Camp scholarship remains vague. While academics don't shy away from writing about this form, most exemplify it more than define it. Some even refuse to define it altogether, arguing that any such attempt causes more problems than it solves. So, I ask the question, can we define camp via its structure, theme and character types? After all, we can do so for most other genres, such as the slasher film, the situation comedy or even the country song; therefore, if camp relies upon identifiable character types and proliferates the same theme repeatedly, then, it exists as a narrative system. In exploring this, I find that, as a narrative system, though, camp doesn't add to the dominant discursive system. Rather, it exists in opposition to it, for camp disseminates the theme that those outside of heteronormativity and acceptability triumph not in spite of but because of what makes them different, othered or marginalized. Camp takes many forms. So, to demonstrate its reliance upon a certain structure, stock character types and a specific theme, I look at the overlaps between seemingly disparate examples of this phenomenon. These include a documentary film (Grey Gardens), a one-woman show (Elaine Stritch: At Liberty), a pop concert (Cher: The Farewell Tour), a diva (Vanessa Williams), a horror film (Carrie), a biopic (Ed Wood), an episodic television procedural (Charlie Angels), and a serialized television dramedy (Desperate Housewives). Then, I take what I find in those chapters and apply it to a non-canonical camp text when I look at theatrical and novelistic depictions of a sport: baseball. This reading suggests that baseball can actually serve as a form of camp. Throughout, by employing structural analysis, queer theory and postmodernism, I uncover camp mythological potential. In addition to demonstrating something which no critic has done previously, namely, that we can, indeed, identify camp via structure, character and particularly theme, this investigation results in several other discoveries. For instance, it reveals that most academics incorrectly label or dismiss camp as a gay only discipline. As becomes evident here, its theme has built into it widespread appeal, as opposed to appeal solely the domain of gay males. Also, it demonstrates camp continued relevance and vitality. Some scholarship in the last two decades or so has proclaimed camp dead, dying or insignificant. By showing our continued need for this form, by using up to the minute examples and by illustrating that critics often wholly misunderstand and misidentify this phenomenon, this dissertation challenges those assertions head on. History demonstrates a longstanding tradition of and a continued need for people to camp. Yet, the scholarship surrounding this form limits, dismisses or misidentifies it, its audience, its relevance, its appeal, its history, its power, and so forth. By asking if we can identify a timeless and necessary theme, one illustrated via character and structure, and in finding that we can, I hope to lay these problems and misconceptions to rest once and for all. In the end, camp exists. And, it exists as a <italics>narrative system as a genre, if you will. Sometimes, genres exist cyclically, lying dormant for a period, only to reemerge, refreshed and once again popular, at a later time. (We've seen this in cinematic westerns or Broadway musicals, for example.) So, genres seemingly never die. This addition to scholarship on camp, then, demonstrates that the myth producing system investigated here has an identity, a purpose, a history, a relevance, a widespread audience, a great deal of both power and potential, and a likelihood that it will always exist. And, since, as I find, camp again and again offers the theme that others regularly find success due to their alterity (as opposed to in spite of it), these findings make sense, for the form serves its own function. / Mass Media and Communication

Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, critical scholarship concerning the fairy tale genre has done much to address the social, historical, cultural, and national motivations behind transformations of the fairy tale from a European starting point. However, the fairy tale’s development in the United States, including both its media-based adaptations and literary extensions, has been given limited attention. While the significance of Walt Disney’s animated films to the American fairy tale tradition has been addressed (by literary and film scholars alike), an interdisciplinary study drawing together Disney’s European and early twentieth century precursors (from literature, stage, and film); his own influential, modern debut; respondent literary and animated work of his immediate successors; and postmodern and twenty-first century adaptations has not been done. By examining the trajectory of a single tale, Snow White (or for Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), this dissertation aims to acknowledge the scholarly attention given to Disney’s animated films, while further examining attributes which I suggest have enabled Disney to have a “folkloric impact” on the fairy tale genre in the United States. Disney’s work stands upon the bedrock of not only European but American Snow White variations and makes these “new” through an innovative deployment and unification of word or language, sound, and image, unimagined prior to the debut of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). The effects of Disney’s influence, as a master storyteller, on both the fairy tale genre and commercial market were so profound that this particular version of the tale refuses to be forgotten, its shadow haunting successors who aimed to counter or redefine its understanding of fairy tale in light of shifting American values and culture. Therefore, even as the fairy tale is frequently understood to have moved beyond its folkloric “origins” (I use this term loosely, as the origins of fairy tale are surrounded by controversy), using the critical framework of folklorists Steven Swann Jones and Linda Dégh, as well as filmic folklorists, Sharon R. Sherman and Juwen Zhang, I explore how Disney’s patchwork of tradition, new technology, and media generated an easily recognizable and communicable tale, one that would be recalled, repeated, and reformed through adaptation by generations of audiences. These subsequent storytellers, in turn, extend American fairy tale tradition and lore still further. / English

The “forgotten war” is the label most frequently used to recall the conflict that took place in Korea from June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953, with variations of this phrase found in museum exhibitions and monuments across the country. Since the widespread presence of so many mentions of Korea clearly demonstrates that the Korean War is not forgotten, this project critically evaluates several forms of public memory (including museum exhibitions, historical scholarship, films and television shows, state and local monuments, and memorial infrastructure including bridges, highways, buildings, and trees) in order to explore how the war has come to be called forgotten. This project also seeks to examine the foreign policy issues of labeling the Korean War as forgotten, by exploring how it is recalled globally and why it is essential to remember details about the war. This project also seeks to fill a niche in the scholarly literature on public memory of American wars by examining Korea as prior studies have both WWII and Vietnam. In addition, this project intervenes in several more scholarly conversations ranging from the argument that the television series M*A*S*H was not primarily an allegory for Vietnam, as is often alleged, to the contention that a Korean Anti-War Movement was much more widespread than has been appreciated by academics interested in the history of activism. This dissertation is designed to highlight the ongoing need to remember the Korean War in detail, given the threats to world peace made by North Korea, and to make clear that it is vital to understand the enduring legacy of the war for twenty-first century diplomacy, which can only be done by examining how the war has been publicly recalled and why the forgotten war label persists despite evidence that Korea has been widely remembered. / History

Iranian documentary filmmakers negotiate their relationship with power centers every step of the way in order to open creative spaces and make films. This dissertation covers their professional activities and their films, with particular attention to 1997 to 2014, which has been a period of tremendous expansion. Despite the many restrictions on freedom of expression in Iran, especially between 2009 and 2013, after the uprising against dubious election practices, documentary filmmakers continued to organize, remained active, and produced films and distributed them. In this dissertation I explore how they engaged with different centers of power in order to create films that are relevant to their society. To focus this topic, my research explores media institutions, their filmmaking practices, and the strategies they use to produce and distribute their films. This research is important because it explores the inherent contradictions in the existence of a vibrant documentary film community in a country that is envisioned as uniformly closed and oppressive in the West. The research is also personally motivated, because I have close connections to the Iranian documentary film world, where I previously made films and produced television programs. I conduct the study with a multi-faceted approach, utilizing participant observation in the field in a four-month period, in-depth interviews with key players, personal reflections, and textual analysis of the films. I focus on about twenty filmmakers and their films, chosen from a pool of more than 500 documentary filmmakers, giving a cross section of this community based on their age, sex, and their professional history and success within Iran and internationally. / Media & Communication

Men's tears are considered rare, and women's tears are considered profusive. Thus, we tend to think of tearjerkers and melodrama as the province of weepy women viewers. However, if we look back at the last several decades of Hollywood filmmaking, melodramas focused on men--or "male weepies"--have been a steady staple of American cinema. This dissertation explores cycles of male melodramas since 1969, placing them in their socio-historical contexts and examining the ways that they participate in public discourses about men, masculinity, and gender roles. Melodrama's focus on victims, bids for virtue, and idealizations of not how things are, but how they should be, have made it a fitting and flexible mode for responding to the changing social landscape of America since the rights movements of the 1960s. Specifically, these films consider both the ways that white capitalist patriarchy has circumscribed the public and private lives of men and the ways that advancements of women and racial minorities are impacting (white) men's lives. This study analyzes the rhetorical effects of these films through both textual evidence and popular reception. Chapters are organized by chronology and subgenre, discussing buddy films of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Midnight Cowboy, The Last Detail, and Scarecrow), paternal melodramas of the late 1970s and early 1980s (The Great Santini, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Table for Five), films of sensitive men in the early 1990s (The Prince of Tides, Regarding Henry, and Philadelphia), and black male weepies from the 1990s and 2000s (Boyz in the Hood, Antwone Fisher, John Q, and The Pursuit of Happyness). The epilogue also considers the developing genre of the bromance, a hybrid of melodrama and comedy. By classifying and analyzing these films as male melodramas, this dissertation challenges both the popular denigrating view that tearjerkers are "chick flicks," and the continued gender bifurcation within film studies' work on melodrama as a narrative mode, which tends to treat weepies as a female form of melodrama and action films as a male form of melodrama. While individual subgenres have received some critical attention, this dissertation is one of the first works to look at male weepies collectively. Putting the spotlight on male weepies reveals Hollywood's interest in gender and the emotional lives of men, though the films display a mix of progressive and conservative strains, often common in Hollywood filmmaking. Specifically, these weepies tend to question and often even reject traditional masculine ideals, and thus exhibit some forms of gender "liberation"; at the same time that they show men suffering under patriarchy and even the pressure to be powerful, these films also shore that power up for men by never forfeiting it. As such, these films reveal the dangers of Hollywood "doing" gender critique: however inadvertently, they contain feminist, anti-racist, and anti-homophobic challenges and re-inscribe the various privileges of characters (in terms of gender, race, sexuality, and often class). However, the films also dramatize the ability of people to change and to empathize with others, and often invite the viewer to do so, even across gender and racial lines. In this way, male melodramas reveal a complex response to social changes; they are marked by an interest in men changing and a more equitable society, even as fully giving up privilege seems difficult. / English

This editorial introduces the special issue on “Digital Humanities & Film Studies: Analyzing the Modalities of Moving Images,” which contains a total of eight exciting contributions. Moreover, this editorial aims to highlight the complementary disciplinary perspectives on the computer-aided analysis of moving images, which are important prerequisites to better understand and situate a common DH perspective.

Alors que le XXème siècle est parcouru par des débats épisodiques concernant l’influence supposée néfaste de différents médias sur les jeunes, il faudra attendre les années 1990 pour que le cinéma se confronte réellement à la représentation du problème, dans un contexte marqué à la fois par l’apparition de ce qui était perçu comme de nouvelles formes de violence juvénile et par celle de nouveaux médias définis par l’interactivité qu’ils permettent. Puisque ce sont ces représentations que cette recherche interroge, l’enjeu consiste alors pour nous à inscrire les propositions filmiques dans une histoire des discours sur l’influence des médias, en postulant qu’au déplacement des inquiétudes vers les médias interactifs et participatifs, et à l’émergence du prosommateur qu’ils ont accompagnée, correspond un changement de paradigme de l’influence des médias. De l’influence des médias à l’aliénation dans le dispositif, il s’agit dès lors de mettre au jour les mécanismes de ce nouveau paradigme tel qu’il s’exprime dans les œuvres, qui envisagent l’influence à partir de la configuration dans laquelle se déploie l’expérience médiatique des personnages (du dispositif médiatique), et à partir du mouvement de perte dans l’extériorisation de l’usager (de l’aliénation) qui la caractérise. / While the twentieth century was punctuated by episodic debates over the supposedly harmful influence of various media on young people, it was not until the 1990s that the cinema really tackled the representation of this issue, in a context marked both by the appearance of what was perceived as new forms of juvenile violence, as well as by the emergence of new media defined by the interactivity they allow. Since this research questions these representations, our purpose is to reinscribe them within a history of discourse around media influence, making the hypothesis that, with the emergence of prosumers, concerns shifted towards interactive and participatory media, generating a paradigm shift around media influence. From media influence to alienation in the dispositif, it is therefore a question of revealing the mechanisms of this new paradigm, in films which look at influence based on the configuration in which the media experience of the characters unfolds (on the media dispositif), and based on the dynamics of loss in user exteriorization (on alienation) that characterize this experience.

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