This thesis is in support of the Master of Fine Arts exhibition entitled The McFarlands at East Tennessee State University, Slocumb Galleries, Johnson City, Tennessee, November 5th - 9th, 2007. This artist's photographic survey, which lasted approximately two years, investigated the lifeworld of a family in a rural Appalachian town. His photographic work depicts the subjects working on their farm growing tobacco and their relationships within the family unit. The artist discusses his work in terms of historical and contemporary influences with an emphasis on the relationship to the work of Lewis W. Hine, Wright Morris, Mary Ellen Mark, and David M. Spear. The thesis includes images and discussion of four works.

The media is one of the strongest influences on how society views the criminal justice system and all actors therein. This is especially true for offenders of violent crime. Notably, women who kill are rare. However, when women do murder someone, the media tends to over expose them and portray them in different ways. The current study is intended to examine how the media portrays women murderers. In particular, this research is focused on how fictional and true crime programs portray female killers. Do they portray them in a positive or negative light? Do they portray them realistically? Are true crime shows more realistic than fictional crime shows? Each of these questions was explored and it was found that true crime programs, even though not wholly realistic, do portray women much more realistically than fictional shows. It is important to study these portrayals in order to understand how women killers are portrayed, how society views and interprets these particular criminals, and what are the steps necessary in order to prevent and change the way media process this crime.

In this paper, I will reflect on the challenges I faced from the first idea to the final export of 40 Meters Down, and how I overcame these.

Documentary and docudrama practices have expanded with increasingly convergent media. Cinema, television, and the web conspire to create new vehicles of information and entertainment. Footage is manipulated, reenacted, and narratively altered for viewers who must negotiate flexible and porous parameters of fact and fiction. Bill Nichols began a conversation about documentary’s “blurred boundaries” that has continued and intensified with scholars such as John Corner, Steven Lipkin, Alan Rosenthal, Vivian Sobchack, Derek Paget, and Jonathan Kahana. Documentary and docudrama techniques must be more closely scrutinized and categorized, with particular focus on the importance of reenactment and reflexivity. A phenomenon that illustrates explicit interaction between documentary footage and fictional affect has remained undefined. My project proposes a new term, “documentary adaptation,” to explain the use of documentary films or television programs as source material for a fictional retelling. Films such as Rescue Dawn (2006), Grey Gardens (2009), Devil’s Knot (2013), or Loving (2016) have an uncanny and indeed literary relationship to previous documentary films conveying the same story. My research reads, theorizes, and contextualizes these adaptations. I note industrial and audience demand for narrative that engages with familiar facts. These unique dramas are sites of affective engagement with history as well as contemporary journalism. The project employs cinema and media studies terms and techniques to analyze documentary adaptation, to interpret a distinct merger of cinema and television aesthetics. This dissertation revises the dilemmas of documentary and reveals an invention to confront a new era of flexible media.

This photographic documentary seeks to record the transition from teenager into adulthood of twelve girls living in Melbourne, Australia between 2002 and 2008. Throughout the process of the project the artist has sought to challenge the assumption that reaching adulthood can be defined by achieving certain milestones in society, and that the transition period is as much about personal self-realisation on the part of the individual, as it is about measurements set by society. The photographic work is accompanied by text in the form of quotes taken from audio interviews conducted throughout the documentation process. This paper compares the ideas set by society about the process of becoming an adult and the real life events that triggered this transition period in this particular group of girls.

Abstract not available

The 1998 television broadcast of The New Zealand Wars documentary series was a significant public event, which had a major impact on a broad range of communities and individuals in Aotearoa New Zealand. This popular television history engaged with issues of historical veracity, race, culture and nationhood and challenged previously dominant discourses associated with these concepts. In doing so, it provoked heated debate, and a re-imagining of 'nation', and also opened up spaces for alternative ways of engaging with historical narrative. Informed by post-colonialism, cultural studies and cultural memory, this thesis explores the discursive and affective role of The New Zealand Wars, as it has operated within the turbulent climate of 1990s New Zealand cultural relations. This catalytic function is described in this thesis as a phenomenon of a television series shaped by, whilst also intervening in, processes of cultural colonisation and decolonisation. While both of these processes involve the transmission of discourse via cultural forms, the act of cultural decolonisation requires, in addition, the convergence of a number of agents (people and communities, discursive and memory resources) and circumstances, within particular contextual conditions. Such a convergence provided the conditions for the discursive synthesis, which shaped the production, construction and reception of this series. The role of audio-visual media (and specifically television documentary) in transmitting cultural memory is significant as it enables the flow of memory through channels or forms (such as visual, oral and aural traditions) that can bring about new perspectives and critical reflections upon colonial discourse and dominant concepts of nation and culture. In addition to these social and intellectual processes of audience engagement, this thesis argues that experiential and affective dimensions of cultural memory can (in these specific circumstances) open up radical spaces, offering the potential for generating awareness and sparking political action. These issues are explored through a tripartite analysis of the production context, construction and reception of The New Zealand Wars series. The integration of these three phases of analysis has generated a number of insights into the potential of audio-visual forms, including their producers and audiences, to participate in the negotiation of, and resistance to, colonial discourse. Such insights serve to challenge taken-for-granted constructions of nation and history, and suggest the increasing relevance of alternative concepts such as community-building and cultural memory. Ultimately, this thesis argues that television documentary can serve as a prime site for the articulation of these concepts. The New Zealand Wars serves as a case study, which demonstrates both the potential of this site, and the significance of the social-historical and cultural context in framing this series.

This thesis examines the use of video technology as an alternative communication medium within a dialogic framework. It explores multiple dialogic encounters and different meanings of dialogue. It analyses dialogues within and around video technology and dialogues with contemporary events in Mexican history. The author argues that these dialogic encounters are contributing to an ongoing process of transformation in Mexican consciousness. The thesis’s theoretical framework draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and employs a dialogic method that emphasises diversity. The author conducts an in-depth analysis of multiple series of dialogues between key people, events and discourses. The author examines the lives and work of a sample of the most significant independent video-makers producing work on the indigenous Zapatista rebellion that began in Chiapas, Mexico, on 1 January 1994.The author focuses on the discourses of independent video-makers looking at the indigenous Zapatista rebels and considers the indigenous uprising to be both a ‘political catalytic event’ and a ‘multi-catalytic event.’ The different dialogues looked at throughout the thesis reveal various processes of consciousness-raising which act in diverse, unexpected and unprecedented ways. The author argues that these dialogues have contributed to a crisis of legitimacy for the hegemonic power in Mexico and have also influenced the way the mainstream media operate, and their power within Mexican society. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

My argument is that documentary texts can be transformed into artworks via the processes of intertextuality and detournement, when they are exhibited as video installations. I argue that early 1920s modernist avant-garde painter-filmmakers shared with contemporary documentary video installation painter-filmmakers particular tendencies, characteristics and interests. The bodies of work in each period explore the generic properties of documentary through (primarily) abstract visual associations, rather than through a conventional linear space. Important 1920s modernist avant-garde films by Dziga Vertov, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, Joris Ivens, Man Ray and others will be considered in highlighting the relationship between documentary and avant-garde cinema. I use this discussion as a basis for examining my own work: for the creative component of this thesis, I filmed and edited a three screen video installation. I interviewed 67 Australian Muslims and used these interviews to explore the use of documentary in video installation. The theoretical framework I used is based on the following: Julia Kristeva?s notion of intertextuality, derived from Mikhail Bahktin?s work on dialogism, to interpret how documentary texts take on conventions appropriate to other genres; Guy Debord?s concept of d鴯urnement to provide a theory for the reuse of pre-existing artistic elements found in documentary film; genre theory to interpret interactions between documentary texts; Ludwig Wittgenstein?s notion of ?family resemblance? to explore the indistinct boundaries of documentary; and Pascal Beausse?s analysis of how artists have hijacked documentary. I also draw on Bill Nichols?s analytical framework of documentary modes (poetic, expository, observational, participatory, performative, reflexive) to explore documentary in cinema and installation art. The documentary genre is not habitually discussed outside film, television, photography or the web. My research demonstrates that the genre has found its place in other areas of artistic practice and can also apply to medium of video installation.

The areas of investigation are the portrait, the gaze, the American filmmaker Errol Morris, representation of reality and subcultures. These are discussed within an historical, technical, cultural and social framework. Colour, the film theorist Bill Nichols, the filmmaker Errol Morris are discussed with reference to the central gaze and what constitutes reality. Taking on another identity, the role of subcultures and my influences as a photographer are explored within this context. Work for Examination Other Lives is a photographic work consisting of portraits including: civil war re-enactors who believe that the war between the northern and southern states of America still exist Elvis Presley impersonators and fans who believe that Elvis Presley still lives people who take on another identity as scarecrows in the context of a local festival people who take on another identity as medieval knights.