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, as an object of analysis, this paper explores culture as a tool of exclusion in France through sociological, architectural, and political contexts. It investigates La Haine as one of the first representations of the banlieue to mainstream French audiences, as well as the ways in which the film reveals how immigrants and children of immigrants struggle to find personal, cultural, and national identity in France.

Understanding The Effects Of Disgust And Political Ideology On Moral Judgment Through Photography, Xijia Yuan

Scripps Senior Theses

Feelings of disgust may have effects on one’s moral judgment; specifically that experience of disgust has linked to increased severity of moral judgments. Additionally, one’s political beliefs may also affect one’s moral judgment, such as conservatives tend to make harsher judgment toward moral situations and behaviors. A 2 x 2 x 2 factorial quasi-experiment has been proposed to study 420 participants, legal adults from both conservative and liberal neighborhoods, randomly assigned to one of two conditions, disgust-eliciting versus neutral. Participants will view either four disgust-eliciting photographs or four neutral photographs, and then complete survey questions on disgust rating, moral judgment, …

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 Parton Paradox: A History Of Race And Gender In The Career Of Dolly Parton, Lindsey L. Hammers

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

With a career that has spanned over five decades, country music artist Dolly Parton has continually redefined her image and her music to remain relevant. By incorporating the musical and lyrical stylings of disco and other popular music genres into her songs, Parton moved beyond music’s color line to increase her popularity as an artist. This thesis shows how Parton established a distinct career that catered to different audiences as she traversed the musical color line and repackaged what feminism looked like to country music fans during the Women’s Movement of the 1960s. Placing Parton’s actions in conversation with music’s …

Un Nino Judio En El Equipo: Futbol E Identidad En Pelota De Trap (De Leopoldo Torres Rios), Mirna Vohnsen

Articles

Este art ículo se centra en la representación de Abrahamcito, un niño judío que aparece en la película argentina Pelota de trapo (Leopoldo Torres Ríos, 1948). Se explora la relación que el niño tiene con su padre y los demás niños del vecindario, así como también la manera en que el fútbol como metáfora de integración promueve una alianza superior a cualquier otra. Se demuestra que Abrahamcito, quien hace frente a los ideales de su padre y se une a los otros niños en los juegos de pelota, forja su identidad de pertenencias múltiples en la que integra su identidad …

"Perhaps," She Said, "Looking Itself Could Be An Antidote.", Sarah Moore

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

(The Work Of) Play In The Age Of Electronic Reproduction, Alexis Newton

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Electronic technologies have allowed for the mass (re)production of new media artifacts on a previously unachievable scale. While media across the board have been effected by the scope of such technology, videogames specifically provide an interesting and generative point of contact in the digital world. Videogames bridge gaps between the academic, political, and popular often unintentionally and unconsciously in ways that other new media artifacts and technologies cannot. But, while this is so, there seems to be a gap in discourse that brings together virtual and embodied experiences in order to create a more cohesive and holistic understanding of the …