This dissertation investigates undersea cinema from its origins to the present. Addressing a range of documentaries, narrative fiction films, and sound recordings made undersea, this project emphasizes ocean cinema’s ties to the histories of ocean exploration, conquest, and conservation—contexts from which undersea films cannot be extricated. For over a century, undersea films have brought the distant world of the deep up close to the eyes and ears of a broad public; they have been a major influence on popular understanding of the ocean, which today is of great environmental significance and a powerful symbol of a fragile global ecology. This project aims to show how the ocean as a cinematic site of ecological consciousness is, as a condition of its production, intimately linked to environmentally unfriendly histories of technology. The often-dazzling images of marine life shown on film can increase viewers’ sensitivity to the other forms of life with which they share the planet. At the same time, producing these images has historically relied on exploratory technologies built for the purpose of better exploiting the marine environment economically and militarily. This contradiction between films’ meanings and their conditions of possibility is not limited to ocean cinema; it characterizes a wide range of environmental films. By focusing on ocean cinema, a particularly rich case of unseen worlds, environmental consciousness, and destructive techno-scientific commitments coming together, this dissertation aims to illuminate a tension that pervades environmental cinema in general.

This dissertation argues that a critical anti-war cinema emerged with the birth of the so-called war documentary during World War I. Focusing on Leon Caverly, the first official war cinematographer of the United States military, I that argue America’s first war propaganda films gave birth to America’s first anti-war cinema. Military-produced images of World War I are available in various archives such as the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Marine Corps History Center. In addition to unedited reels of war related footage, the archives hold propaganda films such as Pershing’s Crusaders (1918), America’s Answer (1918) and Under Four Flags (1918). These feature films were shot by cameramen in the Marines or the Signal Corps and then edited into works of propaganda by the United States Government’s Committee on Public Information. Caverly was the first cameraman to join the effort of filming at the front. While he was a Marine and an instrumental player in America’s propaganda program, he also completed a cinematic history of the Great War through his creative nonfiction camerawork that was more subtle and critical than conventional war documentaries would suggest. Previous studies of World War I propaganda provide context for America’s cinematic efforts or profiles of individual cameramen. But little or no attention has been paid to formal analysis of the films themselves. Furthermore, scholars have not yet regarded these films as anything other than examples of early documentary or government propaganda. The same holds true concerning Leon Caverly. Not only was Caverly the first United States war cinematographer, but the most significant work of propaganda made during the war was composed of footage shot entirely by him. Released in 1918, America’s Answer captivated audiences in America and Europe, providing inspiration for the home front to support the war. However, a striking discrepancy exists between the content of Caverly’s shots and the rhetorical editing structure of the film. In contrast to the pro-war sentiment articulated by the editing and its intertitles, America’s Answer’s individual shots reveal a practice of camera-writing that represents an aesthetics of anti-war cinema at odds with pro-war propaganda. Caverly’s work does not show the horrors of war with documentary realism. Nor does his work openly critique America’s war effort. Rather, Caverly aspires to be a camera-historian whose moving images and photographic work demonstrate a preoccupation with writing history steeped in the temporal aesthetics of the camera arts. This dissertation considers still and moving image practices that “write with time” such as double-exposures, shots that emphasize duration, moving camera shots that evoke temporal relationships, and framing that gives metaphorical expression to time. The fact that these practices appear in Caverly’s wartime work indicates that World War I footage has a greater significance for film history than simply exemplifying documentary realism or propaganda. This dissertation shows that, while the most harrowing aspects of World War I combat remain unseen in Caverly’s work, his creative camera-writing approaches war and the fragility of life in unconventional ways.

This study examines the collaborative work of the filmmakers Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (1962-2006) in respect to current and future formations of political avant-garde filmmaking. Throughout their joint career the Marxist filmmakers understood their work as part of an ongoing effort to participate in the class struggle, despite of an overall decline in faith regarding revolutionary politics. Straub-Huillet pursued this desire for radical, social and political change not simply on the level of filmic content, but rather by employing distinct cinematic practices. This study is, at the same time, an effort to combat the political inertia that affected film theory as part of larger disciplinary shifts in the humanities. In order to do so, I am engaging, first and foremost, in poststructuralist discourses that will be discussed on the basis of traditional forms of Marxist-oriented critical theories. Reason for this is an attempt to replace metaphysical paradigms with an aporetic structure that is affirmative of difference, rather than identity. Based on the notion of an elective affinity Straub-Huillet's film adaptations challenged traditional forms of cinematic authorship and collaboration. Instead of simply referencing other authors, Straub-Huillet allow the author as an other to enter and intervene with the film-text. This creative relationship is as much characterized by an act of resistance that is maintained through an overt formal use of direct quotations. This introduces a principle of repetition and reproduction into the films that defines the couple's filmmaking process as a practice of creative labor. The textual figure of the border draws out further how this practice gives rise to new understandings of cinema in regard to nation, culture, and history. Figurations of ruins outline, in addition, how these issues pertain at once to necessity and the limits of representation. This points, in conclusion, to a central dilemma affecting all political film practices: the difficulty of reinventing images that are not already clichés or corporate entities. Straub-Huillet address this problem in a specific way; they aim at the production of an image that pertains to a (future) revolutionary event on the basis of an already existing classical genealogy.

My thesis work explores the visual space of the screen by taking the form of the Sierpinski Sieve, providing a cinematic work that works to be the experience of itself.

Disciplines arrive at moments of crisis. So do those who labor within and at the margins, intersections, outskirts, and centers of those disciplines. This written thesis draws together these moments of both disciplinary and individual crisis, at the intersection of anthropology, nonfiction filmmaking, and film studies. In response to existential, representational, and ethical anxieties, these writings and videos affirm life, within and between the disciplines, myself, and my collaborators — each of whom has experienced or is recovering from an eating disorder. Through navigating the representation of these experiences, the work interrogates the limits and potentials of representation in nonfiction film and video more broadly, and how it relates to anthropology, activism, and pedagogy. It asks: what is a good (ethical) representation of another individual’s experience, especially of something as seemingly private or vulnerable as an eating disorder and the recovery from it? This thesis approaches this question from technological, methodological, ethical, philosophical, and practical perspectives, and in doing so, aims not so much to resolve these disciplinary and personal crises, but to move through and with them, towards a theory and a practice of embodied ethical representation.

This written thesis serves as a public record for the production of Jesse Kreitzer's MFA thesis film Black Canaries, a 1900s coal mining folktale inspired by his Iowan heritage. The thesis includes Mr. Kreitzer's genealogical and historical research as it pertains to his maternal ancestry and coal mining in south-central Iowa. The thesis also accounts for the conceptual, personal, and practical considerations for the production of Black Canaries. Additional materials include the film's production packet, reference guide, production storyboards, and screenplay.

Since its inception in 1897, the annual Cheyenne Frontier Days has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors to Wyoming for a 10-day celebration of "Western roots," culminating in the world's largest outdoor rodeo nicknamed "The Daddy of 'Em All." Shot during the 2018 Frontier Days, Daddy of 'Em All tracks the proliferation of settler colonial narratives that the event seeks to ossify through its signs, symbols, and sets. Through dislocated images and interviews with past and present Frontier Days volunteers and attendees including my mother, a then-resident of Cheyenne, the film grapples with heritage, ideology, violence, and borders in a time of growing nationalism.

By discussing how New Queer Cinema and queer theory have informed one another, I aim to understand how the gaze operates when a film prioritizes multiple subjectivities of experience. However, I hope to move beyond the tendency in queer theory to essentialize and categorize subjective or “true” experiences as a pretense to challenging dominant representations of identity. Although the politics of representation are crucial to the identification of social ills, I aim to identify the potential to theorize the gaze as an opportunity to locate desire throughout visual texts from various marginalized positions, not limited to sexuality and gender. If the main goal of new queer films is to offer more “authentic” queer realities – or more accurately, to oppose mainstream stereotyping – then these films maintain the existence of a dominant/heterosexual/homophobic discourse, ultimately reaffirming the hetero/homo binary. Additionally, because these films are primarily intended to address political representation in the mainstream, they essentialize identity once again by only portraying certain positive images, what is “authentic” anyway? As a result, they actively exclude other constructions of identity, coding cultural difference as “deviant” because it falls outside of the hetero/homo binary, rendering other sexualities/difference invisible and unable to resist. This preoccupation with recasting the stereotype, by filmmakers and critics alike, often ignores the value of the visual text and remains oblivious to the potential for the gaze to simultaneously elicit multiple and often contradictory forms of desire. Theorizing the gaze as queer means to interrogate the mechanisms of spectatorship, decode cultural difference, destabilize the authority of experience, and most importantly, reimagine the terms of desire.

La Sagrada Familia is a short film that looks at the complex interactions between three women. A grandmother, a mother, and a daughter must spend the night together in the countryside as they prepare for a wedding. Their already strained relationships will be put to the test as painful memories and unresolved grudges arise to haunt them. The story’s title is inspired by the Sacred Family Basilica in Spain. The monument is a beautiful catholic monument that has remained unfinished for hundreds of years much like the neglected relationships of an otherwise loving family.

When one thinks of Disney’s Mickey Mouse, fear and horror are not terms normally associated with this iconic American cartoon character; however, the video game Bendy and the Ink Machine turns animated bodies (cartoons) into bodies the player fears. In this game family friendly cartoon characters are transformed into figures of fear. Furthermore, Bendy and the Ink Machine does this by making the bending of Black bodies visible through what I call the gameic gaze. The transformation from family friendly into fear happens through the resistive gaze, the gameic gaze, which lingers on the bending of the diegetic cartoons. Bendy and the Ink Machine actualizes the historical contorting of the Black body starting in slavery and continued by the entertainment industry through bending. Bending and the Ink Machine makes the minstrel origins of cartoons visible through the gameic gaze.