Other Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Made Up: A Devised Short Film, Justine Musselman

Honors College Theses

I've explored and studied the use of devising in theatre, and decided to bring that process to the making of a short film. Devising is the process of an ensemble creating a piece together in a collaborative and creative environment. These devised works start without a final script and are formed through discussion, improvisation. and ensemble exercises. Film is a new medium for devising and allows for unlimited creative opportunity and exploration. My devised short film utilizes dramatic makeup as an artistic device to assist in the storytelling. The narrative focuses on the idea of how we present ourselves publicly …

Luncheon, Tomasz Gubernat

Theses and Dissertations

Documenting the apparently prosaic activities of nearly two hundred Polish immigrant senior citizens, “Luncheon” is an observational portrait of a place that seems foreign and significantly removed from its New York City surroundings. For this dwindling demographic, daily activities and commemorative performances provide a way to revivify collective memories and maintain individual identities that are still deeply connected to a place far removed in both space and time. “Luncheon” is an exploration of how memory and identity are constructed and maintained, nationality imagined, and communities preserved.

The Effect Of Post-Production On Storytelling In Narrative And Documentary Filmmaking, Natalie Pace

Senior Honors Theses

Documentaries and narrative films both tell stories in different ways. A common saying states that narrative filmmakers write one movie, shoot another, and edit a third. In postproduction, timelines are rearranged, montages are created, new dialog and voiceovers are written, and the score can alter the mood and meaning entirely. Documentaries can change even more over the course of their creation. Usually, the script of the documentary is not written until the edit, after most of the interviews and B roll have been shot. This paper examines whether documentary post-production makes more or less use of storytelling techniques than does …

Conceptions Of Nietzsche In Popular Film And Television, Jeffrey Willicut

Senior Theses

There are few faces or names in the field of philosophy more recognizable than Friedrich Nietzsche’s. His cartoonish, bushy mustache and stern, unwelcoming brow appear in posters on the walls of angsty teens, in the street art and murals of trendy and upcoming urban neighborhoods, and even in the punishingly glossy pages of every high school history textbook. More recognizable still are his ideas, which have found their way into the ears or eyes of just about everyone in the Western world, whether they know it or not. His concept of the Übermensch, or his notion that God is dead, …

A Reason To Daydream, Corinne Schipull

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Sexism in American culture comes as no surprise. In 2017, the film industry saw an increasing number of powerful men within its ranks exposed and exiled for allegations of sexually predatory behavior. Many see this purging as a sign of changing times, but this view is optimistic: the tides of change ebb in and out, and this problem far exceeds the movie industry. Well before the onslaught of articles on the likes of Harvey Weinstein, my classmates and I resolved to craft our senior thesis film with a crew made up entirely of women: we simply saw the pool of …

21st Century Film Criticism: The Evolution Of Film Criticism From Professional Intellectual Analysis To A Democratic Phenomenon, Asher Weiss

CMC Senior Theses

Film criticism has changed since its inception and will continue to change moving forward. The evolution of film criticism has largely been a story of the shift from an elite field of intellectual exploration by a few knowledgeable experts to a democratic phenomenon where expert analysis is aggregated and averaged, and the lines are blurred between true expertise and the random opinions of the masses. This paper will address the transition from the birth of film criticism to its popularization through the 90s, to what it has become today. By exploring the nature of film criticism historically and reviewing the …

Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual thesis, including some background, and bibliographic information: Oregon/Death/Animation/Vocation and the artist as an agent of potential.

Hellbound - The First Season, Stephen Seiber

Honors Projects

A student short concept film developed in order to pitch a television series.

Magical Realism And Film: A Look At Midnight’S Children, Jeff Floss

English Theses

Magical Realism, arguably one of the most important literary forms to develop in the 20th century, is rarely discussed as a film genre, though there are notable film adaptations of magical realist novels. This thesis explores the film adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to demonstrate how a magical realist novel may be adapted to a visual form, and still maintain the aesthetic sensibilities—and political implications—of the literary original. Drawing on film adaptation studies, close reading, and film analysis, the thesis argues that film can be an effective magical realist genre, even if the conventions of visual mediums are dramatically …

Impressive Failures: Mavericks Of Film Authorship And The Impossibility Of Success In Hollywood, Tom S. Davies

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation directly challenges the critical and commercial primacy of success attached to Hollywood films and their filmmakers, especially when one argues for or against their quality and/or importance within cinematic history. Through a process of shifting and multiplying perspectives within a broader narrative that is critical of what separates success and failure, certain films and filmmakers that were judged as failures or disappointments under impossible prerequisites of creating a successful film––commercially, aesthetically, or both–– are, instead, reconsidered as constructive counterpoints to the expectations of the Hollywood economic field of production as well as to the inevitable disappointment of the …

She Would Not Be Silenced: Mae West's Struggle Against Censorship, Charlotte N. Toledo

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

Mae West, an actress during Hollywood's Golden Age, used her fame on stage, in films, and on the radio to offer social commentary on relationships between men and women in society. Her irreverent style of addressing issues of female sexuality and power certainly caught peoples attention and made them think about these issues in new ways. At the same time, her racy delivery made her a target of stage, film, and radio censorship. She refused to be silenced and continually pushed against restrictions to deliver he message of empowerment in her trademark provocative manner.

A Theoretical Application Of Metaphor Research To The Film Industry, Michael J. Stanton

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper explores the value of using metaphor based marketing research methods (most notably Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique) in the development and green-lighting processes of filmmaking. A review of literature reveals that even large blockbuster films lack any marketing research employed in the developmental stage. Audiences are extremely difficult to analyze when considering something as abstract and subjective as what makes a “good” film. Metaphor based marketing research methods (e.g. ZMET) offer a solution by examining the minds of consumers through language markers called metaphors. Using a metaphor based marketing technique early in a film’s development process may help to …

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.

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 …

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.

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 …

"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.

The Post Banishment Films Of Jafar Panahi, Christopher L. Inoa

Capstones

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

"The Effort To Translate": Fan Film Culture And The Works Of J.R.R. Tolkien, Maria Alberto

Journal of Tolkien Research

In his 1940 preface “On Translating Beowulf,” J.R.R. Tolkien contends that “The effort to translate, or to improve a translation, is valuable, not so much for the version it produces, as for the understanding of the original which it awakes” (53). Though made with a specific literary tradition in mind, Tolkien’s assertion about the value of translation bears re-visitation in light of circumstances where the terminology has shifted. Specifically, Tolkien’s own work has since become the myth undergoing translation, and in popular parlance, translation itself has changed from simply describing the transference of a text between languages to now include …

Book Review: Remembering Genocide, Tony Barta

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Lost In Adaptation, Caitlin S. Manocchio

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

philosophical societies that send us here as their representatives- can no longer, in this case, allow itself [the philosophical idea] to be enclosed in a single idiom, at the risk of floating, neutral and disembodied, remote from every body of language

(Derrida 1994: 14)

Introduction

In Sending: on representation (1994), Jacques Derrida questions the function of representation that we can use to offer a challenge to the experience and structure of representation as a practice in visual culture and for contemporary spectatorship. When the function of representation is being questioned, rather than its subject, the practice of representation is seen …

Film And Theatre: Hybridization And The Convergence Of Mediums, Rachel A. Jones

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This essay explores the ever-changing relationship between theatre and film. I used my expertise in both theatre and film to create a recording of a children’s theatre show Upside Down Fairytales in order to show how mediated theatre can be created. This essay argues that mediated theatre can be used educationally, dramaturgically, and for entertainment. The uses of mediated theatre can be very effective for those in communities where theatre is not accessible. This essay states that a new medium is created when live performance is recorded and it can have an impact on how theatre will continue to be …

Found In Translation: An Analysis Of Popular American Film In Spain, Emily Dushek

Honors Projects

This research examines American popular film in Spain with the aim of understanding if and how removing a popular text (such as a film) from its original language and socio-cultural context and translating it for consumption in a different language and culture affects the interpretation of the film. The study delves into the very successful 2012 films The Avengers (Joss Whedon) and Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino) and uses textual analyses and comparisons of the original English and the translated Castellano Spanish versions of the films, specifically focusing on the translations, as well as analyses of film reviews and critiques written …

Their Swords, Our Plowshares: "Peaceful" Nuclear Weapons, Propaganda, And Cold War Memory Expressed In Film: 1959-1989, Michael A. St. Jacques

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons as tools of warfare and diplomacy. Immediately following the Second World War, American attitudes toward the atomic bomb were overwhelmingly positive. Once the Soviet Union developed their own atomic bomb and the United States lost the atomic monopoly, attitudes started to shift. After the first hydrogen bombs tests, public sentiment, as demonstrated in film, became markedly negative. To counter these negative attitudes and portray their nuclear weapons as peaceful tools instead of weapons of mass destruction, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed …

Exploring Ethnic Stereotypes Through The Production Of Five Short Films, Ines Galiano Torres

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a nontraditional thesis that combines social research in ethnic stereotypes in TV and film with the creative process of film production. This paper contains the formal step of research, in addition to the details on the production and creation of five original short films related to the issue of ethnic representations.

Rejecting The Ethnic Community In Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, And Scarface, Bryan Mead

Journal of Religion & Film

Film scholars commonly suggest that the 1930s American movie gangster represented marginalized Italian and Irish-American film-goers, and that these gangsters provided a visual and aural outlet for ethnic audience frustrations with American societal mores. However, while movie gangsters clearly struggle with WASP society, the ethnic gangster’s struggle against his own community deserves further exploration. The main characters in gangster films of the early 1930s repeatedly forge an individualistic identity and, in consequence, separate themselves from their ethnic peers and their family, two major symbols of their communal culture. This rejection of community is also a rejection of the distinctly Italian …

From Marseille To Mecca: Reconciling The Secular And The Religious In Le Grand Voyage (The Big Trip) (2004), Yahya Laayouni

Journal of Religion & Film

By the early 1980’s, a generation of children of Maghrebi (North African) parents born and/or raised in France started to become more visible, particularly after they organized a march in 1983 from Marseille to Paris under the slogan “For Equality and against Racism.” This generation was introduced to the public as the “Beur generation.” The word ‘Beur,’ coined by this generation, is the result of a Parisian back slang and means ‘Arab.’ It quickly gained popularity and has been used to refer to children of Maghrebi origins living in France. As much as it has been hard for the Beurs …

The Big Short, Elizabeth Armon

Communication Studies

The Big Short (McKay, 2015), adapted from the non-fiction novel The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (2010), follows three separate but parallel stories leading up to the United States housing crisis of 2008. On a macro-level, the film brilliantly depicted the creation, and the ultimate burst, of the credit and housing market bubble. However, on a micro-level the audience is given an opportunity to realize and empathize with the internal struggle that many of the main characters faced as they grappled with the fact that their financial gain from shorting the market came with the caveat …

Blackfish-Ing For Buzz: The Rhetoric Of The Real In Theme Parks And Documentary, Steven W. Schoen

Faculty Publications

In 2014, a year of record tourism in the state of Florida, SeaWorld saw a drop of one million visitors to its theme park in Orlando. The decline followed Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s 2013 documentary film Blackfish, which presented the circumstances of orcas, or “killer whales,” held in captivity at parks like SeaWorld as cruel to the animals and dangerous to their trainers. In 2016, SeaWorld announced it will stop breeding orcas, and phase out its orca theatrical shows by 2019, a move widely attributed in the press to the impact of Cowperthwaite’s film. This article examines the film Blackfish as a …