Cinema & Media Studies

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Open Access
Beyond the Screen: The Integration of XR Media in Canadian Cultural Institutions
(2024-07-18) Klimek, Caroline Anne Giroux; Longfellow, Brenda
The integration of Extended Reality (XR), encompassing Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) represents a paradigm shift in contemporary art and media landscapes. While XR permeates sectors ranging from gaming, real estate, advertising to education, its foray into cultural institutions like film festivals and artist-run centres (ARCs) remains an underexplored research area. Furthermore, existing literature often examines the technological facets of XR, overlooking its cultural impact. Addressing this gap, this dissertation is a comprehensive exploration of how Toronto's cultural institutions are embracing XR, their strategic adaptations to it, the challenges encountered, and the ensuing ramifications on audience dynamics and institutional ethos. Through case studies, my research examines film festivals’ use of XR, particularly within TIFF, Hot Docs, and imagineNATIVE, the notable Art Gallery of Ontario, and pivotal ARCs including Trinity Square Video and Inter/Access. Using a sociocultural framework, this dissertation meets and probes at the nexus of technology, artistry, institutional imperatives, access, and audience interactivity with XR. By offering insights into film festivals’ engagement with XR, emphasizing its influence on festival operations, labour and programming. The examination then shifts to the art gallery, with a spotlight on the AGO, unraveling the tensions and trade-offs of blending legacy with XR innovations. The role of ARCs takes center stage as incubators for XR experimentation and platforms for artist empowerment. This dissertation culminates in a critical discussion of the challenges posed by the technological and planned obsolescence of XR artworks in a capitalist market. It advocates for sustainable methodologies to safeguard the longevity and accessibility of such works and uncovers how artists are addressing the concern of obsolescence within their XR artistic practice. Beyond mere technological enhancement, the integration of XR by cultural institutions intertwines with complex sociocultural, economic, and artistic nuances. This dissertation highlights the seminal role of cultural institutions in defining XR’s trajectory in the arts, making it a critical read for cultural curators, artists, scholars, and policymakers grappling with how to manage the pace of change in the emerging media landscape.
Open Access
Catastrophe Aesthetics: Affective Epistemologies of Climate Change in Experimental Media Art
(2019-03-05) Mulvogue, Jessica Siobhan; Marchessault, Janine Michele
Catastrophe is no longer an exception to the everyday. Anthropogenic (or capitalogenic) climate change is slowly but radically altering Earth. But climate catastrophe does not abide by conventional understandings of the catastrophic. Rather than a temporally and spatially bound rupture, climate change is slow-moving, vast, and in the everyday, imperceptible. This complicates its representation. My dissertation contributes to a growing conversation that asks: how do we effectively (and affectively) convey the slow warming of Earth, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, or the geological imprint of the human species? These are crucial questions for making sense of a complex present and for exposing and resisting the structures and systems that have produced this present. I argue that the aesthetic realm is a privileged space in which climate change catastrophe can be made visible and, more broadly, sensible. I examine a diverse group of experimental media artworks: Buckminster Fullers expanded cinema environments, The Geoscope and World Game; the fossil-fuel themed interactive documentaries Offshore (Brenda Longfellow, 2013) and Fort McMoney (David Dufresne, 2013); and a collection of contemporary, geological experimental film and photography. While emerging from diverse contexts and focusing on different climate-related themes, these artworks provide a rich arena to explore what I am calling catastrophe aesthetics. Catastrophe aesthetics is a mode of critical art making that attempts to express the catastrophic nature of climate change. Not trying to provide solutions to climate change, my case studies instead offer fertile grounds for elucidating the indiscernible contours, interrelations, and violence that make up this quotidian catastrophe. They do so by employing innovative image technologies and experimental formal strategies, which engender affective encounters with various worlds and entities on screen. In producing novel experiences and modes of relation with a changing Earth new affective epistemologies of climate change can emerge.
Open Access
Contained: Haunted Aural Architectures in Virtual Reality
(2024-07-18) Trommer, Michael Klaus; Van Nort, Douglas
Contained is a virtual reality (VR) project that stages anthropocentric spaces as haunted acoustic architectures, non-places permeated with the sonic spectres of unseen forces. The work seeks to invert the traditional, visually-biased audio-visual hierarchy via a positioning of spatial and haptic audio as the central elements within an immersive cinematic experience, emphasizing sound’s ability to not only permeate space and surround the auditor as an affective atmosphere, but also its capacity to penetrate, saturate and vibrate a listening body, forming an intense relational bond between self and environment, whether material or virtual. This project evolves from and roots itself within an acoustemological approach: acoustemology is best described by Steven Feld as engaging “sound as a way of knowing” (Feld 2015, 12)). Contained explores how concepts rooted in the discipline might bear an impact not only on how immersive audiovisual experiences are created, but also on how they might enable a unique, profoundly embodied encounter. Thematically, this project presents an auscultation of our anthropocentric milieu, integrating field recordings, 360º camera footage and 3D scans of urban corporate towers, logistical networks, industrial areas and other non-places (Augé 1995) as well as urban encampments and derelict locales that are resonant with both the heard and unheard acoustic emanations of the technotope we have become dependent upon for our survival. In doing so, it approaches sound as a material that can be apprehended as both corporeal and abstracted: in addition to the airborne, audible sound of the subject spaces, Contained integrates the electrical, vibrational and mnemonic emissions that permeate our everyday habitats, highlighting their roles as unheeded yet nonetheless deeply affective components of a quotidian and contingent soundscape.
Open Access
Dissertation in Which There Appear Lost Punchlines, Dreadful Puns, Low Resolution, etc.: On the Failure of Humour in Avant-garde Film and Video
(2019-11-22) Moneo, Cameron David; Zryd, Michael
This dissertation explores the overlooked functions that humour has served in American avant-garde film and video, arguing that humour is involved consistently in many of the key operations and philosophies that have energized these moving image practices. Taking humour as an alternative historical and interpretive lens, this dissertation conducts new readings of three major formations or moments in the discourse of the American avant-gardes. These are: underground film, structural film, and early feminist video art. A branching theme of these readings is failure, seen to carry complex meanings and humorous pleasures in various cases of avant-garde activity. The introductory chapter details the propagandization of failure in the 1960s underground cinema, and argues that a divisive brand of humour highlights the sense of the avant-garde in this cinema. Chapter 1 re-conceptualizes the humourless structural film movement of the 60s and 70s, arguing that, for filmmakers like Michael Snow, the idea of structure is not a dogmatic working principle but something of a ruse, one whose limits are meant to be teased, pushed, and exceeded. Moving to early feminist video art, Chapter 2 emphasizes the importance of humour in the project of articulating feminist political horizons. In videotapes by Susan Mogul and Martha Rosler, performative nonchalance and lack of preciousness about low-grade equipment can be seen as forms of humorous delivery, which stay utopically open to future re-articulations. Circling back to underground film, Chapter 3 locates humour in the failure to distinguish sharply between the avant-garde and popular culture. Through readings of humour in queer underground film, and then in more recent pop appropriation videos, this chapter illustrates the hilarity, critique, and utopian feeling that can result when the effects of pop and of the avant-garde are brought excessively close. This dissertation assembles conceptual scaffolding for understanding humorous failure as a variable avant-garde theme, drawing upon such scholars as Matei Calinescu, Jack Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz. With failure in mind, this dissertation further reflects on the instability of humour itself as an object of study, and as a device, attitude, or value that might be put to work for us.
Open Access
Embodying Affect: Critical Interventions in Human-Computer Interaction via Embedded and Embodied Design in Extended Reality
(2024-11-07) Pnacekova, Michaela; Fisher, Caitlin
Human computer interaction has been significantly advanced by the integration of biometric sensors and artificial intelligence, allowing more intuitive and engaging user experiences. However, there is a lack of critical engagement practices with artificial systems and their implementation in user design. The primary objective of this multimodal dissertation (composed of the virtual reality prototype Us Xtended and the online platform Miro) is to close this gap by proposing a methodology of critical embedded and embodied design via biofeedback in extended reality. It aims to do so by creating a design pathway that fosters embodiment, user agency and responsible consumption of emerging technologies. The methodology involves affect recognition and self-quantification as a critical, analytical and storytelling device. This approach aims to redefine human-computer interaction by embedding criticality and agency within the process. This is applied in the prototype via the materialist and performative aspects of biometric data and affective analysis and represented on a three-dimensional affect scale. This quantification apparatus is integrated into the experience. The critical evaluation lies within ways participants shape their experience through their biometric and behavioral inputs. Via self-reflection and comparison between the systemic analysis and self-evaluation, the project critiques affect recognition practices and stresses ethical considerations in ways biometric data is interpreted by artificial systems, reflecting on the reproduction of systemic biases in affect recognition technologies. At the same time, it highlights the system’s reliance on measurable bodily signals, emphasizing the importance of understanding its limitations. This educational aspect enhances users' ability to navigate new technologies, contributing to responsible consumption of emerging media. In essence, this dissertation advocates for a critical, embodied approach to human-machine collaboration. By exploring the intersections of technology, art, and critical theory, it aims to foster deeper understanding and more responsible engagement with the technologies that increasingly shape our existence in the digital age.
Open Access
Embodying the Image - Spect-Actorship and Virtual Reality
(2024-11-07) Baillargeon, Justin; Marchessault, Janine
"Embodying the Image: Spect-actorship and Virtual Reality" addresses spectator behavior and emotional engagement across various forms of virtual reality (VR) experiences, including seated, standing, and room scaled setups. Using a comparative methodology, the study addresses the spectatorial shift triggered by VR's resurgence in various cultural contexts, exploring both out-of-home and in-home experiences across artistic, educational, and entertainment objectives. Central to the investigation is the concept of the spect-actor, drawn from theorist and theatre practioner Augusto Boal, representing individuals who transition from passive spectators to active participants within narratives. Through comparative analysis, the present dissertation showcases VR's evolving affective characteristics and user engagement levels in three different kinds of VR experiences. By focusing on immersion in diverse reality environments, the dissertation aims to address a gap in VR research concerning the artistic, educational, and entertainment aspects of VR spectatorship. Immersion, defined as the extent of a system's ability to create a lifelike illusion of reality, is explored both technologically and psychologically. The dissertation underscores the importance of decision-making interfaces in the amplification of a spect-actor's sense of immersion. The dissertation argues that less mediated Artistic VR experiences provide greater user agency and spect-actorship, allowing enhanced control and influence over actions and experiences. It situates how Educational VR operates within structured frameworks, investigating the intersection of educational objectives, pre-defined learning outcomes, user agency, spect-actorship and embodiment. Finally, turning to Entertainment VR, the dissertation focuses on its synthesis of cinematic storytelling, user agency, authenticity, and spect-actorship to understand diverse approaches in delivering emotionally impactful narratives. This dissertation is the culmination of extensive research and dozens of interviews with VR developers exploring the dynamics of agency and embodiment across three different VR genres developed based on the works that have been selected for this research. Through in-depth comparative analysis of diverse VR works, several key findings have emerged, shedding light on the nuanced interplay between user agency, narrative structure, and spect-actor engagement. The study emphasizes the importance of user agency in fostering immersion and spect-actor engagement within VR experiences. Whether in more open-ended environments or structured educational settings, balancing user freedom with predefined objectives proves essential for maintaining engagement and enhancing the sense of embodiment. In navigating the diverse landscape of VR storytelling, developers must carefully orchestrate the interplay between narrative coherence, user agency, and emotional resonance to create impactful experiences that transcend traditional spectatorship. This dissertation sheds light on the pivotal role of embodiment in eliciting deep emotional responses from users across a range of contexts and genres.
Open Access
Film Noir as the Sovereign-Image of Empire: Cynicism, White Male Biopolitics, and the Neoliberal Cinematic Apparatus
(2018-03-01) Nagypal, Tamas; Trifonova, Temenuga D.
This dissertation develops a theory of film noir as sovereign-image, a meta-generic and meta-cinematic discourse that confronts the viewer with the biopolitical ambivalence of the cinematic apparatus but enjoins her to nonetheless affirm its normative use. I argue that classical American noir deploys a proto-neoliberal ideology to turn the indeterminacy at its core into a spectacle of victimized white men, offering emphatically gendered and racialized images of a pathological entrepreneur of the self who is not ashamed to exhibit his wounded private life as the source of his singular market value. I claim, however, that even in his fully developed contemporary form in which his classical predecessors trauma induced shamelessness turns into a cynically calculated affective display, noirs neoliberal hero is not the self-made man he appears to be but remains delegated by a homosocial group to be the sovereign arbiter of their lifes value for them, instead of them. As an individual whonot unlike the film vieweris temporarily isolated from his peers he is in the exceptional position to freely decide what kind of life to consider productive for the process of capital accumulation, turning his body into the arbitrary link between what Agamben calls bare life and a qualified form of lifea link I call the sovereign-image. I track the evolution of film noirs sovereign function alongside the expansion and transformation of the United States from a territorialized nation state to a deterritorialized global financial network (what Hardt and Negri call Empire) to shed light on how Hollywoods anomalous noir crisis, its war trauma induced state of exception, became the expression of the governing paradigm of unbridled global biocapitalism in the age of North Atlantic unilateralism. In contemporary neo-noirs like The Usual Suspects (1995), Trainspotting (1996), Inception (2010), Fight Club (1999), or Drive (2011) becoming a self-made neoliberal subject coincides with gaining membership in a hybrid and flexible white male bios, the old-new flesh of Empire now cynically framed as the condition of possibility for autonomous selfhood as such. In critiquing neo-noirs cynical paradigm I demonstrate that its reactionary force can be mobilized only if the films first construct a biopolitical zone of indistinction where the inevitability of the western capitalo-patriarchal status quo is questioned and the equality of all forms of life is posited.
Open Access
Gilles Deleuze's Poetics of Cinema: Preparatory Remarks for a Re-Reading of Cinema 1 and 2
(2024-11-07) Cabrita, Joshua Daniel; Marchessault, Janine
The purpose of this thesis is to lay the groundwork for an interpretation of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image as works of film poetics. English-language commentators tend to treat the books primarily as philosophical works, and only secondarily as contributions to film theory. I argue that this interpretive strategy gets things exactly backwards. To understand both the philosophical and film-theoretical value of the Cinema books, we need to see them mainly as contributions to the field of film poetics. My argument for this claim proceeds in three main steps. First, I explain what film poetics is and isolate the claims it's primarily in the business of making. Second, I situate Cinema 1 and 2 within this tradition and compare the books’ theoretical approach to the methodology developed in David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film. And finally, I gesture towards some of the implications that Cinema 1 and 2 have for philosophy, showing how the books extend and challenge Kant’s “aesthetic” inquiry in the Critique of Pure Reason.
Open Access
In the Name of the People: Yugoslav Cinema and the Fall of the Yugoslav Dream
(2017-07-27) Maric, Zoran; Forsyth, James Scott
This dissertation outlines the trajectory of Yugoslavias decline through an examination of select works of Yugoslav cinema from the late 1960s to the late 1980s which cogently commented on their sociopolitical context. It brings together various interpretive perspectives and utilizes film studies, cultural studies, political history, and postcolonial studies to discuss how the Yugoslav society and its political system are scrutinized through allegory, satire, and genre revisionism, for instance, and to elucidate what the films contribute to discourse on the origins of Yugoslavias violent breakup. Through a discussion of cinema, arguably the most politically subversive form of expression in the Yugoslav public sphere, this dissertation offers insight not only into why the country broke up but also, and perhaps more importantly, into what was lost when it broke up. Although it revolves around Yugoslavias failure, the dissertation validates the egalitarian, anti-imperialist Yugoslav idea and offers a take on the countrys demise that is free of Balkanist stereotypes and anti-communist paranoia common to most discussions of Yugoslavias end. It counters the view of Yugoslavia as a dictatorship which disintegrated when dormant ethnic antagonisms of its peoples were inexplicably reawakened, and ties the emergence of ethnic nationalism to Yugoslavias economic collapse of the 1970s and 1980s caused by the grasping reach of Western economic liberalism.
Open Access
"Inventories of Limbo": Post-Minimal Aesthetics in Cinema From the Readymade to Institutional Critique
(2016-09-20) Horwatt, Elijah Saul; Zryd, Michael
This dissertation charts the philosophical premises of post-minimalism in the practices of experimental filmmakers and video artists, exploring specific reorientations of cinematic works since the late 1960s. Post-minimalism refers to a myriad of aesthetic transformations initiated by the conceptual art movement, interrogating the ontology of art from a perspective outside its historical bonds to medium, style, and Kantian aesthetic judgment. I examine three strategies in the progression of post-minimal aesthetic practice: the readymade, institutional critique, and seriality. A central goal of this research is to remap entrenched language and ideas in the spheres of the arts and cinema to point to a profound reciprocity between cinematic technology and post-minimal aesthetic intelligence, perception, and judgment. This research moves away from the problems raised by artificially constructed movements and prescriptive categories which inevitably produce important sites of exception, and look instead to the aesthetic engines of post-minimal artmaking offering opportunities for constant renewal, evolution, and refinement. I follow these aesthetic engines like a knights tour in chess, jumping through history, appearing in unexpected places and at unexpected times to draw continuities in the approach to the heretical breaks from modernism found in post-minimal aesthetic intelligence. I will primarily focus on four objects: William E. Jones Tearoom, Robert Smithsons Underground Cinema, Lis Rhodes collaborative intervention into the Film as Film exhibition, and Christian Marclays The Clock. Examining the use of Marcel Duchamps concept of the readymade, and its profound assault on both medium specificity and authorship, I illustrate radical new ethical imperatives in the presentation of found footage filmmaking. My two core chapters grapple with ontological and locative explorations of cinematic architectures and sites. The two projects discussed engage with institutional critique, a philosophical model of artmaking which directly engages the sites, economic infrastructures, administrative imperatives, and power dynamics of the cinema, museum, and gallery. Finally, I examine a case study in contemporary post-minimal practice through Christian Marclays 24-hour installation The Clock, and will explore its relationship to archival projects engaging in the collection, ordering, and hermeneutic approach to 20th century media. I will explore this installation as symptomatic of both a technologically determined grammar of collection for the now immense digital archive, and an archeological inclination for artists to thematize film history.
Open Access
Magical Realism in Transnational Cinema
(2020-11-13) Lang, Cody Matthew; Forsyth, James Scott
This project is an analysis of the magical realist genre in cinema, specifically its multiple forms found in transnational cinema. The status of magical realism in film as a genre will be questioned and this project argues that the concept is best understand as a transgeneric critical category rather than a genre in the conventional understanding of the term. Magical realism as academic concept has been discussed in-depth in literary theory and this project extends those discussions into the field of cinema. The history of criticism of magical realism is summarized as it applies to studying film with special attention given towards the semiotic differences between literature and cinema. Furthermore, this project explicates the distinct ways that magical realism operates in cinema in contrast to literature while also noting the shared aesthetic strategies between each media. Each section covers a thematic topic observed in transnational magical realist cinema: metafiction in overt and covert forms; the representation of historicity; and the representation of marginalized subjectivities, specifically looking at how magical realist cinema presents issues of class, gender, race, and sexual identity. The final thematic discussion discusses the possibility of utopian discourses in magical realist cinema, the attempts to envision a less exploitative social collective according to a variety of cultural and national contexts in late-capitalism. Key films discussed in this project include: Death by Hanging (1968), Underground (1995), Naked Lunch (1991), Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), Miracle in Milan (1951), The Tin Drum (1979), Synecdoche, New York (2008), Tropical Malady (2004), Gozu (2003), Daughters of the Dust (1991) among many other works.
Open Access
Nollywood Film Industry: Informal Film Practices and Their Cultural Formations
(2021-11-15) Akande, Olaniyi Joseph; Longfellow, Brenda
This dissertation further situates Nollywood practitioners informal understandings of their film industry within academic discourses around Nollywood conceptualizations. Local, grassroots knowledge and practices are essential in understanding the emergence, nature and perpetuation of Nollywood, and there exists no closer resource source to Nollywood than those who practice in the industry. In so doing, the role of informality as a local and indigenous system of practice becomes central to how Nollywood is understood among its practitioners, which is sometimes different from how scholars have looked at it. Largely employing ethnographic and discourse analysis methodologies, this dissertation brings these informal Nollywood knowledge forms in dialogue with theories in post-colonialism national cinema, vernacular modernism, media industry studies, and neorealist national cinema.
Open Access
Programming Process Pedagogy: Towards Meaningful Audience Engagement and Public Participation Models Within Contemporary Canadian Media Arts Festival, 2012-2024
(2024-11-07) Sicondolfo, Claudia Francesca; Marchessault, Janine
The 2010s are remembered as a decade of interventionist participative engagements that were led in large part by youth- and collective-oriented forms of meaningful online civic activism. Motivated by affective politics of belonging, these movements also contributed to building lucrative neoliberal participation-based social media platforms, powered by algorithms of misinformation. During this time, the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA) published a formative 2012 Discussion Paper entitled “Public Engagement in the Arts,” which encouraged Canadian cultural programming to consciously engage more public audiences in the social aspects of the arts through programming updates that more readily facilitated co-creation, learning, cultural mediation, and creative self-expression. I engage with this heightened period of participative affect to investigate the social, economic, and civic impacts of “meaningful engagement” programming within the Canadian independent media arts ecosystem from the early 2010s to the mid 2020s. Led in large part by participative curatorial tactics, this dissertation investigates how these directives impacted concentrated groups of identity-based communities and changed a number of programming parameters within Canadian media arts festivals. Demonstrating how participation narratives have become central curatorial tactics within contemporary Canadian media arts film festivals, I posit a theoretical intervention in the Canadian media arts festival ecosystem. It considers the boundaries, stakes, and directives for publics, audiences, and creative ecology ecosystems across these festival initiatives. Working through ethnographic life-story research that is contextualized within discursive cultural policy analysis, this dissertation presents original research from four primary media arts festival case studies to present a contemporary theory of screen engagement called “public process pedagogy.” I argue that this theory of participation is not only found but expected within granting and programming directives for contemporary community-based media-arts festivals within Canada. Importantly, I do not consider or judge this theory of participation from a moral perspective. Rather, I recognize how public process pedagogy is influenced by complicated neoliberal and settler-colonial tensions. In turn, this dissertation presents more sustainable frameworks of evaluation for participation-based programming within this contemporary media arts ecosystem.
Open Access
Return to Form: Analyzing the Role of Media in Self-documenting Subcultures
(2020-11-13) Wood, Glen Paul; McCullough, John
This dissertation examines self-documenting subcultures and the role of media within them. The production and distribution of subcultural media is largely governed by intracultural industries. Elite practitioners and media-makers are incentivized to document performances that are deemed essential to the preservation of the status quo. This constructed dependency reflects and reproduces an ethos of conformity that pervades both social interactions and subcultural representations. The production of media and meaning is constrained by the presence of prescriptive formal conventions propagated by elite producers. These conditions, in part, result in the institutionalization of conformity. The inclusion of three case studies in this work illustrates the theoretical and methodological framework that classifies these formations under a new typology. Accordingly, this dissertation introduces an alternative approach to the study of subcultures.
Open Access
Seeing the Spell: Baroque, Decadence, and a Cinema of Digital-Animated Liberation
(2016-09-20) Morton, Malcolm David; Trifonova, Temenuga D.
This dissertation draws on the artistic traditions of seventeenth-century Baroque and nineteenth-century Decadence in seeking to formulate an analytical vocabulary for the aesthetics of digitally-animated spectacle in contemporary cinema. The dissertation seeks to critique binary antinomies of narrative vs. spectacle, and instead propose a concept of narrativized spectacle whereby digital visual effects have brought about a profound liberation in cinemas capacity to envision narrative story-worlds, and depict their workings. It takes the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster as its chief subject for this inquiry, insofar as this is the filmmaking idiom most given to the embrace and deployment of digitally-liberated spectacle, and one which is frequently assumed to be largely bereft of formal and narrative sophistication. This dissertation argues, on the contrary, that the Hollywood blockbusters spectacular nature in fact bears complex utopian implications, and that the crudities which occasionally mar the form in practice are more the result of not being imaginatively hyperbolic enough, rather than being too much so. The dissertations invocation of Baroque and Decadent aesthetics provides a conceptual apparatus for describing this contemporary cinematic idiom of digitized blockbuster spectacle. It identifies a Baroque aesthetic in such stylistic traits as verticality, profusion, and the sublime, as well as narrative themes of transgression of limits, reverence before imposing scale and grandeur, and refusal to ennoble passivity and martyrdom. Likewise, it identifies Decadent aesthetics in stylistics which privilege the gaze, the enclosed and aestheticized space, and formal ritual, as well as narratives ordered around principles of perversity, self-consciousness, and interconnectedness. The ultimate intervention which this dissertation seeks to make, however, is to demonstrate the centrality rather than marginality of animation to cinema, insofar as cel animation has always possessed the graphic freedom to realize any imaginative vision, which digital effects have only recently extended to live-action cinema. All of the aesthetics of Baroque and Decadent blockbuster spectacle that the dissertation traces could be and, the dissertation seeks to show, were deployed in the animated feature years in advance of the liberation of representation that digital effects would bring to live-action.
Open Access
Signs of Genesis: A Study of Ambiguity in Contemporary Experimental Cinema
(2023-08-04) Garcia, Lawrence Neal Uy; Zryd, Michael
This thesis conducts a synoptic study of experimental cinema using the central notion of cinematic ambiguity, here defined as any means of probing cinema’s boundaries of intelligibility, thereby thematizing the process by which the medium becomes intelligible in the first place. Using largely contemporary film examples, it identifies three main types of ambiguity, each intended to clarify established but sometimes ill-defined traditions, namely: the lyrical and structural film (ambiguities of sound and sense), the “experimental documentary” (ambiguities of description), and the “political avant-garde” (ambiguities of myth). Building on this discussion, it then uses Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “genetic sign” to forward a genetic definition of experimental cinema, attempting to give consistency to the term “experimental.” The animating conviction is that a more explicit specification of our terms, far from restricting our recognition of artistic possibilities, might in fact expand our notions of what an “experimental” work can be.
Open Access
Smashed Typewriters and Sour Smoke: A Historical Poetics of the Screenplay
(2018-05-28) Verner, Caroline Suzanne; Trifonova, Temenuga D.
Screenplays typically provide the starting point for film development and production. They also draw on a rich history of literary conventions and aesthetic traditions that well exceed their technical blueprint function, as emergent attention being given to screenplays as reading matter by both casual and scholarly readers suggests. This dissertation proposes a historical poetics of screenwriting as a way of working through these conflicting ideas about the screenplay: what it is, how to read it, and how these concepts have evolved over time. It pursues an intensive analysisfrom the silent era scenario to the present-day master-scene scriptthrough several frames, including the historical implications of discourse for the screenplay concept, the linkages between screenwriting and earlier forms of lens-based prose, narrative voice and the rhetoric of the possible performance, and the closet, made-to-read screenplay as a class of literary fiction. Engaging theoretical traditions of narratology, authorship, and adaptation studies, the research illuminates how to read a screenplay aesthetically, invoking the fictional blueprint metaphor as a new interpretive strategy that views the script as independent and complete, outside any actual production reality.
Open Access
The Dynamic Story Mosaic: Defining Narrative Strategies in Transmedia Environments
(2016-11-25) Schneidmueller, Brigit Maria; Fisher, Caitlin
Transmedia storytelling became one of the most prevalent buzzwords in the mid- 2000s used to describe a wide array of storytelling forms ranging from entertainment franchises to alternate reality games to any project that told stories across more than one medium. Over time, the term had been diluted so significantly that it has lost most of its meaning, and the opaque discourse has left practitioners, scholars, and audiences alike confused about its true meaning. The Dynamic Story Mosaic: Defining Narrative Strategies in Transmedia Environments charts this development and offers a typology to identify and explain narrative strategies in multi-platform environments. The typology anchors on the two dimensions of narrative deviation and the number of release events over time; these dimensions are constitutive for the production, reception and marketing and branding of transmedia projects, and provide a stable basis for analysis and interpretation. Through a blend of analytic, comparative, and descriptive approaches, paired with a number of case studies, this dissertation is a historical analysis of the emergence of transmedia storytelling and transmedia discourse, and provides a direction in the analysis of transmedia projects by providing a typology that remains stable regardless of the future of storytelling in this area.
Open Access
The Flexible Face: Unifying the Protocols of Facial Recognition Technologies
(2023-08-04) Tucker, Aaron; Rogers, Kenneth B.
“The Flexible Face: Unifying the Protocols of Facial Recognition Technologies” reconstructs the key historical constellations of technical, representational, and political protocols that have resulted in contemporary facial recognition technologies’ (FRTs) ubiquitous field of automated vision. This dissertation excavates the past 200 years including case studies such as the Nippon Electric Company’s work on the first public demonstration of FRTs in 1970, the 1990s establishment of the massive dataset FERET, and the contemporary solving of masked faces within FRTs during COVID, while also involving unique archival work from The Francis Galton Papers (London U.K.) and the papers of Woodrow “Woody” Bledsoe (University of Texas at Austin). From this historical scholarship, this dissertation argues that FRTs’ effectiveness as a biopolitical tactic is rooted in an incredible adaptability and flexibility brought about by the technology’s entwined technical, representational, and political protocols. Utilizing a three-pronged media archeological methodology, this dissertation presents a unified understanding of FRTs’ three sets of protocols working symbiotically: the technical protocols draw from vision science rooted in 19th century experimental psychology which have been expanded into deterministic and linear models of vision, powered by advancements in the science of vision, computer science, and computer vision; representational protocols, most overtly present in the facial databases used in machine learning training and operationalizing of the technology, act under predictive logics to categorize and hierarchize the faces under observation into stable data defined by difference; political protocols, in combinations of state and corporate actors under globalized capitalism, manage and control individuals and populations through the gathering and circulation of facial data and by use of the technology, often in service of a self-perpetuating hegemonic power powered by asymmetrical control of political recognition. This dissertation’s historical approach surfaces how the various formations of protocols within FRTs have depended upon, and continue to depend upon, the circulations of both top-down and bottom-up forms of power united with performances of citizenship that collapse consent and coercion within the behaviour of citizens and non-citizens in ways that manage and gatekeep resources related to citizenship, in particular during moments of crisis.
Open Access
"The Place of Imagination": Humphrey Jennings and the Biopoetics of Everyday Life
(2020-11-13) Birdwise, Scott William Douglas; Marchessault, Janine Michele
This dissertation seeks to reanimate discussion of British artist and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings by reconsidering his body of work in light of the biopolitical transformations of modern life. While biopolitics is a familiar paradigm in the humanities and social sciences that understands how the category of life, in the figure of the population, became the primary object of political management and control, Jennings is famous for his poetic documentary films about the everyday life of resistance during the Second World War. Remembered as the cinematic poet of ordinary people, Jennings combined his concern with everyday life with his ongoing interest in Classical and Romantic traditions of poetry and painting modulated by the formative influence of Surrealism, to become one of the most significant British documentary filmmakers of the first half of the twentieth century. Bringing together a concern with everyday life with questions of poetic form and meaning, then, this dissertation uses the concept of biopoetics to examine how Jennings repeatedly returns to an animating tension between the poetic imagination of the people, on the one hand, and the management of the population on the other. In order to draw out how Jenningss oeuvre is animated by tensions within the people/population, this dissertation moves roughly chronologically through a selection of Jennings's projects, including his contributions to British Surrealism and the social research organization Mass-Observation in the 1930s; his unfinished imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution, Pandaemonium; and his documentary films made under the auspices of the Crown Film Unit during the war. In each case, this dissertation examines how Jenningss use of an array of poetic and cinematic techniques emerges from a biopoetic desire to at once document and transform the everyday life of the people.