Conceptions of masculinity on film shifted after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from representations of male heroism as invulnerable, powerful, and safe to representations of male heroism as resilient, vengeful, and vulnerable. At the same time, the antagonists of these films shifted towards representations as shadowy, unknowable, and disembodied. These changing representations, I argue, are windows into the anxieties Americans faced in the aftermath of the attacks. The continuing presentation of power as linked to violence, however, illustrates the ways in which conceptions of masculinity have stayed the same.

Both the Second World War and the Korean War presented Hollywood with the opportunity to produce combat films that roused patriotic spirit amongst the American people. The obvious choice was to continue making the popular squad films that portrayed a group of soldiers working together to overcome a common challenge posed by the war. However, in the wake of various racial and ethnic tensions consistently unfolding in the United States from 1940 to 1960, it became apparent to Hollywood that the nation needed pictures of unity more than ever, especially if America was going to win its wars. Using combat as the backdrop, squad films consisting of men from all different backgrounds were created in order to demonstrate to its audiences how vital group cohesion was for the survival of the nation, both at home and abroad. This thesis explores how Hollywood’s war films incorporated racial and ethnic minorities into their classic American squads while also instilling the country’s inherent values of democracy.

L’obiettivo di questo lavoro è la ricostruzione di un oggetto mediale di cui ormai in Rete si sono perse le tracce: il webcinema, il cinema creato, realizzato e distribuito attraverso la Rete. Esso nasce e si sviluppa in una fase pionieristica del web tra la seconda metà degli anni novanta e i primi anni del XXI secolo, in un periodo segnato dalla sviluppo della tecnologia dello streaming che consentirà la trasmissione di contenuti sonori e audiovisivi attraverso la Rete, ridefinendo il concetto del web stesso da collezione di testi a flusso di informazioni audiovisive, l’euforia della net economy e lo scoppio della bolla delle dot-com. Per analizzare questo fenomeno ibrido, di cui la teorizzazione coeva è scarsa e di cui la Rete sembra essersi dimenticata, adottiamo l’approccio metodologico della Actor-network Theory che ci permetterà di investigare i veloci cambiamenti, l’instabilità e l’eterogeneità propria dei media digitali. Con l’analisi del case history verrà evidenziata la complessa relazione esistente tra dimensione tecnologica e dimensione sociale che nel caso dei media digitali è improntata a momenti di apertura nei confronti della innovazione e di stabilizzazione e definizione di determinati modelli d’uso. / Aim of this work is the reconstruction of a forgotten media by the Net: webcinema, cinema created specifically for viewing on the Internet. It is born and it develops in a pioneering phase of the web between the second half of the Nineties and first years of XXI century, in a period marked from the development of the streaming technology allowing the transmission of sound and audiovisual contents through the Net, redefining quite the concept of the web from collection of texts to audiovisual informational flux, net economy hype and the collapse of the dot-com bubble. In order to analyze this hybrid media object, barely studied by the contemporaneous scholarship and forgotten by the Net, we use the Actor-network theory approach that will allow to investigate the rapid changes, the instability and the heterogeneity of digital media. The case history will underline the complex relation between technological dimension and social dimension that digital media modellize in an opening approach versus innovation and a stabilization one versus some certain user models.

The field of video game studies has through later years shown a growing interest in game's spatialfeatures, along with their narrative implications. By introducing earlier findings of spatialmanifestations of dreams and psychological content in narrative works, with regards to their medialrepresentation into this discussion, I hope to conjoin video game research (better known asludology) with a line of psychoanalytic inquiry, which hitherto seems to have been left unexploredwithin media research.    While establishing a viewpoint through the interdisciplinary field of media research andpsychoanalysis, my intention is to broach a discussion on the possibilities of expanding itsviewpoints and theoretical frameworks unto the video game medium. In the present thesis I will forthis purpose center the discussion on the dreamlike Portal games, developed by Valve Corporation,which manages to enact a psychologically interesting narrative content largely through its spatialfeatures, as well as their game mechanics.    The psychoanalytic approach I intend to adopt for this study will, apart from taking mediaspecifications into account, also necessarily, following Gilles Deleuzes and Félix Guattaris focus onthe historical-political situation in their critique of earlier psychoanalytic inquiry, be directedtowards a societal context while addressing the individual works. I will thus, while analyzingspatial-psychological implications of works in different media, be regarding contemporary topics ofcultural phenomena and theories on human psychology as important factors for the forms ofexpression and thematic content, which contemporary cultural artifacts may take.    The term transmediality, which below will be discussed in appliance to psychoanalytic inquiry,refers in this thesis to the definition outlined by the literary scholar Irina Rajewsky, who situates itsemergence in an ongoing development in the field of the interconnected narratology and intermedialstudy, in which I hope to engage and contribute.

This dissertation examines the development of Chinese art film in the 1990s. It explores the mechanisms that were conducive to the emergence of this art wave and its representative cinematic styles. Art film was a historically underdeveloped film practice in China, especially under the mass line-dominated Socialist film system. I argue that Chinese art cinema was fundamentally defined by the second art wave, which was flanked by the first art wave (the Fifth Generation Cinema) of the 1980s, and the full capitalization of the film industry in the new millennium. The key to understanding the second art wave was the paradoxical industrial process of the Socialist film system reform of the 1990s. The controlled top-down reform made the emergence of independent production possible while at the same time denying its legitimacy. As the result, the Chinese art film production breathed new life but was pushed from the mainstream to the realm of the alternative. In alliance with other youth subculture phenomena of the time, such as rock music and avant-garde art, art film came to be defined as a distinctive position in the field of Chinese film production in terms of the mode of production (mostly independent), distribution (international film festivals), and film style. Three styles are examined in detail in this dissertation: the documentary-inspired new realist style represented by films of Jia Zhangke, the modernistic expressionist style represented by films of He Jianjun, Zhang Ming, and others, and the style that falls in-between the new realist and expressionist style represented by early films of Zhang Yuan, Lou Ye, and Wang Xiaoshuai. / text

Sexual delinquency marked midcentury cinematic representations of adolescent girls in 1940s, 50, and early 60s. Drawing from the history of adolescence and the context of midcentury female juvenile delinquency, I argue that studios and teen girl stars struggled for decades with publicity, censorship, and social expectations regarding the sexual license of teenage girls. Until the late 1950s, exploitation films and B movies exploited teen sex and pregnancy while mainstream Hollywood ignored those issues, struggling to promote teen girl stars by tightly controlling their private lives but depriving fan magazines of the gossip and scandals that normally fueled the machinery of stardom. The emergence and image of the postwar, sexually autonomous teen girl finally began to see expression in mainstream melodramas of the late 50s, and teen girl stars such as Sandra Dee and Natalie Wood created new, “post-delinquent” star images wherein “good girls” could still be sexually experienced. This new image was a significant departure from the widespread belief that the sexually active teen girl was a fundamentally delinquent threat to the nuclear family, and offered a liberal counterpoint to more conservative teen girl prototypes like Hayley Mills, which continued to have cultural currency.

Exploration of the influence that politics may have on artists’ creativity has been undertaken by looking at selected works of Yugoslav film director Aleksandar Petrović. An attempt was made to identify thematic or stylistic motifs in his films that could be understood as reflections on the political context in which the work was made. One of the most common approaches to examine a work of one filmmaker, the auteur theory, has been modified into the theory of political auteur, to aid in identifying recurrent motifs and themes that artists introduce in their work as a reaction to the surrounding political reality. As Petrović worked in Yugoslavia during Socialism, this period was historicised in order to support the identification of ‘political motifs’ in his films. The period between 1965 and 1973 is taken as the focus of research, since it is known as the 'liberal hour', the period of great artistic and intellectual freedoms, during which Petrović directed four of his most significant films. Each of these four films is analysed in respective chapters, first by elaborating on the then current political background, and then by analysing the films’ narratives against it, and extrapolating thematic and stylistic motifs reflecting back on this background. Such exploration of art and politics has been undertaken with a view to emphasise consistent motifs in art works, not only to do with an artist’s personal interests, but also those that emerge as a result of imposing societal structures.

Debates concerning the veracity, ethics and politics of the documentary form circle endlessly around the function of those who participate in it, and the meaning attributed to their participation. Great significance is attached to the way that documentary filmmakers do or do not participate in the world they seek to represent, just as great significance is attached to those subjects whose participation extends beyond playing the part of eyewitness or expert, such that they become part of the very filmmaking process itself. This Ph.D. explores the interface between documentary practice and participatory culture by looking at how their practices, discursive fields and histories intersect, but also by looking at how participating in one might mean participating in the other. In short, the research is an examination of participatory culture through the lens of documentary practice and documentary criticism. In the process, however, this examination of participatory culture will in turn shed light on documentary thinking, especially the meaning and function of ‘the participant’ in contemporary documentary practice. A number of ways of conceiving of participation in documentary practice are discussed in this research, but one of the ideas that gives purpose to that investigation is the notion that the participant in contemporary documentary practice is someone who belongs to a participatory culture in particular. Not only does this mean that those subjects who play a part in a documentary are already informed by their engagement with a range of everyday media practices before the documentary apparatus arrives, the audience for such films are similarly informed and engaged. This audience have their own expectations about how they should be addressed by media producers in general, a fact that feeds back into their expectations about participatory approaches to documentary practice too. It is the ambition of this research to get closer to understanding the relationship between participants in the audience, in documentary and ancillary media texts, as well as behind the camera, and to think about how these relationships constitute a context for the production and reception of documentary films, but also how this context might provide a model for thinking about participatory culture itself. One way that documentary practice and participatory culture converge in this research is in the kind of participatory documentary that I call the ‘Camera Movie’, a narrow mode of documentary filmmaking that appeals directly to contemporary audiences’ desires for innovation and participation, something that is achieved in this case by giving documentary subjects control of the camera. If there is a certain inevitability about this research having to contend with the notion of the ‘participatory documentary’, the ‘participatory camera’ also emerges strongly in this context, especially as a conduit between producer and consumer. Making up the creative component of this research are two documentaries about the reality television event Band In A Bubble, and participatory media practices more broadly. The single-screen film, Hubbub , gives form to the collective intelligence and polyphonous voice of contemporary audiences who must be addressed and solicited in increasingly innovative ways. One More Like That is a split-screen, DVD-Video with alternate audio channels selected by a user who thereby chooses who listens and who speaks in the ongoing conversation between media producers and media consumers. It should be clear from the description above that my own practice does not extend to highly interactive, multi-authored or web-enabled practices, nor the distributed practices one might associate with social media and online collaboration. Mine is fundamentally a single authored, documentary video practice that seeks to analyse and represent participatory culture on screen, and for this reason the Ph.D. refrains from a sustained discussion of the kinds of collaborative practices listed above. This is not to say that such practices don’t also represent an important intersection of documentary practice and participatory culture, they simply represent a different point of intersection. Being practice-led, this research takes its procedural cues from the nature of the practice itself, and sketches parameters that are most enabling of the idea that the practice sets the terms of its own investigation.

xi, 180 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation examines the relationship between British and American conceptualizations of the Anglophone Caribbean and the way that Anglophone Caribbean fiction writers and filmmakers tend to represent the region. Central to my project is the process of reexportation, whereby Caribbean artists attain success at home by first achieving renown abroad. I argue that the primary implication of reexportation is that British and American conceptualizations of the Anglophone Caribbean have had a determining effect upon attempts by Anglophone Caribbean fiction writers and filmmakers to represent the region. Chapter I introduces the dissertation. Chapter II, "The 'Double Audience' of Samuel Selvon and The Lonely Londoners ," concerns Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon, who--along with George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and V. S. Naipaul--is cited as being among the most important and influential of the West Indian authors who began publishing in the 1950s. Although I consider all of Selvon's ten novels in that chapter, my main concern is The Lonely Londoners (1956), Selvon's best known and perhaps most pivotal and misread novel. Chapter III, "Contrapuntally Re-reading Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come, " features a reevaluation of the Jamaican filmmaker's 1972 motion picture, which in many complex ways remains the Caribbean film. Chapter IV, " Pressure and the Caribbean," focuses on Trinidadian filmmaker Horace Ove's Pressure (1975), which I deliberately treat as a Caribbean film although it is still best known as Britain's first feature-length dramatic movie with a "black" director. Vital secondary texts include selected works by Edward Said, Mikhail Bahktin, and Richard Dyer, as well as Kenneth Ramchand, Keith Warner, and D. Elliott Parris. The three existing book-length analyses of Selvon's fiction are the main voices with which the Selvon chapter is in discourse. David Bordwell's work in cinematic narrative theory and Marcia Landy's contribution to the study of British genres are essential to the frameworks through which I read the cinematic primary texts. / Adviser: Gordon Sayre

xx, 800 p. : music. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Despite the immense popular and critical response given to the Harry Potter narrative and phenomenon, little has been written about the music for the Harry Potter films. I establish that the aesthetic differences that viewers perceive between the different Harry Potter films are largely due to the musical approaches of composers John Williams, Patrick Doyle, and Nicholas Hooper over the course of four director/composer collaborations for the first five films. This study provides a rare opportunity to examine the work of different composers for a continuing narrative. Moreover, when we explore how music is used in varied ways within the films, we see how each musical approach shapes film visuals into the narrative that the filmmakers sought to convey; when the music changes, the story changes. Music creates the geographic, cultural, and temporal landscapes that draw us in to Harry's 'muggle' and magical worlds. Music defines the way we perceive Harry's emotional experiences of love, joy, loss, and death, and also defines the philosophical perspectives on the nature of evil and its conquest. Sometimes, the music provides clues to the mystery long before visuals and dialogue address them, and musical relationships (with visuals and within the music itself) allow us to perceive the properties and powers of magic and humanity that may otherwise transpire unseen. Music also plays a role in the types of humor that are represented in the films--from socially-sanctioned transgressions, to macabre, to bawdy, deadpan, and caricature. However, while the core narrative themes in the films are closely related to the main themes in Rowling's original novels, an examination of how Rowling's descriptions of musical events compare with representations of these events in the films reveals that Rowling created a more nuanced social landscape (especially with regard to gender) than is re-contextualized with music in the films. / Committee in charge: Marian Smith, Chairperson, Music; Anne McLucas, Member, Music; Mark Levy, Member, Music; Carl Bybee, Outside Member, Journalism and Communication