Graduate Theses & Dissertations

Cartoons Ain't Human
Why show things that aren’t people acting like people? In the field of animation, it’s a surprisingly big “why?”, because it’s a “why?” that doesn’t lead to any sort of doctrine of ontology, of inevitability, of manifest destiny, or of anything like that. But it does lead to another “why?”—“why did anthropomorphic depictions of animals and non-human entities come to define an entire era of American short-form animation?” When we think about ‘classic era’ cartoon shorts, the first names that come to mind are likely to be those of anthropomorphic animal characters—Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and a list of others so numerous that any machine Wile E. Coyote tried to build to count them all would probably explode. This can make us lose sight of the fact that human characters had their place as well in these films: Bugs and Daffy regularly tangled with Elmer Fudd; the studio that made cartoon stars of Betty Boop and Popeye produced no famous animal characters at all in its heyday. And yet, it’s the animals that steal the show in the animated shorts produced by major studios in America from the 1920s through the 1960s. Part of their appeal lies in the fact that they were useful and recognizable substitutes for humans. Without making things too ‘personal’ for the audience, they could be used to examine and deconstruct social practices in the full-speed-ahead period that took America from World War I to the war in Vietnam. Animals weren’t the only ones to get a full-on anthropomorphic treatment in these shorts. Machines and other artefacts came to life and became sites of interrogation for contemporary anxieties about the twentieth century’s ever-expanding technological infrastructure; parts of the natural world, from plant life to the weather, acted with minds of their own in ways that harken back to the earliest animistic folk beliefs. No matter when or how it’s being used, anthropomorphism in animation is a device for answering, not one big “why?”, but a lot of little “why?”s. What you’re about to read is an exploration of a few of those little “why?”s. Author Keywords: America, Animation, Anthropomorphism, Cartoons, Deconstruction, Popular Culture
Landscape and its Discontents - Art and Ruins, a Critical Topography in Word and Image
From Altdorfer and Poussin to Cézanne, Monet and to the Group of Seven, landscape has been a focal point of artistic inspiration for most of what we think of as modern art history. In contemporary times the concept and representation of landscape has shifted from visions of an idealized and exalted place to notions of the landscape as a ruins and site of ecological disaster. Because of this seismic inversion, artists are no longer solely making visual the beauty and serenity of nature but are rather finding novel ways of problematizing it and incorporating themes of its eventual disappearance, its inescapable transformation into ruins. The following dissertation puts forward a critical topographical study of three sites and three different artists who deal with this new found relationship to landscape. The three landscapes are located in different parts of the world and from different artistic contexts yet showing that they retain an aesthetic and conceptual character that links them together is part of the work of the dissertation. The first site is El Sol del Membrillo, a film by Víctor Erice in which the filmmaker chronicles painter Antonio Lopez García’s attempts to paint the ephemeral, he attempts to paint that which is in the act of disappearing. The second site is The Mill St Cemetery in Cambridge, England where artist Gordon Young has contributed a work of public art titled Bird Stones that blurs the line between landscape, sculpture, monument and artwork. The third and final site is Tommy Thompson Park in Toronto, Canada that presents itself as an ecology park of retrieval, recovery and as a public art space. My investigation of this last regional research site is offered both as a chapter and as a videography about wilderness as wasteland. Author Keywords: Aesthetics, Anthropocene, Art, Cinema, El Sol del Membrillo, Toronto: The Leslie Spit
WOMEN IN HORROR
The objective of this dissertation is to measure the influence of the contemporary influx of women’s involvement in the horror genre in three dimensional capacities: female representation in horror films, female representation as active, participatory spectators and female representation in the industrial production of horror. Through the combined approach of theoretical and empirical analysis, this dissertation examines the social conditions that facilitated women’s infiltration of the horror genre. Beginning with psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship, it is demonstrated that female filmmakers have challenged horror’s traditional images of victimized women through the development new forms of feminine representation in contemporary horror films. Using data collected from a sample of 52 self-identified female horror fans, it is revealed that the purported invisibility of female horror spectators is a consequence of their alternative modes of consumption. Through interviews conducted with four female producers and an examination of their cultural productions, I illustrate that women have reconstituted the horror genre as a space for inclusivity, political activism and feminist empowerment. Cohesively, these findings reveal the contemporary feminist reclamation of horror to be a form of resistance intended to challenge the patriarchal structures that facilitated women’s historical exclusion from the horror genre. Author Keywords: Abjection, Feminism, Film, Gender, Horror, Psychoanalysis
Changes in the Representations of Women from the 1980s Turkish Cinema to New Turkish Cinema
The thesis examines the changes in the representations of women in Turkish cinema from the 1980s through the 2000s in terms of semiotic codes. To demonstrate the shifts of the representations of women over three decades, four films directed by two representative filmmakers of the 1980s and the 2000s are analyzed within the context of gender codes: A Sip of Love (Atıf Yılmaz/1984), The Night, Angel and Our Gang (Atıf Yılmaz/1994), The Third Page (Zeki Demirkubuz/1999) and Envy (Zeki Demirkubuz/2009). Using gender as code in deconstructing women’s characteristics and their representations in the films, the research highlights the structural image of women in the semiotic sense. The stereotypical representations in Turkish cinema question social norms, patriarchy, and Islamic norms in Turkey. Author Keywords: Gender codes, Islam, Patriarchy, Semiotics, The representations of women , Turkish cinema
On Tilt
On Tilt: The Inheritance and Inheritors of Digital Games accepts and extends Eric Zimmerman’s contention that literacies currently being developed during video-game play will be more broadly applicable (outside games) in the next hundred years as Western work, education, entertainment, and citizenship spaces become ever more shaped like video games. To the end of better understanding both video games and the players and literacies contiguous with them, this dissertation interrogates comparisons between video games and... non-digital games, film and other fictional texts and worlds, blogs, casinos’ games of chance, and the strategies employed by face-to-face criminals, always asking about the roles and responsibilities the human participants in these systems take; that is, this dissertation investigates what video games inherit from other forms of art, including non-digital games, and what the gamers and audience of today and tomorrow inherit through their contact with video games. The dissertation examines in detail works by Jodi Dean, Bernard Suits, Bruce Sterling, T. L. Taylor, Walter Benjamin, Gavin de Becker, N. Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Gessler, and Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, considering their work, the video game, and gamers, in terms of power gaming, genre, fiction and suspension of disbelief, audience, motivations, fungibility, the zombie vs. the robot, value vs. meaning, agency, slipstream, capitalism, and ontology. Ultimately, the dissertation suggests that there are two disparate strains of gamification building Zimmerman’s future, arguing first that the penetration of video games into culture is changing the way we behave and exist as audience and more generally, and, second, that what is at stake, in terms of the attitudes, labels, and gameplay that we accept in terms of games and gamification is significant to what it means to be human, especially within systems that are only partly human, in the next hundred years. Author Keywords: digital, gamification, genre, literacy, new media, videogame
Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema
This dissertation re-evaluates theories of genre and spectatorship in light of a critic-defined tendency in recent art cinema, coined extreme cinema. It argues that the films of Mexican director Carlos Reygadas and French director Catherine Breillat expand our generic classifications and, through the re-organization of the visual presentation of genre-specific clichés and devices, their films transform sense experience and thought. My approach loosely follows Stanley Cavell’s various assertions of film as a medium of thought or, simply, that films think. Reygadas and Breillat allow spectators to reflect on the genre-film experience; I contend that their films make it apparent that genre is not established prior to the viewing of a work but is recollected and assembled by spectators in ways that matter for them. In fostering this experience of collection, these two directors propose a kind of ethics of curatorship: spectators are tasked with collecting and recollecting their film experience to generate particular social, cultural, and political critiques. To further accomplish and foster film as thought, the directors appeal to spectators’ sense experiences. I therefore deploy contemporary film theories on the senses, both phenomenological and affect theory, and partake in close readings of the films’ forms and narratives. The Introduction outlines my intervention in genre theory, discusses the key theoretical texts, develops the phenomenological framework I employ for the chapters to follow, develops my methodology through a description of Cavell’s style, and presents the stakes of my argument. Chapter one considers the place of experimental narrative cinema in Reygadas’s Post Tenebras Lux (2012). I argue that through his realist style, this film aims at an experience for spectators “as if” in a dream and through this film experience I posit the critique I find internal to the film. The second chapter turns to Catherine Breillat’s oeuvre and the confrontation her work poses to conceptions of pornography. I bring her 2001 feature Fat Girl (À ma soeur!) to bear on what I claim to be a new style of pornographic work and its challenge to patriarchy. The final chapter brings together Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo, 2005) and Breillat’s Sex is Comedy (2002) to accomplish an analysis of sexual performances in otherwise dramatic films. Author Keywords: art cinema, Carlos Reygadas, Catherine Breillat, contemporary cinema, film theory, genre theory

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