Mediating the Mill: Steel Production in Film counters opinions by film scholars and critics who often see films that represent steel production and its spaces as failed aesthetic projects or as dull propaganda or educational films, and who undervalue the importance of the specificity of the steel mills and the industry represented in them. It argues that such films are aesthetically and historically rich texts for film and history, but that they can only be interpreted as such when their historical and industrial specificity is returned to or brought alongside the film texts. Using the work of Siegfried Kracauer and film and history scholars, it argues that such films can be read as artifacts of collectively held understandings, imaginings, and affects. In particular, it argues that films representing steel production provide unique insight into collectively held responses to macroeconomic events in the 20th century--from monopoly capital's consolidation and the introduction of Fordism and Taylorism, to the Keynesian compromise, to the Cold War "consensus," to the breakdown of Fordism and introduction of global overproduction, and finally to neoliberalism. Using the work of Frederic Jameson, it interprets these films as cognitive maps of steel production from subjective position within antagonisms of class and economic control. Indeed, it argues that 20th century steel production was a subject uniquely able to bring forth cognitive maps, due to the difficulty of representing it as a coherent industrial process. When filmmakers "mapped" the process, they created cognitive (and affective) maps that tell us more about the provisional acts of representation, and what drives and informs them, than about what or who is represented. Finally, it argues that this cognitive and affective work can only be grasped by close attention to the films' aesthetics, which always also allows for `suggestive indeterminacy' and polyvalent readings, especially due to the striking material world made spectacular on film. This examination of steel production in film also expands the category of industrial film to include documentaries, animated educational films, experimental films, and popular fiction films. As such, this dissertation is made up of case studies of four sets of films of steel production and its spaces. The first set, state-sponsored social documentaries of the 1930s, includes films by Joris Ivens, Dziga Vertov, John Grierson, and Willard Van Dyke and considers how these filmmakers differently imagined the state's role in steel production in this period. The second, mid-twentieth-century sponsored films, includes films made for US Steel and other steel firms from the 1930s through 1960s, and places these films into the context of public relations as an attempt to shape how workers and the public viewed corporate interests. The third, experimental films of the 1970s, focuses on films by Hollis Frampton and Richard Serra that consider the difficulties of connecting the film artist's perspective with that of the steel worker as the western steel industry began to draw down its workforce and as economic change split the middle class. The concluding chapter examines popular dystopian Hollywood films of the late twentieth century as part of a broader shift in the US to a neoliberal economy that left little room for workers. Despite the breadth of my chapters, this dissertation draws on the work of Walter Benjamin in understanding catastrophe as the line connecting the chapters, but also in following the potential when a mass art turned its attention to the massed workers and mass spectacles of steel production.

By examining viewer reception of female antagonists in traditionally feminine roles on television—particularly the role of wives and mothers who have husbands to answer to and children to look after and are thus expected, in some form, to act as a caretaker or guide for others—we can explore modern societal attitudes towards female agency and gender-based expectations of behavior.

This thesis project examines the way that cinematography can create an emotional connection between the film’s characters and the audience. The main component of the project is a film I wrote, directed, and shot, about a stool that falls in love with a pair of pants, titled “The Window Display.” While it is clear that the typical film relies on the emotional impact of the fictional story, this film attempts to create the same effect but with inanimate objects. Thus, “The Window Display” illustrates the ways in which different visual language, especially images from the silent film era, work together to help a human audience emotionally identify with an inanimate protagonist.

This research explores the portrayals of perpetrators in television broadcast coverage of truth commissions within politically transitioning societies, particularly how these discourses may influence the perceptions and experience of transition out of conflict. It focuses on the narratives constructed around apartheid-era perpetrators who participated in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as shown by the South African Broadcasting Corporation's (SABC) weekly broadcast, Truth Commission Special Report. It also considers how this informs perpetrators in speaking about their own histories. The SABC broadcasts aired between the 21st of April 1996 and the 29th of March 1998. It acted as a key news source on the workings of the TRC for a large group of citizens. An average of 1.1 to 1.3 million people tuned in each week for the first year, and an average of 510,000 people tuning in during its second year on air.1 The TRC hearings were recorded and filmed, and parts of these recordings were included in the SABC programme, along with further research by Special Report journalists. This included stories from the apartheid era that were not told through the TRC, further interviews with perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and communities, as well as reference to news and legal documents. As SABC describes it, the Truth Commission Special Report series “contributed to the TRC's pursuit of revealing the truth about, and engendering a deeper engagement with, South Africa's past conflicts.”2 The series was hosted and produced by well-known anti-apartheid journalist and Afrikaner Max du Preez, whose own identity became central to the narrative put forth. His team of journalists and producers included other Afrikaners such as his long-time colleague Jacques Pauw, and the young Anneliese Burgess. Otherwise, “his team of journalists varied over the twenty-three months of the series, generally including five and seven people who were racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse.”3 As South Africa transitioned out of the apartheid state, transparency of the transitional mechanisms taking place was essential for the transformation of governance and the appearance of accountability.4 This demand acted as one of the driving forces for the intense media involvement in the country's chief transitional process, namely the TRC. This research hinges on the hypothesis that the media's involvement in the South African transitional process went beyond the provision of transparency and may have influenced people's perceptions and experience within the transition per assertions by scholars such as Parver and Wolf, Fischer, Kent, and Mihr, 5 among others. It uses this as a starting point to then investigate the series' narrative as a source of these perceptions and the subsequent experiences of the subjects. This points not only to outcomes, but also their influencing factors with the intent to suggest recommendations for more intentional media coverage of political transitions, with perpetrators being one facet of such.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / When discussing and addressing child soldiering in Africa, both in print or in film, there are a number of key factors that need to be considered. For example, taking into account the root causes for both recruitment and voluntary enlistment - which include the changed nature of weapons and warfare, the breakdown of law and order, and intolerable levels of poverty, unemployment and also the social pressures on children to engage in armed conflicts. By bearing these factors in mind when delving into this complex subject matter, helped in ascertaining the ways in which certain modalities of thinking about Africa, as well as her child soldiers, influence Western perspectives, convictions and beliefs via a variety of media. However, for this particular dissertation, the focus is turned entirely to the Afro-pessimistic / Afro-optimistic cinematic representations of African child soldiers in three case study films: Ezra (2007), The Silent Army (2008) and War Witch (2012). These films were closely analysed at the hand of certain research question which ultimately allowed for both researcher and reader to keep an open mind when being confronted with the different faces of Africa’s children on screen.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / This study documented the process of mobile Digital Storytelling with a particular focus on the development of civic awareness and voice as well as the participants’ strategies to address multiple audiences of digital stories and to distribute their video creations through pre-existing peer-networks.

Bibliography: leaves 110-120. / This minor dissertation is undertaken to examine the cross-cultural similarities that are revealed by motion pictures through analyzing the work of Akira Kurosawa and contrasting it with selective mainstream cinema texts. Kurosawa is a critical case in point due to his welding of Occidental and Japanese ideas into his films, and his origin from a hybridized Japan, a society which historically has freely absorbed and embellished itself from numerous cultures, including America, Korea, China and Europe.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-237) / Daniel C Hallin and Paolo Mancini's Comparing Media Systems (2004) has been hailed as an important contribution to understanding the inter-relationship between the media and political systems. The work was, however, based on a study of 18 stable, mature and highly developed democracies either in Europe or in North America. As an emerging democracy that has recently undergone dramatic change in both its political system and its media, South Africa's inclusion poses particular challenges to Hallin and Mancini's Three Models paradigm. This thesis focuses on the South African print media and tests both the paradigm's theoretical underpinnings as well as its four principle dimensions of analysis: political parallelism, state intervention, development of a mass market and journalistic professionalisation. A range of insights and a number of modifications are proposed. This thesis is based on interviews with South Africa's most senior media executives and editors, a comprehensive study of the relevant literature and 15 years of personal experience as a political analyst, columnist and parliamentary correspondent covering South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy. The thesis sheds new light on the functioning and applicability of the Three Models comparative paradigm as well as on the development and future trajectory of South African print media journalism.

This thesis project accompanies the 2019 photographic portraiture series entitled Becoming. Using James Baldwin, Audre Lorde and Zora Neale Hurston as departure points, both the photo series and this academic explanative seeks to explore the question of what does it mean to become? Or in other words, what is the imperative to be who you are, to actualize within a space that demonstrates a regular investment in the destruction of bodies that are Black and queer. Through a set of five individual interviews, the questions of what does it mean to be who you are? why is it important? how do you become through your creative work? serve to create space for knowledge production, combatting what Spivak dubs as epistemic violence. Guided by the principles of post colonial life writing, African and Black feminist thought, Black queer theory, and art as an emancipatory tool, this thesis centers voices often theorized about yet rarely heard and argues that creative work more broadly offers a path for liberation. The published work of Becoming, both the photographs and interviews, can be found at http://www.becomingphotoseries.com/ and fulfils the creative media aspect of this dissertation/creative project.

Media studies has recently witnessed an upsurge in theoretical and empirical work that investigates the moral-ethical implications of the mediation of suffering. The research focus has largely been limited to representations of distant suffering by global media to audiences in the Global North. Contrary to the above, this work focuses on the mediation of suffering by media in the Global South. This study is underpinned by the understanding that suffering is also a proximal (local) phenomenon and mundane (everyday) phenomenon. It is against this backdrop that this work uses the B-Metro tabloid's mediations of child abuse in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe as a case study. The study espouses a holistic view of mediation where mediation is the social circulation of meaning across the moments of production, text and reception. Roger Silverstone's concept of proper distance is used to evaluate the extent to which the BMetro's representations of child maltreatment are successful in engendering an ethic of care among its readership. Methodologically, the study triangulates focus group data about the context of production, with a textual analysis of the child abuse stories and focus group data about the reception of the same. Findings from the context of production point to an overreliance on legal, social and cultural elites for news about child abuse. Data shows that B-Metro journalists are torn between compassion and institutionalised compassion fatigue about child abuse. Findings also point to the prevalence of a gendered perception of child abuse among the journalists. Textual analysis data revealed that the editorial discourse identifies the ethic of care and the ethic of voice as being instrumental in the fight against child abuse. Further, the texts exhibit a patriarchal, gendered and heteronormative conception of child abuse. Reception data shows that it is more plausible to think of media users' responses as being located along a continuum whose range spans compassion fatigue and an ethic of care. A typology of witnessing is used to capture readers' responses to the mediations of child abuse. The tabloid genre was found to be simultaneously enabling and disabling the successful activation of an ethic of care. The thesis concludes by advancing a dialectical view of mediation that explores the equivalences and ambivalences between the moments of production, text and reception.