Browsing by Subject "Cinema"
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Item Connected isolation: screens, mobility, and globalized media culture(2008-12) Groening, Stephen Francis>"Connected Isolation: Screens, Mobility, and Globalized Media Culture" is an analysis of the implications of individualized media forms that increasingly constitute and encroach upon what was previously regarded as public space. I argue that the role of screens in non-theatrical contexts requires that we reassess the importance of media distribution and flows. The reconfiguration of social spaces caused by the proliferation of screens leads to new aesthetic modes and new forms of sociality. The push and pull of those media forms results in a social order I call "connected isolation," a predicament in which subjects must isolate themselves in order to connect to the world through media technologies. These technologies compel separation from the local in order to achieve immediacy with the global, thereby reconfiguring long-standing categories of space. The unresolved tensions between public and private produced by these devices (the use of cellular phones in public areas, for example) express the emergent social order of connected isolation. My dissertation provides a deeper understanding of a larger cultural problematic - the role of communication technologies in structuring social belonging - through a focus on the tensions between community and technological innovation in a social milieu structured by mass media. To describe the emergence of connected isolation as a new social order, I engage four theoretical constructs: distraction, the "space of flows," "mobile-privatization," and the aesthetic of liveness. As specific objects of analysis, I examine corporate training films from the silent era, in-flight entertainment, cellular phones, and television screens in public spaces. This dissertation, then, moves between the sociology of culture, economic geography and social theory to arrive at some conclusions regarding electronic communications technologies and the proliferation of screens.Item The lives of film: heritage, restoration, and the materialism of cinema(2013-11) Stoddard, Matthew DonaldIn this dissertation I argue that a new cinematic apparatus [dispositif] has appeared in the last three decades that ties the ontology of the medium to the precarious physical life of celluloid. I refer to this apparatus as the "new materialism" of cinema. The dissertation traces the development of this apparatus around film heritage and film restoration, and in the context of post-Fordism, that is, the post-industrialization of the global economy. I argue that this materialism, which centers on the conservation of celluloid as the material artifact of a fading era, points to significant new forms and functions of cinema. In the first half of the dissertation this argument is developed vis-à-vis several recent experimental films and in terms of what the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) calls "intangible heritage." As intangible heritage, the history of cinema takes the form of a living archive of values, norms, and communicative procedures. This archive, I argue, is becoming directly integrated into the production of capital, and of social life more generally, and thus forms a new nexus of economic exploitation and political struggle. The second half of the dissertation examines how the dynamics of heritage are crystallized in, and shaped by, film restoration. For example, in the "before and after" demonstrations featured on many DVDs of restored films the image is posited as a material remnant of the past that is absorbed into the present and made viable for new markets. This process occurs through the application of technical expertise, rather than the traditional processes of mechanical duplication. Alongside such promotional materials, the dissertation also examines restoration through its effects on film form, focusing on restored versions of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1996) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2010). I contend that restoration creates an image with a peculiar ontology, which simultaneously invokes the authenticity of a photographic original and the interactive surfaces of new media. This image dramatically alters the construction of time in restored films and reflects structural shifts in the temporality of work. Overall, the dissertation provides both an original historical account of how cinema was re-imagined amidst pronouncements of the death of the medium, as well as a new type of historical materialism that links the details of cinematic form to emerging modes of labor.Item Medical screening: medical imag[in]ing, the body, and the self.(2011-06) Cohen, Sara JoThis dissertation examines representations of medical imaging technologies in order to understand how sick artists (writers, painters, and filmmakers) use diagnostic technologies in their work to assert their subjectivity in the face of medicine's efforts to objectify them. It uses the phrase "medical imag[in]ing technology" to refer broadly to visual and aural aids that have assisted physicians and surgeons with their work, and focuses primarily on the X-ray, the microscope, and the telephone, which had a brief stint as a proto-ultrasound device at President James A. Garfield's deathbed. Its chapters engage a series of texts connected in their efforts to understand the body through medical imag[in]ing technologies: Thomas Mann's 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, Alice James's diary, Frida Kahlo's paintings, Sergio Leone's westerns, Norman Mailer's films and writings, and the narratives surrounding the James-Younger Gang's 1876 raid on Northfield, Minnesota, and the 1881 assassination of President Garfield. I posit that these nineteenth and twentieth century texts and their efforts to understand both illness and medicine through medical imaging technologies anticipate contemporary efforts to involve patients in their health care through online medical records, illness blogs, and illness-based social networking sites.Item Moving Pictures, Empty Words: Cinema as Developmental Interface in the Chinese Reconstruction, 1932-1952(2017-06) Chen, HongweiThis dissertation is a genealogical study of the relationship between instructional technologies and uneven development. It focuses on the work of the Chinese educational film movement, which unfolded as a mélange of governmental and non-governmental initiatives over the course of the 1930s and 1940s. As I argue, educational cinema presented Chinese interlocutors with a "developmental interface," that is, an equivocal material and metaphorical framework for negotiating the technical, economic, and cultural asymmetries produced by modern imperialism and capital accumulation. Challenging unidirectional conceptions of media instrumentality, which are often based on flattening notions of the state and medium specificity, the project approaches the educational film as an interface, defined as a surface connecting heterogeneously structured realities, defined by distributions of workability and unworkability. Inserted at the rough edges between Confucian traditions of popular uplift, modern models of pedagogical discipline, and the international circulation of communication technologies, jiaoyu dianying/"educational cinema" comprised a particularly unworkable interface, caught between the dispersive temporalities of acute developmental unevenness, on the one hand, and the path-determining technological and institutional forms that defined international modes of media governance, on the other. As an interface for developmental desires, educational cinema united teachers, politicians, filmmakers, and engineers under a common framework, promising them a direct line to masses otherwise dispersed by social fragmentation, illiteracy, poor roads, dialect differences, and an intensifying rural-urban divide. As a global aesthetic and technical reality, it subjected its users to a new, and no less unequal, milieu of international technology exchanges, expert knowledges, and mass-mediated visibility. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods of institutional history alongside the close reading of films, reports, diagrams, and teaching guides generated by Chinese instructional bodies, I show how cinema participated in the metamorphoses of institutional power, literary authority, temporality, and affective texture that defined Chinese Republican-era cultural crisis.Item Non-Aligned Features: The Coincidence of Modernity and the Screen in Indonesia(2016-12) Yngvesson, DagIn Non-Aligned Features: The Coincidence of Modernity and the Screen in Indonesia, I deploy extensive archival, ethnographic, and participatory research on Indonesian mass media as a critical intervention in the study of cinema. Examining Indonesian cinema from independence in 1949 until the present, I focus in particular on complicating understandings of how Western technologies, techniques and ideas have functioned as catalysts or determinants for the development of both nationalism and national cinemas worldwide. I examine local cinematic canons that bear the imprint of centuries of engagement with various transnational networks and forces. In the view that emerges, the pervasive politics of left-right alignment specific to the Cold War appear radically shifted – not simply, however, to a place “between” the binary poles of the United States and the Soviet Union, or within the triad of classical, oppositional, and Third cinemas that articulate their struggle as an epic of superpowers. Instead, following many of the Indonesian cineastes and critics I study, I endeavor to open the reading, viewing, present to an older domain of aesthetics and commodity exchange in which the linear arrangement of events leading to and from the rise of capitalism in Europe is made to coincide with other probable causes of the modern. In this regard, I engage in particular with the discourses and modes of address of Javanese wayang – the conceptual-textual center of shadow play and a critical platform for Indonesian art, politics and historiography, whose narratives and screens are always positioned to “coincide” with the present state of affairs. Far from buried or brushed aside in contemporary geopolitics, I argue that the methods and perspectives underpinning media like wayang continue to act as filters that critically influence the circulation and absorption of aesthetic and political ideas. The lineage of cinema’s development in Indonesia thus defined a form and sphere of influence neither here nor there, then nor now in the broadest terms of film theory and practice.Item Postdémocratie, Afropolitanisme et Afrofuturisme: littérature et cinéma comme moyens d’engagement politique en Afrique noire francophone(2018-11) Mamah, Abou-BakarCe travail analyse, à travers la littérature et le cinéma francophones, les changements sociopolitiques intervenus en Afrique subsaharienne depuis les années 1990. J'explore comment les écrivains et les cinéastes jugent l’échec sociopolitique et quels remèdes pragmatiques ils envisagent. Ces événements ont longtemps retenu l'attention des critiques qui ont évalué les retombées de l'indépendance en termes de désillusion, de néo-colonialisme et de gestion du pouvoir par les nouveaux dirigeants africains. Plus de cinquante ans après les indépendances de la plupart des pays africains francophones, il est nécessaire d’examiner comment la situation sociopolitique en Afrique francophone subsaharienne à partir des années 1990 a été décrite et critiquée dans la littérature et le film, et à quelles fins. Alors que cette décennie a vu l’apparition de réformes démocratiques prouvant que les nations africaines étaient désireuses de lancer un nouveau mouvement historique, l’élan en faveur de l’ouverture a été étouffé dans une nouvelle phase que j’appelle la « Postdémocratie ». Je soutiens que cela constitue un nouveau discours politique distinctif dont cette thèse diagnostique à travers les romans et les documentaires. Ma recherche se fonde sur la théorie postcoloniale d’Achille Mbembe, telle qu’élaborée dans son livre On The Postcolony (2001), à travers laquelle il analyse la constitution du pouvoir et la gouvernementalité en Afrique. En tant que l'un des grands théoriciens des études africaines postcoloniales, Mbembe s’intéresse aux relations complexes entre les structures du pouvoir et la sphère publique, de l'indépendance à la Postdémocratie. Je soutiens que cette relation est l’un des thèmes dominants dans la littérature et le cinéma africains de l’après-1990: les écrivains et les cinéastes politiquement engagés essayent de reconfigurer les agitations entre conciliation et dénonciation des abus du pouvoir à l’ère de la Postdémocratie, dans le but d’anticiper l’avènement de la justice sociale. À travers les notions d'Afropolitanisme, une nouvelle identité cosmopolite africaine, et d'Afrofuturisme, un nouveau rêve idéaliste africain, mon travail représente une nouvelle interface productive entre la littérature, le cinéma et les sciences politiques.Item Vocalities of Violence: Acousmatic Sound and Trauma in Latin American Cinema (1999-2016)(2022-08) Jasnoch, Emma“Acousmatic” describes a sound that occurs without an identifiable visual origin.Similarly, trauma is built upon gaps between source, cause, and effect, where an event of violence is not entirely psychologically assimilable. Through examples in contemporary Latin American cinema depicting forms of social, political, and economic violence, I show that trauma and acousmatic sound are mutual operations whose displaced articulation serves as a new cinematic narrative strategy. I argue that this mode of storytelling through sonic incongruence in soundscape, voiceovers, and embodied voices emerges uniquely within the New Cinema movement since the late 1990s and a transnational context of collective trauma.