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<p> This thesis highlights a method of representation that is critical of both images of Chinese powerlessness and images of Chinese power. In <i> Chan is Missing</i> and <i>The Princess of Nebraska</i>, two films by Chinese American director Wayne Wang, representations of Chineseness and Chinese identity are always determined through the discursive context in which they are enunciated. The films each employ the device of a missing subject, in order to show that its meaning does not refer to the subject itself but rather is determined through the context in which it is talked about. This creates different and often conflicting versions of the same subject, which can only be resolved by seeing that the subjects of Chineseness and Chinese identity are always a response to the contexts out of which they are discussed.</p>

<p> Ethnic identity can be subject to both passive and overt review, which has the potential to cause traumatic fracture of identity. I am a second generation American-Puerto Rican, which can be defined as a person born in the United States of native Puerto Rican ancestry. Personal identity is constructed in part via social and linguistic associations that work with, and against, the cohesive development of an individual&rsquo;s claim to his or her identity. From the standpoint of a non-fluent Spanish speaker of Puerto Rican descent, I analyze the connection between place, language, and in particular, face-to-face communication, as these aspects come together in developing/disassembling identity. The major focus of this thesis concerns the power of the face as a point of (mis)recognition between people, the site in which a confrontation of identity takes place, in conjunction with spoken language. </p><p> The face is the essential locus on the body for recognizing that the person before you is indeed a person; from that point forth, identity is revealed and awareness of subjectivity constructed. Stuart Hall discussed the construction of identity through the concepts of the <i>enlightened subject,</i> the <i>sociological subject,</i> and <i>the post-modern subject. </i> I will be referring to an individual&rsquo;s identity in terms of these three models, while focusing on ethnic and cultural associations. It should be understood that in my discussion of face, &ldquo;face&rdquo; is not comprised solely of what rests above one&rsquo;s shoulders; rather, the concept incorporates the entirety of an individual&rsquo;s physical representation. I will question the ways in which language shapes identity, and how culture(s) and society reinforce it. I will also explore the conflict that unfolds when one is denied ownership of the identity that one has established as true. This analysis incorporates philosophy and cultural theory, including, but not limited to: Emmanuel Levinas&rsquo; &ldquo;Face of the Other,&rdquo; which professes that we must not inflict conceptual violence on the face of the person standing before us; additionally, Gloria Anzald&uacute;a&rsquo;s theory of the ethnic face and <i>haciendo cara</i> (making face), which states that minorities (women in particular) must construct layers of masks in order to adapt, and to deflect persecution. </p><p> Language defines the borders of &ldquo;face,&rdquo; and urges us to construct a binary of correct and incorrect, true and false. However, a person&rsquo;s identity cannot be false, because subjectivity exists beyond language. In the context of this thesis, I re-frame the individual&rsquo;s frustrations with misrecognition of ethnic identity, through my focus on face and fluency, or lack thereof, in a particular spoken language. Through my video practice, I have forged a new pathway to explore these dualities. In a self-revelatory process, this project guides the viewer through a mixed media visualization of ethnic authentication and judgment.</p>

<p> This thesis exposes unconscious gender bias in actor training and the entertainment industry. Such exposure will aid teachers and industry professionals in identifying language and practices that perpetuate this prejudice, and ultimately, effect revisions, forging a new standard for good acting. I posit that images generated by an industry that continues to drive this bias through unequal opportunities for women, double standards, and the preeminence of the male gaze in cinematic practices, contribute to situating women as objects of desire, rather than as subjects who command professional equity and respect. I will introduce the science behind this long-standing problem and the need to reorient the brain toward gender equality, thereby offering means through which students, educators, and industry professionals can forge an equitable environment, one that empowers young women to take ownership of their presence in the entertainment industry and thus society&rsquo;s perception of them.</p>

<p> Artists such as Chantal Akerman and Sylvia Plath, both of whom came of age in mid-twentieth century America, have a tendency to show concern with doubles in their work&mdash;Toni Morrison&rsquo;s <i>Beloved </i>, Maya Deren&rsquo;s <i>Meshes of the Afternoon</i>, Cheryl Dunye&rsquo;s <i>The Watermelon Woman</i>&mdash;and oftentimes situate <i> their</i> protagonists as doubles of themselves, carefully monitoring the distance they create between themselves and their double. This choice acts as a kind of self-constitution, by which I mean a self-fashioning that works through an imperfect mirroring of the text&rsquo;s author presented as a double in a fictional work. Texts that employ self-constitution often show a concern with liminality, mirroring, consumption, animism, repressed trauma, suicide, and repetition. </p><p> It is the goal of this thesis to examine these motifs in Sylvia Plath&rsquo;s <i> The Bell Jar</i> and the early work of Chantal Akerman, all of which coalesce to create coherent&mdash;but destabilizing&mdash;texts that propose a new queer subject position, and locate the death drive&mdash;the desire to return to the mother&rsquo;s womb&mdash;as their source. I will examine the uncanny on various levels, zooming out from the micro-level elements of the text to its broader relationship to its environment: from rhetoric, to the physical landscapes of the texts, to characters of the text, to the structure of the text (as confined by its frame), and then, finally, outside the text itself, to the author&rsquo;s relationship with her double. What I will argue here is that Akerman and Plath&mdash;in doubling on both the extradiegetic and intradiegetic levels of their work&mdash;propose a queer liminal space that siphons and ultimately expels repressed uncanny desire, allowing for both self-sustainability and personal integrity.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / This dissertation examines existing attempts to answer the question "Can film philosophize?" (the"CFP question") and offers an original, affirmative account of the possibility of philosophizing by means of film. Focusing OD. narrative fiction films, this dissertation shows how the practice of philosophy can be transformed, and its powers expanded, through its encounter with the realm of moving images. The first chapter presents the groundwork for such a discussion, laying bare the scope of the various theoretical bases through which film and philosophy have been thought to intersect. The chapter follows the threads of extant discussions, from (a) explicitly philosophical approaches to film ("philosophy of film") to (b) in-depth studies of film's thematic constructs ("film theory") and (c) proposals of the symmetry or even fusion of film and philosophy ("film-philosophy"). Each of the three subsequent chapters addresses one of three possible answers to the CFP question.Chapter two focuses on a conservative approach ("the exclusivist thesis") that negates the possibility of any meaningful philosophical capacity in film. Chapter three considers a more moderate view ("the inclusivist thesis") that acknowledges the cinematic capacity for philosophical argumentation, in a manner that is unique, but only partial. The fourth and last chapter introduces an innovative perspective ("the integralist thesis") that countenances a unique cinematic potential to philosophize by insisting on a radical conception of the practice of philosophy itself. To reach this ultimate conclusion, the dissertation elaborates two crucial features of film - the non-linguistic nature of its narrative and the role played by the audience in film - and shows that exclusivists and inclusivists fail to take these features into consideration (largely owing to the principles from which these theorists set out to answer the CFP question). Exclusivists and inclusivists argue that film cannot philosophize (at least not properly) because philosophizing is an essentially linguistic endeavor and film is not.If, however, those crucial features are taken into account, it becomes apparent that exclusivist and inclusivist approaches alike are fatally flawed. The dissertation concludes, in conversation with the integralists, with an affirmation of film's philosophical potential.

Since the end of the Cold War, the combined influence of audiovisual media, modern urban conflicts and asymmetric enemies has generated a new kind of military live training simulation to prepare soldiers for future combats. These novel hybrid exercise battlefields are situated in artificially constructed urban spaces and integrate real physical training with techniques and imagery inspired by the fields of cinema and media. This thesis critically examines this convergence of entertainment practices and images in military training and the resulting, potentially negative, impacts on the execution of warfare and perception of urban spaces and populations. The thesis begins by tracing the evolution of terrain representations in wargames – from black and white squares, painted landscape elements and actual maps, to virtual environments, miniature houses and real-scale architectures. The historical relationship between the film industry and military training is analysed in order to explore the emergence of cinematic components in simulated combat training landscapes that brought the flat world of wargames to its real third dimension. The mock urban training space is then investigated as a “meta-cinematic city” – a city created through cinematic tools, including set and sound design, which portrays a cinematic city (a city as represented through a filmic medium). This analysis focuses on how cinematic elements, such as creative geographies and architectural sequences, are created in order to train for the subversion of traditional conceptions of urban spaces and architectural elements in urban combats. Furthermore, the examination reveals how the sensory qualities of moving image technologies are employed to generate a multi-sensory “hyperrealism” and “hyperimmersion” to train physical and emotional reactions and engrain military responses to combat stimuli. The analysis furthermore excavates both the conscious and unconscious remediation of media imagery and practices in the creation of the artificial “human terrain”. The mise-en-scène of the enemy population is investigated in order to uncover how the simulation of “foreign” and “alien” identities is increasingly based on the media coverage of these population groups. The analysis critically considers how the resulting role-play reproduces self-perpetuating stereotypes that pre-shape the soldiers’ perception of populations. Lastly, the thesis explores how artificial media cycles are generated as part of the combat training to prepare soldiers’ self-representation and communication skills under unpredictable, straining circumstances and to effectively communicate the army’s message to the world. This section especially focuses on the growing military “weaponisation” of the media, which has now begun to market the military training itself as an entertainment attraction to worldwide audiences – thus closing the circle between entertainment and military practices and subsuming the population in the war preparation. With entertainment and marketing imagery, technologies and concepts now at the core of military preparation, stereotypes of population groups and urban spaces and a “de-realization”, “gamification” and “sanitisation” of warfare are increasingly carried over into real conflicts, thus affecting critical decisions as a result of entertainment-based conditioning. Furthermore, to ensure public support, the general population is turned into an indispensable part of military training through participatory video games, social media and training centre visits and consequently becomes increasingly complicit in the merging of entertainment and military practices and subject to the same remediated preconceptions.

<p> The themes of crime and justice have captured the attention of Americans for decades. These themes are frequently portrayed in Hollywood films. While these stories capture the attention of Americans, both young and old, they propagate messages about what justice is, how it should be accomplished, who should serve it, and who is worthy to receive it. These messages have important implications for how Americans come to understand the American criminal justice system and its procedures. Reflective of lived experience, films about crime and justice have often drawn upon the victimization of women as an exigency for telling tales about justice as related to females. <i>The Bounty Hunter</i> (2010), <i>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</i> (2011), <i> Les Mis&eacute;rables</i> (2012), and <i>Safe Haven</i> (2013) are analyzed using ideological criticism to reveal their ideological constructions of justice for women, what subject positions these films interpellate female audience members into, and how women, as interpellated by these ideologies, should engage in the criminal justice system.</p>