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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Film aesthetics'
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1
Wood, Sarah. "Lost film found film." Thesis, University of Kent, 2015. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/48012/.
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In an age where the historical event is mediated increasingly through the still and moving image, new stress is placed on the archival image as surviving evidence of and performer of history. Lost Film Found Film asks what the scope is for re-intervention by artists who engage with the documentary archival. What is found in their reappropriation? What is lost in the remix? Through a discussion of key works by Jean-Luc Godard, Hito Steyerl, Harun Farocki, Jayce Salloum, Johan Grimonprez and Eyal Sivan, Lost Film Found Film offers a definition and a description of what I have called the Cinema of Aftermath. I define this as cinema that evolved in the aftermath of the Second World War, that deploys found footage film not only as a form of critique but also as a form of participation in wider historical and political events. I argue that the Cinema of Aftermath comments on politics and is also political. Central to its project is a questioning of the potency of the archival image in both its self-reflexive and wider cultural use. In three chapters, I explore how the Cinema of Aftermath recalibrates the meaning and renews the formal possibilities of the documentary, and analyse the performance of memory, truth and evidence by this aestheticisation of archival image.
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Downey, John William. "Aesthetics, critical theory, and cinema." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.260587.
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Hoffman, Sarah G. "Not Just Entertainment: Hollywood Animation and the Corporate Merchandising Aesthetics and Narratives for a Children’s Audience." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1490966620486322.
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Rocha, Antunes Luis. "The multisensory film experience : a cognitive model of experiential film aesthetics." Thesis, University of Kent, 2017. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/62461/.
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This thesis introduces the concept of the multisensory film experience through a cognitive model of experiential film aesthetics in which we argue in favour of the idea that spectators can have perceptual experiences of film in the realm of thermoception, nociception and the vestibular sense-all of which are senses outside of the classic senses of sight and hearing examined in the context of film studies. We examine each of these senses in relation to the work of three contemporary film directors who have taken stylistic and experiential advantage of these senses to build their own authorial voices, namely, Gus Van Sant, Ki- duk Kim and Knut Erik Jensen. We employ a combination of arguments from the field of multisensory studies (neuroscience) and cognitive film theory and from our own analysis of the stylistic elements of film. We call this a model of 'experiential film aesthetics' because of the intersection between stylistic elements and spectators' own perceptual mechanisms. Experiential film aesthetics are, therefore, a film experience that involves not the conventional idea of watching film in a perceptually detached manner but rather the idea of perceptually participating with senses that have no direct stimulation but rather indirect stimulation through visual and aural information. In this sense, we explore our proposed viewpoint, which is characterised by the apparent paradox that the film medium in its conventional audio-visual form is a sensory gateway to a multisensory experience. These experiential film aesthetics can serve as a useful introduction to further investigations of the experiential nature of film and across sensory modalities that have not yet been examined in film studies.
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Isaacs, Bruce. "Film Cool: Towards a New Film Aesthetic." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1156.
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The influential theorist, David Bordwell, talks about various modes of watching film: the intellectual, the casual, or the obsessive interaction with cinema practiced by the film-buff. This thesis is an attempt to come to terms with film and film culture in a number of ways. It is first an attempt at reinscribing a notion of aesthetics into film studies. This is not an easy task. I argue that film theory is not adequately equipped to discuss film in affective terms, and that instead, it emphasises ways of thinking about film and culture quite removed from the act of film ‘spectating’ – individually, or perhaps even more crucially, collectively. To my mind, film theory increasingly needs to ask: are theorists and the various subjectivities about whom they theorise watching the same films, and in the same way? My experience of film is, as Tara Brabazon writes about her own experience of film, a profoundly emotional one. Film is a stream of quotation in my own life. It is inextricably wrapped up inside memory (and what Hutcheon calls postmodern nostalgia). Film is experience. I would not know how to communicate what Sergio Leone ‘means’ or The Godfather ‘represents’ without engaging what Barbara Kennedy calls the ‘aesthetic impulse.’ In this thesis, I extrapolate from what film means to me to what it might mean to an abstract notion of culture. For this reason, Chapters Three and Four are necessarily abstract and tentatively bring together an analysis of The Matrix franchise and Quentin Tarantino’s brand of metacinema. I focus on an aesthetics of cinema rather than its politics or ideological fabric. This is not to marginalise such studies (which, in any case, this thesis could not do) but to make space for another perspective, another way of considering film, a new way of recuperating affect.
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Isaacs, Bruce. "Film Cool: Towards a New Film Aesthetic." English, School of Letters, Art and Media, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1156.
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PhDThe influential theorist, David Bordwell, talks about various modes of watching film: the intellectual, the casual, or the obsessive interaction with cinema practiced by the film-buff. This thesis is an attempt to come to terms with film and film culture in a number of ways. It is first an attempt at reinscribing a notion of aesthetics into film studies. This is not an easy task. I argue that film theory is not adequately equipped to discuss film in affective terms, and that instead, it emphasises ways of thinking about film and culture quite removed from the act of film ‘spectating’ – individually, or perhaps even more crucially, collectively. To my mind, film theory increasingly needs to ask: are theorists and the various subjectivities about whom they theorise watching the same films, and in the same way? My experience of film is, as Tara Brabazon writes about her own experience of film, a profoundly emotional one. Film is a stream of quotation in my own life. It is inextricably wrapped up inside memory (and what Hutcheon calls postmodern nostalgia). Film is experience. I would not know how to communicate what Sergio Leone ‘means’ or The Godfather ‘represents’ without engaging what Barbara Kennedy calls the ‘aesthetic impulse.’ In this thesis, I extrapolate from what film means to me to what it might mean to an abstract notion of culture. For this reason, Chapters Three and Four are necessarily abstract and tentatively bring together an analysis of The Matrix franchise and Quentin Tarantino’s brand of metacinema. I focus on an aesthetics of cinema rather than its politics or ideological fabric. This is not to marginalise such studies (which, in any case, this thesis could not do) but to make space for another perspective, another way of considering film, a new way of recuperating affect.
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McCann, G. K. "The keys to dreamland : Marxism, aesthetics and film." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.236971.
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Mokoena, Katleho Karabo. "Black aesthetics and the son of man film." Diss., University of Pretoria, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/63033.
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The Son of Man (2006) is the first film in the Jesus film genre with an entirely black cast,
including the leading role of a black Jesus. Historically, the Jesus film genre has been
produced by western filmmakers with a white cast in ancient film sets, portraying how the
world of Jesus would have been in first century Palestine. Portrayals of Jesus are, thus,
typically portrayed as a white man with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and long white/brown
robes with sandals. Son of Man however, places the narrative of Jesus in a contemporary
South African context. Jesus is black, bald-headed, speaks isiXhosa, and upholds
isiXhosa culture and tradition. Son of Man is a transcultural narrative of Jesus, relating
the gospel narrative(s) to the black experience in South Africa. Son of Man diminishes
the perception that the image of Jesus can only be portrayed as western. It reinforces the
ideology of Black Consciousness and the praxis of Black Theology creatively and
artistically through film. This study analyses arguments about the purpose and role of art (film) in the black
experience. This study will demonstrate how art may be used to address social injustices
in post-1994 South Africa and the Son of Man film will be used as a case study. First, we
will discuss the interdisciplinary study in the fields of Theology and Film Studies: provide
the history of the portrayal of the Jesus figure in film, and define black aesthetics. Second,
we will relate blackness and art from the Black Power Movement in the United States of
America and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa during the 1960s. We
will also discuss how Black Liberation Theology relates to aesthetics. Third, we will
discuss the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Fourth, we will explore what it
means to be black and Christian in post-apartheid South Africa. Last, we will integrate
these findings and provide a conclusion.Dissertation (MA Theol)--University of Pretoria, 2017.
Dogmatics and Christian Ethics
MA Theol
Unrestricted
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Mroz, Matilda. "The aesthetics of cinematic duration in theory and film." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.612172.
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Taylor, James. "Hollywood superheroes : the aesthetics of comic book to film adaptation." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/93641/.
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This thesis develops a theoretically-informed approach with which to analyse the aesthetics of the adaptation of superhero comic books into blockbuster films. Pervasive modes of thinking present superhero blockbusters as artistically degraded products that are not worthy of aesthetic analysis. I demonstrate that exploring the ways in which superhero blockbusters adapt comic book style and form reveals aesthetic sophistication and multiplicities of meaning. Engaging with comic book and film history also enables me to identify ways in which superhero blockbusters have contributed to the development of Hollywood’s blockbuster filmmaking paradigm. My approach combines models and concepts from studies of adaptation that employ poststructuralist theory. This theoretical framework explains transformations that content may undergo as it is adapted between the different forms available to comics and film, and enables examination of dialogues occurring in the vast networks of intertexts in which superhero blockbusters are situated. After my review of literature establishes the thesis’ theoretical underpinnings, my chapters undertake close textual analysis of three distinct case studies. The selection of case studies allows me to continue to develop my approach by examining different superhero archetypes, alongside significant contexts, trends and technologies that impact Hollywood blockbusters. Chapter one looks at the first superhero blockbuster, Superman: The Movie (1978). I begin by outlining, and exploring relations between, the range of Superman texts released prior to the film. Doing so reveals the qualities of the intertextual networks that comprise a superhero franchise. I then analyse the strategies that Superman: The Movie deploys to adapt and enter the network of Superman texts, before situating the film in the context of the emerging blockbuster paradigm in 1970s Hollywood. Chapters two and three analyse films produced in the twenty-first century, as superhero blockbusters gained a central position in Hollywood production. Chapter two evaluates the aesthetics of the Spider-Man trilogy (2002, 2004 and 2007) in relation to two contexts that are often considered to have facilitated the superhero blockbuster’s twenty-first century success: the increasing use and sophistication of digital filmmaking technologies in Hollywood, and the contemporary sociopolitical climate. Looking at the representation of bodies and space elucidates the ways in which the films incorporate digital filmmaking technologies into their adaptive practices and offer a sociopolitical commentary. Chapter three examines the strategies that films produced by Marvel Studios, with particular focus on team film The Avengers (2012), deploy to adapt the model of seriality that superhero comic books use to interconnect multiple series in a shared diegesis. The analysis focuses on ways in which The Avengers uses bodies and space to compress the expansive diegetic universe into a single film, and interrogates how these strategies shape the film’s sociopolitical meanings. My case studies demonstrate that the approach developed in this thesis illuminates the complex and equivocal meanings that the adaptive practices of superhero blockbusters generate.
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Vitali, Valentina. "The aesthetics of cultural modernisation : Hindi cinema in the 1950s." Thesis, University of Ulster, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.268856.
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Magara, Cindy Evelyn. "Contemporary East African Cinema: Emergent Themes and Aesthetics." Thesis, University of Sydney, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/24115.
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At the turn of the 21st Century, a dynamic and eclectic cinema that had been slowly developing in the East African region gain traction. Yet, the nascent cinematic imaginaries of East Africa have received the least scholarly attention of all the regional cinemas of the African continent. The study explores emergent themes and aesthetics of East African Cinema by locating East African cinema in contemporary African cinema criticism, particularly its indigenous concepts, epistemes and approaches to film analysis. By conceptualising eclectic national cinemas into a complex homogenous entity, I argue that the various national cinemas of East Africa are best understood as a single regional, transnational cinema (at least within East Africa), given the shared socio-political, economic and cultural experiences, and this homogeneity manifests in the representation of parallel themes and aesthetics. I also posit that East African cinema is not a closed static cinema, however, because its aesthetics are influenced by other continental and international cinemas such as Nollywood, Bollywood, Hollywood and European cinema. Despite these influences, the narratives of East African cinema continue to be centrally organised in terms of African oral storytelling aesthetics. To explore the emergent themes and aesthetics in East African cinema, this study employs a range of disciplinary research methods. By combining close textual analysis with interviews with significant East African filmmakers, this thesis examines how the East African filmmakers partake of their presumed role of modern griots to reflect and shape popular discourses. Such discourses include the representation of history in the post-colonial era, power struggles concerning gender, class conflict, and migration to the Western world, all of which are recurrent themes in films across the region.
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明奇英 and Kee-ying Thomas Ming. "An analysis of the filmic: a philosophical grounding for film aesthetics." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1993. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31212578.
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Tweed, Hannah Catherine. "Aesthetics of autism? : contemporary representations of autism in literature and film." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2015. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5996/.
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This thesis analyses representations of autism in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglo-American literature and film. It posits that, while many cultural portrayals of autism are more concerned with perpetuating the stereotypes surrounding the condition than with representing autistic experiences, there is evidence of a small but significant counter-current that is responding to and challenging more reductive representational modes. Each of my chapters examines prevailing narrative tropes that reinforce existing stereotypes of disability (narratives of overcoming, victimhood, dependency), which can be clearly evidenced in contemporary depictions of autism, from Barry Levinson’s Rain Man (1988) to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). In each case, a significant proportion of texts use the generic markers of autistic representation to question and subvert these more established literary and cinematic approaches. The twenty-first century authors discussed in this thesis repurpose and interrogate the prevailing stereotypes of autistic representations, and provide provocative considerations for the study of postmodernism, crime fiction, melodrama and autobiography. This critical crossover and the employment of genre tropes cross-examines the subversive potential of genre fiction and the significance of postmodernism as frameworks for examining depictions of autism. This thesis proposes that this crucial minority of texts embodies a writing forwards out of stereotypes of autistic representations, by both autistic and neurotypical authors, into new, twenty-first century representational patterns.
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Ming, Kee-ying Thomas. "An analysis of the filmic : a philosophical grounding for film aesthetics /." [Hong Kong] : University of Hong Kong, 1993. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B15949941.
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Leadbetter, Katharine. "The achievement of female presence on film." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c9239c60-f0a8-41fc-9250-ddea73f9c9c6.
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This thesis examines the different ways films have explored female presence as a narrative and stylistic concern. The role of female presence in the creation of film meaning has often been reductively minimised or altogether neglected within many theoretical approaches to cinema. Depictions of female characters—especially those found in Hollywood films—have been viewed by feminist critics only in terms of the manifestation of sexist ideological principles, whilst more recently, 'affective' film theorists have reduced the role of presence to a simple question of fluctuating physical intensity. This thesis contests these limiting and monolithic understandings of the function of female presence by demonstrating how films have produced complex and diverse meanings through their portrayals of women characters. Closely analysing films by six directors from various styles of cinema, including examples from Classic Hollywood film and more experimental or avant-garde works, the thesis contends that films can raise the question of the condition of a female character's presence as a vital component of meaning. It illuminates how the subject of female presence is advanced, moment-to-moment, as a crucial element in the achievement of these films' intricately wrought dramas. The thesis therefore shows that female film presence is neither simply a symptom of ideology, nor a vehicle for varying degrees of affective intensity. Rather, it is something which is actively at stake in the drama and the design of films.
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Todd, Jeffrey M. "Einstein's film theory of montage and architecture." Thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/21653.
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Yanick, Anthony Joseph. "Prolegomena to a Theory of Cinematic Bodies: What Can an Image Do?" Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1386619321.
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Tohline, Andrew M. "Towards a History and Aesthetics of Reverse Motion." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1438771690.
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Hendricks, Jonathan. "Playing-With the World: Toy Story's Aesthetics and Metaphysics of Play." Scholar Commons, 2017. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6709.
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Pixar’s Toy Story (John Lassiter, 1995) is not just a story about toys and the children that play with them, but a demonstration of how we interact with the world. This thesis looks at the way in which both main children, Andy and Sid, interact with their toys and how this interaction is one that is structured by way of what Martin Heidegger calls “Enframing.” In this modality of playing, toys and other things and entities in the world, and the world itself, appear to the children as on-hand resources for use at any time and can be molded, as if plastic, to fit their needs. I problematize this way of interacting with the world by looking at not only it manifests in Toy Story, but also in the process of the film’s production, Silicon Valley aesthetics, our reliance upon plastics, neoliberal capital in light of the “1099 economy,” and ecological ramifications of these practices as seen in the ecological registers. Through these metaphysics, we seek to mold the world in accordance with human-centered interests as we play within the world. My thesis also turns to understand how metaphysics has transformed over time so that we can work towards bringing forth a different way of relating to the world that is sustainable, ethical, and one of care. I argue for an understanding of things in the world likened to an interconnected and interdependent network that we are always connected to, and in an “interplay” with. I conclude the project by arguing for a possible turn to the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, and other philosophers who work in process metaphysics for a possible reinvigoration of “apparatus theory,” which has lost favor with many film scholars since the 1970s/1980s. I argue that a process framework could provide fresh light on the cinematic apparatus in light of digital at-home streaming services, as well as work towards revealing stronger interlinked connections between media, economics, ecology, geopolitics, etc.
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Taig, Phillip Barry. "The Musicality of The Sublime: Romantic sensibilities in film music." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2021. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/24674.
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This thesis gives a cultural and philosophical account of the meaning of music through the analysis of romantic film music as it underscores dramatic, narrative film. The argument is furnished by thinkers and poets of the Romantic revolution in thought, language and sensibility that took place at the end of the eighteenth century and into the first third of the nineteenth century. The main claim is that romantic orchestral music is particularly suited, and has become ubiquitous as a standard, for expressing the darkness of the human heart; exhilarated and awed by the thrills and terrors of the sublime; elated and tortured by its pleasures and pains; recognizing that even happiness, pleasure and love are underwritten by the dark reality of our divided selves engaging a world riven by contradictions.
Schiller’s conception of das Musikalische, as a pre-conceptual reflection of the importance of music, provides a potent starting point for this argument. The ability of music to express a characteristic darkness, which finds its way into romantic orchestral film music, is enlisted precisely because only it can express such darkness in consonance with the existential and chiaroscuro darkness of film and cinematic experience as a spectacle of the sublime.
Chapter one cites some examples of symphonic orchestral film music in order to locate the style of music to be discussed. Chapter two presents a philosophical argument that justifies the main claims of the thesis. Chapter three presents a concise historical account, connecting the dark sublime of romantic literary practice with the evolution of dark themes in popular entertainment, leading eventually to the films of Hollywood’s Golden Era. Chapter four connects the mythological programme of Wagner’s conception of music drama with the New Mythology of the Romantics, and demonstrates how this programme came to influence symphonic film music. Chapters five and six give a musical and filmic analysis that illustrates the claims made throughout the thesis. Chapter five examines an instance of music composed in the late-romantic period being applied to a film. Chapter six gives a detailed analysis of two films that demonstrate abundantly the application of a dark sublime aesthetic to cinematic experience through the use of symphonic orchestral film music, and extends the insights gained to other, illustrative examples.
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Roesch, Matthew. "Les Sensations fortes: The phenomenological aesthetics of the French action film." The Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1499821478202158.
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Virvidaki, Aikaterini. "Testing coherence in narrative film." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f8be5619-95b9-4810-a46b-2712707f80aa.
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This thesis aims to explore how narrative films that are marked by crucial obscurities and explanatory gaps in their development manage to become coherent. More specifically, the thesis is interested in examining how these obscurities and explanatory gaps can be understood as meaningful aspects of the films' organisation. Since the function of coherence in film has rarely been examined directly, the thesis first attempts to illuminate it by drawing on the work of two aestheticians who have examined it more systematically. Thus, the first part of the thesis discusses the work of Victor F. Perkins and George Wilson, while attempting to explore aspects of the work of these two aestheticians through the analysis of specific films. The writings of Perkins and Wilson provide a good starting point for the thesis because they raise crucial questions regarding the ways through which narrative films manage to deal with significant tensions in their organisation and intelligibility. The main body of the thesis (the second part of the thesis) then examines four narrative films, each of which is marked by a significant aspect of apparent incoherence. In each case, the thesis attempts to show that this aspect of apparent incoherence - rather than merely obstructing the film's intelligibility - essentially contributes to the creation of the film's idiosyncratic internal logic. In order to understand how this becomes possible, the thesis pays close attention to the ways in which the various components of each examined film relate to each other, observing and analysing the aesthetic strategies which enable each examined film ultimately to come together.
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Gavhed, Kristina. "Using the New to get hold of the Old : self-representation, visual representation, and identity creation through new media." Thesis, Konstfack, Institutionen för Bildpedagogik (BI), 2010. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:konstfack:diva-3303.
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My BA-thesis deals with the matter of identity, and how the use of convergent and new media construct a prerequisite for identity construction. In what ways are socio-cultural exchangesvisible within these media? How do convergent and contemporary media help with representation of self and self-expression? I wanted to investigate how online social networks such as Facebook and blogs affect identity and if it changes the conditions under which identity is created. Through denotations and connotations others absorb this information and appropriate it before they in turn share it. I have performed interviews with four main sources who‟ve all revealed how they interact online. In an anonymous online survey five informants offered responses on their social networking habits as well, confirming that most people do not randomly search for information but are instead given information through already established contacts.The artistic presentation of my work began as a series of portraits of myself in various outfits.I then altered this to a brief film, where I copied my face onto bodies of models, similar to paper dolls – a way to represent the idea that by altering clothes my identity changes in the eyes of others, while on the inside I remain the same as I ever was. I then made two short films, about 5-6 minutes in length where I give two lessons: one on how to do a Victory Roll hairstyle, and one on how to put on a 1940‟s inspired make-up, similar to the tutorials one can find on Youtube.com. I then turned all three movies into a DVD, which I showed at the Konstfack Spring Exhibition. I created a small dressing room with the intent of having visitors try on clothes they might not otherwise wear. During the process of writing this essay I have come to the conclusion that we are constantly affected by input from sources around us. We are all part of a network, online and away from the keyboard, of a never ending flow of information. However, with the ever expanding availability of social media our sources increase and even a person who never leaves his or her city has many more options of broadening their horizons, of finding information possibly not available to them before. In regards to how this affects students and teachers it offers more freedom but also responsibility. Teachers must stay on top of new developments, as well as be up to date on new findings. Students now have the freedom to search for information outside the classroom, as well as outside their social cultural setting. Also, as contemporary and convergent media is largely image based even those who are illiterate can with the help of friends, or on their own, find many image sources and via this visual medium be part of the chain of information and expand their knowledge.
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Vidal, Belén. "Text/figure/fantasy : from period aesthetics to the literary film in contemporary cinema." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.414036.
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Skopeteas, Ioannis. "Photographic practice and aesthetics in the film image : the case of the Greek feature films in the mid 1990s." Thesis, University of Westminster, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.434289.
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Seijo, Maxximilian. "Anti-Fascist Aesthetics from Weimar to MoMA: Siegfried Kracauer & the Promise of Abstraction for Critical Theory." Scholar Commons, 2019. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7933.
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This thesis re-examines the life's work of German-American critical theorist, Siegfried Kracauer, to recover abstraction from tacit historical associations with modern fascism. Evoked in critical theory more generally, the abstraction-to-fascism-teleology imagines 20th century fascism as the dialectical fulfillment of modern alienation. Rooting such alienation in the flawed Liberal and Marxist conceptions of monetary relations, critical theorists conduct their aesthetic analyses via ambivalent condemnations of abstraction’s assumed primordial alienation. In the thesis, I critique the abstraction-to-fascism-teleology through an affirmation of neochartalist political economy’s conception of money’s essential publicness and abundance. Drawing from this abstract legal mediation, I trace Kracauer’s various condemnations of abstraction along the terms of his embodied contradiction among the WWII and Cold War fiscal mobilizations to illuminate repressed pleas for abstract mediation within his work and midcentury aesthetic realism broadly. Further, I move from the midcentury moment to the Weimar moment in order to locate potential in Kracauer’s early affirmation of abstraction as a communal medium. I find such affirmations neglected in the Liberal and Marxist responses to the unemployment crises of the Great Depression in Germany. By looking to Kracauer’s Weimar essays on architecture and photography, as well as a reading of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), I pinpoint historical and contemporary promise in their commitment to the inclusive potential of abstraction’s (no)thing- ness, a commitment that was mirrored in the proposed monetary issuance of the WTB public works plan of 1932, which was ultimately rejected by the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the lead up to their defeat in the parliamentary elections of 1933 and the Nazis’ rise to power.
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Xu, Jiacheng 4159187. "Yi, Observational Documentary Aesthetics, and the Identity Politics of Transcultural Migrancy." VCU Scholars Compass, 2017. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4816.
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There is a moment in Edward Yang’s acclaimed film Yi Yi (2000) in which a young boy in a conversation with his father observes that he cannot see what his father sees and that his father cannot see what he sees, prompting two questions: “How can I know what you see?” and “Can we only know half of the truth?” Unable to provide adequate answers, his father instead offers his son a camera. Later in the film, the same boy presents his uncle with a picture he took of the back of his head. When asked why, the boy responds by saying, “You cannot see it yourself, so I’m helping you.” These two scenes in Yang’s film illustrate the spirit of the questions that guide the aesthetic approach I have taken in my own documentary project. My thesis is composed of two parts: a video project and a research paper, the former of which is a documentary entitled Yi. Named after its primary subject, the film explores the intersections of transnational migrancy and cultural identity through a series of interviews that are intercut with scenes of everyday life that are shot in an observational style. The research paper that follows will situate the project within a specific historical, conceptual, and aesthetic context, before delineating how the cinematic composition of my documentary engages with this framework.
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Payne, Simon. "Materiality and medium-specificity : digital aesthetics in the context of experimental film and video." Thesis, Royal College of Art, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.503027.
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This thesis proposes a concept of materiality and medium-specificity that is relevant to the theorisation of digital aesthetics in the context of experimental film and video. Drawing on the example of structural/materialist film, in particular, the thesis presents a critique of several theories associated with new technology, which describe digital media as immaterial and privilege practices that involve virtual reality, immersive environments and cinematic aesthetics. The discussion of a number of key experimental films and videos highlights differences between film, analogue and digital video, but the issue of materiality is not located in terms of technology alone. The comparison and analysis of individual works, in terms of the subjectivity they engender, shows materiality to be located in the relationship between the work and the viewer. In revisiting a range of significant historical films and videos from a digital age the thesis offers a new perspective on past works as well as offering an original account of the contemporary films and videos that are discussed. In considering aesthetics associated with intervals, framing, abstraction and the concept of medium-specificity more generally, the thesis points to aesthetic strategies and an approach to practice that might carry across media. The five videos that accompany the thesis pose questions that are analogous to those that are raised by some of the work discussed in the writing; and in tackling the materiality of the medium they contribute to the project's definition of a critical practice.
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Warwick, Harry. "The aesthetics of enclosure : dystopia and dispossession in the 1980s Hollywood science-fiction film." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2018. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/427159/.
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As an increasing body of historical and economic scholarship attests, the processes Marx placed under the heading of 'primitive accumulation', and which he saw as the precondition of capitalism, continue today in a particularly intense form. If Marx's main example in Capital, Volume 1 (1867) was the enclosure of English land from the late fifteenth century, now scholars can point to the expansion of intellectual property rights, the privatisation of water and other public services, the sale of the US national forests, the imposition of 'structural adjustment programmes', and the war in Afghanistan as so many 'new enclosures'-efforts to bring ever greater zones of human activity within the ambit of capitalist production. Yet what remains unexamined in this still-growing literature is how the new enclosures have been represented in the sphere of culture. Have cultural forms been able to register these new expropriations? If so, how have they depicted a process that is pervasive, but whose forms of appearance are so diverse? This thesis endeavours to answer such questions through the analysis of five major Hollywood science-fiction films of the 1980s: Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), and Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987) and Total Recall (1990). It argues that, taken together, these films develop an 'aesthetic of enclosure': a series of representational strategies that make enclosure visible. Typically understood by scholars as a critical and historicising genre, the science-fiction film is well positioned to detect, examine, and challenge capitalism's renewed efforts to privatise and dispossess.
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Furstenau, Marc. "Cinema, language, reality : digitization and the challenge to film theory." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=84508.
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Digital cinema has provoked a strong response over the last decade, not only from the movie-going public, but also from film theorists. It has re-opened basic theoretical questions about cinematic representations of and reference to reality.This thesis begins with a critical review of the vast theoretical literature dealing with the digitization of the cinema. Most theorists have come to the conclusion that the cinema is dead because digitization has severed the ties between what we see on the screen and real life. At root, this conclusion is derived from a structuralist, nominalist position prevalent in contemporary film theory.
I argue, instead, that film theory needs to re-address the complex issue of the relationship between image and reality, rather than simply accepting the traditional view. In so doing, I follow Stanley Cavell's call for a more thorough consideration of realist traditions in film theory, the premise of which is an unquestioned relationship between representation and reality.
The complexity and subtlety of that relationship has been addressed most systematically and fruitfully by Charles Saunders Peirce. Indeed, many structuralist theorists have made reference to Peirce in response to the shortcomings of a semiologically inflected film theory. In the second step of my argument, however, I show that structuralist theory has produced misleading conclusions, since a Peircian semiotics is incommensurable with the structuralist position. In fact, this implicit conflict has led theorists to doubt the real in the digital cinema, rather than investigating the logically necessary continuity of reality and representation, regardless of its technological kind.
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Dickerson, Allyson. "The Accompanied Experience and the Aesthetics of Memory." Honors in the Major Thesis, University of Central Florida, 2014. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETH/id/1584.
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For me, a memory is the thought of a feeling. Feeling, in this case, is the appreciable radiation of sensory emanating from all objects and persons in a given moment of time. “All thought,
like all feeling, is a relationship between one human being and another human being or certain objects which form a part of his universe” (Astruc). Be it an instance of attraction to another person, a place, a creation, an object, or purely an aesthetic pleasure, said instance will become ingrained as a part of an aggregation of moment-to-moment experiences that form an individual’s universe and lifetime of perceptions. Through film, I hope to give a visual tangibility for such feelings, a replayable, and relatively more permanent, representation. It’s a process similar to the way a headstone memorializes a life. A few words in stone could never measure up to the present time of actually living, but this is because they are not comparable. In much the same way, a synthesized montage of images cannot be compared to a memory, but should be used as way to experience the memory in a new way.B.F.A.
Bachelors
Visual Arts and Design
Arts and Humanities
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Williams, Daniel. "The role of imagination in Bergman, Klein and Sartre." Thesis, Brunel University, 2013. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/7448.
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This thesis provides an inter-disciplinary study of selected works by Ingmar Bergman. I explore how key concepts from Melanie Klein and Jean-Paul Sartre apply to the focus on characters in a state of heightened imagination; and the value placed on imagination in the construction of these films. This involves recognition of the way an active response from the viewer is encouraged. Klein, Sartre and Bergman also attend to contextual factors that challenge any notion of subjectivity as sovereign and the power of imagination is frequently placed in a social context. All three figures develop their ideas within specialised fields drawing on the influence of others. Chapter 2 shows how Klein’s ideas relate to the influence of Freud before exploring how her work can be applied to Bergman’s films through the example of Wild Strawberries. Chapter 3 concentrates on Sartre’s early work, The Imaginary and considers how this is significant in relation to some of Sartre’s better-known philosophical ideas developed during and after the Second World War. These ideas will lead to an exploration of The Seventh Seal. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 focus on three films from distinct parts of Bergman’s career: Summer with Monika, The Virgin Spring and Hour of the Wolf. In Chapter 4 this will be preceded by a brief over-view of three more films from the early part of Bergman’s career. These chapters explore how Kleinian and Sartrean ideas can be incorporated in close analysis, and alongside selected critical responses to the films. The analysis integrates key points from Klein and Sartre in a methodology specific to film studies. This will include analysis of cinematic elements such as camera work and lighting, and recognition of narrative structure and character development
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Montgomery, Michael Vincent. "Bakhtin's chronotope and the rhetoric of Hollywood film." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/185758.
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This dissertation considers Hollywood film locales rhetorically, as the site of many different kinds of community activities and perspectives. In particular, my focus will be on locales and mise-en-scene elements that replicate certain "chronotopic" patterns of time and space organized by our culture in its literature. These special patterns, along with their signifying functions, were first outlined by Mikhail Bakhtin during the period 1937-1938. As a first step, I begin with a broad survey, outlining the salient features of Bakhtin's individual chronotopes ancient and modern, and considering fundamental connections between these chronotopes and classical Hollywood genres of the 1940s. I devote my second chapter to the exploration of other important theoretical bases of Bakhtin's work; in particular, to the belief in the rejuvenating power of folk language and the carnivalesque. My argument is that the "idyllic chronotope" is given the same position of centrality in Bakhtin's discussions of space and time as carnivalesque speech genres are in his discussions of language. The appearance of an "idyllic interlude" in a work of literature or in a film can suddenly throw the rest of the represented world into moralizing "perspective" just as a carnivalesque insult or quip can "degrade" a high-sounding speech. My third theoretical problem will be the reception and processing of the film text. How does the audience of a film apply their socially-formed schema and knowledge of the characters' "situations" to a film text in order to construct meaning? Here I demonstrate how the "high-lighting" of a film text with recognizable chronotopes can help an audience to form judgments about characters and to construct analogies between character situations and situations arising in their own communities. In my fourth and final chapter, I branch out from Bakhtin's models to consider new chronotopes as they may develop during a particular historical decade. Specifically, I examine the representation of the "shopping mall" as it appears throughout a dozen or so 1980s films in order to show how the spatiotemporal worlds suggested by these films can be "opened out" into a study of teen culture and social mores across the decade as a whole.
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Morales, Matthew. "Concerning Virtual Reality and Corporealized Media: Exploring Video Game Aesthetics and Phenomenology." Scholar Commons, 2018. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7343.
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Since the birth of the New Hollywood blockbuster out of the Hollywood Renaissance in the 1970s, popular moving image media has continually exhibited an intense interest in play with Newtonian physics and tactile, immediate experience. As the entertainment industry has moved further away from analog and celluloid and deeper into a digital media space, we have begun to see new a new breed of media project that differently engages with our sensorium in order to newly use (and abuse) this interest. I term this digital media project “corporealized media.” Corporealized media, as I define it, refers to media that includes, but is not limited to, the current undertaking in virtual reality technology and other media that has the primary focus of calling attention to or recognizing the user’s physicality, corporeal form, and embodiment. Through phenomenological readings of contemporary corporealized works, I suggest that current popular use of corporealized media is potentially dangerous and inhibiting to society. It has the ability not just to inform aesthetics, but also to shape our greater understanding of our potential connections to others. Instead of embracing physical contraction, we should aim to collectively accept the possible expansion that abstraction in media allows.
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Li, Hongyi. "From Present to Transcendental: Xian Chang Aesthetics in Sixth-Generation Films." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1596752736472154.
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McDiarmid, Heather E. (Heather Elizabeth). "The aesthetics of death, youth, and the road : the violent road film in popular culture." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=24093.
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The "roadkill" films are part of a sub-genre of the more popular road film genre. Recently there has been a large number of extremely violent films featuring couples on the run. The reason behind the emergence and popularity of the "roadkill" genre can be understood through an aesthetic analysis. Chapter one examines the aesthetics and affective characteristics of the extreme violence within this sub-genre of film. This chapter refers to the works of Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, as well as Rene Girard. Chapter two explores the postmodern aesthetic of the roadside iconography by using authors such as Jean Baudrillard and Robert Venturi. The third chapter considers the aesthetics of contemporary youth as well as the soundtracks of four of the main "roadkill" films: Kalifornia, Love and a.45, Natural Born Killers, and True Romance. By considering the aesthetic elements of the "roadkill" film, one can understand the timely emergence of this genre.
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Malmquist, Sebastian. "Aesthetics of Defiance : Queer Subjectivity in the Films of Xavier Dolan." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Filmvetenskap, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-145006.
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This master's thesis is an investigation into Xavier Dolan's depictions of queer and non-normative characters. Through close analyses of the director's first five films, this study identifies Dolan's recurring stylistics and narrative techniques, and how they relate to his cinematic representation of individuals who do not conform to society's norms. The question of how queer subjectivity is presented to the spectator of the films guides the study, which outlines different kinds of subjective images and ways of expressing the inner worlds of the protagonists. As one of the first extensive academic studies of Dolan in English, the thesis carries out a dialogue with the few existing scholarly sources on the filmmaker, while also employing theories put forward by Deleuze, Pasolini, Bonitzer and Foucault, among others. Whereas previous writings on Dolan have focused almost entirely on national aspects of his work – interpreting the films as typically Québécois – this study considers the filmmaker from an international perspective. Although being an auteur study, the thesis highlights current issues of queer self-representation and the voices of the marginalized, proposing that Dolan's work offers non-normative alternatives to heteronormative narrative structures, patriarchal storytelling conventions and traditional family constellations.
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Kennedy, Barbara M. "Towards an aesthetics of sensation : a reconsideration of film theory through Deleuzian philosophy and post-feminism." Thesis, Staffordshire University, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.327506.
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Seidel, Sebastian Martin. "A portfolio of compositions and an investigation into electroacoustic compositional techniques and aesthetics in cinematic film." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2014. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/98.
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The purpose of this study is to investigate the occurrences of electroacoustic content in and its relation to cinematic film. Key research questions include: What pioneering techniques and aesthetic positions used by creators of early electroacoustic music have found their way into mainstream cinema? Where and when have they been developed? In which films do they appear, and how are they distributed among film genres? The findings of this study assert the idea that many techniques that are part of sound design of contemporary cinematic film (the process and result of mixing and manipulating sounds) come directly from pioneers of electroacoustic music. Electroacoustic techniques and aesthetics play an important role in the history of sound film in making fundamental contributions to production processes, the relation between directors and sound makers, and film sound theory. On an aesthetic level, electroacoustic music in film has reformed the role of sound in film: a film score can contain 'noise', while speech and sound effects can actually serve as music. The findings also assert that electroacoustic techniques and aesthetics can be found in cinematic film from the beginning of sound film in the late 1920s. Once established, techniques have largely remained the same, regardless of the carrier media and their transformation from analog to digital: modern, digital techniques are refinements of their analog predecessors. Aesthetics have developed along with techniques, albeit much slower; their potential and exploration is far from being exhausted. The use of electroacoustic content for a particular element of film sound is not unusual and often genre-specific (for example in science fiction and thriller). However fully electroacoustic scores are rare. A portfolio of selected original compositions by the author complements this study. Acoustic and electroacoustic pieces for film and multimedia highlight different aesthetics, techniques and practices of film sound and film music.
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London, Joseph. "The Beloved: A documentary film on the history and aftermath of Fremantle’s Rajneesh sannyasin community – and – Hidden Realities: Transcendental Structures in Documentary Film: An exegesis." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2018. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/2130.
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This creative work and its associated exegesis examines the concept of what I have termed a ‘transcendental structure’ in relation to a documentary film form, and what outcomes, specific to a non-fiction mode of representation, result from the application of this structure. A transcendental structure in film has a long history of investigation and interpretation in narrative fiction film theory and practice, but is substantially absent from documentary scholarship. The topic appears, in different forms, in the critical writings of Zavattini (1940), Bazin (1946), Pasolini (1965), Schrader (1972), Deleuze (1985), and more recently, Perez (1998) and Minghelli (2016). All of these theorists have identified a cinema of a double nature: on one level, explicit in its narrative programme and engagement, while on another level, simultaneously registering a spatial and temporal ‘beyond’ that invites an alternative experience based on a formal engagement. This aesthetic or non-narrative dimension is made perceivable through cinematic strategies that aim to interrupt or suspend the narrative flow and foreground elements external to the narrative programme. It is for this reason that landscape holds particular importance to a transcendental structure; in its physical interaction with and set-apartness from the human narrative, and through this, in its contrasting temporality to the narrative and less tangible level of registration.
This research will proceed by testing this structure through my own creative practice: a documentary feature on Fremantle’s Rajneesh sannyasin community, titled The Beloved. This is an ongoing community in Fremantle, which in the eighties, experienced a dramatic and public rise and fall as a movement. It is also a community with which I have an enduring personal relationship. This has allowed me to address not only their public history, but also the troubled memory that survives within the community. This documentary will be accompanied by the exegesis which will identify the concept of a transcendental structure within fiction film scholarship and, in the absence of critical writings that relate to this concept in documentary, will examine documentaries that are able to be discussed in these terms. The key films that I examine in the exegesis include Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985), which brings the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust into the realm of present experience by rejecting archival imagery in favour of landscapes from the concentration camps in their contemporary state; and sleep furiously (Koppel, 2008), in which the unprocessed trauma of community disintegration is registered through affect-based experience rather than the narrative or representational programme.
From the sum of this research, I argue that the interview based historical documentary is particularly suitable as a platform for a transcendental structure, and useful to historical subjects of a sensitive, troubled, and unresolved nature. The double nature of the structure, exhibited in the dissociation of the voice recounting the historical narrative from imagery of present-day settings, opens up new communicative possibilities and spaces for the contemplation and processing of incomprehensible, repressed, or traumatic experience.
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Goritsas, Helen. "Beyond the limits of the auteur: on the possibility of an encounter theory of modern cinema." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/9493.
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Despite contention and criticism, auteur theory has significantly influenced screen studies for over half a century and has framed the recurring “brand” or “style” of a director’s personal vision as cinema’s major creative force. Bounded as that theory is within one person’s thoughts and defined in terms of a director’s finite subjectivity what of the auteur’s relation with the world beyond their private selves? As a counterpoint to the exaltation of the cult of the director and in order to restore to film its value as a work, both this thesis and my associated studio practice will engage in a meditation on the idea of surpassing the self in the process of creation. This is an acknowledgement of an act in which one is both present but in a moment of leaving the self behind, dissolving the barrier between self and other as exemplified by the director’s willingness to yield to the work and during acts of genuine collaboration. In choosing the human factor, despite the industrial nature of film production, the view of authorship offered - the possibility of an Encounter Theory of Modern Cinema, a dialogical philosophy of transformative meeting will endeavour to broaden the concept of the auteur, beyond the self-enclosed, private subjectivity of the director. Encounter theory is grounded upon the percussive seeds of Personalist humanism which so informed the criticism of film theorist Andre Bazin. Personalism affirms the absolute dignity and value of persons as subjects and not as objects in which each person is not isolated from others but engaged in interpersonal relations. In acknowledging the interdependence of existence, Encounter Theory thus constitutes a refutation of an either/or division and proposes an aesthetics of cinema concerned with “relation between.” The overall aim of this thesis is to explore in depth the film medium’s primary artistic advantage, namely, its capacity to derive benefit from the negation of the presence of man, an acknowledgment of the continuum of existence in the very absence of one’s own self. Andre Bazin’s reflection upon “the world in its own image” interestingly pointed to this very challenge in cinema: the manifestation of the unique image that could overcome the distinction of the subject and object dichotomy, neither the expression of individual subjectivity, the distorting perspective of a singular point of view, nor the representation of illusion, acting as a barrier between life and art. In starting from the premise that it is from relations that we deduce things, it is concluded that “personal vision” is not an isolated phenomenon and that connectedness is an integral part of our relationship to one another and the world around us.
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Lacunza, Mariana A. "“Digital Aesthetics and Notions of Identity in Contemporary Bolivian Filmmaking” “Estéticas digitales y nociones de identidad en el cine boliviano contemporáneo”." The Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1325178598.
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McDaniel, Kyle. "Aesthetics of Historiophoty: The Uses and Affects of Visual Effects for Photography in the Historical Documentary Film." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/20729.
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This dissertation examines the origins, applications, and functions of visual effects in the historical documentary film. This research study investigates how aesthetic and editorial practices and tools are used for different image forms and as part of the visual presentation. A research design that implements qualitative interviews, visual analysis, and focus groups was incorporated to examine visual effects and images at three specific sites. The pan-and-zoom effect and its variants as well as select titles from the filmography of Ken Burns were used as case studies for this dissertation. The findings from the analyses suggest that visual effects for still image forms and the repetition of these applications and strategies are significant to the content depicted in images, the scope of the visual presentation, and the capacity for audiences to connect to historical information in the film.
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Jennings, Danny Roy. "The Aesthetics of Nature and the Cinematic Sublime: A Creative Investigation into an Organic Transcendental Film Style." Thesis, Curtin University, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/58984.
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The aim of this practice-based screen arts doctoral thesis is to investigate how cinematic representations of nature evoke an aesthetic of the sublime. The thesis answers this research question both through experimental film practice and critical analysis of theoretical and artistic texts. Informed by concepts such as the sublime, transcendence, the metaphysical imagination, critical realism and phenomenology, and the films Werner Herzog and Andrei Tarkovsky, this thesis investigates an organic transcendental film style.
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Hexel, Vasco. "Understanding contextual agents and their impact on recent Hollywood film music practice." Thesis, Royal College of Music, 2014. http://researchonline.rcm.ac.uk/382/.
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Hollywood film composers work within a complex process of film production, with limited control over the final outcome. Certain contextual agents have shaped the developing craft and caused recent Hollywood film music (since 1980) to depart from the symphonic neo-Romantic style that has traditionally and commonly been associated with Hollywood film scores. Developments in storytelling, changing demographics among filmmakers and composers, evolving business models, and the influence of television have altered the content and style of Hollywood films and film music. Furthermore, technological advances in film, soundtrack, and music production have contributed to changes in prevalent composer practice. Film music is always mediated by the films it accompanies and contemporary Hollywood films that speak a progressive language tend not to use conventional music of the classical Hollywood tradition. Film music must bow to commercial pressures that are often at odds with originality. An analysis of the workload distribution among composers in the 50 top-grossing Hollywood films each year between 1980-2009 reveals an uneven distribution skewed towards a select few individuals. These composers exert considerable influence on their field. Further findings summarized in this thesis also show a statistically significant increase in non-melodic minimalist writing as well as strong correlations between non-orchestral instrumentation and non-traditional musical styles over the past three decades. This thesis assesses recent Hollywood film music practice and the opportunities and challenges screen composers face. Acknowledging the role and influence of so-called contextual agents in film music composition means to consider film scores in the spheres of conceptualisation and compositional practice. The key research question addressed in this thesis is: 'What is the context in which Hollywood film composers actually work and how does this affect their creative practice and the musical outcome?'
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Clayton, George Wickham. "Bearing witness to a whole bunch of murders : the aesthetics of perspective in the 'Friday the 13th' films." Thesis, University of Roehampton, 2013. https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/studentthesis/bearing-witness-to-a-whole-bunch-of-murders(3b4e4093-9711-49f6-808f-ba55852871bd).html.
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With twelve films released over the last thirty years, the Friday the 13th series has proved a popular mainstay of the slasher sub-genre of horror, in spite of negative critical reception and minimal academic engagement. The academic discourses that do address the series often frame their arguments based on socio-political function, socioeconomic platforms, psychoanalytic traditions, and cultural relevance. While there is some work that attempts to understand the generic positioning and function of the Friday the 13th films, little work has engaged with the film texts in order to understand and explain the form and structure of each instalment in the series. This thesis not only aims to explore and describe the aesthetic form of the slasher sub-genre of horror, but also to argue the central significance of perspective on the aesthetic effect of the slasher. Perspective, a term that builds upon theories of point of view and subjectivity, permeates the formal design of the slasher film. Therefore, this relationship will be the driving focus of the analysis undertaken with regards to the Friday the 13th films, which will include chapters focusing on specific uses of the camera, sound, editing, and sequences creating a narrative understanding of preceding films in the series. Following this analysis, the aesthetic development of the Friday the 13th series will be contextualised within contemporary generic trends, demonstrating to what extent this franchise is representative of the slasher, and where it proves anomalous or progressive. This will not only demonstrate the role the Friday the 13th films play within the slasher, but also how the slasher has aesthetically evolved over more than three decades. Ultimately, the relevance of this analysis and formal historicizing will be suggestive of the wider context of film studies and cinema as a whole.
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Frisvold, Hanssen Eirik. "Early Discourses on Colour and Cinema : Origins, Functions, Meanings." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Filmvetenskapliga institutionen, 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-1261.
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This dissertation is a historical and theoretical study of a number of discourses examining colour and cinema during the period 1909 to 1935 (trade press, film reviews, publications on film technology, manuals, catalogues and theoretical texts from the era). In this study, colour in cinema is considered as producing a number of aesthetic and representational questions which are contextualised historically; problems and qualities specifically associated with colour film are examined in terms of an interrelationship between historical, technical, industrial, and stylistic factors, as well as specific contemporary conceptions of cinema. The first chapter examines notions concerning the technical, material, as well as perceptual, origins of colour in cinema, and questions concerning indexicality, iconicity, and colour reproduction, through focusing on the relationship between the photographic colour process Kinemacolor, as well as other similar processes, and the established non-photographic colour methods during the early 1910s, with an in-depth analysis of the Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects, published in 1912. The second chapter examines notions concerning the stylistic, formal and narrative functions of colour in cinema, featuring a survey of the recurring comparisons between colour and sound, found in the writing of film history, in discourses concerning early Technicolor sound films, film technology, experimental films and experiments on synaesthesia during the 1920s, as well as Eisenstein’s notions of the functions of colour in sound film montage. The third chapter examines the question of colour and meaning in cinema through considering the relationship between colours and objects in colour film images (polychrome and monochrome, photographic and non-photographic) during the time frame of this study.
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Wang, Li. "Cultural Representations of the One-child Policy in Chinese Literature and Film since 1978." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/20558.
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This dissertation focuses on the cultural representations of the one-child policy ever since 1978. The artistic discourses about the one-child policy provide a fantastic space to explore China’s post-socialist society and contending ideologies. It also sheds light on the intricate relation between aesthetics and politics and these among the state, family and individual. Moreover, as discourses, artistic narratives and images also participate in the redefining of reproduction/one-child policy. Therefore, inquiries into the interaction between aesthetics and politics enrich our understanding of how reproductive ideals are constructed, negotiated and transformed.
This dissertation can be divided into five parts. In the introduction part, I introduce issues related to the one-child policy, materials which I use and my main approaches to interpret them. Chapter Two explores how post-1978 family planning films and novel envision the ideal reproductive lives of peasants through the construction of ideal reproductive subjects, especially ideal female models. These artistic works also show changed representations of the ideal role models. Chapter Three looks into the patriarchal reproductive subject in Mo Yan’s Frog which centers on the conflict between state power and traditional male-centric reproductive culture. Although there are ambiguities, the novel demonstrates that the state has failed to transform peasants’ traditional reproductive ideas. Chapter Four deals with women’s exploration of reproduction from the 1980s on. The writings of some female authors demonstrate a consciousness of independent female reproductive desire. In some works, we can even see the emergence of a new kind of female reproductive privacy. In these works, reproduction becomes the female protagonists’ personal, private matter and women’s subjectivity is seen in their ability to make reproductive decisions according to their own interests. In the Coda, I talk about my future research plans.
Overall, in this dissertation, I trace the political, economic, cultural, and technical factors that contribute to the gradual emergence of pluralism in reproductive ideas and practices. My dissertation demonstrates the dynamic interaction among different forces affecting reproduction, one of the most strictly controlled realms in Chinese life. Although reproduction is still mainly dictated by the state current two-child policy, a push towards greater individual autonomy is starting to gain momentum.10000-01-01
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Johan, Adil Bin. "Articulating a nation-in-the-making : the cosmopolitan aesthetics of Malay film music from the 1950s to 1960s." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 2014. http://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/articulating-a-nationinthemaking(b536d96b-536c-466e-831c-7ce8feb64738).html.
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This thesis provides an in-depth study of the ‘Golden Age of Malay Film’ (1950s to 1960s) by analysing the musical practices and discourses of commercially-produced vernacular Malay films. In exploring the potency of such films and music, it uncovers the relevance of screened music in articulating the complexities and paradoxes of a cosmopolitan Malay identity within the context of mid twentieth-century capitalism, late British colonialism and Malaysian and Singaporean independence. Essentially, I argue that the film music produced during this period articulates a cosmopolitan aesthetic of postcolonial nation-making based on a conception of Malay ethnonationalism that was initially fluid, but eventually became homogenised as national culture. Drawing theoretically on how cosmopolitan practices are constituted within discursive and structural contexts, this thesis analyses how Malay film music covertly expressed radical ideas despite being produced within a commercial film industry. While non-Malay collaborators owned and produced such films that were subject to British censorship, Malay composers such as P. Ramlee and Zubir Said helmed the musical authorship of such films; thereby, enabling an expressive space for their Malaynationalist aspirations. Methodologically, the study unravels the complexities and paradoxes of emergent nation-making through an intertextual analysis of Malay film music; drawing on film narratives, musical and historiographical analysis, literature surveys, and ethnographic fieldwork. I argue that Malay film music from the independence-era could not be confined by rigid ethno-national boundaries when its very aesthetic foundations were pluralistic and contemporaneous with the history of constant change, exchange, interactivity and diversity in the Malay world. This thesis reveals that despite the forced homogeneity of Malay nationalism, Malay film music from the independence-era challenged a limited conception of ethno-national identity. The aspiring and inspiring cosmopolitan ‘frameworks’ of P. Ramlee’s and Zubir Said’s music reverberates in new interpretations of identity, independence, and musical expression in the Malay world.