acase@tulane.edu / 1 / XOSÉ PEREIRA BOÁN

This is a critical history of how film criticism and theory have engaged with the issue of race and ethnicity, carried out from a historical materialist position – adopting the Neo-Marxian orthodoxy of Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson, and a concern with class politics. Those theories are used to question the postmodern and poststructuralist assumptions that connect race-related film criticism, racial discourse and racial politics, with a view to better serve the field’s political objectives. Criticism promises to deliver – via the intermediate desire for cultural democracy in the mass media – on the ultimate promise of social justice. How well is that battle being fought? Tracking the development of the field’s different theoretical models, this project examines how each of them defines the ideological function of films. Racerelated film criticism can be divided into First and Second generations, distinct in how each understands cinematic racism to operate through different theories of textual operations. First Generation theory consists of positive image analyses and stereotype studies, but Second Generation scholarship eschews its empiricism, incorporating paradigms of discourse analysis, psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Within the field’s progression, theoretical contradictions exist which induce a move towards historical materialism and class-based analysis. Among them is the continued assumption of an autonomous subject in the tradition of Western humanism, which runs counter to the social constructivism and notion of split subjectivities inherent in postmodern theory. By connecting that subject to the authentic, critical and unified subject posited in Adorno and Jameson’s writings about cinema, I argue for historical materialism and considerations of the Culture Industry as the means to study mass media and racial ideology. The final theory section proffers a re-reading of Edward Said’s Orientalism, and demonstrates how film and media studies have misappropriated it as a poststructuralist theory, when he is actually more in line with the Frankfurt School. The case study examines how the star discourse of actor Keanu Reeves, whose ethnic ambiguity is often attributed to his inscrutable persona and a diagnosis of postmodern symptoms. That view overlooks a unified, modernist subjectivity on Reeves’s part.

Mediating the Mill: Steel Production in Film counters opinions by film scholars and critics who often see films that represent steel production and its spaces as failed aesthetic projects or as dull propaganda or educational films, and who undervalue the importance of the specificity of the steel mills and the industry represented in them. It argues that such films are aesthetically and historically rich texts for film and history, but that they can only be interpreted as such when their historical and industrial specificity is returned to or brought alongside the film texts. Using the work of Siegfried Kracauer and film and history scholars, it argues that such films can be read as artifacts of collectively held understandings, imaginings, and affects. In particular, it argues that films representing steel production provide unique insight into collectively held responses to macroeconomic events in the 20th century--from monopoly capital's consolidation and the introduction of Fordism and Taylorism, to the Keynesian compromise, to the Cold War "consensus," to the breakdown of Fordism and introduction of global overproduction, and finally to neoliberalism. Using the work of Frederic Jameson, it interprets these films as cognitive maps of steel production from subjective position within antagonisms of class and economic control. Indeed, it argues that 20th century steel production was a subject uniquely able to bring forth cognitive maps, due to the difficulty of representing it as a coherent industrial process. When filmmakers "mapped" the process, they created cognitive (and affective) maps that tell us more about the provisional acts of representation, and what drives and informs them, than about what or who is represented. Finally, it argues that this cognitive and affective work can only be grasped by close attention to the films' aesthetics, which always also allows for `suggestive indeterminacy' and polyvalent readings, especially due to the striking material world made spectacular on film. This examination of steel production in film also expands the category of industrial film to include documentaries, animated educational films, experimental films, and popular fiction films. As such, this dissertation is made up of case studies of four sets of films of steel production and its spaces. The first set, state-sponsored social documentaries of the 1930s, includes films by Joris Ivens, Dziga Vertov, John Grierson, and Willard Van Dyke and considers how these filmmakers differently imagined the state's role in steel production in this period. The second, mid-twentieth-century sponsored films, includes films made for US Steel and other steel firms from the 1930s through 1960s, and places these films into the context of public relations as an attempt to shape how workers and the public viewed corporate interests. The third, experimental films of the 1970s, focuses on films by Hollis Frampton and Richard Serra that consider the difficulties of connecting the film artist's perspective with that of the steel worker as the western steel industry began to draw down its workforce and as economic change split the middle class. The concluding chapter examines popular dystopian Hollywood films of the late twentieth century as part of a broader shift in the US to a neoliberal economy that left little room for workers. Despite the breadth of my chapters, this dissertation draws on the work of Walter Benjamin in understanding catastrophe as the line connecting the chapters, but also in following the potential when a mass art turned its attention to the massed workers and mass spectacles of steel production.

In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Boromir refers to the lands of Mordor as the place where evil never sleeps. Cinematic evil itself never sleeps, always arising in new forms, to the extent that there exist as many types of evil as there are films. This thesis examines this constantly shifting construction of evil in American popular cinema between 1989 and 2002 - roughly, the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attack on the World Trade Center - and how this cinema engaged with representations of enemies and of evil per se. The thesis uses content and thematic analysis on a sample of the 201 most successful films at the U.S. box office during the period. In these films, cinematic evil is constructed according to a visual aesthetic that attempts to engage with societal values, but fails to do so due to the emphasis on its visual construction and its commodification. As Baudrillard argues, evil has become a hollow concept devoid of meaning, and this is especially so for cinematic evil. It is recognised, and is recognisable, by the visual excessiveness of its violence (or potentiality for violence), and by certain codes that are created in reference to intertextual patterns and in relationship to discourses of paranoia and malaise. But cinema in this period failed to engage with the concept of evil itself in any meaningful way. Cinematic evil mirrors the descent into the chaos and disorder of a postmodern society. All cinematic evil can do is to connect with this sense of unease in which the 'reality of evil' cannot be represented. Instead, it draws on earlier icons and narratives of evil in a conflation of narrative and spectacle that produces a cinema of nostalgia. Moreover, stripped of narrative causality, these films express a belief, unproved and unprovable, that evil things and evil people may arise in any form, in any place and at any time: a cinema of paranoia. Together, these factors produce a cinema of malaise, perpetually confronting an evil it is unable to define or locate.

This study is intended to provide a record of the founding and development of one of Australia's oldest and longest surviving film festivals and to determine the nature and impact of the Festival in its engagement with other cultural, social, and political institutions over the thirty years from 1954 to 1983. I have taken my research from a variety of sources, primarily the archive of Sydney Film Festival papers and ephemera lodged at Mitchell Library, Sydney. I have utilized a number of publications from the period, including daily newspapers, trade papers and specialist film and art journals. These give some indication of the Festival's influence and impact within the wider community and help position it in terms of predominant cultural and social values. I conclude that the Sydney Film Festival has played a significant, and so far somewhat underestimated, role in the development of Australian film culture and industry, and has influenced the nature and reception of films in commercial distribution within the country. In a pedagogical sense, it has influenced contemporary understanding of film and film history, in part by privileging particular movements and filmmakers over others and in part by creating a communal and interactive environment in which films, filmmaking and other aspects of film culture can be discussed, analysed and celebrated. This is a history of an organisation whose membership included some of the major figures in Australian film and related media and I have been committed to bringing a human element to the events and issues explored. To this end, I have utilized the extensive Oral History archive created in 1992 by the Sydney Film Festival in order to commemorate its fortieth anniversary. As is often the case with historical research, some of these personal memories are in conflict with one another and with the documentary record. By a process of referencing and cross referencing, I hope I have arrived at an approximation of a truth about a moment in the life of an Australian cultural icon.

This dissertation considers Thai cinema as a national text. It portrays and analyses Thai film from the introduction of cinema to Thailand during the reign of King Chulalongkorn (1868-1910) up until the present day (2004). At its core, this thesis adopts the ideas of Higson, O’Regan and Dissanayake in considering the cultural negotiation of cinema and the construction of nation. In this study of Thai National Cinema two principal methods are employed—economic and text-based. In terms of political economy Thai National Cinema is explored through the historical development of the local film industry, the impact of imported cinema, taxation, censorship and government policy, and the interplay between vertically and horizontally integrated media businesses. Special attention is paid to the evolving and dynamic role of the ruling class in the local film industry. The dissertation’s text-based analyses concern the social and ideological contexts of these national productions in order to consider extant characteristics of Thai nationhood and how these are either reflected or problematised in Thai Cinema. Of particular relevance is this dissertation’s emphasis on three resilient and potent signifiers of Thai identity—nation, religion, and monarchy—and their interrelationship and influence in the development of Thai National Cinema. These three ‘pillars’ of Thai society form the basis for organising an understanding of the development of Thai cinematic tradition, now over a century old. This thesis argues that any discussion of the historical, or current, development of Thai National Cinema must accommodate the pervasive role that these three principal forms of national identity play in formulating Thai society, culture, and politics. The recent challenges of globalisation and postmodernism, as well as the rise of an educated middle-class, provide opportunity for reconceptualizing the relevance of these three pillars. In this way Thai National Cinema can be considered a useful barometer in both reflecting and promoting the construction of Thai identity and thought.

This Master of Arts project in Creative Writing was submitted to the School of Creative Media at Royal Melbourne University of Technology. It contains a full length feature screenplay for an un-produced road movie entitled Free Radicals. It is primarily a dark love story between the drug-addicted rent boy Roman and the budding actor, the protagonist Jonathan. It is however written in a conventional structure familiar to Hollywood professionals, and a good deal of humour is used to attract interest in the story. The storyline itself is more familiar to the audience of road movies and independent features in the US or European Art House ventures. The exegesis explores the history and the conventions of the road movie genre, in addition to the established and not often debated conventions of screenwriting theory. The thesis attempts to show how these theories were applied to the screenplay and how they influenced the process of writing it within an academic and commercial context. The MA project shows how different expectations may create a conflict in the personal writing process and inspire a product that makes compromises. The reason for reading this project may not only be the product itself but also the insight it offers into a screenwriting profession where it is often important to meet expectations.

Leipzig, Universiẗat, Habil.-Schr., 2006.

No description available.

<p>Abstract</p><p>Titel: Animerad film – En analys av genus och hjälte-/skurkstereotyper i fyra filmer</p><p>Författare: Anna Gummesson och Louise Sköld</p><p>Handledare: Daniel Zachrisson </p><p>Examinator: Ingegerd Rydin </p><p>Syfte: Syftet med den här uppsatsen var att analysera fyra animerade långfilmer för att se om det går att urskilja några specifika mönster vad gäller genus, samt vad gäller stereotyperna hjälte/hjältinna och skurk.</p><p>De filmer som valdes var Snövit och de sju dvärgarna (1937), Den lilla sjöjungfrun (1989), Skönheten och Odjuret (1991) och Shrek (2001), av vilka alla utom den sistnämnda är producerad av Walt Disney Company. Shrek är i stället producerad av Dreamworks. Filmerna valdes ut efter årtal, då vi ville se ifall det fanns några uppenbara skillnader som kan knytas till det år de producerats i, men också efter hur pass relevanta de skulle vara att analysera utifrån valda teman, med tanke på handling och rollkaraktärer.</p><p>Metod: Textanalys med inslag av ideologikritik.</p><p>Resultat: Det fanns en hel del mönster att finna i båda temana, som även till viss del visade sig hänga ihop, på det viset att den idealiserade bilden av genus var den som hörde ihop med hur hjältinnan/hjälten var framställda. Den bilden visade kvinnan som den perfekta, vackra, söta och goda, och till viss del passiv och svagare. Mannen skulle vara stilig, modig, ädel, stark, vältränad och handlingskraftig. Filmernas skurkar har allihop någon slags brist som gör dem icke-önskvärda att identifiera sig med och som markerar dem som skurkar. Det kan handla om utseendet eller personligheten.</p>