abstract: Scholars argue that masculinity and war are united because masculinity is best observed through male-dominated arenas, such as the military. Moreover, film can serve as a medium to not only establish what is socially acceptable, but play an active role in the creation of one’s identity. Filmmakers past and present have employed the motif of masculinity in their war films, which put it at the center of the social structure and creates an overall acceptable cultural ideology. These filmmakers have established the overall rules, themes, and methods used as part of the war film genre. These rules, themes, and methods served well for pre-1970 American war cinema, when women were not allowed in the military as soldiers. However, as of 2003, female soldiers have grown to comprise twenty percent of the active soldiers and officers in the military. Studies on masculinity construction are well documented in World War II, Vietnam, and Gulf War-era combat films; however, little has been studied on post-9/11 American war films involving the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Using literature on masculinity constructs, both inside and outside of film, as well as social construction theory, identity theory, genre theory, and auteur theory, this dissertation textually examines masculinity construction in six post-9/11 American war films. This dissertation finds that the contemporary war genre continues to construct masculinity similar to past eras of war film. Comradery, the warrior image, not showing emotion, having a violent demeanor, and the demonization of women and cowardice were all prevalent in one or more of the films analyzed in this study. However, there were many nontraditional masculine ideals that were implemented, such as women being present and taking an active role as soldiers, as well as women being portrayed in the warrior image. The films analyzed demonstrate that the war film genre is still depicting and therefore socially constructing masculinity in a way that was prevalent in pre-1970 war films. However, the genre is evolving and nontraditional masculinity constructs are starting to present themselves. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Journalism and Mass Communication 2019

This project interrogates the status of documentary film as an oppositional force and conduit for radical social and political change. The first two chapters examine the interconnected transnational history of the radical or "committed" documentary. This historical inquiry leads me to construct a set of parameters for how the radical documentary was defined and codified between 1926 and 1990. My investigation is particularly attuned to how documentary filmmakers in this tradition moved away from a didactic mode of address that sought to educate a state sanctioned "citizen subject." Instead, I argue that the radical documentary tradition grew out of the modernist avant-garde movement and activated a "revolutionary subject" in opposition to the state. To date, there have only been a handful of accounts locating post-1990s documentary practices within the domain of radical political concerns and the possibilities presented by the intersection of documentary and new media technology. The second part of the dissertation examines how such practices extend and challenge the aforementioned historical definitions while intervening in a diverse range of contexts. The final three chapters focus on an eclectic corpus of films and videos that include the work of the video advocacy organizations WITNESS and B'Tselem, student documentaries made in Iraq, and interactive documentary projects by new media artists Zohar Kfir and Sharon Daniel. I argue that these groups and artists create an "activist subject" that intervenes within specific social and political situations during wars, occupations, and cases of human rights abuses. Ultimately, I conclude that the radical power of documentary film lies not in and of itself as singular object of art or evidence, but in the discourses it engenders and within the discourses and contexts in which it is placed. In the increasingly post-digital age of new media, the study and practice of radical documentary demands a multi-faceted approach as well as an openness to expanding definitional boundaries of what a documentary is, how it functions, how it circulates, and how its impact is measured.

During this time of increased attention toward the representation of women in media, simply applauding including female characters often leaves out the analysis of what purpose they serve within their narratives. The anxiety over women’s fertility in Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), Children of Men (Cuaron, 2006), and The Handmaid’s Tale (Bruce Miller, 2017) expresses a crisis in contemporary culture over changing gender roles. Even though these three texts use the antagonists to seek to control over women’s bodies, the narratives themselves still employ infertility as a threat for women. What does the reappearance of mass infertility in our dystopian media tell us about how we value and depict women? These audio-visual texts, set in disturbing futures, attempt to intervene discursively in these political conversations. Their narratives appear critical of hegemony on their surface, but lurking beneath is a return to gender essentialism that defines women through their ability to reproduce.

Since performers first became credited for their on-screen work in the early twentieth century, stardom has been understood as a primary factor distinguishing cinema as a unique, discrete art form. Much of the work done by canonical film scholars emphasizes film as a continuous medium defined by relation, as well as the irreducible value of human presence in creating meaning that transcends the boundaries of film. These are important cornerstones of star studies, a subfield within film studies that interrogates how film performers accrue and project meaning and value. They also isolate continuity as a singular tool for developing approaches to understanding cultural and ideological value of film stars – determining why certain stars are such powerful commodities and addressing the deceptively elusive question of what they actually mean. Through careful inspection of the transactions between film production and culture, my dissertation – “He’ll Just Be Paul Newman Anyway: Film Continuity and the Star Image” – pursues two primary goals regarding the cultivation of stardom and our understanding of star persona. First, I reestablish the star image as a discrete force, informed by on-screen performances and off-screen biography but remaining distinct from both (following the framework of French film theorist Edgar Morin). I attempt to disentangle these figures, asserting star image – the intangible, ethereal collection of values, expectations, and investment constituted from both performer and character – as the central mechanism for interpreting human presence. Second, I explore the notion that narrow range of performance and on-screen consistency are more essential to developing stardom than the revelation of the performer’s actual self. This position applies both to the production of stars and to our critical understanding of them, creating compelling connections to central debates of film studies. In doing so, my goal is to reassert the star as the most valuable and definitive source of meaning in film. The combination of Paul Newman’s on-screen continuity, enduring persona, and career trajectory (rising to stardom during the fall of the studio system) makes him uniquely valuable for understanding the evolution of film stardom and encourages new perspective on the development and deployment of star image. Moreover, Newman is an ideal subject for investigating the star image as a discrete force and the function of range in its development. Through critical examination of his on-screen tendency to “go his own way,” I demonstrate the immense value stars can offer to our understanding of the moving image and surrounding culture(s). Moreover, in asserting star persona as a discrete force integral to interpreting the meaning of human presence in film, I also cultivate a contextual understanding of the rebel archetype in response to changing dominant cultural ideologies. In doing so, my work directly addresses valuable questions essential to and extending beyond film studies: why stardom is essential to defining film and understanding how it signifies, how star persona is accumulated and deployed in individual films and across a whole career, and what meanings are generated and revealed by the star as an projection of social values and ideals.

The purpose of this project was to articulate a definition and understanding of the emerging genre of rogue cinema through the lens of rhetorical theory. To this end, I lay out a theoretical groundwork based principally on the works of Kenneth Burke and Slavoj Zizek to build a definition and to analyze the works of four filmmakers whose work could be considered rogue: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Dusan Makavejev, Lars von Trier and Werner Herzog. The first chapter is dedicated to articulating the theorists I use and showing how they can be used to examine rogue films. The second chapter is dedicated to the films of Jodorowsky, focusing in particular on his films Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, looking at how these films form a critique of our conventional views of religion and spirituatity. Chapter three looks at Makavejev's films WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie and discusses how they undermine the capitalist/communist dichotomy that has defined most of 20th century politics. Chapter four examines Lars von Trier's films Europa and Dancer in the Dark, framing them in particular with the Dogme movement and looking at how von Trier rebels against cinematic convention. The last chapter looks at Herzog's films Aguirre: Wrath of God and Stroszek and discusses how Herzog blends fiction and reality in ways that question our cultural and moral values. Since little has been written on rogue cinema to date my aim here has been to help develop rogue cinema as a concept and begin the work of building a theoretical basis for the idea of this as a genre. In my conclusion I suggest avenues for future scholars to expand on this idea and discuss what further work needs to be done for rogue cinema to become an accepted idea.

My dissertation explores non-visual experiences of film through a study of the recurring cinematic figure of the blind heroine in three periods of US cinema - late silent, classical, post-studio. My analysis of films, multi-sensory film "spectatorship" and film production critically depart from the readings offered by semiotic and psychoanalytic film theory, in favor of theories of cinematic perception and theories of genre, namely, melodrama and suspense. My approach reorients theories of film that have explained cinema as an exclusively visual culture towards a broader consideration of sensory perception and film experience.Attention to Helen Keller, as an author and a cinematic protagonist, and to the ability of the figure of the blind heroine to reorganize the structure of the films that address her frames my discussion of modern film form. Film has attempted to represent the spatial, tactile and aural experiences of gendered blind protagonists for sighted viewers - to visually produce non-visual experiences and to move beyond the limitations of its own technologies. In each of the technological periods I examine, film uses cinematography that addresses the body, sonic and visual attention to texture and movement, and narrative and affective structures of melodrama and suspense, to create the audience's aesthetic experience. My work explores the ways in which cinema has been multi-sensory, embodied, and "not-visual" - that is, visual but also more than visual - through critical evaluation of the dominant arguments of film theory, formal analysis of films, and historical accounts of film production.Keller's work and the films I examine offer a theory of the modern phenomenological subject - a subject whose senses are not, finally, located within the body of the individual but are shared with, and borrowed from, the world of human and cinematic bodies they encounter. / Dissertation

<p>The basic question of "Political Cinema: The Historicity of an Encounter" is whether or not it is possible to think a concept of political cinema while affirming the autonomous capacities of both cinema as an art and politics as the thought of collective self-determination. Is it, in other words, possible to elaborate a relationship between cinema and politics that would at the same time establish a separation between the two and thus refuse to reduce one to the other. Such a relation of separation is called an encounter. Cinema encounters politics insofar as politics affects it and insofar as cinema can produce certain political effects, but also only insofar as cinema itself is immanently capable of configuring this relationship to politics. Following this conviction, the question of political cinema has to be considered at a distance from questions of genre, where political cinema would be merely one among other cinematic genres, and distinguished from the problem of political instrumentalization of cinema (propaganda). Political cinema refers to real cinematic inventions that happen in relation to processes of human emancipation.</p><p>"Political Cinema" tests this basic conviction through four separate case studies. These case studies are limited and local analyses, which nevertheless cover a broad historical background and are, furthermore, meant as concrete points from which more general theoretical questions can be addressed and formulated. The introductory statement (Chapter 1) sets up the theoretical stakes of the dissertation. Part I analyzes the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's appropriation of several elements of laughter - comedy, militant humor, carnival, caricature and satire, etc. - as specifically cinematic means Eisenstein used to bring his films as closely as possible to the revolutionary process of the October Revolution and the break the latter introduced into the history of humanity. Part II of the dissertation (Chapters 3 and 4), presents a discussion (primarily on the example of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times) of the figure of the worker as a forceful cinematic symbolization of the existence of the modern proletarian masses, through the creation of which, however, cinema does not give up the effective autonomy of its expression. Part III, which consists of an analysis of the work of the Palestinian director Michel Khleifi, shows how the filmmaker's strategy of blurring the boundary between documentary and fiction is an artistic procedure (a cinema of "documentary fiction") that makes visible the complexity of Palestinian historical experience and memory, but does so at a distance from any direct political discourse on the question of Palestine (Chapter 5). And finally, the Conclusion to the dissertation, presents an analysis of the recent Romanian film, which renders visible striking new ideas of political cinema that are, however, produced in the absence of anything more than mere traces of what deserves to be called politics (Chapter 6)</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation examines the pair subject-subjectivity embedded in the problematic of the end of art, as it is figured in exemplary fashion by film and literature. The analysis examines critically the problem of the subject vis-à-vis subjectivity by opening a dialogue that allows the necessary double terms of this discussion to emerge in the first place from the encounter with selected filmic and literary texts: Jacques Rivette's La belle noiseuse and Samuel Beckett's Film, The Unnamable and The Lost Ones. These texts are analyzed on an equal footing with the thought of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gianni Vattimo, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze who have written on both subjectivity and art. The study thus proposes a real movement - in terms and through art - that treats the metaphor of anamorphosis on the level of praxis: the image of subjectivity appears on the screen that is the filmic or literary text as the result of a passage in terms. The subject that emerges at the end of the analysis puts in perspective a certain practice of metonymic reading as renewed political potential of subjectivity.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation uses film to explore shifts in conceptions of race, cultural identity, and national belonging in Germany from the 1950s West Germany to contemporary reunified Germany. Through the analysis of several German productions featuring black characters in major narrative or symbolic roles, it identifies narrative and cinematic techniques used to thematize and problematize popular German conceptions of race and racism and to utilize race as a flexible symbolic resource in defining specific identity borders. The dominant discourse around the concept of race and its far-reaching implications has long been impeded by the lack of a critical German vocabulary. This gap in mainstream German language is in large part a consequence of the immutable association between &ldquo;race&rdquo; (in German, <italic>Rasse</italic>) as a term, and the pro-Aryan, anti-Semitic dogma of National Socialist ideology. As Germany struggles to address racism as a specific problem in the process of its ongoing project to rehabilitate national identity in a post-colonial era indelibly marked by the Second World War, the films discussed in this work &mdash; <italic>Toxi</italic> (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), <italic>Gottes zweite Garnitur</italic> (P. Verhoeven, 1967), <italic>Angst essen Seele auf</italic> (R.W. Fassbinder, 1974), <italic>Die Ehe der Maria Braun</italic> (R.W. Fassbinder, 1979), <italic>Alles wird gut</italic> (Maccarone, 1998) and <italic>Tal der Ahnungslosen</italic> (Okpako, 2003) &mdash; provide evidence of attempts to create counter-discourses within the space of this language gap.</p><p>Using approaches based primarily in critical race and film studies, the following work argues that these films' depictions of racism and racial conflict are often both confined by and add significant new dimension to definitions of Blackness and of conceptions of race and racism in the German context. These attempts at redefinition reveal the ongoing difficulties Germany has faced when confronting the social and ideological structures that are the legacy of its colonialist and National Socialist history. More importantly, however, the films help us to retrace and recover Germany's history of resistance to that legacy and expand the imaginative possibilities for creating coalitions capable of affecting social change.</p> / Dissertation

The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented incorporation of women within the Spanish film industry. This is part of a general increase in newcomers since the beginning of the 1990s, when the industry was undergoing a deep restructuring. The media has celebrated this incorporation of women filmmakers, recurrently referring to their different sensibility, a feminine perspective noticeable in their films. Despite the socio-cultural interest of this incorporation, no thorough study of their work has been completed. This research project surveys the extent and scope of these women's incorporation within the industry, and explores the varied ways that their films engage with the main discursive trends that define femininity in Spanish cinema and mass media. Femininity is broadly understood here as the socio-cultural interpretations of what constitutes 'correct womanhood', but, also, discursively: as the space of struggle wherein individual (fictional) women engage with these constructions, by contesting and / or adopting some of their elements. Further attention is given to the ways that these new filmmakers's films engage with traditional and modern formulations of femininity, as articulated in implicit relation to, respectively, Francoism and postfeminism. In the core chapters, several detailed analyses are given of especially relevant films by these women, using a critical discourse analysis approach. These chapters address topics that are foregrounded in these women’s films and that have been central to feminine experience, namely: the family and motherhood, romanticism and sexuality, and the ‘Other’. From the study it emerges that these women’s films adopt a different perspective if only because they often render visible discriminatory behaviours (e.g. discrimination at work) and representational practices (e.g. the sexual objectification of women). Regarding their treatment of the aforementioned ‘feminine themes’ (i.e. family and romanticism), these filmmakers self-consciously engage with the conventions that have constructed femininity in the media.