Orientador: Maria Salett Biembengut. / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Regional de Blumenau, Centro de Ciências da Educação, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação.

The primary focus of this dissertation is to explore a range of light/dark ecological metaphors, which can be read across popular Hollywood cinema from the 1950s to the end of the century. In particular this representational growth in ecological consciousness will be surveyed across a range of genres including Westerns, road movies and science fiction fantasies in particular. Alternative embodiments and agencies of an ecological consciousness, especially feminist and native American Indian, will be closely examined, alongside a white, middle-class, liberal, eco-sensibility, which has become more dominant within modern Hollywood, as evidenced by the Spielberg oeuvre. Each chapter will address a specific theoretical aspect of the study while drawing on detailed examples to illustrate the thesis in general. It is the overall contention of this study that such symbolic expression is both 'shrinking the world' while at the same time 'giving citizens, governments and corporations a heightened consciousness that there are real global ties and maybe a global identity for the occupants of spaceship earth' (Allen et al. 1995: 173). Alongside a more tangible and overt expression of 'light' ecology in film, the human species evolving symbiotic relation with the cosmos (and the resultant oneness with nature) will also be explored. This burgeoning thematic expression is often codified within the duality of a utopian/dystopian future particularly evidenced in the science fiction genre, which continuously adapts and modifies notions drawn from 'deep ecology'. The primary strategy used to uncover such ecological expression incorporates the close textual exploration of space/place alongside moments of excess/sublime within many 'feel good' utopian/dystopian Hollywood texts. This will be articulated through a variety of expressions of rural/urban space and landscape as codified within particular eco-registers by various human and post-human agents, which sometimes transcend the more normative ideological textual specificities of race/class/gender.

O foco desta dissertação é a construção narrativa audiovisual da violência. A partir de discussões feitas na antropologia sobre narrativa, mimesis e violência se quer pensar a respeito de formas de narrar a experiência da violência política e o conflito armado colombiano. O objeto que será analisado são filmes colombianos, dois especificamente: La sombra del caminante (Ciro Guerra, 2004) e PVC-1 (Spiros Stathoulopoulos, 2007). Obras audiovisuais que se apropriam da tecnologia digital e fazem uso criativo dos recursos cinematográficos para se colocar diante das imagens sobre violência e discutir temas como a verdade e a memória, o tempo e o medo, o intimo e do cotidiano. São formas fílmicas que instigam uma discussão sobre as narrações que a sociedade colombiana constrói para contar o terror de décadas de violência política e conflito armado onde atores à margem da lei, sociedade civil e governo se encontram e se constroem. O procedimento metodológico empregado nesta dissertação é, em um primeiro momento, o da análise fílmica, um modelo teórico definido no campo dos estudos de cinema, que propõe um estudo do filme nos seus múltiplos componentes e atendendo aos espaços e dinâmicas nas quais este se insere. Deste modo, em um segundo momento, indagarei a propósito das narrativas do terror, sendo o terror ato, espaço e cultura, uma situação que se torna estável pela instabilidade que o caracteriza: a experiência da violência, da perda (de parentes, de um lugar de origem, de um passado), do deslocamento forçado, da tortura. Esta é uma tentativa de pensar sobre a mediação do cinema para comunicar efetivamente tal experiência de terror, um fenômeno cuja narração se coloca nas margens do dizível. Neste sentido, o cinema articularia o inarticulável e narraria o inenarrável, incorporando experiências do terror na memória coletiva. / This dissertation\'s main focus is the audiovisual narrative construction of violence. Taking account of the anthropological debates on narrative, mimesis and violence; I pretend to think about the ways in which the experience of the Colombian political violence and armed conflict is narrated. The object are Colombian films, two mainly, La sombra del caminante (Ciro Guerra, 2004) and PVC-1 (Spiros Stathoulopoulos, 2007). Films, which use digital technology and implement creatively cinematographic resources to take place before images of violence and discuss topics such as truth and memory, time and fear, the everyday and the intimate. These are oeuvres that instigate a debate about the narratives that the Colombian society elaborates to tell the terror of decades of political violence and armed conflict where actors at the margins of law, civil society and govern meet and build themselves. The methodological procedure employed in this dissertation is in a first moment, film analysis. A theoretical model defined in the area of cinema studies which proposes a study of the film\'s multiple components and the many ways and places in which a film plays part. Thus, in a second moment, I\'ll inquire about narratives of terror, being that terror is an act, a space and a culture, a situation that stabilizes itself thanks to its instability: the experience of violence, of loss (of relatives, of a place of origin, of a past), of forced displacement, of torture. This is a proposal to think about the mediation of cinema to communicate effectively such experiences of terror, a phenomenon whose narration is on the margins of the speakable. In this sense, cinema would articulate and narrate what is not; and would introduce the experiences of terror in the collective memory.

The focus of this thesis is to explore the ideas behind Hollywood Cinema and techniques used to craft camera shots of today’s cinema. The movie industry is one of the United States’ biggest export profits; because of this, American movies standout above the rest. I will be exploring and demonstrating the researched techniques of American cinema.

Num mesmo sopro de escrita, Marguerite Duras fez livros e filmes, e fez filmes-livros. Pela análise e confronto de três obras – Nathalie Granger, Le camion e L’homme atlantique, explora-se essa matéria em fusão constante, morfologicamente em movimento, que pretende escapar a limites e fronteiras (alargando o espaço literário e cinematográfico). Uma matéria que cabe ao espectador-leitor-ouvinte moldar. Questionamento e problematização do mundo pelo olhar e pelo pensamento, a obra desta autora-realizadora transforma a escrita e a sala de cinema numa experiência decisiva e eminentemente política. Procura-se descrever, a partir das obras analisadas, esta poética-potência.

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La huella de lo audiovisual en la cultura ecuatoriana is, in first instance, a historical survey of Ecuadorian feature films from the 1920s to the present day. It traces, in chronological order, all the productions that were either shot in Ecuador or that involved Ecuadorian producers or directors filming Ecuadorian related themes in foreign soil The dissertation begins with the first silent feature film El tesoro de Atahualpa (Augusto San Miguel, 1924) and ends with Fuera de juego (Victor Arregui, 2002), which won the best film in the Cine en Construccion category at the San Sebastian Film Festival in 2002 In second instance, the dissertation also analysis the cultural production of those eighty years in Ecuador and attempts to discover similarities or discrepancies with the other 'art forms' of the period. It establishes the difference between 'high art' and 'low art' and how film has come to be understood in those terms. It attempts to insert Ecuadorian film within the larger context of Latin America and to search for connections, during the early film period (1920--1950), with the itinerant directors who criss-crossed the Continent at the time: Saa Silva, Diumenjo and Santana. It later attempts to rethink the paradigms of the sixties and seventies in Latin America concerning New Latin American Cinema and finally looks at how the new technology of Digital Video has created a new way of looking at film in the Continent / acase@tulane.edu

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PhD / The influential theorist, David Bordwell, talks about various modes of watching film: the intellectual, the casual, or the obsessive interaction with cinema practiced by the film-buff. This thesis is an attempt to come to terms with film and film culture in a number of ways. It is first an attempt at reinscribing a notion of aesthetics into film studies. This is not an easy task. I argue that film theory is not adequately equipped to discuss film in affective terms, and that instead, it emphasises ways of thinking about film and culture quite removed from the act of film ‘spectating’ – individually, or perhaps even more crucially, collectively. To my mind, film theory increasingly needs to ask: are theorists and the various subjectivities about whom they theorise watching the same films, and in the same way? My experience of film is, as Tara Brabazon writes about her own experience of film, a profoundly emotional one. Film is a stream of quotation in my own life. It is inextricably wrapped up inside memory (and what Hutcheon calls postmodern nostalgia). Film is experience. I would not know how to communicate what Sergio Leone ‘means’ or The Godfather ‘represents’ without engaging what Barbara Kennedy calls the ‘aesthetic impulse.’ In this thesis, I extrapolate from what film means to me to what it might mean to an abstract notion of culture. For this reason, Chapters Three and Four are necessarily abstract and tentatively bring together an analysis of The Matrix franchise and Quentin Tarantino’s brand of metacinema. I focus on an aesthetics of cinema rather than its politics or ideological fabric. This is not to marginalise such studies (which, in any case, this thesis could not do) but to make space for another perspective, another way of considering film, a new way of recuperating affect.