<p> This project report will provide a description and analysis of the original musical score, as composed and arranged by the author, for the short animated film <i>Ma&lstrok;y Tre&cedil;bacz,</i> which was produced in collaboration with the film's director, Monica Kozlowski. It will detail the process of the music's composition, including those decisions which were made whilst scoring the picture, the reasons and justifications for so doing, a scene-by-scene analysis of the film and accompanying music, background information concerning the film's origins and influences (including the historical origins of the narrative), the role of the film's score in communicating the story of the film to the audience, how certain choices in scoring impacted the direction of the film's narrative, and a short discussion of the major themes and musical motifs heard within the score (including its incorporation of the <i>Hejnal mariacki</i>).</p>

<p>Syncretism has historically been a problem for the covenant people of God and today is no exception. Recent studies have shown that professing Christians struggle to remain singularly devoted to Jesus amidst a society that begs them to worship other gods. This is especially the case with young men and women between the ages of eighteen and thirty at Northview Community Church in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada. Many of these emerging adults are relatively ignorant regarding the Christian worldview, ignorant about other worldviews that are present in North American culture, and ignorant regarding the skill necessary to exegete films that communicate these worldviews. A course that trains these young people to identify and evaluate worldviews in films should help them to remain faithful to the exclusive call of Jesus Christ on their lives. </p>

<p> The music of Scott Walker (b. Noel Scott Engel, January 9, 1943) continues to influence multiple generations of respected figures in popular music from David Bowie to Radiohead, yet Walker has not set foot on stage to perform since the 1970s. Instead, the singer-songwriter-producer's latter-day reputation has instead thrived upon the basis of his recorded works. Following a radical self re-invention on the Walker Brothers' farewell album <i>Nite Flights </i> (1978) Walker has pushed the boundaries of his chosen media to the extent that his recorded tracks belong more to the aesthetic sphere of fixed art forms such as films rather than performance-oriented forms such as music as it is traditionally categorized among the liberal arts. In the same manner that Sergei Eisenstein and Orson Welles abandoned the rules of theatrical formalism to create works native to the cinematic medium itself, Walker has likewise approached his work in recording studios as a Phonographic Auteur. To abstract Walker's works by discussing them as "songs" detached from their recorded "track" form would be as detrimental to their analysis as would the discussion of <i>Citizen Kane</i> outside of the form language of the cinema. As deconstructions of the binary opposition between track and song the problems surrounding the analysis of Walker's post-1978 works are largely those confronting the analysis of Euro-American popular music that arise from its troublesome relationship with the recorded format. Further, Walker's career evidences how a number of artists in Euro-american contexts have come to regard the recorded, studio intensive format of music as a solution to the problems they are confronted within the the modern public concert spectacle. In doing so these individuals have given birth to a burgeoning autonomous art form, and by extension, a new model of the composer-listener-performer dynamic.</p>

<p> There is a vacancy in history, a vacancy that contains a crucial understanding and hinders us from comprehending history as a whole. The emptiness that we feel does not come from dissipated events or hollow periods. It comes from a lack of perspective, or an absence of empathetic dispositions.</p><p> To elucidate this disconcerting question, I developed a project called Crossroads, which is an interactive narrative piece that can be used as a tool to let people view World War II history from numerous lives. This is a collective project that follows different characters that lived during World War II. Just by observing the content, the viewer can see how the war impacted their lives. Some characters in my project may have crossed paths with each other during the World War II period, but may have dramatically different impression afterwards.</p>

<p> Representations of the reasons and actions of terrorists have appeared in German literature tracing back to the age of <i>Sturm und Drang</i> of the 18th century, most notably in Heinrich von Kleist's <i>Michael Kohlhaas</i> and Friedrich Schiller's <i>Die R&auml;uber</i>, and more recently since the radical actions of the Red Army Faction during the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as in Uli Edel's film, <i>The Baader Meinhof Complex.</i> By referring to Walter Benjamin's system of natural law and positive law, which provides definitions of differing codes of ethics with relation to state laws and personal ethics, one should be able to understand that Michael Kohlhaas, Karl Moor, and the members of the RAF are indeed represented as terrorists. However, their actions and motives are not without an internal ethics, which conflicts with that of their respective state-sanctioned authorities. This thesis reveals the similarities and differences in motives, methods, and use of violence in Schiller, Kleist, and representations of the RAF and explores how the turn to terrorism can arise from a logical realization that ideologies of state law do not align with the personal sense of justice and law of the individual.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of projected film visuals on singers' expressivity in choral performance. The study was divided into three phases. In Phase One, university choir singers (<i>N</i> = 21) viewed eight audiovisual pairings (two film excerpts and four choral etudes) and rated these pairings according to perceived music to film congruency. Based on these ratings, two choral etudes were identified that elicited the broadest congruency contrasts when paired with the film segments.</p><p> In Phase Two, a different group of university choir singers (<i> N</i> = 116) rehearsed and prepared both of the selected choral etudes referred to as "Doh" and "Noo." Subsequently, these singers were organized into smaller chamber ensembles (<i>n</i> = 11), and performed each choral etude three times under the following conditions: (1) while viewing congruent film, (2) while viewing incongruent film, and (3) with no film projected. After each performance, singers reported their level of self-expression. At the completion of all three performances, singers reported their preferred performance condition. Finally, participants listened to their audio-recorded performances and rated these for performance expressivity and personal preference. During Phase Three, choral experts (<i>N</i> = 8) rated performance expressivity and reported personal preference for each audio-recorded performance. </p><p> A two-way ANOVA with repeated measures found significant main effects of both etude and film visual performance condition on participants' expressivity ratings (<i>p</i> &lt; .001). Additionally, a significant etude x film visual performance condition interaction was discovered (<i>p </i> = .001). Participants rated self-expression significantly higher when singing with a congruent film compared with other conditions for both etudes (<i>p</i> &lt; .001). Chi-square tests found most preferred experiences during congruent performances, and least preferred experiences during incongruent performances for both etudes (<i>p</i> &lt; .001). Expressivity ratings for audio-recorded performances indicated significantly higher expressivity ratings for the performances influenced by the congruent film visual of etude "Doh" (<i>p</i> &lt; .05), while no significant differences were found for etude "Noo" (<i>p</i> > .05). Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to filmmaking techniques, music education curriculum, choral rehearsal pedagogy, and composition/performance practice, with recommendations for future research.</p>

This work formulates a new language for speaking about the operatic voice in film. Beyond cultural signifiers, opera has a more specific purpose in film, and this thesis will provide a new language for speaking about it in such a way. Borrowing from Michel Chion's acousmetre, the current document develops a new lexicon for the way operatic music functions, beyond the traditional diegesis, and points out the agency of such voices in film. After outlining the specific attributes of the diva-acousmetre, the agent outlined in the thesis, three chapters explore its use in the films Philadelphia, The Shawshank Redemption, and Transamerica.

If the late 1960s and early 1970s in America could be characterized as a period which disrupted the narratives that structured both public and private life, then William Gaddis's J R, Robert Altman's Nashville, and Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father, all of which appeared in 1975, are emblematic of this period, products of both the aesthetic principles of these three artists and the social milieu in which they created their most exemplary works. All three works subvert or abandon narrative conventions in three general ways. First, they render time as a continuous present, endless and without gaps, as opposed to a narrativized kind of time which suggests a recovery of the past, and which starts and stops with the beginning and end of each event included in the narrative. Second, these works contain no internal organizing center which could stabilize the relationships between their characters. Third, all three works eschew a narrating consciousness, offering no indication of the significance of anything in their fictional worlds. In their non-narrative aspects, the forms of each of these works show the influence of other media; Gaddis's novel possesses cinematic qualities, while Altman's film and Barthelme's novel invite comparisons to painting. By looking to other media, Gaddis, Altman, and Barthelme extend the representational capacities of their own. The result of this refusal of narrative is not the creation of a space within the work, left by elements said to be missing from it, that is filled by the reader or spectator, who then becomes to some degree the "subject" of the work, and is therefore capable of articulating its meaning. On the contrary, by refusing narrative, these works undermine the illusion, perpetuated by narrative, that the world speaks to us in intelligible terms, as well as the illusion of a shared reality made possible by acts of identification between one consciousness and another. J R, Nashville, and The Dead Father attest to the constructed nature of shared reality and illuminate both the limits of individual subjectivity and the irreducible difference between art and its audience.

Riefenstahl's career is examined through criticism which only allows two images: Riefenstahl as a Nazi film propagandist or Riefenstahl as a pure artist. My research shows that Riefenstahl is a complex person; therefore, it is impossible to place her into categories. Through her memoirs, Die Macht der Bilder, Das Blaue Licht, Triumph des Willens, Olympia, Tiefland, her Nuba material, and her underwater work it becomes clear that her career must be examined within the context of its time. Her films and photographs are considered for their artistic qualities as well as for their innovative elements.

By examining the distinctions made by Lessing between word and picture, I present the hypothesis that cinema and literature have essentially the same range of expression possibilities. However, the ways of expression are differently organized so that there are no linear correspondences between the two artistic modes. The result is that a cinematic adaptation is less a translation of a literary work than a recreation. The examination of Doblin's and Fassbinder's texts shows that there are essential differences in the presentation of the plot. While the novel captures in a mode of citation and montage the violence of collective life in the city, the movie demonstrates in its concentration on psychological types and figures the violence within sexual, interpersonal relationships. The emergence of two different contents that is based upon differences in representation underscores the essential equality in the two modes of expression, cinema and literature.