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 "Film Studies"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Art, Activism and Sundarbans: A case study of Musical Environmental Movement through Film
    (2021-07) Roy, Elja
    Art, Activism and Sundarbans: A case study of Musical Environmental Movement through Film is a case-based study of ecocinema. Ecocinema studies involves the ecocritical reading of films with or without overt environmental messages. Scholars in the relatively new, yet the burgeoning field of ecocinema studies primarily critique fictional and documentary films. However, I am among a subset of scholars (Seymour, 2014; Pedelty, 2017) who are bringing a more directly engaged, field-based, and production-oriented focus to ecocinema studies and environmental communication. My research in the Sundarbans (India-Bangladesh) involves artists-activists who use music and performing arts to communicate ongoing environmental issues. I used a field-to-media method to film, study and analyze an environmental movement that advocates for the mangrove forest. That work is presented and framed partially through writing, but more fully through the documentary film, Musical Mangrove. The written sections of this dissertation are in conversation with ecocinema scholars such as Rust, Monani and Cubitt (2012), von Mossner (2014), Macdonald (2004, 2012), and Ingram (2005) to suggest a more collaborative and production-based approach to the study of ecocinema. Additionally, this work points out the need for similar participatory approaches to environmental communication and starts a dialogue between ecocinema studies and environmental communication. Ultimately, my goal is to bring together production-based experience as a field researcher with the broader field of film criticism, especially in terms of environmentally themed film and film studies, for sake of making a distinct, experimental, and integral contribution to ecocinema studies, media studies, and environmental communication more broadly.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Palestine and the Middle East in the Popular Filmic Imaginary: Historical Memory, Grievable Lives, and Encountering the Other in Film
    (2022-07) Bennett, Stephen
    This study explores how American audiences encounter Palestine and the wider Middle East through popular films, and how our collective memories of conflicts in the Arab world are constructed in media. Taking into account how the discourse of film critics often prime audiences to understand films as realistic and historically accurate, this project takes an incisive critical look at how films that are framed as sympathetic and progressive actually deny Palestinians and Arabs agency, and render their lives as disposable and ungrievable. In framing films as a motivated public memory project and analyzing the textual elements and narratives of popular movies, this study also uncovers how the cities and spaces of the Middle East are presented merely as sites of danger and trauma for American and Israeli protagonists. It also delves into the work these films do regarding the malleability of collective national memory and how they rewrite conflicts of the past to help maintain senses of militaristic masculinity and the ideology of exceptionalism. This study also expands on the concept of the Israeli ‘Shoot and Cry’ narratives to demonstrate how that same effect is prominent in American war films and displaces the audiences’ sympathy from the victim to the aggressor. The project closes with an analysis of two films, Amreeka and Forget Baghdad, both of which complicate notions of memory, place, and Palestinian and Arab identity, in stark contrast with what is seen in most mainstream films portraying the peoples and places of the Middle East.