This project concerns a Jewish community in the city of Kobe, Japan and its condition of memory/history. It attempts to create a film of this condition. The project consists of a written thesis and a 40min film. The written thesis describes the process of developing a creative strategy for the film. There are already many films which choose migration as a subject. And because of the loose meaning of migration, different kind of topics are and can be labeled under migration. In this project, I attempt to make a film which is intrinsic to this case. My research process starts with fieldwork to understand this Jewish community. Through a 10 month period of fieldwork mainly in Kobe, Japan, I discovered the incompleteness of history or memory in this Jewish community. In other words, the fragility of their history and collective memory in this place. I set the research question for this project as: ‘what kind of filmic form can respond to this incomplete memory/history condition?' To address this research question, I first examine this fragility of memory and history through an interdisciplinary set of references, such as migration studies, memory studies, and urban studies. I argue that ‘trace' is a useful concept in accessing a past, in spite of the incompleteness of history/memory in this place. I also conceptualize the idea of a geographical trace seeking to understand the nature of migrational traces. I then move on to discussing how the idea of a material trace is not sufficient to adequately attend to this memory/history condition of the Jewish community in Kobe. I first paid attention to existing material traces such as the synagogue, but there is a limit to this approach since much has disappeared. These traces of the community that still exist and the invisible traces that don't anymore form a temporal layer of the city. Also, some of the traces were dispersed and located in other places, such as New York City and Washington, D.C. in the USA. These traces were also invisible in a sense that they are out of the purview from Kobe. The traces located in Kobe and found in New York City and Washington, D.C. form a geographical layer mediated by the experience of migration. Based on this field examination, and also engaging with a corpus of films, documentary theory, and discussions in visual anthropology, I propose what I call a poetics of delay. This poetics of delay seeks to employ cinematic means to translate the condition of history/memory of the Jewish community in Kobe with its gaps and forms of invisibility. I argue that this poetics of delay can communicate the partiality and invisibility of the past through sustaining a literal delay in seeing and knowing within the viewer's experience. The aim of the film is not to provide an undisputed historical narrative of the Jewish community, though it does reflect on that history. Rather, it attempts to represent the difficulty of retrieving history and recovering memory through the medium of documentary film.

Thesis. 1977. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Ross Simonton McElwee, III. / M.S.

This PhD by practice is an attempt to understand personal archives through filmmaking, and the kind of knowledge we can extract from them as well as how we can connect them to a wider social and political context. These questions are the core of my research and are explored in their different ways through both the film/practice and dissertation. I have chosen to make a film about my absent grandfather and his lost relationship with my mother during Fascist Portugal between the 1940s and the 1960s. Family archives have been largely used in films as a way of documenting realities, in the same way as any other public archival footage. In this instance, I tried to explore family and official archives acknowledging their contradictions and omissions with a view to finding a new “way of knowing” that is more closely connected to our emotions. I believe we all own a family archive regardless of its form. I named this archive “the subjective archive” and in it, I include physical archives such as paper documents, photographs and films, as well as a more intangible archive, which includes our memories, the stories we tell and listen to (oral history) and our dreams. The progression of the film is closely related to my journey as I become immersed in the story and learn things through many layers of archive documents. As a conclusion, I argue that these invisible elements of the subjective archive contain truth independent of their indexical nature, whereas physical documents can mislead us.

This study examines the way social media changes the way documentaries are developed, produced and distributed. I want investigate how web 2.0 technologies disrupt the documentary sector and the way producers navigate the social media ecology. Research exposed an industry in transformation. New roles, like the Producer for Marketing and Distribution (PMD), the Impact Producer (IP) and a participant-centric mode of documentary filmmaking are revealed. The way users connect via social media has changed the way people interact with each other at work. A balanced real- and virtual world network approach makes a strong and highly central network position for a documentary project possible. Emotional contagion and an authentic online presence create value for a films social media campaign. Both are crucial factors to the mobile multi-device audience expecting a credible social media experience. Research suggests that users accept the risks associated with the way their data is exploited by social networks as long as the user's social media experience is not diminished. The concept of the Global Digital Family is revealed when reappraising social media. I suggest further research into the problem of online authenticity. Kozinets' ideas on Gemeinschafts-type engagement (Kozinets, 2015) shed light on the phenomenon. But exactly when something is perceived as authentic online is still not entirely clear and should be investigated further. I also recommend that the PMD is formally accredited to encourage industry recognition.

This is a supporting paper for a Master of Fine Arts graduate thesis exhibition of black and white photographs held in Slocumb Gallery April 2-7, 2001. The exhibit represents my major concentration of study in Art at East Tennessee State University. The photographs depict cultural aspects of the rural Smoky Mountains. I begin with a description of the means used to suggest the mysterious aspects of human existence in everyday life. The second chapter discusses the influences of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Graciella Iturbide and details aspects of the Surrealist aesthetic suggested in this body of work. Other articulated contemporary influences include Emmet Gowin, Sally Mann, and Andrea Modica. The content and treatment of five photographs from the exhibition is the main focus of chapter three. In conclusion, the photographs delineate an intimate portrait of several rural families and stand as a tribute to the mysterious in a common place.

Many Days Many Nights is a body of work that examines the notion of place, highlighting the complex relationship between a psychological state of mind and the experience of geographical location. The work incorporates a hybrid documentary photography practice combined with experimental video to construct narrative and is underpinned by a phenomenological inquiry into the relationship between memory, time, and the experience of place, and collectively, how these concepts pervade the subjective photographic frame. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Abstract not available

This thesis is a study of a young woman coming to terms with her grief. It unpacks how an invitation to film an unusual and life-changing event developed into an opportunity to question the ethics of the interview. It examines how the intricacies of a trust relationship influence the very threads and textures of the resulting documentary. This paper is a partnership between a practical documentary project and a more traditional written discussion. The documentary Five Hours with Raja is weighted at eighty per cent of the final thesis and the written exegesis makes up the remaining twenty per cent. Together these two elements investigate the developing relationship between Claudia – the documentary’s key protagonist, and the filmmaker, investigating how their relationship has affected the style, method, content and even the fundamental story line of a documentary. It also discusses the consequential ethical considerations and dilemmas behind creative and practical decisions, investigating ways that a filmmaker can draw the participant into the process to allow a greater degree of ownership, a stronger voice and a more immediate sense of intimacy with the final audience.

This thesis is primarily concerned with the meanings that are produced when women become visible amongst the homeless through photographic representations. While there have always been homeless women, unlike their male counterparts, they have remained largely invisible to the public and government policy makers.Social documentary photography has acted as one of the main avenues through which homeless women have, literally, been rendered visible. Driven by, and implicated in complex sociocultural and political circumstances, socially concerned photographs draw on the real and the fictional to generate truth/power effects.Thus, the thesis re/traces the representation of homeless women in a range of visual texts and ask how this construct has been discursively produced and deployed. In order to explore how socially concerned photography has contributed to, and made use of the idea of homeless, or destitute woman, examples are drawn from a range of photographic genres. These include traditional social documentary, public collections of photographs, photojournalism and publicity materials.The selected images, the circumstances out of which they emerge, and those in which they are read, are interrogated along, and with the consideration of the interconnections between axes of gender, genre, race, class and power. The inquiry does not aim to establish a unitary source, or coherent trajectory of the visual representation of the homeless woman, because origins, particularly of ideas, are always contestable. Rather, a primary aim is to expand the field of possibilities for the visual portrayal of women's experiences of homelessness. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2006. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Ronald Tobias. Includes DVD. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-47).