Between Dec 19, 2024 and Jan 2, 2025, datasets can be submitted to DRUM but will not be processed until after the break. Staff will not be available to answer email during this period, and will not be able to provide DOIs until after Jan 2. If you are in need of a DOI during this period, consider Dryad or OpenICPSR. Submission responses to the UDC may also be delayed during this time.

Browsing by Subject "Early Cinema"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Colonial Sublime: Infrastructure, Landscape, and Traveling Cinemas in Korea, 1898-1926
    (2019-08) Ahn, Sejung
    This dissertation examines the link between Korea’s technological modernity and its earliest cinematic history through the aesthetic lens of the sublime. Cinema was introduced to Korea in conjunction with the expansion of infrastructures under a direct and indirect system of colonial rule. And it immediately served as a technique and technology of national and imperial governance, as a way of forging new political subjects during a tumultuous time of social change. Focusing on primitive representations of film technology, the aesthetic conventions of travel film genres, preliminary forms of state-policy films, chain drama’s production of national landscapes, and the influence of colonial urbanism on the building of cinematic networks, this dissertation reconstructs the contested beginning of motion-picture technology in Korea during which the Korean experience of modernity was shaped and defined in negotiation with nation-building and globalization. In doing so, my approach takes a distinct perspective with recourse to the aesthetics of the colonial sublime. In the first place, as an aesthetic category in origin that refers to the subject’s emotions of shock and terror, the sublime is a useful concept to understand the formation of the strangely masochistic spectatorship of early cinema for which sensation and astonishment were so central. With the modification of the adjective “colonial,” however, the colonial sublime has also lent itself well to an examination of the aestheticization of colonial politics and the colonial politics of aesthetics. By bringing together early cinema studies and studies on colonial modernity in Korea, I show that cinema as visual technology — along with other infrastructural projects — has been constantly aestheticized as a spectacle in the development of cinematic culture in Korea.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The ghost and the corpse: figuring the mind/brain complex at the turn of the twentieth century.
    (2010-12) Kamerbeek, Christopher
    My dissertation investigates how debates about the relationship of the mind and the brain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are refracted through literature and early cinema. I engage select literary texts and films of the period--including the private letters and public fictions of Henry James, the psychology of William James, the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber, the correspondence and case studies of Sigmund Freud, the films of the Edison Film Company, and the novels of Edward Bellamy--in order to demonstrate how concerns about the limits of the human body correspond with concerns about the limits of the text and the frame. Each of my chapters addresses the "afterlife" of posthumous interpretation--how individual subjects become objects of study, how individual bodies give way to literary archives, psychological cases, and film stock. I contend that the competing diagnostic practices of psychology and neurology model competing modes of seeing and reading and that the figures of the ghost and the corpse--the representative bodies of psychic and anatomical space--emerge as metaphors for the material and immaterial detritus of works of art.