Tesis

L’objectif de cette thèse est d’étudier le cinéma américain indépendant du point de vue de la différence qu’il instaure avec le cinéma hollywoodien, comme une ligne de fuite qui le déterritorialise tout en créant pour lui-même des formes nouvelles d’expression et de contenu. Cela suppose de considérer ses rapports avec le cinéma hollywoodien comme rapports entre deux plans d’immanence surgis au même niveau d’individuation à l’intérieur d’un plan d’immanence plus large, celui du cinéma nord-américain. Et, en même temps, il suppose de considérer la différence entre ces sous-plans dans ce qu’elle implique pour une pensée en cinéma, à savoir en blocs d’images-mouvement et d’images-durée, qui se trouve en face des tensions particulières qui caractérisent la société américaine. Dans cet esprit, la distinction principale qu’il faut considérer est celle qui passe entre : d’une part, le cinéma hollywoodien et ses différentes façons (genres, récit organico-actif) de « sauver » la différence, en la représentant ; et de la représenter en la rapportant aux exigences d’une seule grande forme en affinité directe avec ce que je définis comme rêve de continuité et de cohérence de la société américaine ; et, d’autre part, le cinéma indépendant et ses différentes façons de témoigner d’un fond rebelle qui déterritorialise le sens prédéterminé vers lequel les actions et les situations du cinéma hollywoodien convergent. Ce qui se trouve au-delà ou en-deçà de la représentation organique-hollywoodienne et que le cinéma indépendant arrache à cette dernière est un espace de distribution errante, intensive, entre forces et rapports de forces. / The objective of this thesis is to study the American independent cinema from the point of view of the difference which it founds with the Hollywood cinema, as a line of flight which deteritorialises the latter, while creating for itself new forms of expression and content. That supposes to consider its relation with the Hollywood cinema as one between two plans of immanence emerged on the same level of individuation inside a broader plan of immanence, that of the North-American cinema. And, at the same time, it supposes to consider the difference between these under-plans in what it implies for a cinema-thought, namely a thought in terms of blocks of movement-images and time-images, facing the particular tensions which characterize the American society. Within this framework, the principal distinction that should be considered is that which passes between: on the one hand, the Hollywood cinema and its various ways (genres, organico-active régime) “of saving” the difference, by representing it; and of representing it by bringing it back to the requirements of only one great form in direct affinity with what I define as a dream of continuity and of coherence of American society; and, on the other hand, the independent cinema and its various ways of testifying to a rebellious core which deteritorialises the predetermined direction towards which the actions and the situations of the Hollywood cinema converge. What is beyond or below Hollywood organic representation and that the independent cinema tears off from the latter is a space of wandering and intensive distribution between forces of power and forces of resistance.

The objective of this thesis is to examine and analyze the presentation of spaces, figures, and the processes of judgment in afterlife films. American and foreign titles as well as television series are assessed as afterlife films by two criteria: (1) A character has clinically died yet continues to exist and (2) a living character finds his or her self in an afterlife space. Films with characters that have near-death experiences (NDEs) are included in relation to the above three qualities. After screening nearly one hundred and thirty titles, I have found there is a basic formula structure that has been expanded and transformed into seven other structures, plus those that are combined for a unique narrative. The afterlife corpus is divided into five distinct eras by the quantity of releases that fluctuate in accordance with 20th and early 21st century cultural anxieties and technological advances. A secondary argument proposes why the afterlife story is perfectly suited to the film medium plus why the industry and audiences are incessantly drawn to the afterlife film premise. The afterlife film perpetuates universal and age-old questions on the significance of life and death in the guise of enticing sights and stories. Each afterlife film may have its own identifiable design and theme but they are connected to higher concerns of mortality and second chances.

Movies can be a source to enjoyment, cultural enrichment and relaxation. But movies are also filled with messages and subtext, that effects the one who watches the movie. One of the effects are the reproducing of stereotypes and racism. This essay concentrates on the five best grossing science fiction movies in Sweden between the years 2009 – 2014. I found out that the movies Avatar, Transformers 3, Avengers, Prometheus and Guardians of the galaxy all helps to reproduce white norms and that it effects the participating aspect of democracy. It also becomes clear that Swedish schools is not prepared enough to educate their young in source criticism.

Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous character, has starred in a variety of stage and screen adaptations in the ninety years since he was first introduced in The Great Gatsby (1925). This dissertation explores the Gatsby character as depicted in six important adaptations of the novel, including two Broadway productions, Owen Davis’ 1926 drama and John Collins’ 2010s play, Gatz, and four major motion pictures: Herbert Brenon’s 1926 lost silent film (starring Warner Baxter); Elliott Nugent’s 1949 black and white film (starring Alan Ladd); Jack Clayton’s 1974 color film (starring Robert Redford); and Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 3-D film (starring Leonardo DiCaprio). Each adaptation culls a new portrait of the titular character from Fitzgerald’s text and shows how Jay Gatsby is really James Gatz, an enigmatic man whose ongoing performance renders him an impostor who is chasing an impossible dream and staging an elaborate production. The major adaptations underscore the elasticity of the Gatsby character, and demonstrate that he is nothing if not an actor. This dissertation interprets these six adaptations of the novel as supplemental biographies of Jay Gatsby that contribute to the evolving legacy of the character in American popular culture. Production teams, at least in some sense, become stewards of Gatsby’s reputation, and they are therefore partially responsible for (re)defining the character’s enduring role in contemporary society. Each feature-length film revives public and scholarly interest in Fitzgerald and his fiction, and because their releases coincided with peaks in sales of the novel, their relationship with literary studies cannot be underestimated.

This project seeks to determine the extent to which rock music brought an end to the Hollywood film genre of the musical. It stresses the importance of rock and post-1960s popular music scholarship to film studies and vice-versa. Both objects of popular music inquiry remain relatively unexamined within film studies. But while the value of film studies to popular music scholarship has been much more widely acknowledged, much more work remains in these areas. Therefore, this project will look at the workings of rock ideology and how it impacted the development of the Hollywood musical. It will also examine recording technology and the ways in which it transformed both the film and music industries. The second half of this project is an extended analysis of how Hollywood films of the post-rock era (1970 onward) have reflected these changes. It theorizes that it was not so much the musical that “died” in this era as it was a particular kind of musical number – the Spontaneous Outburst of Song. The later chapters use the concept of mode as opposed to genre to examine how the pleasures offered by the musical of the classical Hollywood era remain available albeit in different guises and genres. Furthermore, these pleasures are capable of fostering the kinds of communities, if not utopias, that some scholars claim have died along with the classical Hollywood era. / text

This dissertation argues that Robert De Niro's performances in the 1970s mark him as pivotal a figure in the history of American film acting as Stella Adler, Elia Kazan, and Marlon Brando. De Niro's transformations into Vito Corleone, Travis Bickle, and Jake La Motta take the Method to the extreme, permanently changing our understanding of screen performance while revealing the relationships among authorship, agency, and acting. Utilizing rare artifacts from De Niro's recently donated materials to the Harry Ransom Center, I provide hitherto unseen evidence of his meticulous research, his conversations with directors, and his extreme bodily transformations that I argue constitute a truly unique iteration of the Method. Though certainly a student of Adler, De Niro's efforts to reshape productions around his characterizations and exercise his growing power to do whatever it takes - including rewriting dialogue to reflect vernacular speech, improvising scenes for spontaneity, and finding his own costumes – demonstrate a particular commitment to artistic truth, historical accuracy, and verisimilitude that mark him as inimitable within the diverse world of Method theorists, pedagogues, and practitioners. There is nothing, I argue, that appears in a De Niro film that has not been deliberated, discussed, or fought for by the actor, and I consider here how his filmography – including pivotal '70s films such as MEAN STREETS, TAXI DRIVER, THE DEER HUNTER, and RAGING BULL – speaks to a Method performance that extends beyond the screen and behind the scenes. Demystifying De Niro's "Method" therefore allows us to revisit key cinematic contributions to 1970s US film culture and significantly deepens our understanding of actor agency by troubling dominant historical narratives of production and confounding assumptions about on-set hierarchies. / text

Social scientists have long held that the media has a profound effect on modern societies. However, the cultural production of motion pictures and television shows has largely been neglected as a topic of inquiry. The following dissertation seeks to fill this lacuna in the current research by offering a systematic, comprehensive, and comparative analysis of the industry known colloquially as "Hollywood." Specifically, this dissertation seeks to uncover the matrix of causal processes that filter the infinite array of potential television shows and motion pictures to the chosen few that are selected for production. This process is known as "development and green lighting." Drawing from 110 interviews with writers, directors, producers, agents, managers, studio executives, network executives, financiers, and assistants who had been involved in the development and green lighting process, I explore not just decision making but the social milieu within which those decisions were made. Over the course of three chapters, three distinct social processes are examined in turn: institutional scripts ("Formulas"), status ("Stars"), and social capital ("Relationships"). Throughout the thesis, a new approach to cultural production is carried out, based on an inductive methodology where micro-level social processes are examined in the context of macro-level struggles over legitimacy, power, and resources. / Sociology

This thesis aims to provide an insight into the stereotypical imagery of journalists on the screen and its changes in popular culture, namely in film. Much research has been done on categorising different filmic characters and on journalist in popular culture as well as in real life, but from my knowledge no comparative approach focussing on the changes in the filmic stereotypes has been undertaken yet. Therefore my literature review covers existing research on journalists in film and the various categories scholar do put these characters in. Using qualitative content analysis, namely by watching and opposing sixteen selected movies, this study aims to give some in-depth view into the question if and how filmic stereotypes have changed over the approximately seventy years that lie between the films from the first (1930-1949) and second (1990-2004) period of analysis. In eight comparative chapters this study argues that some stereotypes have changed while others remain the same. Influential factors for these changes as found in the thesis are for example history, culture and audience expectation. The reason some stereotypes do not change is that they are deeply embedded in American myth that is even harder to change than stereotypes. The thesis concludes that most journalistic figures underwent considerable changes or even disappeared with only the crusading journalist, as a mythical heroic figure, hardly changed at all.

Hollywood’s dominance of the movie industry has been the subject of numerous studies. An interdisciplinary literature review in this thesis identified twenty different single or multiple factor explanations that try to account for Major studio dominance at different time periods but cannot comprehensively explain how Hollywood acquired and maintained dominance for nine decades. This thesis reviewed the economics, management and marketing literatures to identify existing theoretical explanations for the acquisition and persistence of market dominance. It then integrated existing theories identified within the business literature into a ‘theoretical lens’. This lens enables an historical analysis of Hollywood’s longstanding dominance of the movie business to be undertaken from a strategic business perspective. This thesis concludes that the Major studios rise to market leadership and enduring dominance can primarily be explained because they developed and maintained a set of strategic marketing management capabilities that were superior to rival firms and rival film industries. It is argued that a marketing orientation and effective strategic marketing management capabilities also provide a unifying theory for Hollywood’s enduring dominance because they can account for each of the twenty previously identified explanations for that dominance. The original contribution of this thesis is the development of a strategic marketing management lens and a set of guiding questions that can facilitate a strategic analysis of market dominance in any industry.