This thesis book describes the development and production of Once Ever, a short narrative film. The writing, pre-production, shooting, and editing of the film is reviewed. Script drafts and a final budget are included in the appendices. Once Ever concerns a young Chinese immigrant couple who deal with the changes in their new life in the United States. When the girl gets a chance to step out of the Chinese community, she discovers her goal in the new environment. The boy tries to recover their relationship. However she chooses to leave when she realizes the barrier between them is the difference between their values. The title Once Ever means the main characters encounter; at the end, they miss the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for happiness. Such as good luck in life, people often want to repeat a good experience they have in life; but it often turns out different from what they had planned.

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Tim Burton is steadfastly concerned with the visual imbrication of the patriarchal unconscious in the real. Insofar as he inscribes this problem into contemporary cinema in a programmatic way, surrealism (particularly its critique of representation) comes into razor-sharp focus as a point of reference for his films. Often advanced through allegorical appropriations, especially of media images, Burton's oeuvre recalls surrealism's historical critique because it likewise involves the unsettling of identity by sexuality, and the unsettling of reality by means of the simulacrum. Insofar as Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), have to do with events in which repressed material returns in ways that play havoc with unitary identity, aesthetic norms, and social order, they resonate with Burton's penetrating comprehension of the historicity of the uncanny. In Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Burton's camp deployment of psychosexual disorder to disturb conventional pictorial space, object relations and (masculine) gender identity models the outmoded cultural artifact as an enigmatic vestige of a traumatic encounter or fantasy, equivocal in its restorative and incendiary effects. Setting the text's syntax of symbolic castration against the back projection of postmodern patriarchy's putative loss of a referent or an authentic domain of being, Edward Scissorhands brings into focus the ideological alignment of sexual and cultural disavowal. In Batman and Batman Returns, the makeover of traumatic scenes into artistic origin myths is campily performed. While surrealist fixations double as modernist tropes of setting up an origin in order to institute a self and/or a style, surrealist primal fantasies wreak havoc on such origins; the modernist search for roots produces rootless scenes. No doubt inheriting a few optical cataracts from surrealist sexual politics and insights into the hookups between psychic energy, landscape, architectural form, and social mythology, Burton undertakes an archaeology of patriarchal subjectivity as fossilized in (post)modern spaces. Unless our (de)realizing postmodern dreamscapes (i.e., landscapes, cityscapes, and cinemascapes) are considered a postmodern fulfillment of the surreal, Burton's camp-surreal is far from defunct. / Arts, Faculty of / Theatre and Film, Department of / Graduate

All eight feature films (1965-1981) of John Boorman were viewed and analyzed according to Auteur Theory. The recondite themes and motifs found throughout his work revealed a preoccupationwwith character and events in the Grail legend. Thematically, Boorman's rendering of the Arthurian protagonist revealed him in the modern context of the private eye, the soldier, the defrocked priest, the displaced aristocrat, and the wilderness adventurer. Merlin figures, and women figures intrinsic to the Grail legend appear in all his work. Aesthetically Boorman's feature films are veiled allegories of the Arthurian quest. Those recondite stylistic elements as abstract framing, colour distortion, elliptical editing, and overlapped and electronic sound were found to modify the cinematic conventions of those genres in which he worked. Boorman's mise-en-scene often approached the surreal. His action hovered between the world of slapstick, and the world of dream. The world-view that emerged from these feature-films makes Boorman a religious existentialist, or an Immanentist. / Arts, Faculty of / Theatre and Film, Department of / Graduate

This thesis seeks to demonstrate that the theoretical concerns of spectatorship and gender, which are usually reserved for analysis of live-action cinema, equally apply to the animation of Chuck Jones. Chapter one provides a brief history of animation. It describes the major technological advances in animation and the major styles that flourished in America between 1940 and 1960. The influence of Walt Disney and Tex Avery are examined in relation to Jones' work and biography. Chapter two discusses the cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny as the main character, while chapter three concentrates on the cartoons featuring Daffy Duck and other characters. In both chapters under the rubric of spectatorship, I centre on the gaze between the viewer and the screen. I employ popular theories of the gaze, including definitions of voyeurism as postulated by Freud and Laura Mulvey. In both chapters under the rubric of gender, I examine the function of the female within Jones' cartoons and analyze the elements of camp and homosexuality which are prevalent. The concluding chapter analyzes the cartoons which feature Bugs and Daffy together. In this chapter in addition to a discussion of the gaze between the viewer and the screen, I consider the gaze between the two characters. This analysis reveals that the animation of Chuck Jones can enable film theoreticians to gain a deeper insight into the nature of the cinematic apparatus. / Arts, Faculty of / Theatre and Film, Department of / Graduate

Includes bibliography. / The central purpose of this thesis is to examine ideas of solitude and alienation as they relate to the masculine identity of men - particularly American men as represented in Hollywood films. The subjects include several outsider characters from history and fiction, which are divided into two primary categories: those men who have rejected society and sought solitude for themselves, especially in nature; and those who have been rejected by society, who find themselves on the relative margins of the patriarchal society they expected to embrace them. There is one question at the core of this exploration: If masculine identity is socially determined in accordance with strict normative values, what then of the outsider, who has ostensibly rejected, or been rejected by, society and is in many ways no longer subject to its rules? After a general introduction to psychological and philosophical notions of solitude and alienation, I use the first chapter to develop a theoretical framework for discussing hegemonic American masculinity, which is potently represented on screen by the Hollywood film industry to both reflect and inform the society that funds it.

Zugl.: Mainz, Universiẗat, Diss., 2004.

Magisterarb. Humboldt-Univ. Berlin, 2008?

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