This thesis expands the discussion of the mass appeal and sustained success of reality TV by initiating an examination of the direct connections between reality TV and cinematic and written fiction. As reality TV has firmly established itself as a successful genre of entertainment over the last two decades, scholarship has been slow to follow. The majority of existing scholarship focuses on reality TV as a descendant of the documentary and emphasizes the role of the non-professional, the average person, as the star. Reality TV's appropriation of structural elements from general fiction is acknowledged only briefly and the use of specific techniques borrowed from fiction is largely unexplored. Although reality TV is a variation of the documentary, this thesis explores reality TV's creation of its voyeuristic appeal through the appropriation of key elements that come directly from fiction. Specific techniques used to create a voyeuristic appeal in reality programs, such as the morally ambiguous character and the confession, can be traced, respectively, to the surprising sources of Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allan Poe. Reality TV, in appropriating these techniques from Hitchcock and Poe, has a similar formula for entertainment: the thrill of voyeurism as a sublime experience. The consistent appeal of reality TV cannot be fully understood without an awareness of its connections to these two great artists.

In this thesis I focus on the artistry and essential work, behind the scenes that storyboard artists have contributed to, since the early days of film history. The works I will focus on are the important phases of pre-planning of feature films and animated films. I theorize on the aspect of what makes a good story and how it is brought to life on the screen, as well as how the story is actually conveyed with this drawings. The hypothesis maintains the importance of storyboards, as well as defining their main purpose. Using a formalistic point of view and historical argumentation, I examine and compare five different directors´ use of storyboards and how their respective collaborative teams (i.e director of photography, production designer and story artists, editors etc) create each film´s particular nuances and cinematic expressions. The source materials used are works by Bill Krohn, Giuseppe Cristiano, Steven D. Katz and Robert Kapsis, amongst others. The films/DVDs for my research have consisted of numerous behind-the-scenes materials and storyboards that have been featured with these filmic references. My conclusion is that the subsequent cinematic expression in each work is already apparent in the early process. This is revealed sometimes in the sketchbook of the director, but most often in the important collaborative work of the whole production team. In this we discover aspects as to what makes an elaborate, filmic masterpiece, facts most often unknown to a normal cinema audience.

No description available.

The implication of space in film is worth exploring in detail particularly with regard to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, since he is, perhaps more than any other filmmaker, concerned with the dynamics of proximity. Possibly because of his experience as a set designer on Graham Cutt’s silent films Woman to Woman (1922), The White Shadow (1923), The Passionate Adventure (1924), The Blackguard, and The Prude’s Fall (both 1925), Hitchcock very early in his career was faced with the task of expressing himself - without words - through setting, set shape, and room size. In Francois Truffaut's book, Hitchcock, the Master relates an important (since he remembers his) childhood episode in which his father arranged for the chief of police to lock him in a jail cell for five or ten minutes, admonishing that, “This is what we do to naughty boys.” Consequently, we see in Hitchcock’s films (which were all visually designed by him in the storyboard process) a persuasive aura of claustrophobia which involves a certain amount of connotes guilt and fear. As I intend to explain, this claustrophobia has far-reaching implications in five hermeneutic contexts, proving to be an important key to his moral-aesthetic universe.

Diss. Univ. Zürich, 2004/05. - Ref.: Elisabeth Bronfen. / Im Buchh.: Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press. Register. Literaturverz.

Cette thèse vise à apporter un éclairage philosophique sur l'œuvre cinématographique d'Alfred Hitchcock. Plus spécifiquement, il est question d'envisager les phénomènes esthétiques et narratifs afin d'évaluer la pertinence de ses films en matière de morale. Pour ce faire, nous proposons un travail en quatre étapes : tout d'abord, il faut prendre le temps nécessaire pour consolider les fondements théoriques de l'exégèse. La première partie s'efforce donc de mettre en place les éléments principaux pour la connaissance de son œuvre, du contexte de production et de ses caractéristiques les plus pertinentes. Par la suite sont envisagés les apports théoriques et conceptuels des critiques dans la filiation de laquelle se situe ce travail : la politique de réhabilitation d'Hitchcock opérée par les Cahiers du cinéma porte ses fruits aujourd'hui encore, malgré la nécessité de dépasser leur approche spiritualiste. Ainsi, cette thèse se veut leur héritière, tout en revendiquant l'utilité de perspectives alternatives comme celles de Robin Wood ou de William Drummin. Le second moment se propose d'entrer dans la diégèse hitchcockienne et d'analyser le plus justement possible les particularités du monde fictionnel créé à travers la cinquantaine de films constituant le corpus. Cette étude met en valeur l'idée d'un pessimisme latent qui se manifeste à travers une contingence ambivalente, une menace de la fatalité, une ambiguïté des fin heureuses, et une critique presque généralisée des institutions. La représentation des personnages n'est pas plus heureuse dans la mesure où l'antagonisme traditionnel méchants / bons est faussé par un manque d'héroïsme des protagonistes et une sympathie récurrente des vilains, dont la mise en scène particulièrement ambiguë favorise un rapport non conventionnel de la part des spectateurs. La troisième partie tente de dépasser cette inquiétude généralisée en montrant que les ressources personnelles des protagonistes, associées à leur rencontre parfois traumatisante avec le monde les amène à rendre possible une certaine éthique des rapports humains. Le couple engagement / dévouement est au centre de ce développement, permettant de mettre en avant la possibilité d'une évolution des personnages : d'une amoralité initiale, résultat d'une hostilité généralisée et d'un égoïsme primaire, ils peuvent prétendre au statut de véritables héros, porteurs ou représentants de valeurs et de vertus liées à l'altruisme et à l'acceptation du monde. Enfin, le dernier mouvement propose une étude de la réception, dont le but est de comprendre la position spectatorielle. Pour ce faire, nous analysons les procédés permettant le partage des expériences, afin de parvenir au concept de " vicarialité " qui semble le plus à même de décrire la forte implication et la conscience de soi qui résulte de l'esthétique hitchcockienne. Le moment final est centré sur la constitution du jugement moral du spectateur et sur la pertinence de cette œuvre dans la vie éthique du public.

No description available.

ANNOTATION: The work The Mirror of Reality in the Imagery of Dreams of the 19th and 20th Centuries - Creative Individuality versus the Chaos of the Time is based on the assumption that dreams are inseparably linked to the concept of existence in human life (Michel Foucault). The study touches on the ways in which dreams are depicted in visual culture that does not coincide with chronologically organized historical events, but is an expression of a free alliance between artists in the European space and centuries of common experience. These works are generally socially critical, exposed to unimaginable pressure from public censorship. The artist must pretend it is only an innocent game, a crazy idea, a whim. At the same time, these paintings are not an expression of boundless imagination, but they are subject to the firm rules of spatial construction of the painting. This is due to the traditional delimitation of dark depths - the underworld of Virgil's Saturn myth of pre-Roman culture, alternating with the vertically felt open heavens as variants of the original Plato's The Myth of Er, which in the 20th century paintings is replaced by the idea of an open landscape with illumination on the low horizon. The work deals with the work of Albrecht Dürer, his copperplate Melancholia I (1514) and his so-called...