Visual Studies Commons^™

“Mortality’S Wilting Flower:” Terror Management Theory And Music In Animated Films, Lauren Bertsch

Senior Honors Projects

There’s something about animated films - so full of light and wonder - that invokes this “warm and fuzzy” feeling when you sit down to watch it. Yet an entire spectrum of human emotion is demanded from us as an audience. Buried in the heart of animated films are these dark themes, problems that lie in the bedrock of humanity. And it leaves us pondering: why? The answer may actually stretch back to when our species developed thought and reason. In 1973, American anthropologist Ernest Becker uncovered the mental foundation that allows us to live, function, and thrive in a …

Visual Weimar: The Iconography Of Social And Political Identities, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

In the Weimar Republic, images were perceived to be as unreliable as they were powerful. They helped create and codify difference while simultaneously blurring lines within the categories of gender and race. Visual culture provided a wild playground for discourses about gender presentation and sexuality that encompassed veterans, athletes, criminals, the New Woman, and androgynous figures. Despite the growing prominence of images in race science, it was widely held that images could not be trusted to convey accurate information about race. The propagandistic use of images for political purposes had the potential to be equally ambiguous. It was ultimately up …

The Video Camera Spoiled My Ethnography: A Critical Approach, Katherine Gregory

Publications and Research

As videography and other media technologies are normalized in the field of qualitative methods for the purpose of data collection, there is a growing need to discuss the benefits and limitations of these data collection tools. This article chronicles an ethnographic video study focused on the experiences of Muslim adults living in the Netherlands, and why the author opted to end the project. Issues focus on reckoning with the imperial gaze of the camera, performative behavior of participants before the camera and interdisciplinary tensions the researcher faced from conflicting trainings as a qualitative methodologist and media practitioner.

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 …

Undocumented Migration And Political Community In Susan Meiselas's Crossings Photographs, Sarah Bassnet

Visual Arts Publications

In 1989, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948) photographed irregular border crossings in southern California. At the time, it was relatively easy for undocumented migrants from Central America and Mexico to cross between ports of entry, even as there was growing pressure on American officials to address border security.1 One photograph in Meiselas’s Crossings series depicts a border patrol officer apprehending a migrant off the interstate near Oceanside (fig. 1). Two torsos fill the center of the image. The officer grasps the man’s clothing, propelling him toward the nearby vehicle. With heads cut off by the frame and backs turned, …

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 …

Little Magazines, Postwar Internationalism, And The Construction Of World Cinema, Louise Kane

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This essay explores how two interwar film magazines, Close Up (1927-33) and Experimental Cinema (1930-4), pioneered early forms of world cinema as part of wider postwar attempts to forge transnationalism, improved international relations, and humanistic dialogue among people and nations. I argue that both magazines presented the cinema as a form of global community through their establishment of film societies and clubs, inclusive contributor policies, turn toward Russian cinema, and staunch rejection of Hollywood cinema’s commercialism. These strategies enabled the construction of a shared, albeit idealistic, vision of world cinema centered on comparative approaches, anti-imperialism, and the preservation and documentation …

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.

Terre Brûlée : Une Éco-Poétique Du Vide, Pierre Taminiaux

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Au XXIe siècle, les sociétés occidentales sont confrontées à de nouvelles formes de chaos. Celui-ci comporte plusieurs dimensions, à la fois sociales, culturelles et écologiques. L’art doit dès lors prendre en considération cette situation d’une manière ou d’une autre. C’est ce qui m’autorise à parler ici de mes images photographiques rassemblées sous le titre de Terre brûlée.

Celles-ci ont été prises à l’automne 2017, au Portugal, près de la ville de Leiria, dans une forêt de bord de mer (une pinède, plus exactement) qui fut longtemps considérée dans l’histoire de ce pays comme un domaine royal. Cette saison fut …

"Torture The Women": A Gaze At The Misogynistic Machinery Of Scary Cinema, Sarah Hankins

Copley Library Undergraduate Research Awards

A frightening truth remains that within horror-thriller films the experience of women is at the heart of the horrifying. This project analyses the effects of film media on the construction, fetishization, and destruction of female figures and engages with feminist critical concepts, such as Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze” and Linda Williams’ “body horror,” to evaluate Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958) and Satoshi Kon’s anime Perfect Blue (1997). Importantly, this essay critiques the misogynistic inner-workings of the horror-thriller genre typified in Vertigo—that evokes visual pleasure from objectification, victimization, and physical, often sexual, violence—and contrasts it with Kon’s anime. This paper finds …

Barrier-Breaking Women In Indian Cinema, Paulina Sobczak

Communication Student Works

During the last 100 years, Indian Cinema has played a major role in the influence of certain attitudes toward women in Indian society. Early on, women were portrayed as evil temptresses, sex symbols, and/or damsels in distress. These roles went against equality and were far more challenging for the women in Indian films. In 1954, a group of about 13,000 women petitioned the prime minister that these character types were unacceptable. They believed these films were having a negative effect on society, especially for the generations to come. This short documentary showcases the journey of the women who began this …