published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, June, 2009. / Release of full electronic text on OhioLINK has been delayed until June 1, 2014. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 470-483)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, June, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. Release of full electronic text on OhioLINK has been delayed until June 1, 2014. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 470-483)

The work of contemporary Atlantic Canadian filmmaker William O. MacGillivray is a set of confrontations. His five fiction feature films investigate, perhaps even recalibrate, conventionally understood ideas of centre and margin, time and space, and most pointedly, traditional and modern. What MacGillivray presents in his work is not, in the manner of George Grant, a lament for a traditional or old and noble world locked inexorably in the processes of technological erasure. Instead, echoing the actively ambivalent response to technology-induced change advanced by Harold Innis and others, what the films reveal is a range of possible alternative critical positions within the experience of modern lite in contemporary Atlantic Canada. As Carlos Fuentes reminds us, this does not necessarily entail 'sacrificing the past in favour of the new,' as much of the rhetoric surrounding notions of the modern insists, but rather the 'maintaining, comparing, and remembering values we have created, making them modern so as not lose the value of the modern.' ln a sense, this process is about remembering time. Fundamentally, in creating rich, complex narratives about a part of Canada facing considerable and rapid change, MacGillivray is making his own cinematic 'plea for time' in his confrontations with notions of what constitutes a modern existence. It is also a plea for space, to remember that as there are 'different modern times' there are also 'different modern spaces.'

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 184-198).

Thesis (M.A. in English)--Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2006. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

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This thesis takes as its focus the relation between particular constructions of filmic time and the resulting affective and emotional experiences these temporalities produce on a spectatorial level. This connection between time and affect is thought through more specifically here in relation to an idea of the everyday not only as a thematic concern with the minutia of routine daily existence but also as distinct, and yet shifting, conceptions of filmic and viewing time. While film studies has often approached the temporal construction of the quotidian through the rubric of ???real time,??? I explore different articulations of the everyday in a number of film practices through the writings of Henri Lefebvre. As a sociologist and philosopher preoccupied with the revolutionary quality of everyday time in both material reality and art practices including film, Lefebvre???s work enables this thesis to approach film as an especially potent and significant site for affective experiences of time and of the everyday. Beginning with John Cassavetes??? Faces (1968) and an analysis of an affective everyday temporality that film is able to produce as a temporal medium, this thesis goes on to consider the quotidian through photography and stillness in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), dying and witnessing via Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993), and finally melodrama and unrequited love in Wong Kar-wai???s In the Mood for Love (Huayang Nianhua, 2000). In the analysis of these films and videos, this thesis draws on film debates explicitly concerned with time as well as focusing on those places in philosophy and critical theory where a promising and productive articulation of film and its inscription of time and affect can be found and conceptualised. In this investigation, the everyday as both a temporal construction and a spectatorial affective experience is a means to reflect on the cinema as a continually shifting and dynamic affective site.

This thesis takes as its focus the relation between particular constructions of filmic time and the resulting affective and emotional experiences these temporalities produce on a spectatorial level. This connection between time and affect is thought through more specifically here in relation to an idea of the everyday not only as a thematic concern with the minutia of routine daily existence but also as distinct, and yet shifting, conceptions of filmic and viewing time. While film studies has often approached the temporal construction of the quotidian through the rubric of ???real time,??? I explore different articulations of the everyday in a number of film practices through the writings of Henri Lefebvre. As a sociologist and philosopher preoccupied with the revolutionary quality of everyday time in both material reality and art practices including film, Lefebvre???s work enables this thesis to approach film as an especially potent and significant site for affective experiences of time and of the everyday. Beginning with John Cassavetes??? Faces (1968) and an analysis of an affective everyday temporality that film is able to produce as a temporal medium, this thesis goes on to consider the quotidian through photography and stillness in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), dying and witnessing via Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993), and finally melodrama and unrequited love in Wong Kar-wai???s In the Mood for Love (Huayang Nianhua, 2000). In the analysis of these films and videos, this thesis draws on film debates explicitly concerned with time as well as focusing on those places in philosophy and critical theory where a promising and productive articulation of film and its inscription of time and affect can be found and conceptualised. In this investigation, the everyday as both a temporal construction and a spectatorial affective experience is a means to reflect on the cinema as a continually shifting and dynamic affective site.

Thesis (Ph. D. in English)--Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2008. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.