趙曉彤. / "2013年8月". / "2013 nian 8 yue". / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 171-178). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in Chinese and English. / Zhao Xiaotong.

Antonio Pietrangeli (1919-1968) est une figure incontournable du paysage cinématographique italien, en tant que critique tout au long des années 1940, puis comme réalisateur à partir de 1953. Formé par les débats critiques qui ont accompagné l’élaboration du néoréalisme, il place son premier film (Le Soleil dans les yeux, 1953) sous les auspices d’une saison néoréaliste finissante, ensuite réélaborée à travers un réalisme conçu sous les termes de la perte et de l’inachèvement, dont on trouve un écho dans son attention à la condition féminine. La présente étude propose une première monographie en langue française sur l’œuvre de Pietrangeli, conduite d’après l’ambition d’établir un dialogue entre son œuvre critique et filmique. L’hypothèse d’une pensée pietrangelienne du réalisme cinématographique, en mettant au jour des modalités de pensée spécifiques à la critique et la création, permet d’établir un dialogue dans lequel la question réaliste apparaît comme un outil conceptuel, qui éclaire la contribution de Pietrangeli à l’élaboration d’une modernité cinématographique. Les trois premiers chapitres retracent un « combat réaliste » qui s’inscrit pleinement dans l’historiographie du néoréalisme italien et se caractérise par sa spécificité morale. Elle annonce une transition épistémologique d’après laquelle la pensée du cinéma s’éloigne d’une tradition idéaliste au profit de perspectives existentielles, incarnées dans une filmographie où le réel, devenu objet de doute, dessine une phénoménologie sceptique que nous aborderons dans les quatrième et cinquième chapitres. / Antonio Pietrangeli (1919-1968) has been a prominent figure in Italian cinema, as a critic throughout the 1940’s and as a director from 1953. As an actor in the critical debates during the elaboration of neorealism, Pietrangeli places his first film (Empty Eyes, 1953) under the auspices of a neorealist ending season. This style will evolve afterwards towards a realism conceived under the concepts of loss and incompleteness, which is particularly visible in the light of his concern to the condition of women. The present study proposes the first french-language monography about the work of Pietrangeli, with the ambition to establish a dialogue between his critical and filmic work. The hypothesis of a Pietrangelian conception of cinematographic realism, by revealing specific relations between critics and creation, established a dialogue where the realistic question appears as a conceptual tool, which enlightens Pietrangeli's contribution to the elaboration of a cinematic modernism. The first three chapters trace back a "realistic struggle", which is fully part of Italian neorealism’s historiography, and is characterized by its moral specificity. It announces an epistemological transition, meaning that the conception of cinema moves away from an idealistic tradition in favor of existential perspectives, embodied in a filmography where reality, becoming questionable, indicates a skeptical phenomenology, which constitutes the core of the fourth and fifth chapters.

Contents: Introduction; The Smell of Revolution and Popcorn; Filling the Gaps: Historical Context; Brazilian Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism and Political Discourse of the New Brazilian Left; US Films and the Iraq War: This isn’t my America; Epilogue

This project chronicles an in-depth character study on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope in film. The term was coined in 2007 by a film critic about a very specific kind of female character—one who exists “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” The MPDG has often been written off as nothing more than a stereotype or sexist characterization of a woman, but I argue that the MPDG can be much more than a flat character, as evidenced by the increasingly complex characterization of the MPDG in independent film. Based on case studies of several films, I discuss how the MPDG has grown from a supporting archetype into a well-rounded and multi-dimensional character. Based on a history of female depiction in film, a discussion of the critical interpretations of the MPDG, and these case studies, I argue that the MPDG has the potential to exist as a complex and realistic character rather than just an archetype.

Thesis (MDram (Drama))—University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / Spectatorship is an essential aspect of the film industry, and hence a key facet of film studies. In film studies, however, the notion of subjectivity is marginalized in a preference for broad generalizations. This is because any consideration of subjectivity leads to indeterminate results. Such research is consequently of no use to filmmakers in guiding them on how best to accommodate mainstream consumer preferences, which is most often the objective of spectatorship studies. However, apart from this, subjectivity is a key component in film reception as every human being views ‘reality’ subjectively and therefore films also. Although the outcome of studies that include the notion of the ‘subjective individual’ will be indefinite, it is an important aspect of any study of spectatorship. The notion of the ‘subjective individual’, as opposed to the generalized notions of ‘audience’ and ‘spectator’, is thus crucial and consequently underlies my entire discussion. In an attempt to demonstrate the importance of subjectivity in film spectatorship studies, I address three primary notions in film reception studies – the text’s structure, cultural complications and psychological satisfactions. In doing so, I consider how each of these notions significantly involves the ‘subjective individual’. In addressing the first notion – the text’s structure – I examine the role of the spectator in relation to the film text, particularly during the reception process. I show how codes function, are organized, and are very specifically encoded into the text by the filmmakers. I then examine how the spectator – the recipient of the communication, who is positioned by the text (interpellated) to receive the narrative – decodes the text’s message. This process thus involves not only subjectivity in the filmmakers’ choices, but also in the ‘reading’ position that the spectator adopts, according to his/her personal interpretation of the text. The second notion – cultural complication – involves the aspects which condition both the encoding and decoding processes of film, namely: ideology, polysemy, the overlapping ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, and the unconscious desires of spectators. Each aspect has a profound affect on spectator response and, consequently, on the study of spectatorship. Moreover, each aspect entails the notion of the ‘subjective individual’. The third notion – psychological satisfaction – deals with unconscious desires and thus addresses subjectivity in spectatorship in its most intense form. Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’ theory and Freud’s work on dream analysis demonstrate how personal the desires motivating the viewing of films are, again revealing subjectivity as a key aspect in film spectatorship study. In amalgamating these ideas, I draw on the phenomenon of celebrity. The film celebrity, originally an ‘object’ of the film text, has become central to popular culture for reasons of psychological satisfaction. I explore how spectatorship and what generates it – the film industry – have co-created the film celebrity and, in turn, how this phenomenon moulds popular culture and affects ideology; subsequently affecting the “theory of ‘reality’” by which we, as individuals in society, live. Since this “theory of ‘reality’”, although constituted by the dominant ideology, is personal and conditions the way we (as human beings and film spectators) view everything, spectatorship studies cannot ignore spectators as ‘real’ people – ‘subjective individuals’.

This thesis investigates the political and social contexts of the adaptation of the 1992 novel The Children of Men, written by prolific British mystery writer P.D. James, to a 2006 US film of the same title, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Both novel and film share the same premise, imagining a future world where human reproduction is no longer possible; however, each deals with drastically different ideological and political concerns. As a case study of the politics of adaptation, this project considers adaptation as both a product and a process, analyzing representation, medium specificity, genre and political contexts as well as issues of production and reception. / text

Thesis advisor: Stephen Pfohl / This work inquires about the subjectivity construction individuals perform in our contemporary media culture. It examines the structure of believing that can be inferred from the narrative elaboration of beliefs exerted in social conversations when pop-media related to spirituality or transcendency are used as inputs for conversation. For this purpose, I investigate the consumption of three films that triggered for their audiences intense controversies that included topics belonging to the blurry crossroad where spirituality, science, and religion intersect: What The Bleep do We (k)now!? (USA 2004), The Da Vinci Code (USA 2006), and The Passion of the Christ (USA 2004). My approach departs from the sociology of spirituality perspective, and draws on some insights developed by ritual studies, sociology of religion, social psychoanalysis, consumer studies, and visual studies. Based on a multi-method strategy of inquiry, formal film analysis, focus and discussion groups, and interview data collected from the audience, this dissertation finds that the burgeoning of a media driven popular culture spirituality in Mexico is creating a wave of Pop-Esotericism. As a rational narrative with consumption and conversational drives, Pop-Esotericism is not only a resonant media-reference, but also constitutes a pre-text in the construction of ephemeral and collective conversational spaces wherein the belief system is engaged and refurnished. To give a full account on the pop-esoteric phenomenon and on overall contemporary belief systems, I propose a theoretical model aimed to uncover the dynamics and strategies we engage to articulate spirituality, identity, and reality in our current global media context. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

A dissertação é dividida em duas partes. A primeira consiste em um estudo sobre a noção de mise en scène no cinema, levando em conta suas origens teatrais e algumas de suas aplicações na teoria cinematográfica. O enfoque privilegia as definições essencialistas formuladas por uma parcela da crítica francesa, concentrada nas revistas Cahiers du Cinéma e Présence du Cinéma nos anos 1950-60. A segunda parte da dissertação, mais fincada na análise fílmica, aborda alguns elementos estéticos do cinema contemporâneo, dentre eles o conceito de cinema de fluxo, que designa um conjunto de filmes que ocupam um ponto cego em relação à definição clássica de mise en scène trabalhada na parte I. O Intruso (Claire Denis, 2004), Sombra (Philippe Grandrieux), A Viagem do Balão Vermelho (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007) e Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002) são alguns dos filmes analisados. / My dissertation is divided in two parts. The first one investigates the concept of mise-enscène as applied to film practice, taking as reference its theatrical origins and some of its extensions to film theory and criticism. My approach privileges the essentialist definitions presented by a group of French critics, focusing on two reviews, Cahiers du Cinéma and Présence du Cinéma, covering their issues published in the 1950s and 1960s. The second part, concentrated on film analysis, discusses some aesthetic features of contemporary cinema such as the notion of cinema of flux, which refers to a set of films located at a blind spot when we look at cinema styles from the standpoint of the classical definition of mise-en-scène discussed in Part I. The intruder (Claire Denis, 2004), Shade (Philippe Grandrieux, 1998), The voyage of the red balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007) and Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002) are among the films.

This dissertation is a rhetorical study of the critical reception of the French film Hiroshima mon amour (1959; dir.: Alain Resnais; screenplay: Marguerite Duras). My main argument is that the themes of love and technology followed a dialectical progression in the critical reception of Hiroshima mon amour. They were important and politically charged in the first essays on the film at the turn of the Sixties. But they lost momentum and became more neutral due to the academization of Film Studies and to the rise of semiology that privileged linguistic abstractions. The return of the themes of love and technology in the Eighties signals the search for renewed forms of commitment. However, this commitment "through abstraction" is also predicated on forgetting. In fact, a different understanding of commitment does not allow remembering that Hiroshima mon amour was also a protest against the first French atomic test in Algeria and its colonial implications. My dissertation examines the limits of what can be said through different paradigms of criticism and commitment through the careful study of the rhetorical situation of each critical act. Jacques Derrida's twin concepts of aimance and of the peut-être guide my research. I examine how we can think Hiroshima mon amour on the background of the paradoxical communities that invented new forms of political participation in postwar France. The early debate on the representation of "mad love" in Resnais' film signaled a concern for the way in which modern technology undermined the binary oppositions between war/peace, civilian/military, and friend/enemy. The paradoxical communities that originated from this realization opened to rhetorical articulations that united people with no communal party membership. Derrida's politics of aimance carries on this reflection on the peut-être by targeting the traditional view that envisions the political as limited to the public sphere and tend to exclude women. By contrast, Hiroshima mon amour empowered women because it tapped into the dark territories of the private in order to show that modern technology had colonized the intimate and daily life. Hence, women critics could acquire a strong political voice from the oppression of the private.

1) My Truth: Women Speak Cancer is a creative nonfiction based on three years of interviews with twelve survivors told through the lens of the author's experience as a three-time, sixteen-year survivor of multiple cancers. Each chapter features a different survivor and her story; the cancers discussed include non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Osteosarcoma, Melanoma, as well as brain, ovarian, breast, and thyroid cancers. Current definitions, treatments and statistics are included at the end of each chapter. The book ends with a comprehensive After Words, combining poetry and prose, taking the reader on a further journey of introspection on life, love, friendship, and loss. 2) The Narrative of Pathogynography is a critical exegesis using established theory in the fields of creative writing, sociology, ethnography, literature, and medicine to examine and further define the sub genre of the theoria, poiesis and praxis involved in creating women's illness narrative, or what Housel terms, pathogynography. Housel develops original terminology to define yet undiscovered spaces based on her work in My Truth: Women Speak Cancer.