Visual Studies Commons^™

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

Lifelong Movie Goers, Hardworking Filmmakers, And Oscars Discourse, Haley Kamola

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This paper focuses on the discourse surrounding the Academy Awards, often referred to as the Oscars. The differences in discourse between people working in the film industry and those who watch movies are analyzed, as they represent the supplier and recipient of films and filmmaking. These two groups offer varied perspectives on the topic. The discourse of another group, a group in-between–student filmmakers–is also analyzed. To many people, what makes a film “good” is quite subjective, so the Academy Awards are often a subject of discourse. One particular focus of discourse will be the 2024 Academy Awards. There were a …

Sensorial Memories: A Cinema Speculum In Aftersun(2022) And Petite Maman(2021), Tingyi Zhu

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

In her 1975 article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey used psychoanalysis as a political weapon to critique the issue of the male gaze in traditional Hollywood narrative cinema. Mulvey's work is pioneering for feminist film studies but was criticized and reexamined among film and feminist scholars. Building on the precedent of Mulvey and the feminist research of Luce Irigaray, contemporary scholar Lucy Bolton has proposed the camera as an "Irigarayan speculum," explaining how certain contemporary films delve into female characters' inner worlds, creating them with subjectivity and diversity. Drawing on contemporary feminist film theories and phenomenology theories, I …

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! …

Flm170.1 Storytelling For The Screen Pitch Deck Example 1, Sae Institute

Exemplars

Premise

How far would a good man go for the

sake of his loved ones?

Logline

Fired from his job, Hunter, a kind-hearted, but headstrong

man, turns to a high-risk burglary scheme that could keep

a roof over his sick partner’s head

Flm170.1 Storytelling For The Screen Pitch Deck Example 2, Sae Institute

Exemplars

LOGLINE

Young idealist Nuraini Anatoly is on a mission to change the

world. Despite her passion for social justice she feels alone and

misunderstood. When she meets the troubled inmate Gabriel

Jarrah, a meaningful connection quickly develops between them.

But when the security of this relationship is tested, Nuraini is

confronted with important questions of right and wrong and what

it is that really matters.

Climate Action At The University Of Maine: A Documentary Short Film, Santiago Tijerina

Honors College

Fossil fuel divestment is central to the discourse surrounding climate change, nevertheless, it is a movement driven by student activists and it is a sign of institutional change at a global scale. Climate Action at the University of Maine, written and directed by Santiago Tijerina and created in collaboration with the University of Maine and the Center for Undergraduate Research (CUGR), is a documentary short film driven by the research objective of understanding the rise of student activism at the University of Maine and the recent decision of the Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels.

The subject matter …

Hasta Que La Muerte Los Separe: La Representación De La Violencia Machista En La Literatura Y El Cine Hispánicos Contemporáneos, Anna M. Martija Perez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Violence against women is a worldwide social problem that is far from being eradicated. Sociologists and psychologists have studied this complex issue rooted in the unbalanced distribution of power between the sexes and writers have portrayed it in their works since the Middle Ages to present. This dissertation provides a comparative study of recent representations of male violence in fictional and non-fictional works produced in different Hispanic countries. The works analyzed include: Icíar Bollaín´s film Te doy mis ojos (2003); recent documentaries such as Home Truth (2017) and Las tres muertes de Maricela Escobedo (2021); shortfilms like Disonancia (2005) and …

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.

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 Disappearance Of The French New Wave, Emir Kulluk

CISLA Senior Integrative Projects

The French New Wave is considered to be one of the most influential waves within cinema history, starting from the end of the 1950s, going all the way through the 1960s. Thanks to the directors of this era, there have been a myriad of movies that challenged the norms of filmmaking, redefining the techniques used and the stories told within cinema. However, if this era was so fruitful and is deemed to be so valuable for cinema in general, then why did it not continue? In this paper, I will be taking a look at French society, external influences, as …

Humanizing Scholarship: Going Public Via Multimodality, Mario L. Avalos

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Humanizing Scholarship” offers a look into the ways that multimodality can be used to make the scholarly conversations had within the academy more accessible to members of the public. This thesis acknowledges and echoes the responsibility academics have to bridging the gap between their research and the people who so often serve as the basis for the ethnographic work being done in academia. My project does two things: First, it brings together some of the conversations surrounding multimodality and public scholarship. Second, it offers some first-hand models of multimodal compositions—the short films Don Armando and The Adjunct, and the screenplay …

Depicting Absence: Thematic And Stylistic Paradoxes Of Representation In Visual And Literary Imagery, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

The article draws up an inventory of, and compares strategies for, the theoretical and critical treatment of the absence–presence interplay at stake in the literary and visual representations of absence. This brings to our attention a multiplicity of heterogeneous and, to a greater or lesser degree, marginal signify-ing phenomena that have in common patterns of disrupting and deviating from the standard conventions of creating and conveying meaning through figures of absence. Lacking a name for these disparate yet similar instances where meaning is created from empty signifiers, we have chosen to call them figural voids. This attempt to produce a …

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

The Role And Impact Of The Environment In Saving Private Ryan, Bailey M. Ytterdahl, Paul C. Krakoviak

Student Publications

Although certain films may not be explicitly labeled as environmental film, we approach Saving Private Ryan through an ecocritical analysis. We evaluate how the film not only displays the physical and mental tolls of war in several bloody battles, but we also explore the environmental costs. By examining the genre of historical realism, we demonstrate how the film outlines the unique role of the environment in war but also enables the viewers to consider the impacts of war on the surrounding environment. To understand the environmental message in Saving Private Ryan, we used a concept called the “Three Ecologies” by …

Television Journalism, Barbara Nevins Taylor

Open Educational Resources

This Television/Video Journalism syllabus provides students with a road map for learning video storytelling. It provides a guide for learning to research and report using video, how to interview, shoot, edit and produce a relevant news story of about two minutes or less. This short form of video journalism easily translates to other platforms and social media.

It also examines the history of TV and the cultural shifts that produced the evolving technology.

Intermedialidad En El Documental Cubano Contemporáneo, Esteban Alfonso Lopez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cuban documentaries, which have experienced dramatic changes in the last two decades, are now more in tune with the most recent global trends in cinema. However, the scarce implementation within the documentary genre of other perspectives and modes of analysis, outside those that are purely cinematographic, has stalled investigations in the field, thus creating a disengagement with the structural and thematic renovation that has been taking place within the discourse of contemporary Cuban documentaries.

My dissertation “Intermedialidad en el documental cubano contemporáneo” examines a select sample of representative texts and Cuban documentaries, with a view to adapting and/or developing an …

De La Novela Picaresca A El Chavo Del 8, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

Los albores de la modernidad[i] coincidieron con la emergencia de la novela picaresca en la que temas como la niñez, la educación, la pobreza agravada por el hambre extrema, y la idea de la movilidad social, aparecieron representados en obras muy populares como El Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), El Buscón (1626), El Periquillo Sarniento (1819) y La vida inútil de Pito Pérez (1938). La popularidad de la novela picaresca emanaba de su novedosos realismo social y urbano, sumados a la disponibilidad de copias hecha posible gracias a la imprenta de Gutenberg. El Chavo del 8 (1971-1980) ha tenido una …

Review Of Aesthetics, Ethics And Trauma In The Cinema Of Pedro Almodóvar, Kelli Fuery

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

A book review of Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla's Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar.

Here To Win, Not Here To Settle, Sarah Kaino

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Ethnic representation goes beyond color blind casting, the diversity of actors, or non-stereotypical casting choices. It is not just a matter of minorities being included in mainstream storylines, but minorities being able to tell their own stories as well. The relevance and relatability of storytelling in film and theatre transcends culture, which is in part the beauty of these mediums. But the impact of Asian Americans seeing stories from their own culture cannot be exchanged for anything less because there is no substitute for visibility. Movies are the source of inspiration for many. Movies can also reinforce a transparent ceiling …

1st Place Contest Entry: Countering The Current: The Function Of Cinematic Waves In Communist Vs. Capitalist Societies, Maddie Gwinn

Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize

This is Maddie Gwinn's submission for the 2019 Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize, which won first place. It contains her essay on using library resources, a three-page sample of her research project on how the Czech New Wave and New Hollywood cinema are defined by their agency in preserving and prescribing cultural meaning across their societies while being bound to their economic systems, and her works cited list.

Maddie is a senior at Chapman University, majoring in Film Production. Her faculty mentor is Dr. Carmichael Peters.

The Intermedial Politics Of Handwritten Newspapers In The 19th-Century U.S., Mark A. Mattes

Faculty Scholarship

Handwritten newspapers appeared in a variety of social contexts in the 19th-century U.S.1 The largest extant portion of 19th-century handwritten newspapers emerged from home and school settings. More far-flung examples include those written aboard ships during exploratory and military voyages. Others were produced within institutions such as hospitals and asylums. Such works were written during times of privation, including life in an army regiment or a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War. At other times, handwritten newspapers accompanied efforts at westward settlement and transcontinental railway journeys. Impromptu papers could follow in the wake of natural disasters that knocked out print-based …

The Fluid Gaze In Virtual Reality, Soudhamini

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

"In 2006, in the course of an Artists Residency in Munich I made a video triptych titled Meditations on the Tiger, in which a story unfolds over three adjacent screens... The story is as linear as it can get, but working with three screens I found I could move laterally as well... There were multiple tracks of time running together on that train - the real time of action and event, the hurtling projected time of anticipation and expectation, and the deep, reflective time of memory, thought and speech. 3 video timelines synchronized so we begin to approach image, just …

A Recipe For Black Girl Magic: A Critical Study Of The Mise-En-Scene In Beyoncé’S Visual Album Lemonade As A Radical Representation Of Black Women, Tatiyana Jenkins

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Lemonade, a visual album released by pop icon Beyoncé Knowles Carter in 2016, crafts a mise-en-scene that redefines the way that black women are allowed to feel and exist in media culture. Contrary to the negative stereotypes and misrepresentations perpetuated in media, Lemonade is a radical attempt to provide audiences with an alternative representation of the experiences of black women. For this honors project, I address the controversy surrounding the visual album’s radical representations of black womanhood. To inform my understanding of the visual album I examine the various creative contributions such as the film Daughters of the Dust directed …

Selected Readings On Augmented Reality, Ekphrasis, And Michael Field, Robert P. Fletcher

Sight and Song Augmented: Painting and Poetry in Mixed Reality

No abstract provided.

Sight And Song Augmented, Robert P. Fletcher

Sight and Song Augmented: Painting and Poetry in Mixed Reality

This file is an Android application built in the Unity 3D game engine with the Vuforia Augmented Reality extension. It remediates Sight and Song (1892) by Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), a collection of ekphrastic poetry about paintings by the Old Masters.

Course Syllabus (W17 Online) Coli 211m: "Superhero Film And Contemporary Culture", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

What might the current popularity and ubiquity of superhero film say about contemporary culture? This course will explore three possible implications of this question: (1) that the superhero genre reflects a moment in our species’ history of reconciling the human being-technology relation, which we shall view as a complex system constituted by our productive relations to material and ideological tools and their ensembles, the needs and aspirations that determine how we conceptualize and activate these relations, and the technically rationalized social reality that is their result, (2) that this ongoing process of reconciliation evinces, at once, the …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

The World Of The Cat's Table: Literature Through Production Design Analysis, Andrea J. Johnson

Senior Honors Projects

The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje is a rich piece of literature that has a diverse set of characters confined to one pivotal location, a ship. Just as the novel builds a world around its characters, in this project I attempted to build a space around immersive design choices.

Production Design is a visual response to analytic reading. By taking a written piece or concept and creating the physical/visual atmosphere for the work, a production designer’s job is to create the overall look and tone of a creative production, be it for a film, play, or museum space. This is …