The objective of this thesis is to examine and analyze the presentation of spaces, figures, and the processes of judgment in afterlife films. American and foreign titles as well as television series are assessed as afterlife films by two criteria: (1) A character has clinically died yet continues to exist and (2) a living character finds his or her self in an afterlife space. Films with characters that have near-death experiences (NDEs) are included in relation to the above three qualities. After screening nearly one hundred and thirty titles, I have found there is a basic formula structure that has been expanded and transformed into seven other structures, plus those that are combined for a unique narrative. The afterlife corpus is divided into five distinct eras by the quantity of releases that fluctuate in accordance with 20th and early 21st century cultural anxieties and technological advances. A secondary argument proposes why the afterlife story is perfectly suited to the film medium plus why the industry and audiences are incessantly drawn to the afterlife film premise. The afterlife film perpetuates universal and age-old questions on the significance of life and death in the guise of enticing sights and stories. Each afterlife film may have its own identifiable design and theme but they are connected to higher concerns of mortality and second chances.

In the mid-1990s, two discourses of girlhood emerged in both the popular and academic spheres. Consolidated as the girl power discourse and girls in crisis discourse, the tension between these two intertwined discourses created a space for new narratives of female adolescence in the decade between 1995 and 2005. As sites of cultural construction and representation, teen films reveal the narratives of girlhood. The films under consideration serve as useful exemplars for an examination of how such discourses become mainstreamed, pervading society’s image of female adolescence.

Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture and Material Imagination uses a theory of image vernaculars in order to explore the ways in which contemporary visual culture both reflects on and constructs 21st century cultural attitudes toward the human and the nonhuman. This project argues that visual culture manifests a vernacular posthumanism that expresses a fundamental contradiction: the desire to transcend the human while at the same time reasserting the importance of the flesh and the materiality of lived experience. This contradiction is based in a biodeterminist desire, one that fantasizes about reducing all actants, both human and nonhuman, to functions of code. Within this framework, actants become fundamentally exchangeable, able to be combined, manipulated, and understood as variations of digital code. Visual culture – and its expression of vernacular posthumanism – thus functions as a reflection on contemporary conceptualizations of the human, a rehearsal of the posthuman, and a staging ground for encounters between the human and the nonhuman. Each chapter of this project begins in the field of film studies and then moves out toward a broader analysis of visual culture and nonhumanist theory. This project relies on the theories and methodologies of phenomenology, materialism, posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, film and media studies, and visual culture studies. Visual objects analyzed include: the films of Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, and Krzysztof Kieślowski; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997); the film 300 (2006); the TV series Planet Earth (2006); DNA portraits, the art of Damien Hirst; Body Worlds; human migration maps; and remote surgical machinery.

The project is a transnational study of how filmic representations of urban criminals and marginal figures transformed as Brazil, France, and the Maghreb shifted from military governments to liberal democracies. Beyond ideological productions that simply produce positive or negative portrayals, I examine how films made under military regimes invite audiences to identify with anti-heroes while films made under liberal democracies invite admiration of institutional figures, turning standards of good and evil on their head. The anti-authoritarian potential of violence in earlier periods is construed as a failed redemption in later ones. The theoretical background of the project rests on the oppositional and constitutive relationship between the outlaw and the state, the relationship between urban space and criminal personification, and the historical specificity of the transgressive figure's embodiment of socially un/desirable traits. I establish a geographic and conceptual continuity through a comparative postulation of urban citizenship--who belongs to the city and who does not, who is marked in their transgression and who is not, who is laudable bandit and who is condemned. In delving into a face-to-face relationship between the outlaw and the state following an aesthetic and historical tracing of a highly iconic figure at the margins of the law, the project brings statecraft into focus through the use of visual and representational forms.

While the themes of garbage and refuse pervade many of the most important works of Italian cinema from the era of Neorealism to the present, thus far no scholarly attempts have been made to examine the commonalities germane to their portrayal and their relationship to larger questions of Italian cultural trends. The present study explores how filmmakers' depiction of the residual is synecdochic of an artistic vision that endeavors to capture reality at its most unprepared and, subsequently, comes to represent the increasing complexity of the mimetic undertaking in an Italian society thrust rapidly into the late stages of capitalism. / Romance Languages and Literatures

The aftermath of Italy's cinematic movement neorealism left several directors searching for a new cinematic practice and a new directorial identity. Many of the most artistically intrepid directors of the era turned to women as a means of professional and personal reinvention. This study analyzes the collaborations of Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni with the actresses Sophia Loren, Ingrid Bergman, Giulietta Masina, and Monica Vitti, respectively. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This research analyses the impact of transformation and hybridization processes at the intersection of art, science and technology. These forms of transformation and hybridization are the result of contemporary interactions between classic and digital media. It discusses the concept of 'remediation' presented by Bolter and proposes the concept of 'digital ekphrasis,' which is based on Manovich' s analyses of the interactions between classic and digital media. This is a model which, borrowed from semiotic structures, encompasses the technical as well as aesthetic and philosophical transformations of contemporary media. The thesis rejects Baudrillard's and Virilio's proposed concepts of 'digital black hole' as the only possible form of evolution of contemporary digital media. It proposes a different concept for the evolutionary model of contemporary hybridization processes based on contemporary forms of hybridizations that are rooted in aesthetic, philosophical and technological developments. This concept is argued as emancipated from the 'religious' idea of a 'divine originated' perfect image that Baudrillard and Virilio consider to be deteriorated from contemporary hybridization experimentation. The thesis proposes, through historical examples in the fine arts, the importance of transmedia migrations and experimentations as the framework for a philosophical, aesthetic and technological evolutionary concept of humanity freed from the restrictions of religious imperatives.

abstract: Disability is a label accompanied by a multitude of misconceptions and stereotypes. During various periods in Germany, attitudes towards disability have ranged from disgust and fear, to acceptance and inclusion. Being disabled in Germany once meant certain isolation; at the hands of the Nazi regime, it was met with almost certain premature death. Since those darker days of Germany's history, the country has become one that now affords its disabled citizens with the same rights as the non-disabled population and seeks to create a barrier-free environment. This study examines these perceptions of disability in Germany from the 1920s through the first decade of the 21st century. In order to accomplish this goal, cinema is used to provide insights into contemporaneous ideas about disability. By drawing upon analyses of six films that span the course of nearly 80 years, careful examination of disability portrayals reveal philosophical shifts in how the German people interpret disability. When analyzing these films, aspects of physical and mental disability are brought to the surface and discussed in terms of their sociopolitical and philosophical implications. To provide a social and cultural framework that gives significance to the changes in these cinematic roles, a historical survey of the German disability rights movement is folded into the discussion. The films explored in this study serve as culturally important visual aids that illustrate positive changes for the disabled living in Germany. Although not directly influencing cinematic portrayals of disability, the German disability rights movement that arose in the postwar period shaped ideas about disability and allowed disabled Germans to be accepted and included in society. With these rights now available disabled Germans are able to lead a self-determined life and portray themselves as equals. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. German 2010

<p> This dissertation explores the work of author Jonas Hassen Khemiri and filmmaker Ruben &Ouml;stlund, examining the ways both artists consistently negotiate racial identification and &ldquo;Swedishness&rdquo; in neoliberal economic contexts that are often at odds with other Swedish, exceptionalist discourses of social justice. Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund represent contrasting perspectives and tonalities, yet both artists identify the successful competition for capital as a potentially critical component in achieving access to &ldquo;Swedishness.&rdquo; Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund recognize that race and economics are intertwined in neoliberal arguments, even in Sweden, something their works help to elucidate. The implications of such similar observations from very different artists might go overlooked if discussed in isolation. </p><p> I argue that it is crucial to analyze the negotiation of identity in these works not merely in abstract economic terms, but through their use of a very specific neoliberal economic discourse. In Khemiri&rsquo;s and &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s work, characters-of-color and white characters alike employ and internalize this neoliberal discourse as they compete in a highly racialized Swedish society filled with increasing economic precarity. I will also discuss the ways Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund continually undermine these characters&rsquo; attempts to succeed in this economic competition, and what this may say about the need for the ultimate deconstruction of normative categories of identity. </p><p> Another aim of this dissertation is to explore the ways Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund use queerness as a conceptual strategy to mediate the understanding of race and economics. Nearly every one of &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s films and most of Khemiri&rsquo;s novels and plays feature queerness in the form of homosexual characters, homoeroticism, and/or homosociality. The ubiquity of queerness in their work helps us understand the connection between masculinity and the maintenance of economic privilege. Queering this connection can generate narratives that undermine normative categories and present new ways of thinking about neoliberal ideology. </p><p> However, both Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund frequently undermine the potential positives of what Jack Halberstam calls &ldquo;queer failure&rdquo; and portray what appears as actual failure (Halberstam 2011). Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund leave queer characters or characters who experience queerness in ambiguous positions, in which their queerness either fails to rescue them from toxic hetero-masculinity and/or becomes a symbolic manifestation of the dissolution of stable sense of selfhood amid competing discourses of &ldquo;Swedishness.&rdquo; This dissertation will examine the implications of actual queer failure in relation to neoliberalism in these works. The tension between competitive success or failure becomes even more pointed for a spectator or reader when the competitors are children, potential symbols of Sweden&rsquo;s future. In both artists&rsquo; work, the figure of the child continually represents this tension between competing, social-justice and neoliberal discourses. </p><p> Chapter One examines Khemiri&rsquo;s first two novels, <i>Ett &ouml;ga r&ouml;tt</i> (2003) and <i>Montecore &ndash; en unik tiger</i> (2006), as well as his play <i>Invasion!</i> (2006), exploring the way characters interpret and perform neoliberal economic values and how success and/or failure either jeopardizes or enhances a stable sense of identity. Chapter Two shifts attention to &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s earlier films, focusing on his first widely-released and controversial films <i>De ofrivilliga </i> (2008), <i>Play</i> (2011) and <i>Turist</i> (2014), considering how characters embody or challenge notions of the neoliberal subject of capacity. In &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s films, this struggle with &ldquo;Swedishness&rdquo; is often portrayed as a Nietzschean tension between individual will and social pressure. Chapter Three will compare and contrast &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s and Khemiri&rsquo;s most recent works &ap;<i>[ungef&auml;r lika med]</i> (2014), <i>Allt jag inte minns</i> (2015), and <i>The Square </i> (2017). In this final chapter, I argue that Khemiri&rsquo;s and &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s most recent work demonstrates a departure from their previous plays, novels, and films in two critical ways. First, all three works situate capitalism as the overarching cause of internalized tensions between the individual and society. Second, characters in these later works who embody neoliberal values symbolize the ultimate fractured identity. &Ouml;stlund and Khemiri appear to have followed a similar arc toward representing actual physical and mental embodiment of the effects of economic systems. The dissertation&rsquo;s conclusion suggests additional perspectives on the above works and offers ideas for potential future scholarship.</p><p>

This dissertation studies the cultural imagination of Manchukuo the nation (1932-1945). As a nominal nation-state imposed upon Chinese Manchuria by the Empire of Japan, Manchukuo is a contradiction between sovereignty and coloniality, both due to the historical competition of geopolitical powers in the region and its multiethnic composition of the national community. In its short political life, Manchukuo bears witness to an unprecedented flourish of literary and film production. This textual corpus remains understudied and its relationship to Chinese literature and culture or Japanese literature and culture is insufficiently explored. Armed with postcolonial and minority discourse, this project examines how Manchukuo cultural production mediates the notion of the nation and sovereignty in the context of Japanese imperialism. The close reading and critical interrogation of this body of literary and filmic texts shall generate provocative questions for the reconstruction of Chinese literary studies and East Asian studies. The body of the dissertation consists of four interrelated arguments. Framing the reading in the context of recent scholarly debate on “the Sinophone,” Chapter two considers Manchukuo literature as a “minor literature” whose distinction lies in its writers’ use of “deterritorialized” Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. Multilingualism and multiethnicity are therefore the (trans)national features of Manchukuo literary production. This literary “sovereignty” is then re-examined through the representation of Manchukuo’s women and family in Chapter three. Interpreting coloniality through reading gender relations, this chapter highlights the unusual progressive portrayal of women in Manchukuo. This discovery of Manchukuo women’s autonomy and mobility is reinforced in the interpretation of Manchukuo’s dramatic feature films. Working through feminist critique of gender division and looking into magazines of the era, chapter four and five analyze the films’ explanation of a contradiction within Japanese imperialism. This contradiction of “sovereignty” and “submission” gets further elaboration in Chapter five. An interpretation of the star text of Ri Kōran reveals her stardom and Manchukuo film musical provides a unique anti-romantic “affiliation” of the Manchukuo nation.