Other Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Contemporary Films And Contemporary Issues: An Introductory Film Class Curriculum, August W. Liguori-Chien

Liberal Studies (MA) Final Essays

Teachers spend years teaching students to interpret texts. This interpretive skill is deemed vital in our education system, but little time is devoted to developing students’ ability to interpret film, the most popular media students engage with. Film is an incredible amalgamation of words, motion, and music. The world of film offers students incredible opportunities to interpret, analyze, and be moved. If our students must be able to interpret literature shouldn't they also be able to do the same in the immense world of film.

This class will not focus exclusively on the history of film or the classically taught …

The Complexity Of "The Hate U Give", Esosiye Alexander

Emerging Writers

"The Complexity of 'The Hate U Give'" discusses significant cultural and societal aspects of the 2018 N.A.A.C.P. award-winning film, "The Hate U Give." As part of evaluating the film, this essay analyzes the film's portrayal of police brutality in the black community, its long-term consequences, complex discussions that black adults have with youths and themselves, and how difficult it is to get justice for the victim.

Greenpeace In Germany And The U.S.: A Case Study In Non-Profit Web Design, Maximilian J. Weirauch

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis draws on Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model, connects it to basic principles of web design, and applies it to a website analysis of the global non-profit organization Greenpeace. This case study of cultural dimensions in web design utilizes Hofstede’s framework from 1974 throughout all its chapters and focuses on the cultural differences between Germany and the U.S. My hypothesis that successful marketing materials such as websites must communicate differently with their U.S.-American and German audiences is partially borne out. But it is important to note that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model cannot fully account for certain intercultural dimensions of …

Masochistic Drive & Horror, Anne Farley

CMC Senior Theses

Human nature is inherently masochistic, meaning we self gratify through the means of some type of self-harm. The term masochism usually refers to sexual tendencies, but in this paper, it will be used as a reference to some sort of self-infliction of pain whether it be mental or physical. It is rare that we, as individuals, do not partake in masochism on a daily basis. When we engage in an activity or task that inflicts a type of pain, or stress on our bodies and mind, we are rewarded with gratification. This can be observed in gym-goers, individuals who thrive …

The Jazz Archive: Theorizing A Relationship Between Jazz Improvisation And Standard Repertoire., Toby Wren

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

The jazz standard remains an enduring part of the tradition of jazz performance and pedagogy. Contemporary jazz scholarship has tended to focus on improvisation as a practice and jazz-as-lived-experience and, while the jazz standard repertoire has occasionally been the subject of study the relationship between the standard repertoire and the ‘language’ or style of jazz has not been theorised. In this article I argue that the distinctive style of jazz improvisation is at least in part, determined by the characteristics of its shared repertoire and the statements that have accrued around that repertoire. I borrow Foucault’s conception of the archive …

America's Next Top Model Magnified, Nina Violi

Capstone Showcase

America's Next Top Model was a reality television show that aired from 2003 to 2018 and the show gave women (and men in the later seasons) a chance to become models and be trained by the best in the business. While the show looked like a positive experience from the viewers' perspective, there were many situations when the models were put in uncomfortable situations. The show is related back to the feminism theory.

Seaglass: An Animated Rejection Of Narrative Permanence, Alejandra Louise Blackmore

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how popular narrative structures imply that our reality should be stagnant, thereby leaving us as viewers unprepared for the notion of change. I introduce the term “narrative permanence” as a story structure that assumes the foundations of a narrative are absolute. These stories therefore consider structural change as a threat or abnormal. I analyzed examples such as The Simpsons and news coverage of the BP oil spill to demonstrate how popular media frames change as an unnatural occurrence that must be neutralized. My thesis then culminated in an animated short about a person living in a seaside …

India – Rape And The Prevalent Culture Of Silence In Indian Cinema And Television, Nidhi Shrivastava

English Faculty Publications

In this chapter, I explore two media texts, Imtiaz Ali's Highway and Alankrita Shrivastava's Netflix original series Bombay Begums (2021). I contend that recent filmmakers have begun to arguably reframe the narratives of rape victim-survivors and disrupting the cultural of silence described above. They offer progressive and multi-faceted representations of these experiences, such that there is an opportunity for a dialogue within both private and public spheres. What I mean when I say that they are ‘progressive representations’ is that the rape victim-survivors are not merely reduced to helpless women in distress, nor painted as vengeful, aggressive characters. Instead, their …

Aiming For The Trees: Random Access Information And Paik’S Video Study, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Public lecture and paper presented for the 13th international symposium, The Gift of Nam June Paik, attending to his dreams of random access information and the inauguration of his Video Study.

The Ableist Gaze And Disability Trauma: How Onscreen Representation Erases The Truth, Emily Brown

Departmental Honors Projects

This project critically engages with disability representation in the media through an uncensored autoethnography of everyday ableism. In particular, it focuses on how the Netflix series Special reveals the duality of representation: being seen is validating yet (re)traumatizing. As a queer woman with Cerebral Palsy, I’ve spent my whole life trying to find myself in TV shows and movies, latching onto the few disabled and disabled-coded characters available. I never felt fully seen until I watched Special: a show about a gay man with Cerebral Palsy gaining independence through a writing internship and romantic prospects. Special allowed me to acknowledge …

#Mentalhealthmatters: Mental Health Awareness Campaigns In Media And Its Effectiveness On Stigma Reduction In Third Culture Kids, Airi Sugihara

Scripps Senior Theses

The recent amplified attention towards mental health and overall wellbeing has been accelerated by awareness campaigns in media, which are culturally and regionally tailored to encourage efficacy and positive attitude changes. Some of these mental health awareness campaigns are disseminated on the social media platform Instagram, which is contradictory to Instagram’s corporate lack of acknowledgement towards its addictiveness and negative impacts on user mental health. The aesthetic and influencer culture surrounding social media empowers its systemic problems, which is exacerbated by modern society’s media dependency. Within its discriminatory and oppressive algorithm, mental health awareness campaigns created by Instagram represent corporate …

Owning Your Story: Agency, Power, And Freedom In Greta Gerwig’S Faithful And Radical Little Women Adaptation, Siobhan Cooney

Honors Program Theses

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) has an extensive lineage of film adaptations. The classic novel’s most recent film adaptation was written for the screen and directed by Greta Gerwig (2019). This thesis employs adaptation theory as well as visual and verbal close reading and critical analysis of the film, source novel, and popular film reviews. Gerwig’s adaptation looks, sounds, and feels like the Little Women that has been cherished for decades. The director fulfills these aesthetic expectations to subvert our understandings of sentimentalism, domesticity, individuality, and the relinquishment of childhood. An examination of art’s imitation of life, the epistolary …

Twenty-First Century Adaptations Of Early Twentieth Century American Protest Literature, Kathryn J. Mcclain

Theses and Dissertations--English

Twenty-First Century Adaptations of Early Twentieth Century American Protest Literature examines the resurgence of didactic political literature in the United States during the 21st century, specifically adaptations of early 20th century American leftist protest works by authors such as Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Richard Wright. While the most political aspects of these writers’ fiction are often either criticized as too politically overt – such as Sinclair’s The Jungle and Wright’s Native Son – or forgotten in favor of an author’s perceived literary merit – London’s The Iron Heel in comparison to his other works like Call of the Wild …

The Cowboy Conundrum: An Examination Of Representation Within The Western Film Genre, Madelynn E. Woodard

Honors College Theses

Despite historical demographic data indicating otherwise, much of the Western Film Genre depicts The Cowboy as a white male individual. Previous research has demonstrated that filmmakers often tell and depict stories within which they identify themselves, and with the predominant population of directors within the Western Genre being that of white men, the narrative of the West being portrayed on screen has shifted public perception to an inaccurate portrayal of the history of the West. From Vaqueros to liberated slaves, much of the Cowboy community was comprised of Black, Spanish, Mexican, and Indigenous people of color. This study employed a …

The Waning Days Of Projection In The Mountain West, Samuel Gwinn Dunnington

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Waning Days of Projection in the Mountain West is a novel featuring a young narrator named Argus, who worked for years as an apprentice and assistant to a documentary filmmaker named Max Morgen. The novel begins years after Argus and Max have gone their separate ways. Max has recently died, and his final wish was that his son send Argus all the footage they’d acquired over their years together in order to edit and complete the film Max originally set out to make. Argus must decide how to proceed.

Frank Capra's America: The Fall Of Political Ambiguity, 1930-1950, Lydia Lennice Pakala

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

As the United States sank lower into an economic depression, Hollywood sought to turn bread lines into lines for the box office. While other entertainment outlets faltered, film, with its low cost tickets and ability to help patrons escape, remained prominent. Hollywood started to produce films with profit in mind and in the thick of this environment was Frank Capra, a man destined to become one of the most popular film directors of the 1930s and 1940s. Capra made a conscious effort to choose contemporary stories and as a result they are a glimpse not only into the history of …

Toward An Archaeology Of Manuscripts, Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The title of Rachael Scarborough King’s edited collection of essays, After Print, refers at once to Peter Stallybrass’s insight that printing is a provocation of manuscript, as well as to what the study of manuscripts looks like when we move away from stadial and supersessionist print culture paradigms of authorship and publication and instead embrace archival methods and interpretive approaches that center on concepts of media interrelation in early modern manuscript cultures, such as Margaret Ezell’s concept of social authorship.The essays in King’s collection, including an epilogue by Ezell herself, bear the fruits of such intermedial and transmedial approaches, bringing …

Paper Gangsters: White Collar And Corporate Crime On Film, Jacob Kavoukis

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Many of us have never been victims of a serious crime and as a result, rely on the media in its various forms to provide us with information that we can rely on as being accurate in order to learn about it. Information on white-collar crime in the media differs from more common street crime in that it receives very little attention. The lack of attention could be because these crimes are considered non-violent and victimless, are committed by those of high social stature and power and are often complex and challenging to understand. Films can play an important role …

Femme Ex Machina: Sex Robots, Embodiment, And Posthuman Subjectivity, Julia A. Empey

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Andrea Dworkin warned in her 1974 book Woman Hating that men would soon develop the technology to “create the sex objects that will gratify them” (199). This dissertation investigates one of those technologies: sex robots, as mediated through science fiction film and literature. While the sex robot is still an emerging technology, its embodiment, particularly when female-rendered, has been imagined and negotiated for centuries. Men creating women in a specific, desired image is not new, but the sex robot is currently being transformed from imagined representation to embodied subject. This dissertation traces a pattern of representation that has allowed us …

Media Representation Of Mass Migration In Germany, Mohammed Akhtar

CISLA Senior Integrative Projects

No abstract provided.

American Lotto, Kris Parker

Capstones

The Preka family won the diversity visa lottery and has immigrated to the seaside town of New London, Connecticut. They are a family of four that have dreamed of immigrating to the United States for much of their lives. Originally from Albania, a country with limited opportunities and riddled with corruption, the film will follow them in Connecticut as they adjust to life in the US and the challenges of learning a new language, finding decent work, and adjusting to a new culture. The film explores their emotional journey; their hopes, expectations, and disappointments, as they build a life without …

Audiovisual Metadata Platform Pilot Development (Amppd), Final Project Report, Jon W. Dunn, Ying Feng, Juliet L. Hardesty, Brian Wheeler, Maria Whitaker, Thomas Whittaker, Shawn Averkamp, Bertram Lyons, Amy Rudersdorf, Tanya Clement, Liz Fischer

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

This report documents the experience and findings of the Audiovisual Metadata Platform Pilot Development (AMPPD) project, which has worked to enable more efficient generation of metadata to support discovery and use of digitized and born-digital audio and moving image collections. The AMPPD project was carried out by partners Indiana University Libraries, AVP, University of Texas at Austin, and New York Public Library between 2018-2021.

Age Of Exploitation: Teen Sex Comedy Films Of The 1980s, Thyra Chaney

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

The teen sex comedy film genre is representative of dominant cultural factors which influenced the film industry in the 1980s. Films in this genre have been traditionally described as mindless, dumb, and exploitative. This article seeks to understand the distinction between teen sex comedy and traditional teen films, as well as the social and cultural influences which lead to the development and popularity of the teen sex comedy genre. Teen sex comedies are a document of mainstream society and popular culture in the 1980s.

The Uncanny Desire In American Animation And Film., Kristen Hankins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although surrealism was short lived, the impact on popular culture is ongoing. Analyzing this impact is quite interesting because it set a standard for American animation and film. In this thesis, Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis and the uncanny are investigated through the lens of the camera in American cinema and animation. This thesis looks at cartoons and films that were made after Breton’s surrealist manifestos were published. This thesis aims to show the viewer the lasting impact that Breton had on American popular culture. This thesis is divided into three chapters with an introduction and conclusion. Chapter one discusses Fleischer …

She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power: An Intersectional Analysis Of A Modern Reboot, Laine Marshall

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Children’s animation offers the viewer a unique window into the nuances of current societal norms. Because children’s animation is made for the young, sensitive, and impressionable, it is carefully controlled and often heavily censored. Any statements made regarding the protagonist’s heroism or the villain’s malignity are meant to be accepted as universal truths for the growing minds of our youth. The recent 2018 Netflix and DreamWorks Animation animated reboot of the classic 1980's series "She-Ra: Princess of Power," now titled "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power," shook the animation industry with its groundbreaking representation and astounding visuals. Following its predecessor’s …

The Mvohc Project, Brooke Day

All Theses

ABSTRACT

A Mvohc is a Morphic Vessel of Human Consciousness. The Mvohc Project traverses' theories of spatial identity in tandem with creative world-building as a method for examining the intricacies of the human condition and reimagining reality. My creations are designed to promote autonomy over the contemporary world's ever-evolving societal complexities to empower individuals, foster imagination and communication, and create space for positive change. This body of work incorporates fleshy biomorphic sculptures inspired by science fiction, deep-sea marine life, and the human body. The abject creatures are partnered with constructed audio-scapes that encompass the frenzy of an overarching internal monologue, …

Movies That Sell: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Product Placements In Marvel Movies, Andrew Nii Okai Okai

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The advancement of digital entertainment media has given audiences the ability to skip ads that do not interest them. Consequently, brands face the challenge of creating ads that can compel audiences and finding media outlets that can effectively reach target audiences. Brands today use product placements to promote their products because movie audiences are generally attentive to ads when they are incorporated in a movie’s narrative. Marvel Cinematic Universe is a globally recognized entertainment franchise that uses product placements strategically to promote brands in their movies and TV shows. In this study, I conduct rhetorical analyses of select product placements …

Experiencing Cinematic Vr: Where Theory And Practice Converge In The Tribeca Film Festival Cinema360, John V. Pavlik

Proceedings of the New York State Communication Association

Cinematic virtual reality (VR) production has reached enough capacity to support a festival. This paper offers a theoretical framework of VR narrative structure to critically examine one such festival in cinematic VR. The spotlight here is on the fifteen entries in the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival Cinema360. Findings suggest that although the field of cinematic VR has advanced substantially in recent years in terms of narrative design and user experience, there is still a considerable distance for VR storytellers to travel to fully utilize the nature and potential of the developing medium of virtual reality.

Representation Of Terror And Terrorism In Two Arab Films: Paradise Now (2005) By Hany Abu-Assad And Horses Of God (2012) By Nabil Ayouch, Mustapha Hamil

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Middle Eastern violence and terrorism are not novel subjects in world cinema, especially American cinema. The Arab or Muslim other in these films is always presented as someone who epitomises a culture of violence, directed mostly against innocent civilians. Against the backdrop of Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Middle-Easterners as advocate of indiscriminate terror and terrorism, Arab filmmakers have turned in recent years to the representation of terror and religious extremism. Paradise Now (Abu Assad 2005) and Horses of God (Ayouch 2012) address the controversial issue of suicide bombing with the same motivation: to examine the choice of suicide bombing within …

Resisting Pacification: Locating Tension In G'Ebinyo Ogbowei's Poetry, Niyi Akingbe, Paul Ayodele Onanuga

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.