190 pages / Twenty-first century American cinema is permeated by images of globalization and environmental change. Responding to what Yale researchers have described as a “sea change” in public perceptions of global warming occurring between 2004 and 2007, this dissertation provides the first extended examination of Hollywood’s response to the planet’s most pressing social and environmental challenge – global climate change. Among the most widely distributed and consumed forms of popular culture, Hollywood blockbuster films provide a unique textual window into the cultural logic of ecology during this important turning point in Americans’ perceptions of environmental risk. The term “cultural logic of ecology” is defined as the collective cultural expression of a society’s dominant perceptions and enactments of its relationships with other organisms and their shared bio-physical environments. Surveying the history of climate cinema, my second chapter examines the production and reception contexts of the two films most responsible for renewing public interest in global warming: The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Despite their generic differences, both films combine the formal techniques of melodrama and realism to translate the science of global warming into a moral vernacular. In subsequent chapters, I further intertwine textual and historical analysis to examine other films released during the period that portray aspects of global warming. Considered a children’s film, Happy Feet (2006) employs digital animation to illustrate the ecological impacts of globalization on Antarctica, thus presenting viewers with a more accurate picture of the threats facing emperor penguins than did the documentary March of the Penguins (2005). I next analyze There Will Be Blood (2007) as a critique of patriarchy and natural resource exploitation that resonated with American filmgoers as oil prices were skyrocketing and President George W. Bush admitted “America is addicted to oil.” Consumed on Imax screens and iPods, and as toys, t-shirts, and video games, blockbusters leave massive cultural and carbon footprints. I conclude by arguing that ecocritical scholarship offers the most effective scholarly toolkit for understanding contemporary cinema as a cultural, textual, and material phenomenon. / Committee in charge: Dr. Michael Aronson, Chairperson; Dr. Sangita Gopal, Member; Dr. Louise Westling, Member; Dr. Jon Lewis, Member, from Oregon StateUniversity; Dr. Patrick Bartlein, Outside Member

Without consciousness we become victim instead of actors- even if it is only a question of acting victims. And in the make belief of our lives, the audience is self (Fugard in Frank 2004: 53). The primary concern of this study is the comparison of video interpretations of Athol Fugard with their adaptations as visual texts. It has been argued that 'the playwright's creative labour ends with the completion of the script' (Kidnie 2009: 15).Therefore, amongst other issues this dissertation will explore the politics of production at play during adaptation from printed version to screenplays. My assumption is that a comparison between the printed texts and video versions will add to the understanding of the effectiveness of Fugard's dramatic techniques and comprehension of literary texts; images are easy to decipher by inexperienced interpreters if guided. For the purpose of my presentation I adapt the reader response theoretical position of Stanley Fish based on a comparison that will be explored in terms of my own response to both the written text and visual texts, and in line with other responsed to the play. / English Studies / M.A.

abstract: This dissertation analyzes three films from Mexico, Spain, and Argentina--Kilómetro 31, El orfanato, and Aparecidos (2007)--and their interplay with the historicism that has traditionally served as the default referent for "reality" in Western narrative. While grounding my approach in temporal critique, I borrow from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and queer theory to explore ways in which ghosts and the rhetorical figure of the family are manipulated in each national imaginary as a strategy for negotiating volatility within symbolic order: a tactic that can either naturalize or challenge normative discourses. As a literary and cinematic trope, ghosts are particularly useful vehicles for the exploration of national imaginaries and the dominant or competing cultural attitudes towards a country's history, and thus, the articulation of a present political reality. The rhetorical figure of the family is also pivotal in this process as a mechanism for expressing national allegories, for articulating generational anxieties about a nation's relationship with its history, and for organizing societies and social subjects as such, interpellating them into or excluding them from national imaginaries according to its grammar/logic. The proposed trajectory through these films will help facilitate a study of the potential of these rhetorical figures to either reinscribe or question two of the most fundamental processes that go into the cartography of ideology: the imposition of (a) time and the negotiation of social subjectivity within it. Competing political narratives may use any number of rhetorical strategies to position themselves in time to promote their agendas while continuing to reinforce the overall framework that determines the parameters of what is visible, and thus debatable. As temporal anomalies who are defined by their (in)visibility, ghosts can be used to either reinforce this framework or they can be used to articulate alternative relationships to time, and consequently, other political possibilities. Ghosts, families, and children are especially volatile rhetorical figures because of their potential to expose the mechanisms of societal organization--the construction of social subjects through their relationship to the time and the families of which they are presumably products--as negotiable processes rather than self-evident truths. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Spanish 2013

The relation between memory and identity is significant, particularly if an identity-establishing entity such as a state has vanished. In the context of GDR memory, this pertains to the type of memory discourse: what is remembered, how, and by whom? What are the differences in the discourse about East German memory between the US and Germany? Based on approaches of the Aleida Assmann’s approaches to individual, collective, and cultural memory this thesis seeks to examine the notion and impact of archives in collective memory processes and to analyze the extent to which the medium of film as a concrete and abstract archival complex can represent a part of individual and collective memory. Therefore, I combine the notion of the archive – based on approaches of Benjamin and Foucault – with memory discourses, going beyond the archive’s material character. Furthermore, in my analysis I follow the media studies’ definitions of film as a material-based dualistic, communicative and semiotic system. The analysis focuses on the work of the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which is important for American utilization and circulation of DEFA films and the distribution of audiovisual images of and about the former GDR. The DEFA Film Library is the only archive and research center outside of Germany devoted to a broad spectrum of filmmaking from and related to the former GDR. The DEFA Film Library has been distributing DEFA movies and providing materials for media education since the early 1990s. In this thesis, I examine the multilayered role of the DEFA Film Library in US-East German sociocultural relationships, particularly with respect to its impact on raising awareness of East German culture, history and politics through public and academic film programming and exchange. Using the DEFA Film Library’s work as a case study, I analyze the political impact of film work amidst the challenges of preserving, circulating, and communicating the audiovisual memory of the GDR.

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The advancement of digital entertainment media has given audiences the ability to skip ads that do not interest them. Consequently, brands face the challenge of creating ads that can compel audiences and finding media outlets that can effectively reach target audiences. Brands today use product placements to promote their products because movie audiences are generally attentive to ads when they are incorporated in a movie’s narrative. Marvel Cinematic Universe is a globally recognized entertainment franchise that uses product placements strategically to promote brands in their movies and TV shows. In this study, I conduct rhetorical analyses of select product placements in Marvel movies to investigate how they employ different rhetorical appeals in promoting products; and discuss how the appeals can influence audience perceptions of the products advertised. My findings suggest that product placements in Marvel movies leverage Aristotle's rhetorical appeals to draw audiences' attention and influence their opinions about products.

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