<p>This project began as an investigation of the way children are depicted, characterized, and represented in adult literature, or in fiction that is not meant for children. In this sort of literature, child characters are typically very complicated. And the ways in which they are complicated say a great deal about the author's assumptions about children and childhood, and about the dominant assumptions of children and childhood that characterize the author's historical period. In order to speak to the ideas which characterize the Romantic period, this project concentrates critical attention on two texts by Mary Shelley, and two of the stranger child-like characters from her historical period.</p> <p>This thesis works through what it means to understand the knowledge of kids in terms of what I call the "extracurricular." "Extracurricular" signals this thesis' particular concern with questions relating to the remainders of education and knowledge. Deborah Britzman's work on queer pedagogy provided the language necessary for examining the theoretical and political implications of child knowledge in Shelley. Britzman's discussion of what she terms "difficult knowledge" provided critical traction for talking about the types of education Shelley theorizes, more specifically, in Frankenstein and Matilda, but was not sufficient for a full analysis of the problems that arise in these texts, and within the critical contexts in which the texts are taken up. Instead of simply applying the concept of difficult knowledge to Shelley, this thesis works to translate the Shelleyean concept of "dangerous knowledge" into a model for understanding the relationship of the political to the pedagogical as it pertains to kids. This thesis, in other words, takes place at the intersection of Shelley's discussions of dangerous knowledge and Britzman's discussion of difficult knowledge.</p> <p>The implications that Shelley's work has for the value of public education, and a less privatized society than the one she witnessed and responded to in her fiction, are still urgent today. While our education system is, ofcourse, profoundly different than the system Shelley was writing about, her demands for a public space (as well as a happy domestic sphere), and a system of public education that is healthy, democratic and keyed towards respecting the knowledge of children represent a politics ofhope in which education is taken seriously because it is understood to have a critical place in the formation of subjectivity.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

The following work is a feature length screenplay about Anna Morris, an 18-year-old girl who finds herself faced with a moral dilemma when her estranged father, Robert, contacts her on her 18th birthday. When she learns about Robert’s past involvement in an online child pornography ring Anna must decide if she can forgive him, or -- more importantly -- if he is worthy of forgiveness. However, as the story unfolds we find that it is not just Anna who needs to forgive. This story approaches issues of repentance, growth, and the journey into adulthood as Anna takes on each new challenge.

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This dissertation investigates undersea cinema from its origins to the present. Addressing a range of documentaries, narrative fiction films, and sound recordings made undersea, this project emphasizes ocean cinema’s ties to the histories of ocean exploration, conquest, and conservation—contexts from which undersea films cannot be extricated. For over a century, undersea films have brought the distant world of the deep up close to the eyes and ears of a broad public; they have been a major influence on popular understanding of the ocean, which today is of great environmental significance and a powerful symbol of a fragile global ecology. This project aims to show how the ocean as a cinematic site of ecological consciousness is, as a condition of its production, intimately linked to environmentally unfriendly histories of technology. The often-dazzling images of marine life shown on film can increase viewers’ sensitivity to the other forms of life with which they share the planet. At the same time, producing these images has historically relied on exploratory technologies built for the purpose of better exploiting the marine environment economically and militarily. This contradiction between films’ meanings and their conditions of possibility is not limited to ocean cinema; it characterizes a wide range of environmental films. By focusing on ocean cinema, a particularly rich case of unseen worlds, environmental consciousness, and destructive techno-scientific commitments coming together, this dissertation aims to illuminate a tension that pervades environmental cinema in general.

This dissertation argues that a critical anti-war cinema emerged with the birth of the so-called war documentary during World War I. Focusing on Leon Caverly, the first official war cinematographer of the United States military, I that argue America’s first war propaganda films gave birth to America’s first anti-war cinema. Military-produced images of World War I are available in various archives such as the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Marine Corps History Center. In addition to unedited reels of war related footage, the archives hold propaganda films such as Pershing’s Crusaders (1918), America’s Answer (1918) and Under Four Flags (1918). These feature films were shot by cameramen in the Marines or the Signal Corps and then edited into works of propaganda by the United States Government’s Committee on Public Information. Caverly was the first cameraman to join the effort of filming at the front. While he was a Marine and an instrumental player in America’s propaganda program, he also completed a cinematic history of the Great War through his creative nonfiction camerawork that was more subtle and critical than conventional war documentaries would suggest. Previous studies of World War I propaganda provide context for America’s cinematic efforts or profiles of individual cameramen. But little or no attention has been paid to formal analysis of the films themselves. Furthermore, scholars have not yet regarded these films as anything other than examples of early documentary or government propaganda. The same holds true concerning Leon Caverly. Not only was Caverly the first United States war cinematographer, but the most significant work of propaganda made during the war was composed of footage shot entirely by him. Released in 1918, America’s Answer captivated audiences in America and Europe, providing inspiration for the home front to support the war. However, a striking discrepancy exists between the content of Caverly’s shots and the rhetorical editing structure of the film. In contrast to the pro-war sentiment articulated by the editing and its intertitles, America’s Answer’s individual shots reveal a practice of camera-writing that represents an aesthetics of anti-war cinema at odds with pro-war propaganda. Caverly’s work does not show the horrors of war with documentary realism. Nor does his work openly critique America’s war effort. Rather, Caverly aspires to be a camera-historian whose moving images and photographic work demonstrate a preoccupation with writing history steeped in the temporal aesthetics of the camera arts. This dissertation considers still and moving image practices that “write with time” such as double-exposures, shots that emphasize duration, moving camera shots that evoke temporal relationships, and framing that gives metaphorical expression to time. The fact that these practices appear in Caverly’s wartime work indicates that World War I footage has a greater significance for film history than simply exemplifying documentary realism or propaganda. This dissertation shows that, while the most harrowing aspects of World War I combat remain unseen in Caverly’s work, his creative camera-writing approaches war and the fragility of life in unconventional ways.

This study examines the collaborative work of the filmmakers Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (1962-2006) in respect to current and future formations of political avant-garde filmmaking. Throughout their joint career the Marxist filmmakers understood their work as part of an ongoing effort to participate in the class struggle, despite of an overall decline in faith regarding revolutionary politics. Straub-Huillet pursued this desire for radical, social and political change not simply on the level of filmic content, but rather by employing distinct cinematic practices. This study is, at the same time, an effort to combat the political inertia that affected film theory as part of larger disciplinary shifts in the humanities. In order to do so, I am engaging, first and foremost, in poststructuralist discourses that will be discussed on the basis of traditional forms of Marxist-oriented critical theories. Reason for this is an attempt to replace metaphysical paradigms with an aporetic structure that is affirmative of difference, rather than identity. Based on the notion of an elective affinity Straub-Huillet's film adaptations challenged traditional forms of cinematic authorship and collaboration. Instead of simply referencing other authors, Straub-Huillet allow the author as an other to enter and intervene with the film-text. This creative relationship is as much characterized by an act of resistance that is maintained through an overt formal use of direct quotations. This introduces a principle of repetition and reproduction into the films that defines the couple's filmmaking process as a practice of creative labor. The textual figure of the border draws out further how this practice gives rise to new understandings of cinema in regard to nation, culture, and history. Figurations of ruins outline, in addition, how these issues pertain at once to necessity and the limits of representation. This points, in conclusion, to a central dilemma affecting all political film practices: the difficulty of reinventing images that are not already clichés or corporate entities. Straub-Huillet address this problem in a specific way; they aim at the production of an image that pertains to a (future) revolutionary event on the basis of an already existing classical genealogy.

My thesis work explores the visual space of the screen by taking the form of the Sierpinski Sieve, providing a cinematic work that works to be the experience of itself.

Disciplines arrive at moments of crisis. So do those who labor within and at the margins, intersections, outskirts, and centers of those disciplines. This written thesis draws together these moments of both disciplinary and individual crisis, at the intersection of anthropology, nonfiction filmmaking, and film studies. In response to existential, representational, and ethical anxieties, these writings and videos affirm life, within and between the disciplines, myself, and my collaborators — each of whom has experienced or is recovering from an eating disorder. Through navigating the representation of these experiences, the work interrogates the limits and potentials of representation in nonfiction film and video more broadly, and how it relates to anthropology, activism, and pedagogy. It asks: what is a good (ethical) representation of another individual’s experience, especially of something as seemingly private or vulnerable as an eating disorder and the recovery from it? This thesis approaches this question from technological, methodological, ethical, philosophical, and practical perspectives, and in doing so, aims not so much to resolve these disciplinary and personal crises, but to move through and with them, towards a theory and a practice of embodied ethical representation.

This written thesis serves as a public record for the production of Jesse Kreitzer's MFA thesis film Black Canaries, a 1900s coal mining folktale inspired by his Iowan heritage. The thesis includes Mr. Kreitzer's genealogical and historical research as it pertains to his maternal ancestry and coal mining in south-central Iowa. The thesis also accounts for the conceptual, personal, and practical considerations for the production of Black Canaries. Additional materials include the film's production packet, reference guide, production storyboards, and screenplay.

Since its inception in 1897, the annual Cheyenne Frontier Days has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors to Wyoming for a 10-day celebration of "Western roots," culminating in the world's largest outdoor rodeo nicknamed "The Daddy of 'Em All." Shot during the 2018 Frontier Days, Daddy of 'Em All tracks the proliferation of settler colonial narratives that the event seeks to ossify through its signs, symbols, and sets. Through dislocated images and interviews with past and present Frontier Days volunteers and attendees including my mother, a then-resident of Cheyenne, the film grapples with heritage, ideology, violence, and borders in a time of growing nationalism.