This dissertation examines documentary cinema in Socialist China as an emerging technology of mass politics, a new medium for creating political imaginaries and writing history, and a global vernacular connecting China to other revolutionary and modernizing cultures. At the center of my investigation is documentary cinema's capacities to work across boundaries between reality and fiction, between physical and metaphysical worlds, and between a historical world bound by its materiality and a revolutionary world mobilized to take leaps into a brighter future. I argue that these capacities made documentary a particularly relevant media for socialism for both epistemological and historiographical reasons. Epistemologically, documentary brought together the empirical and the ideological, both fundamental to a Marxist quest for truth. Historiographically, documentary's deep bond to the present moment and its capacity for temporal re-structuring and mass mobilization allowed it to intervene radically into the making and writing of history, particularly in a society engaged with engineering its own transformation. Using visual archives only recently made available, the dissertation's wide-ranging discussions include how documentary re-enacted the civil war upon the founding of the PRC, documented "tomorrow" during the Great Leap Forward, created mass passions for diplomacy in the 1960s, and enabled a poetics of mourning and testimony in the immediate years after the Cultural Revolution. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation explores the relationship between state, citizen and public culture through an ethnographic and historical examination of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in northern Greece. In the two-year period leading up to and following its fiftieth anniversary in 2009, the festival was caught up in the larger economic, political and social crises that have overtaken Greece in the last five years - a painful period of rapid transformation and neoliberalization for one of Europe's staunchest social-welfare states. As the Greek state faces bankruptcy - both economic and political - it is being forced to revisit the terms of its social contract with its citizens. In a country where "culture" was once touted as a national "heavy industry," the relationship between the state and cultural production is also being restructured. Public culture is one of the areas of social life in which people are now struggling with these changes and attempting to redefine what it means to be a citizen of the Greek state - utilizing and revising local, national and transnational identities in the process. / Anthropology

In December 1899, the Italian camera operator Giuseppe Filippi, trained by the famous French Lumière brothers, arrived in Haiti and began conducting film screenings for local audiences. Within the next two years, his Caribbean travels led him to Guadeloupe and Martinique, where he left behind him a seed of interest in an art form that, as I will demonstrate, would alternately develop and wane over the course of the twentieth century depending on funding and the turbulence of the fluctuating French Caribbean political and cultural climate. Chapters one and two provide a thorough roadmap of the development of the French Caribbean film industry and conclude chronologically, arriving at the current state of cinema in these islands. Though the debate over the existence of the industry still carries on amongst local film professionals, particularly in Guadeloupan and Martinican circles, these chapters offer compelling evidence of distinct and verifiable cinematic production. The final two chapters consist of an analysis of a set of five films, chosen for their relatively recent release as well as their thematic, aesthetic, and structural variety. This set of films constitutes evidence of a wave of films unified by their preoccupation with memory, an orientation that mirrors and reinforces a contemporary cultural movement in these islands, and by their advancement of overt, contextually relevant postcolonial political agenda. / text

In the autumn of 1921, silent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was arrested for the rape and murder of a model and actress named Virginia Rappé. The ensuing scandal created a firestorm of controversy not just around Arbuckle but the entire motion picture industry. Religious and moral reformers seized upon the scandal to decry the decline of “traditional” moral values taking place throughout American society in the aftermath of World War I. The scandal created a common objective for an anti-film coalition representing diverse social and religious groups, all dedicated to bringing about change in the motion picture industry through public pressure, boycotts, and censorship legislation. In the face of this threat, the film industry created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, with Republican strategist Will Hays as its president. Hays worked to incorporate moral reformers into his new organization, giving them an outlet for their complaints while simultaneously co-opting and defusing their reform agenda. Hays’ use of public relations as the means to institute self-regulation within the motion picture industry enabled Hollywood to survive the Arbuckle scandal and continue to thrive. It also set up the mechanism by which the industry has effectively negotiated public discontent ever since.

In spite of the substantial amount of critical work that has been produced on Indian cinema in the last decade, misconceptions about Indian cinema still abound. Indian cinema is a subject about which conceptions are still muddy, even within prominent academic circles. The majority of the recent critical work on the subject endeavors to correct misconceptions, analyze cinematic norms and lay down the theoretical foundations for Indian cinema. This dissertation conducts a study of the cinema from India with a view to examine the extent to which such cinema represents an anti-colonial vision. The political resistance of Indian films to colonial and neo-colonial norms, and their capacity to formulate a national identity is the primary focus of the current study.

This thesis opens discussion on American alien invasion films of the 90s as a self-critique, a reaction to being an imperial power at the end of the Cold War. The alien menace in these films is not the "other" but rather the U.S. itself being the colonizer or conqueror looking to expand its sphere of influence. Furthermore, it discusses how Presidential rhetoric in the films play a role in this postcolonial reading. Specific works studied are: Independence Day (1996), Mars Attacks! (1996), Babylon 5: In the Beginning (1998), and The Puppet Masters (1994).

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is the ascertainment of the attitudes of members of the Texas film industry toward the film curriculum offered in Texas institutions of higher learning. Based on the findings the following conclusions have been reached. There is not a high regard overall for film-studies programs in Texas institutions of higher learning within the film industry. This may be overcome by an interaction of the professional film community as an active participant in curriculum planning and development. Of prime consideration should be an association of film schools coordinating programs in cooperation with the Texas Film Commission. An effective curriculum for film-studies education may be organized by utilization of learning modules. This plan would organize the learning experiences in a functional manner and would move toward involvement of a career nature.

xii, 315 p. / Independent filmmaking in China, with the directors' reiteration of literary and cinematic realism carried on from May Fourth, reflects the nation's social uneasiness triggered by the enlarging division between the enlightenment indenture and the unidirectional modernization project. Resisting the national allegories and Hollywood-style big budget fantasies made by the Fifth Generation, independent filmmakers bring back to the screen the unadorned life of city inhabitants. The meaning of "independent" and "alternative" does not exclusively lie in the production and distribution venues but is galvanized by film directors' perception and cinematic depiction of what constitutes the social realities of contemporary China. The locality of hometown and the corporeality of the filmed subjects help to sustain a legitimate image-space for the socially underrepresented, at a time when the Party co-opts the discourse of nation-state to renew their regime. Directors employ the politics of sexuality, where body is the only thing remaining in their control, to usher in a redefinition of the Party and reassure the agency of Chinese intellectuals who were betrayed during the June Fourth massacre. The exegesis of the independent generation extends to the digital video (DV) filmmakers, whose cinematic language features the increased sense of interrogation between the camera and the characters. For the directors' claims of neither representing the people nor wrestling against the Party, nonetheless, DV films retreat to a safe but enclosed space, in which the aggrandized size of the body on screen displays a fractioned and diminished self cutting off from the outside world and falling short of its full potential. Independent filmmaking in China derives its policy-shaping capacity from its increasing participants (domestic audiences, amateur filmmakers, critics, and scholars) and multiplying operative channels (film funds, online forums, and non-official archives), collectively converting filmmaking from a privilege exclusive to the state apparatus and its elite delegates to a right of self-expression belonging to each individual. / Committee in charge: Alison M. Groppe, Chairperson; Tze-Lan Sang, Member; Alisa D. Freedman, Member; David Li, Outside Member

abstract: Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribCrit) as a theoretical framework, this dissertation analyzes a contemporary cinematic film directed by an American Indian filmmaker about American Indians and answers the question of whether the visual texts are unmasking, critiquing, confronting, and/or reinforcing reductive and stereotypical images of American Indians. Using Critical Thematic Analysis as a process, this dissertation interrogates Drunktown’s Finest (2014) to understand ways a contemporary American Indian filmmaker engages in counterstorying as a sovereignist action and simultaneously investigates ways the visual narrative and imagery in the film contributes to the reinforcement of hegemonic representations—the static, constrained, White-generated images and narratives that have been sustained in the hegemonic culture for over a century. With an increase in the number of American Indian filmmakers entering into the cultural elitist territory of Hollywood, moving from the margins to the center, I believe Natives are now in a better position to apprehend and reconstruct a multidimensional and complex American Indian identity. I posit that the reshaping of these mass-mediated images can only be countered through the collective and sustained fostering of a more complex imagery of the American Indian and that authorship of the representation is crucial to changing the hegemonic imagery of American Indians. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Curriculum and Instruction 2017

abstract: ABSTRACT Mexican Golden Age Cinema materialized the narratives of identity, unity and morality that became the obligated point of reference to understand social stability and mexicaness during the post-revolutionary period. Hence, film stars evolved into cultural icons that embodied the representation of patriarchal order as a synonym for nationalism. However, dissident depictions that challenged carefully tailored heteronormative roles were as much a part of the post-revolutionary reality as was the attempt to manufacture a utopic heterosexual family on screen, that functioned as a metaphor for national reunification under the law of the father/president of the Mexican Republic. Nonetheless, even when an distinguished member of the Mexican star system, Sara García´s queer performativity of her quintessential sainted mother and even more revered grandmother characters highlights fissures in the effort to naturalize sexual passivity and heterosexual motherhood as the core of Mexican women identity. Furthermore, García took advantage of her romanticized butch characters in order to revert lesbian invisibility in movies where she portrait roles that exemplified sapphic households. In most of García's films masculine presence became redundant, hence challenging male privilege. Not very far from her own reality, García's queer women of a certain age, involved in female marriages, contested the post-revolutionary discourse of stability and mexicaness even in the heteronormative realm of Golden Age Filmmaking. Regardless of her queerness, unlike any other transgressive figure, Sara García became a national icon in her time and her image continues to hold relevance in current Mexican popular culture. More than five decades after her death young generations are still familiar with her legacy and her image has evolved into the representation of the nostalgia for tradition and alleged "more simple" times. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Spanish 2014