Television Commons^™

Reviving Revive. Is The Notion Of An Independent Artist An Outdated Concept?, Richard C. Moore Mr

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This article published in Spectator Magazine - online - is a reflection on whether or not a cultural policy is a means of controlling the artistic community and whether there is still such a being as an independent Australian artist. It was published as the 2026 submissions for an update to Australia's cultural policy REVIVE -  were closing.

To Print A Remake: An Analysis Of Hollywood Remakes And Their Cultural Value, Connor F. Seaton

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In recent years, audiences and movie critics have expressed concern that Hollywood’s growing reliance on remakes, sequels, franchises, and similar adaptations has led to a broader worry that originality is fading from modern cinema and that the industry is instead focused on using adaptations to maximize profits. Although adaptation is often seen as a commercially driven framework for reproducing existing intellectual property in a new media format, this thesis argues that it should be recognized as an autonomous cultural category with its own artistic, historical, and social significance and merit. By analyzing adaptation scholarship and reviewing its complex historical development, …

The Sauce To Meat Is Ceremony: Cannibalism And Hospitality Serve As Horror And Culture Tropes In Hannibal And Macbeth, Shay Williams

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

When examining Macbeth (1623) as a case study within Shakespeare’s canon, we see all the obvious horror tropes - murder, witches, a ghost, bodies, blood and gore. What is less pronounced is the horror that lies within eating, drinking, feasting, and the ceremony of banquets. On the other side of the spectrum, and unlike the character of Macbeth, we have a figure that epitomizes all things horror, and has been read about in novels, watched on film, and as of late (2013-2015) has been the subject of a Television show, aptly named: Hannibal. In both works, we encounter men/monsters/killers …

A Gendered Perspective On Policing Violence In Happy Valley And Fargo, T. Allen Culpepper

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Portrayal of a police officer determined to fight crime and execute justice in a harsh, isolated environment has become a television and film subgenre, often featuring women facing gender-related challenges. The issues raised in Sally Wainwright’s British television series Happy Valley, can be made more accessible, particularly to American undergraduate students, via its commonalities with the Coen brothers film Fargo. In both, a tough but compassionate policewoman pursues the more sociopathic of a pair of criminals involved in a botched kidnapping attempt instigated by an inept businessman, taking on the case for personal and professional honor, and as …

Science Fiction, Eng 2420, Syllabus And Course Outline, Jason W. Ellis

Open Educational Resources

This Science Fiction, ENG2420 syllabus and course outline was written for an online, asynchronous class taught in the Department of English at the New York City College of Technology, CUNY. It was designed to compliment the OER Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT) and have a Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) approach with readings and viewings found primarily through the Internet Archive. The course follows a historical approach to the science fiction genre covering the Origins of Science Fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Proto-SF, Pulp SF, SF Film Serials, Golden Age SF, SF Film Through the 1950s, New Wave …

The Art Of Animation: How Animation Is Creating A Better Film Industry, Judah Cooper

Senior Honors Theses

With the progression of streaming services in recent years, the art form of animation has gained traction, continuing to develop into exceedingly creative forms through the work of talented artists. Animation has developed alongside the film industry, achieving great success in the process. This thesis will define animation and its place within visual effects, critically analyze categories of character design, theme, and story while demonstrating their relationship with animation, and contrast animation with live action films to understand its strengths and differentiations. The research concludes that animation has great benefits to offer the film industry and should be continued to …

Finding Aid For The Gary Hawkins Multimedia Collection (Mum00705)

Archives & Special Collections: Finding Aids (alphabetical)

Physical and digital files including moving image files, audio, photographs, small manuscripts, and ephemera related to the films Joe and The Rough South of Larry Brown created by filmmaker Gary Hawkins.

The Reflective Age: Nostalgia At The End Of History, Zachary Griffith

Theses and Dissertations--English

This project investigates the ways in which nostalgic American media of the last decade reflects the sociopolitical conditions of the end of history. It begins with the assertion that the end of history represents a confounded, contradictory moment in which large-scale political change is relatively scarce, and belief in a progressive future has largely been abandoned, while cultural change has also accelerated at a pace never before seen––spurred on, in particular, by the constant return of dead styles and dormant IP. In other words, it seems as if nothing is changing and everything is changing simultaneously. The recent boom in …

Celebrating And Practicing Aspects From Eastern- And Western-Centric Animation Styles, Alissa Annette Standerwick

All Theses

Animation styles in a modern world end up influencing the animation of other regions. This project, through animation, celebrates Eastern and Western differences in their animations. Rather than analyzing story differences, aspects of the habits formed by the region’s animators are analyzed and practiced. The formation of animation in respective cultures represents the local history of these regions. So to understand the aspects & technicalities of how animators animate per region, it is useful to understand how film, TV, & comic styles of an entire community impacted that area’s animation

Night Of The Witch: Alternative Spirituality, Identity And Media, Andreana Tarleton

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis works to understand the relationships witches and conjurors have with the film and television depictions of them. Employing the method of film critique, I argue that the witch stands as a cultural symbol in the US of women and femmes with power, and that their stories serve as lessons to these populations about what it means to be an acceptable woman or femme, while simultaneously creating and perpetuating stereotypes of magic practitioners. Then, using the combination of hashtag ethnography, in-person and video interviewing and internet surveys, I argue that #witchblr and #witchesofcolor, as well as the space of …

How Actresses Jessica Chastain, Octavia Spencer And Reese Witherspoon Are Fighting Pay Disparity One Project At A Time, Abbey M. White

Capstones

While working on Steven Spielberg's 2005 miniseries "Into the West," Indigenous-Latina actress Tonantzin Carmelo achieved pay parity with her white male co-stars thanks to a contract clause called "favored nations. Now 15 years later, and in the height of Hollywood's gender parity movement, Hollywood actresses are strategically using the very same clause to chip away at the pay gap. This 7000-word narrative feature explains the historical use of this clause, identifies how actresses are leveraging its power to achieve pay parity on their projects and answers why it's not a one-size-fits-all fix for Hollywood pay inequity.

http://abbeymwhite.com/capstone/how-actresses-like-jennifer-aniston-jessica-chastain-and-lupita-nyongo-are-fighting-pay-disparity-one-project-at-a-time/

İbne, Gey, Lubunya: A Queer Critique Of Lgbti+ Discourses In The New Cinema Of Turkey, Azmi Mert Erdem

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my thesis, I examine the intersections between liberalism, neoliberal globalism, and LGBTI+ visibility and identity politics, through films that present “openly” non-normative sexualities through cis/transgender male, female, or non-binary characters in the new cinema of Turkey. First, I survey existing scholarship on how liberal capitalism impacts the formation of LGBTI+ subjectivities and identity politics. Furthermore, I trace how non-normative sexualities, practices, and discourses evolved along with socioeconomic and political shifts in the Turkish Republic following the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, I review Turkey’s adoption of neoliberal ideologies in the 1980s and how these ideologies engage with its local, heterogenous gender …

Hispanic Stereotypes In Contemporary Film, Emily M. Pressler

Honors College Theses

Stereotypes are present even in the most popular films. Groups of people are often misrepresented in a way that is entertaining, but not necessarily truthful, causing viewers to have a narrow, often incorrect, view of a particular culture or people. This research serves as an analysis of selected contemporary American films that feature a Hispanic character or cultural element. My aim is twofold: first, to shed light on the stereotypes surrounding Hispanics and the excessive appearance of these stereotypical representations in popular U.S. films, and second, to promote open-mindedness by educating others on the cultural diversity of Spanish speakers, especially …

The Commodified Body And Post/In Human Subjectivities In Frears’S Dirty Pretty Things And Romanek’S Never Let Me Go, Rocio Carrasco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Following new materialist analysis, this article takes the body as the central locus of analysis, and relates it to broader questions such as ethics, ideology, power and/or technologies. Specifically, it revolves around the idea of embodied subjectivity as articulated by scholars Rosi Braidotti, Sherryl Vint or Cary Wolfe, whereby body and subjectivity are indissolubly and interestingly connected. Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) exploit the idea of the commodified body, understood here as a vulnerable body, a disposable commodity at the service of powerful and/or wealthy people. Victims of the cruelties inflicted …

La Adaptación Afro-Futurística Y El Placer Como Supervivencia En "Los Pueblos Silenciosos" De Elena Palacios Ramé, Samuel Ginsburg

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

In “The Silent Towns,” from the 1950 collection The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury tells the story of the last man and woman left on Mars. While Walter has romanticized visions of a perfect match, he is ultimately disappointed by Genevieve’s and chooses to live out his life alone. Sixty years later, director Elena Palacios Ramé revived this science fiction classic to ask a simple question with a complex answer: What happens if you move the story to Havana? In the short film Los pueblos silenciosos (2010), Palacios replaces Mars with an abandoned Cuban capital, matching Walter with an extravagant Afro-Cuban …

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.

“We Are Going Live In 3, 2, 1...”: Examining Liveness Amidst Streaming Technology, Jessica Jeanne Johnson

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The products of the theatre, film, and television industries are becoming increasingly homogenized. The modes of entertainment which feature a live audience experience (film and theatre) have seen a gradual decrease in ticket sales to these experiences, while simultaneously there has been a rapidly increasing number of subscriptions to streaming services providing access to productions from all three mediums (film, theatre, television). This fact represents the public’s divergence from the idea of traditional “liveness.” Many scholars believe that liveness has the ability to manifest itself in many mediatized forms (such as in 3D, surround sound, etc.), and while this is …

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 …

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.

Explicar El Fracaso: Casa De Mi Padre (Piedmont, 2012), Liam Baldwin

Spanish: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Audience Response And From Film Adaptation To Reading Literature, Klaudia H.Y. Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Audience Response and from Film Adaptation to Reading Literature" Klaudia H.Y. Lee analyses results from 3000-plus interview conducted across university campuses in Hong Kong in order to investigate the roles of screen adaptations and their intertextual relationship for developing students' critical textual practice. Lee combines reader-response theory (Iser and Rosenblatt) with empirical data to explore students' actual encounters and experience with texts. While the data suggests an influence of screen adaptations on students' choice and motivation of reading, this interest can potentially be developed into a critical awareness of the various intertextual possibilities that exist in different …

How 9/11 Changed The Movies: The Tony Scott Barometer, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Communications: Faculty Publications

In an essay written some years ago on the 1945 film, Mildred Pierce, Linda Williams raises the intriguing question, why does the narrative frequently allude to but refrains from ever specifically mentioning World War II (22)? Williams’ assessment is that certain films are capable of addressing the most significant political events of the era in ways they could not have had they chosen to use direct depictions (24). Released in October 1945, following the end of U.S. involvement in the war, Mildred Pierce coincided with a period of demobilization and the economic and social reintegration of the returning American, largely …

Matteo Garrone's Reality:The Big Brother Spectacle And Its Rupture, Anna Paparcone Bronner

Faculty Journal Articles

In Garrone’s film, Reality, the protagonist Luciano Ciotola becomes obsessed with his participation in the reality TV show Big Brother to the point that his whole life turns into a spectacle. In Italian cinema studies no other scholar had yet analyzed this film, despite its success and the very engaging and up-to-date topic. In my article, at the diegetic level, I show that the spectator experiences an overlap and a (con)fusion between Luciano’s everyday reality and his life as a member of the reality TV show. However, keeping in mind Guy Debord’s seminal work The Society of the Spectacle and …

The Rainbow Effect: Exploring The Implications Of Queer Representation In Film And Television On Social Change, Maya S. Reddy

CMC Senior Theses

In this thesis, I explore how specific films and television shows use the preexisting structure and mechanics of narrative film in order to create queer characters and stories that defy their otherness and stereotypes, thus creating a profound cinematic experience. Not only does the manipulation of these structures and mechanics heighten the realism and depth of the narrative at hand, it also enhances audience identification by allowing queer viewers to find themselves and straight viewers to understand the “other.” In this manner, the New New Queer Cinema and television have had lasting effects on the modern gay rights movement, changing …

Movie And Television Fathers: A Positive Reflection Of Positive Changes, George J. Mcgowan

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Certain films and television programs depicting fathers have both enduring popularity and have reflected the advances in the institution of fatherhood. This has happened because of a symbiosis that has delivered positive results: popular films and television shows that earn money for producers and advertisers have depicted fathers who have changed to reflect the popular example. These depictions have contributed in their way to mending the family dynamic, specifically related to the father’s essential role in the family. Such family-oriented films and television shows have effectively showed fathers (and men that would become fathers) that they could be much more …

Social Themes As Reflected In Film: Scholarship, Criticism, And Theory, Leslie M. Kong

Library Faculty Publications & Presentations

As faculty, we strive to develop methodologies to make more meaningful to students the concepts and principles taught in our courses. Over the years, growing literature has developed that supports the use of popular films, as well as documentaries, in college and university curricula. This essay is not intended as an exhaustive or comprehensive study of resources in this area, but rather as a guide to works that faculty will find relevant in supporting various courses.

Film And Television After 9/11 [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

One of the necessary compromises a book such as Film and TV After 9/11 must make is the amount and variety of examples it can provide. In order to be the first book to cover the subject, the book sacrifices the types of materials covered and the variety of themes they depict. Although the editor, Wheeler Winston Dixon, does not do so, the book’s twelve essays slot into four basic categories: analogies, productions altered to suit the "post-9/11" mindset, post-9/11 productions with metaphorical rather than literal linkages to the event and pre-9/11 productions whose viewing must now take that day …

Filmmakers In Conversation, 1982, William Friedkin, Buck Henry, Melvin Van Peebles, Anthony Loeb

Conversation With...

Several of these conversations were published in monograph form, available on this website. However, three conversations with William Friedkin, Buck Henry, and Melvin Van Peebles appear here for the first time in this 1982 publication.

Other conversations include John Cassavetes, Joan Tewkesbury, Steve Shagan, and Bill Butler. The publication was edited by Anthony Loeb, then chair of the Film Department, Columbia College Chicago. 135 pages.