This thesis considers the films of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar as postmodern melodramas. The crux of my argument is that melodrama is known for its expressiveness and its attempt to restore a spiritual element to a post-sacred world, and is used by Almodóvar to make clear the problems and contradictions inherent in the destabilized world of postmodernity. This definition of melodrama draws primarily on the work of Peter Brooks, Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams; it is modified to apply to postmodernism as defined by Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson. The conclusion reached is that Almodóvar is deeply ambivalent about postmodernity. Chapter 2 considers the twin issues of representation and sexuality in Almodóvar’s first six films: Pepi, Luci, Born (Pepi, Luci Born y otras chicas del montón, 1980), Labyrinth of Passions (Laberinto de pasiones, 1982), Dark Habits (Entre tinieblas, 1983), What Have I Done To Deserve This? (Qué he hecho yopor merecer esto!, 1984), Matador (1986), and Law ofDesire (Le ley del deseo, 1987); with a special eye to the representation of sexual violence, it establishes how Almodóvar develops his ambivalent melodramatic imagination. Chapter 3 considers fashion as a discourse and argues that Almodóvar’s next four films use clothing to place different versions of femininity in dialogue, and uses this as a springboard to consider Women on the Verge ofa Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, 1988), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (I Atame!, 1990), High Heels (Tacones lejanos, 1991), and Kika (1993) as postmodern “women’s pictures.” Chapter 4 considers the appearance of the explicitly political along with the symbolism of the image of the map in The Flower of My Secret (Laflor de rni secreto, 1995), Live Flesh (Came trémula, 1997), and All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre, 1999). Chapter 5 uses the metaphor of ghosts to consider the draw of the past in Talk To Her (Hable con ella, 2002), Bad Education (La mala educación, 2004), and Volver (2006), pointing to both the emptiness of the present and the impossibility of returning to that golden past. / Arts, Faculty of / Theatre and Film, Department of / Graduate

What do Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Val del Omar, Alejandro Jodorowski, Néstor Perlongher, Clarice Lispector, and Octavio Paz have in common? To the naked eye, they seem to feature more differences than similarities: besides the fact that all of them are Ibero-American artists, filmmakers and writers, their birthplaces, origins, generations, styles, and artistic disciplines are quite dissimilar. But there is at least one thing they share: their output was a perfect vehicle to reflect how they were all enthralled by ecstasy, epiphany, illumination, rapture, grace. In Psychology, these events are categorized as “Modified States of Consciousness”, a melting pot that comprises heteroclite mental states like medium trances, ritual possessions, REM states, effects of hallucinogenic substances, orgasm, and so on. The common factor is that in all those cases subjects experience a new way to perceive the world and their self, far away from the one provided by the ordinary state of consciousness. Also, most of them seem to take place in a dimension where rationality is mostly an obstacle. Friedrich Nietzsche certainly believed so, as he associated these irrational events with Dionysus, the god of wine and ritual madness in the classic Greek civilization. The Dionysian cult involved rupturing the bounds of the participants’ self and the collective communion between them as well as with the cosmos. On the other hand, one criterion to distinguish between the experiences that are confusedly grouped in that psychological miscellany is to examine where does it drive us to. There are events that can potentially change our ordinary state of conscience into another that could be described as an illuminated state and could be associated to perceptions of happiness, harmony, and mindfulness. These positive sensations would help explain why, since the dawn of civilization, human beings have used various techniques (such as yoga, ritual dance, the use of narcotics, etc.) in an attempt to recreate the mystical manifestations they previously had lived solely as spontaneous experiences. It must be recognized, though, that ecstatic experiences can be associated not only to a positive dimension, but also to a negative one. Following Nietzschean thesis, Néstor Perlongher (an Argentinean writer who is central to my dissertation) points out that Dionysian experiences can be self-destructive and dangerous, as well as illuminating and liberating. Nietzsche, and Perlongher, contemplate art as the necessary complement of ecstasy, a discipline which can help avoid the negative consequences of these experiences. Salvador Dalí and Octavio Paz (another two authors studied in my dissertation) also link art to ecstasy. Dalí believes in the power of pictorial images to provoke the non-ordinary mental state associated with ecstasy. Nevertheless, Octavio Paz considers poetics one of the best artistic vehicles to express the “instant”, through which a poem breaks the linearity of time while it also creates an “eternal present”. What I exposed above could be considered a sample of what I am doing in my dissertation. I aim to establish a dialogue between diverse “texts” (in the wide sense) and authors in order to delimitate the meaning of the ecstatic phenomenon, as well as their characteristics and particularities. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This dissertation explores the rhetoric of childhood to comprehend how Latin American literature and film signify childhood. It furthermore analyzes the figure of the child as a rhetorical device in the construction of literary and cinematographic meaning in twentieth and twenty-first century poetry, narrative prose and film. I claim that, contrary to prevailing cultural notions of childhood innocence, the child often constitutes an unsettling presence, signaling textual as well as extradiegetic opacities and tensions. Echoes of the Child is divided into three chapters that each present a different approach to childhood. Chapter 1 posits the politicization of the child narrator’s voice as both enabling and restricting the articulation of socio-political trauma. Analyzing texts by Nellie Campobello, Rosario Castellanos, Juan Pablo Villalobos and Juan Rulfo, I contend that child narrators create and subvert meaning depending on the position they occupy vis-à-vis the socio-political turmoil they witness. The second chapter postulates an uneasy alliance between what I call the ‘visual pull’ of the child on screen, and the erotic charge of the image in three Argentine films by Lucrecia Martel, Julia Solomonoff and Federico León / Martín Rejtman. I probe the relationship between the child’s strong screen presence and the forms in which the cinematographic image offers the child ways of transforming sexuality into sensuality; resisting heteronormative sexuality; and of eluding the spell of the adult’s libidinal gaze. Performing when she is merely present, I argue that the child bestows a performative dimension on her acting and her very presence. The third and final chapter posits infancy as an impossible experience in poetry from the historical avant-garde by Oliverio Girondo, César Vallejo and Vicente Huidobro. I contend that reading the poetry guided by the infant reveals two sides of ‘experience;’ the poetic expression of the infant’s experience of the world, a question I broach through psychoanalysis, and the poet’s attempts at articulating transcendental experience in language. My analyses reveal how the rhetoric of childhood bears on issues and dynamics in the socio-political realm; it thus contributes to our understanding of processes of signification within Latin American culture. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This study investigates a form of cultural production defined by the gathering of crisis-related media into public web environments. While it is clear that the many varieties of “digital crisis archives” can exhibit novel features—like rapid exploration, geotemporal visualization, and public curation—it is less clear what kinds of effects these features can have, by what means, and with what bearings upon research and memory practices around the crises they concern, and with what implications for thinking around media and memory more broadly. To pursue these questions, this dissertation aligns close readings of three instances: “ARLIS,” a collection of over two thousand long inaccessible government and nonprofit photographs related to the Exxon Valdez oil spill (1989), digitized in 2009 and uploaded to the image sharing platform Flickr in 2010; the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, a multimedia archive of “born-digital” media and user-contributed stories and imagery centered on Katrina (2005); and the Japan Disaster Archive, a “networked” archive that aggregates over one million items related to the triple disasters in Japan in 2011, and invites users to add to and curate these media. Each investigation concerns questions specific to the archive—“dynamics” of photographic assemblage in ARLIS, “modes” of visitor interaction with the Memory Bank, and “variable characteristics” in the participatory micro-publications of the Japan Disaster Archive—while also seeking out lessons for understanding the larger “genre” of the digital crisis archive. The study suggests that the ways these archives can intervene in post-disaster practices extend well beyond accumulation and dissemination. Digital crisis archives are insistently multivalent, and can serve as sites for imagination, interpretation, and collaborative learning as much as for organization, preservation, and goal-driven research. Getting at the inner workings of these new capacities depends on reference to fields we do not typically align, and carries ramifications for how we think about more traditional medial responses to disasters, particularly digital photographic ones. Throughout I argue that crucial to these archives’ most distinguishing capacities—and to the ways in which they can variously confound and contradict—are permutations of documentary assemblage, visitor interaction, and active participation. / Film and Visual Studies

Abstract not available.

El corpus biliografico en tomo al prologo del "filme poema" Un chien andalou (1929) es voluminoso. En este trabajo proporcionamos una sintesis de los analisis del prologo obtenidos gracias a diversos acercamientos: el analisis textual, la indagacion pragmatica, la intertextualidad y el estudio de la recepcion filmica. Identificamos dos esquemas globales que estructuran las imagenes y los temas del prologo: la contraposicion simple y la poesia asociativa surrealista. En los ultimos anos, teoricos y biografos han relacionado la esqumatizacion del prologo con varios discursos que circulaban en aquella epoca y que, segun Jose Caos, forman parte de la antitesis del racionalismo, o sea el antropologismo: las consideraciones entomologicas de Fabre y de Maeterlinck, las reflexiones del marques de Sade sobre la doctrina tomista, el marxismo, los movimientos literarios ultraista y surrealista, y el psicoanalisis. Segun los defensores del psicoanalisis, estos aspectos formales, tematicos y estructurales del prologo escenifican los mecanismos psiquicos regresivos e irracionales que intervienen en la recepcion espectatorial. Sin embargo, nuestro estudio del prologo dentro el marco cognitivo y ecologico revela el caracter racional y adaptativo de estos comportamientos mentales. Asi concluimos que el filme Un chien andalou, mas alla que una simple reaccion en contra del racionalismo, es el sitio donde se contraponen el racionalismo y el antropologismo.

Multilingual films, such as Lost in Translation (2003), have recently become a phenomenon. Various popular television series also feature an element of multilingualism in their plots. This inclusion of the cultural "other" and its language, specifically, the dubbing into French of "French situations" in American television shows, presents an interesting challenge for audiovisual translation (AVT). In my study, I begin by discussing research on multilingualism in literature, film and television. I then discuss the relevance of translation studies concepts to AVT, and apply them in examining the dubbing into French of American television shows that include situations involving the French language. I describe and analyze how this challenge has been met, where the "other" in the original is the television viewer for whom the show is translated. My work studies the many different strategies used to deal with a very specific translation problem in the field of AVT.

This thesis develops a theoretical methodology that deconstructs and (re)presents phallocentric themes in cultural narratives. This methodology, I argue, is an analytical strategy that displaces the primacy of the mythic structures of the Oedipal narrative in contemporary Western culture because it attends to other means of subjectivization and highlights sites of resignification. The theorization accomplishes three related tasks: it identifies areas in discourse that promote images of integration and wholeness; it reveals the performative nature and historical contingency of phallocentric discourses in cultural media; and it allows for the emergence of de-centered subjects. Drawing from Melanie Klein and Judith Butler, I argue that the Oedipal drama is not the means by which bodies in nature become subjects in culture; rather, it is a discourse that sustains the power and privilege of shifting conceptions of masculinity through its perpetual iteration. The symbolic order is the temporal regulation of signification that describes the atmosphere in which consent and regulation are secured, but it does not determine it. If the Oedipal complex is understood to be a performative expression of dominant discourse rather than a natural process, the Oedipal complex can be said to produce that which it claims only to describe. A poststructuralist psychoanalytic criticism interrogates the text, searching for traces of the always already said embedded in discourse. The analyses of the films Rebecca and American Beauty demonstrate that a Kleinian-poststructuralist methodology identifies new and different interpretations of texts.

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em História, Florianópolis, 2016. / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-20T04:04:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 341073.pdf: 1154453 bytes, checksum: 71b63a142209af480f8f4439f03119b4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016 / Tem sido recorrente no cinema brasileiro dos anos 2000 a abordagem de assuntos relacionados à ditadura militar brasileira. Tal percepção é possível por meio de dados divulgados pelo Observatório Brasileiro de Cinema e Audiovisual (OCA), Agência Nacional do Cinema (Ancine) e Cinemateca Brasileira. O contexto no qual estas produções estão inseridas é marcado por grandes agitações políticas e exposição de ?feridas? sobre o passado militar brasileiro. A fim de verificar os elos entre a representação fílmica e a memória da ditadura militar brasileira, esta pesquisa tem por objetivo analisar alguns filmes de longa-metragem brasileiros produzidos entre 2004 e 2009 que trazem em seus conteúdos assuntos relacionados com a temática da ditadura. A pesquisa parte do cinema e aborda também a atuação da imprensa no processo de construções de visões históricas sobre o tema, especificamente entre os anos 2004 e 2009. Dessa forma, tomamos por base argumentativa algumas reportagens do jornal Folha de S. Paulo e revista Veja.<br> / Abstract : It has been recurrent in Brazilian cinema of the 2000s the issues related to the Brazilian military dictatorship approach. This perception is possible through data released by the Brazilian Observatory of Cinema and Audiovisual (OCA), National Cinema Agency (Ancine) and the Brazilian Cinematheque. The context in which these productions are inserted is marked by major political upheavals and exhibition of "wounds" on the Brazilian military past. In order to check the links between filmic representation and the memory of the Brazilian military dictatorship, this research aims to analyze some Brazilian feature films produced between 2004 and 2009 to bring in their content issues related to the theme of dictatorship. The research part of the film and also discusses the role of the press in the process of historical views of buildings on the subject, specifically between 2004 and 2009. Thus, we based argumentative some newspaper reports Folha de S. Paulo and Veja magazine.

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Ciências da Educação, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação, Florianópolis, 2016 / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-20T04:15:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 339965.pdf: 8317412 bytes, checksum: 315912bd38d918cd8e2084c98f2d49f5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016 / Imagens navegantes de um cinema ambiental amador e experimental permeiam esta pesquisa de mestrado em Educação. Imagens em movimento foram capturadas, articuladas, editadas e convidadas a compor um percurso de trajetos simultâneos dentro do fazer pesquisa, funcionando como (des)caminhos, não como chegadas. Um cinema pensado e tecido na articulação entre imagens e alteridade. Uma confecção que articula cultura e ambiente a partir de encontros com pescadores da cidade de São Francisco do Conde, no interior da Bahia. Uma inspiração nos Estudos Culturais, com a experiência de operar conceitos advindos dos pensamentos pós-estruturalistas, tais como: afeto, ficção, memória e alteridade, e deste modo provocar, através das/com as próprias imagens, uma abertura para outros sentidos, sensações, rememorações e experiências no campo da Educação Ambiental. São Francisco do Conde se mostrou em sua multiplicidade e reapareceu de modos variados. Uma alteridade ainda enigmática. O outro se mantendo inapreensível, irrepresentável. Uma trajetória através de um fazer cinema ambiental como processo metodológico e experiência. Uma navegação por um mar povoado de encontros entre educação, cultura e ambiente. <br> / Abstract : Sailing images of an experimental and amateur environmental cinema permeate this Master s thesis in Education. Images in motion were captured, articulated, edited, and invited to compose a route of simultaneous paths within the research process and act as (mis)directions, not as arrivals. The planning and fabrication of a cinema in conjunction between images and alterity. A production that articulates culture and environment from meetings with fishermen from the city of São Francisco do Conde, located in the countryside of the Brazilian state of Bahia. An inspiration in Cultural Studies while experiencing post-structuralist concepts such as affection, fiction, memory, and alterity, and thus causing, through/with the images themselves, an opening to other senses, recollections, and experiences within the Environmental Education field. São Francisco do Conde stood out for its multiplicity and reasserted itself in various ways. A still enigmatic alterity.The other remaining elusive, indefinable. A path through the environmental cinema making as a methodological process and an experience. A navigation through a sea bursting with meetings between education, culture, and environment.