This written thesis serves as a public record for the production of Jesse Kreitzer's MFA thesis film Black Canaries, a 1900s coal mining folktale inspired by his Iowan heritage. The thesis includes Mr. Kreitzer's genealogical and historical research as it pertains to his maternal ancestry and coal mining in south-central Iowa. The thesis also accounts for the conceptual, personal, and practical considerations for the production of Black Canaries. Additional materials include the film's production packet, reference guide, production storyboards, and screenplay.

Since its inception in 1897, the annual Cheyenne Frontier Days has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors to Wyoming for a 10-day celebration of "Western roots," culminating in the world's largest outdoor rodeo nicknamed "The Daddy of 'Em All." Shot during the 2018 Frontier Days, Daddy of 'Em All tracks the proliferation of settler colonial narratives that the event seeks to ossify through its signs, symbols, and sets. Through dislocated images and interviews with past and present Frontier Days volunteers and attendees including my mother, a then-resident of Cheyenne, the film grapples with heritage, ideology, violence, and borders in a time of growing nationalism.

By discussing how New Queer Cinema and queer theory have informed one another, I aim to understand how the gaze operates when a film prioritizes multiple subjectivities of experience. However, I hope to move beyond the tendency in queer theory to essentialize and categorize subjective or “true” experiences as a pretense to challenging dominant representations of identity. Although the politics of representation are crucial to the identification of social ills, I aim to identify the potential to theorize the gaze as an opportunity to locate desire throughout visual texts from various marginalized positions, not limited to sexuality and gender. If the main goal of new queer films is to offer more “authentic” queer realities – or more accurately, to oppose mainstream stereotyping – then these films maintain the existence of a dominant/heterosexual/homophobic discourse, ultimately reaffirming the hetero/homo binary. Additionally, because these films are primarily intended to address political representation in the mainstream, they essentialize identity once again by only portraying certain positive images, what is “authentic” anyway? As a result, they actively exclude other constructions of identity, coding cultural difference as “deviant” because it falls outside of the hetero/homo binary, rendering other sexualities/difference invisible and unable to resist. This preoccupation with recasting the stereotype, by filmmakers and critics alike, often ignores the value of the visual text and remains oblivious to the potential for the gaze to simultaneously elicit multiple and often contradictory forms of desire. Theorizing the gaze as queer means to interrogate the mechanisms of spectatorship, decode cultural difference, destabilize the authority of experience, and most importantly, reimagine the terms of desire.

La Sagrada Familia is a short film that looks at the complex interactions between three women. A grandmother, a mother, and a daughter must spend the night together in the countryside as they prepare for a wedding. Their already strained relationships will be put to the test as painful memories and unresolved grudges arise to haunt them. The story’s title is inspired by the Sacred Family Basilica in Spain. The monument is a beautiful catholic monument that has remained unfinished for hundreds of years much like the neglected relationships of an otherwise loving family.

When one thinks of Disney’s Mickey Mouse, fear and horror are not terms normally associated with this iconic American cartoon character; however, the video game Bendy and the Ink Machine turns animated bodies (cartoons) into bodies the player fears. In this game family friendly cartoon characters are transformed into figures of fear. Furthermore, Bendy and the Ink Machine does this by making the bending of Black bodies visible through what I call the gameic gaze. The transformation from family friendly into fear happens through the resistive gaze, the gameic gaze, which lingers on the bending of the diegetic cartoons. Bendy and the Ink Machine actualizes the historical contorting of the Black body starting in slavery and continued by the entertainment industry through bending. Bending and the Ink Machine makes the minstrel origins of cartoons visible through the gameic gaze.

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.

This research examines Vietnamese in London, focusing on identity formation and community networks through transnational activities. I argue that ‘the transnational’ is a ‘subset’ of migrant categories, and that Vietnamese transnational identities depend on the measurable activities in which they are involved. Important aspects of this research are: First, the Vietnamese are one of the first major non-British Commonwealth peoples to migrate into the United Kingdom in the modern era. This has had implications related to settlement into British society, overcome by the subsequent shift from refugee status to transnational activity and identities, resulting in widespread Vietnamese transnational networks. Second, the Vietnamese represent one of the first ‘quota’ refugee populations granted entry into the UK. Refugees were accepted prior to entering Britain, and upon arrival, government and private support structures were provided. Also, Vietnamese refugees underwent mandatory dispersal across the UK, a detrimental situation prompting a subsequent intra-Britain migration to urban centres, particularly London. Third, Vietnamese communities in Britain have distinctive characteristics, making a study of identities and networks an interesting and useful one, particularly in light of developing research in transnational studies. These characteristics include the Vietnamese North-South cultural and linguistic ‘divide’, the presence of Vietnamese and Chinese-background Vietnamese, and differences in the timing and reasons for migration. Key research questions relate to transnational activities, identities, and community networks played out in the role, reach and specific pathways of those activities across national borders. Key questions are: ‘What does it mean to be a transnationally active Vietnamese Londoner?’ and ‘How are Vietnamese Londoners engaged in community-based transnational networks?’ These questions are addressed using interviews, participant observation, participation in Vietnamese-related conferences, and in informal conversations on the street and in local Vietnamese shops. This research relates stories of contextualised transnational identities linking Vietnamese from London across the globe.

This thesis examines the mediation of the nation-state as a dimension of the diasporic experience of place. It focuses on the consumption of mass-media about Israel or originating from it by people residing outside of the country. I understand this mediation to take place continuously throughout the day, in multiple spaces, through different technologies. As such, it forms part of the experience of place in media- saturated (urban) environments, allowing for a distant nation-state to become embedded in daily routines. In order to theorise this experience, I draw on Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology, which understands place through embodied perception and habit, and on studies of diaspora and media, which examine the social meanings and uses of media among specific transnational groups. This qualitative project is based on a researcher-absent exercise and extended interviews with British Jews and Israeli immigrants in London. Analysis reveals that orientation includes four areas of practice: investing and withdrawing emotions as part of managing ‘care’, searching for truth, distinguishing between ordinary and extraordinary time, and domesticating media. Some of these practices may be particular to the case of Israel, but some are shaped by discourses around insecurity, rather than Zionism itself. Others appear to be related to experiences of migration and diaspora in general. I argue that these practices are ‘orientational practices’ in which people endeavour to make sense of spatial positioning through negotiating distance and controlling media. I theorise media as ‘orientation devices’ in diasporic everyday life, but ones that are unstable, contested and reflected upon, and hence never fully habituated. The resulting experience is one of increased reflexivity about everyday place and, paradoxically, increased dependency on media for orientation. I conclude by suggesting that practices of orientation point to a mode of being in place in globalisation that is not sufficiently addressed by the dominant understanding of ‘belonging’.

The thesis hereby submitted, ‘How Does Technological Development And Adoption Occur In The Media? A Cultural Determinist Model’ was originally published in Media Technology and Society A History: from the telegraph to the Internet (London: Routledge 1998) and Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television (London: British Film Institute 1996). The argument outlined in those two books is further supported and updated by six other texts published between 1995 and 2005 on the same topic. Media Technology and Society A History: from the telegraph to the Internet deals with the development of electrical and electronic mass media proposing a model for the nature of such developments. It is a final iteration of an approach to this history which has its origins in work first begun in the 1970s. Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television applies the same model to photographic and cinematographic technologies. The thesis argues that all these media developments can only be understood in a social context; that they are to be understood as examples of what has become known as ‘socially shaped technology’ (or, in terms of the thesis, ‘cultural determinism’). This is contrary to the received dominant view that technology itself is the driver determining social formation – termed the ‘technological determinist’, ‘technicist’ or ‘diffusion theory’ approach. In rejecting technicism, ‘How Does Technological Development And Adoption Occur In The Media? A Cultural Determinist Model’ proposes instead an original, pioneering contribution to a revisionist cultural determinist/SST historiography as well as outlining a model to explicate at a theoretical level how such innovations and adoptions occur.