Film, Media & Theatre Dissertations

This dissertation examines the artistic gestures in the artists’ portrait films made by women of color, including: Howardena Pindell, Blondell Cummings, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Mickalene Thomas, and Jumana Manna. As an interdisciplinary genre, artists’ portrait films rethink the moving image’s relationship to cinematic vocabularies of narrative and develop innovative choreographies, or aesthetic arrangements, of the moving body and the moving image. This dissertation adopts the term artistic gesture to engage the ways artists use aesthetic experimentation from other mediums to create intimate portraits that call our social contracts into question. Through an engagement with choreography, this dissertation examines the central role of gesture in artists’ portrait films as a mode of making that is responsive to the subjects in the artists’ works. By engaging gesture at the intersection of the social and the aesthetic, this dissertation engages gestures as physical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary exchanges. Each chapter focuses on the work of an individual artist through dance practices such as contact improvisation, social dance, polyrhythms, and intertextuality. By engaging the moving image choreographically, I examine the ways destabilizing gestures create porous archives that reposition the intimate lives of women of color within the histories of the avant-garde.

Television format, a tradable program package, has allowed Korean television the new opportunity to be recognized globally. The booming transnational production of Korean reality formats have transformed the production culture, aesthetics and structure of the local television. This study, using a historical and practical approach to the evolution of the Korean reality formats, examines the dynamic relations between producer, industry and text in the context of cultural globalization and suggests a new perspective of television studies challenging the center-periphery model.

This dissertation examines technologies of self-mediation and their impact on contemporary visual culture. Since the standard inclusion of the forward-facing camera on the iPhone 4 in 2010, self-mediation has become a widespread form of digital media engagement. Approaching digital self-mediation as a durational event, this dissertation focuses on narrative films, or what I deem “narcisscinema,” and other serial aesthetic practices. In order to address the range of practices possible through technologies of self-mediation, I mobilize the various aesthetic aids through which narcissism has been approached in critical theory. Following an introduction in chapter one, chapter two “The Pool: Narcissism and the Moving Image,” establishes the use value of cinema as a mapping tool that exposes the affective complexity of self-mediation. Chapter three, “The Mirror: Narcissism as Affective Form,” analyzes Darren Aronfosky’s Black Swan (2010) as a poetics of narcissism, examining self-mediation as a disciplinary practice. Chapter four, “Play: Narcissism and Creative Invention,” reviews Deleuze’s reaffirmation of narcissism as a form of play, addressing forms of self-assertion that disrupt the faciality of contemporary selfie culture. Chapter five, “Allure: Narcissism and the Object,” extends this analysis further into a discussion of the incipient narcissism of western philosophy including the recent object-oriented philosophy. Here, I interpret object-oriented ontology as a philosophical form of self-mediation given its preoccupation with the human as object. While the first chapters consider contemporary films which reproduce the zeitgeist of contemporary digital culture by essentializing the mediated self as a white heteronormative female (thereby reproducing the ideal object of the gaze), the latter two chapters further develop a critical racial analysis of photo-sharing and social networking sites, arguing that digital visual culture underscores a formal notion of the subject that first emerged in Enlightenment aesthetic philosophy and always necessitates a problematic racial and gendered hierarchy. Finally, in the coda I examine Jenn Nkiru’s music video for Kamasi Washington’s “Hub Tones” (2018) as an alternative model of self-assertion which disrupts contemporary digital culture’s commerce in faces and its commodification of difference.

This dissertation intervenes to theorize the implications of late 20^th and early 21^st century economic financialization for media studies and visual culture by considering the ways in which both the contemporary economy and contemporary culture share a central emphasis on speculation, a term which ambivalently refers both to the capacity to see, as well as the capacity to hypothesize and imagine. The central issue at stake is the question of how imaginary, speculative, and representational values in the economy can have real effects not only on stock prices but also on the material conditions of lived experience of individuals, as in the emblematic case of the 2008 global financial crisis. To answer this question, the dissertation develops a theory of the figural, drawing on the writings of Erich Auerbach, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, and others, in order to explain how abstract processes of speculation can come to have concrete, material consequences. At stake is the notion that social reality and aesthetics are intimately imbricated through figural relations. Consequently, it is to mediated aesthetic renderings of the process of speculation that the dissertation looks to locate and comprehend these economic and cultural transformations. I focus on objects that deal centrally with conspiracy and investigation, which I argue following Fredric Jameson is the dominant representational locus of the cultural imagination of global finance. Body chapters contain close formal analyses of the amateur conspiracy chart style known as “Chart Brut,” the medical mystery television series House M.D., the found-footage horror film Sinister, and the videos news thriller Nightcrawler. A conclusion considers how the film Arrival constellates the formal and thematic issues at stake in the body chapters together into a potentially unified figure.

Contemporary discourses and representations of automation stress the impending “autonomy” of automated technologies. From pop culture depictions to corporate white papers, the notion of autonomous technologies tends to enliven dystopic fears about the threat to human autonomy or utopian potentials to help humans experience unrealized forms of autonomy. This project offers a more nuanced perspective, rejecting contemporary notions of automation as inevitably vanquishing or enhancing human autonomy. Through a discursive analysis of industrial “deep texts” that offer considerable insights into the material development of automated media technologies, I argue for contemporary automation to be understood as a field for the exchange of autonomy, a human-machine autonomy in which autonomy is exchanged as cultural and economic value. Human-machine autonomy is a shared condition among humans and intelligent machines shaped by economic, legal, and political paradigms with a stake in the cultural uses of automated media technologies. By understanding human-machine autonomy, this project illuminates complications of autonomy emerging from interactions with automated media technologies across a range of cultural contexts.

Ghost Hunting in the New Millennium updates and expands cycle theory through an examination of ghost hunting films and television shows in the 21^st Century across media boundaries. Through a comprehensive media industries framework that incorporates industrial, textual, and cultural analysis, the study examines how similar generic texts can best be understood if examined in terms of production cycles. This is especially true in the modern conglomerate-owned media environment which emphasizes ongoing production and exploitation of popular formulas in different media as a means of maximizing profits and minimizing costs across a corporation’s vast subsidiaries, and which in turn affects the spheres of independent productions and fandom. Ghost Hunting in the New Millennium provides the historical contexts for the development of ghost hunting shows and found footage horror films in their respective media, and then puts them into direct conversation with one another as industrial and cultural products using industrial, textual, and discourse analysis. By bringing cycle studies into discussion with media industries studies, the dissertation argues, media historians can make more focused, cogent arguments about the relationships between generic texts across traditional medium-specific fields of scholarship.

Synchronization has been the key to audiovisual harmony since the advent of sound in cinema. Contemporary global cinemas have been challenging this harmony by playing with the thresholds between audibility and inaudibility in novel ways. Existing film sound literature remains insufficient to explain certain moments in which radically disrupted synchronization demands new modes of listening in films such as Lady Vengeance (Park, 2011), The Revenant (Iñárritu, 2015), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan, 2011), Nénette et Boni (Denis, 1996), and Moonlight (Jenkins, 2016). To correct such a problem, this dissertation entitled Sounding Anew: Anasonicity in Contemporary Global Cinemas theorizes anasonicity as that which is sonic in nature but inaudible (related conceptually to the notion of “avisuality” developed by Akira Lippit in Atomic Light). This concept allows me to generate a new film sound terminology to address the emerging sound techniques that transform conditions of audibility (or inaudibility) in the current second century of cinema. Through close analyses in my case study chapters, I reveal how contemporary global films constantly unsettle synchronization as they traverse the thresholds between the audible and the inaudible. Quietness, as opposed to silence, plays a significant role in these moments when synchronization is off. These films render sounds of the past, the present, and the future indiscernible; more than anything, they demand us to resonate with their philosophical contemplations through the innovative image and sound relations they create. Sounding Anew responds to the sonic experiments in these films that clearly disrupt synchronization and hence a linear understanding of time through a “listening through” modeled on the rigorous “reading through” in Derrida. In addressing the new sound techniques, this dissertation also performs deconstructive gestures playing with the notions of origin, presence, echo, voice, and flashback among others.

In the late nineteenth century, rubber became a precious commodity. Many companies were looking for opportunities to satisfy the market demand by investing in rubber plantations established mainly in colonized lands. In 1916, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, headquartered in Akron, Ohio, in the United States, acquired 20,000 acres in Dolok Merangir, Deli area, East Sumatra, Dutch East Indies (the region is now part of North Sumatra province, Indonesia) by the concession of the Dutch East Indies and the local ruler of the Deli Sultanate. In 1929, Goodyear developed another plantation called Wingfoot, south of the original site, which would soon become the largest rubber plantation in the world. Competing with other companies’ plantations, Goodyear invested in making their plantation prosperous and profitable. They established a rubber laboratory to explore the latest techniques to cultivate the best crop, extract the finest latex, vulcanize top-quality rubber sheets, and efficiently ship the crude material to their main factory in the United States. The corporation shaped local communities and environments to sustain their economic interests in extracting rubber. Goodyear’s initiatives were recorded in Conquering the Jungle, a ten-minute educational ethnographic documentary produced in 1920 and subsequently remade in 1939 as a joint venture between the company’s motion pictures division and the Educational and Industrial departments of Universal Films. The films document the transformation of the land into industrial and extractive zones. My dissertation draws on archival research related to Goodyear's operations, the Dutch East Indies colony, and modern Indonesia. Through a close comparison of both versions of the film, separated by nearly two decades, I explore how the techniques of rubbering, extracting latex, and vulcanizing raw materials transformed a tropical rainforest into a space of profitable extraction. In so doing, I trace cinema’s role in the long legacy of reconstructing a tropical forest as a space of extraction that continues to blight Indonesia’s present.

"The Off-Cuts: Expended Cinema” incorporates a series of the off-cuts: cinematic residues, filmic materials, and cutoff materials compiled from various moving images. This dissertation theorizes the off-cuts as expenditures of an expended cinema: a series of excessive details whose parasitic lives suspend idealized conceptualization of cinematic materiality and utilitarian, yet extractive formal reading protocols. This study argues for the necessity to shift suspended attention towards an aesthetics of the informe: a non-extractive consideration of cinematic materiality and form.

In this dissertation project, I argue that Iranian modern cinema of time-image revives the collective experience of the past, the communal experience handed down through generations that Walter Benjamin calls erfahrung. On the formal level, Iranian modern cinema summons the erfahrung of a non-linear understanding of time (epitomized in what I call “imaginal cinema”), the practices of dissimulation (manifested in what I call “cinema of dissimulation”), and many other Iranian-Islamic traditional notions and practices. In contrast, on the formal level, Iranian mainstream cinema of action-image (FilmFarsi) evokes the disconnected experience under capitalism, an individualized experience that Benjamin calls erlebnis. By opposing the aesthetics of FilmFarsi, and by invoking the erfahrung of the past, Iranian modern cinema connects the atomized modern individuals to the collective memory of the past. Doing so, in cinematic terms, Iranian modern cinema epitomizes what Hamid Dabashi calls “anticolonial modernity,” as it achieves modern cinematic form on Iran’s own authentic terms, distinct and separate from Americanized models imposed through colonial and imperial processes, as manifested in FilmFarsi.

“A Slow Archive of Black Study: The Mixtape” approaches blackness as practice through critical and creative engagement, imagining this document as a mixtape, organized as a series of tracks. Inspired by my late father’s mixtape-making practice, I follow a mixtape methodology of theory, practice, curation, and black life that creates something new, engaging objects as albums, or recognized wholes not intended to be fully accounted for. Inherently archival and fugitive, the slow archive that emerges through a mix-tape methodology is also a practice of black study. This dissertation moves between theory and practice to apply a liquid blackness praxis: blackness is not only what we study but how we study. At stake is the disruption of the institutionalization of Black Studies through disrupting the infrastructure of thinking, even at the risk of uncertainty. Through a mixture of theoretical and creative digging in the crates, each track becomes a critical part of a collective, a common-unity, a movement—a gathering of, with, and for one another—remixing, rewriting, rewinding, reiterating, reforming, and reshaping in its liquidity. Resisting. Studying. Grounding the mixtape in the slow archive of black life sutures practice to a sociality that cares for blackness as it is being, seeing, and being seen.

Since the success of the player-led Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, player-led video game controversies have become mainstream sites of industrial and ideological contention between developers, players, and the culture itself. This dissertation focuses on the history of the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, the game’s specific textual qualities that encouraged player protest, and the negotiations between players and developers in online spaces that persuaded developers to alter the game’s ending based on player demands. Using the Mass Effect 3 as its primary object, this dissertation argues this controversy—as well as subsequent player-led video game controversies—was not simply the result of dissatisfaction with a single plot point or representation in the text or video game community, but the complex negotiation of creative differences between players and developers over the production and control of video game texts and culture. Video games and their controversies are rooted in the medium's intrinsic qualities of interactivity, choice, labor and the need for shared production between developers and players to progress and produce a video game text, which encourages the development of a sense of agency and ownership over the text for both groups. This dissertation argues that video games are not just texts that developers create and that players play, but rather texts produced through the co-creative production practice that Axel Bruns has defined as “produsage”—texts where producers act in dual roles as users while users to also act as producers—that allow players a creative stake in the outcome of a video game text, encourages a sense of agency and ownership, and collapses traditional boundaries between developers and players. Video game controversies naturally arise when players perceive a loss of agency and control over the video game text and attempt to reclaim control over ownership of the text through controversy.

This dissertation will explore the role of brand culture, digital platforms, and fan play in the development of a reactionary fan identity that I call the white masculine crusader (WMC). By interrogating the playful affordances of digital platforms and how people adopt fan practices in reaction to contemporary politics, I reveal three distinct (yet interconnected) fannish and playful embodied expressions of reactionary politics and white supremacy conspiracy theories (the tactical body, the fit body, and the spiritual body). The following chapters highlight how fan communities not only seek and spread reactionary content but often poach brands to play out fantasies of fighting back against a world corrupted by secularism, multi-culturalism, and progressive politics. This dissertation is designed to show how our current media environment, through playful and preparatory practices, enables the persistence of white supremacy and the growth of far-right extremism.

This dissertation project presents a novel approach to videogame narrative studies through the lens of the active opposition of enemies, from boss monsters and villains down to the lowliest encounters with irritating “trash” enemies. Using transactionism—a theory of existence and aesthetics that claims all experience moves across a single physical plane—this dissertation coins and defines the concept of cooposition, a phenomenon in videogames that allows for narrative activity as co-constituted by the player and the game through active, productive antagonism. After identifying and exploring the lingering difficulties in accounting for videogame narrative in a complete and satisfying theory, this project establishes cooposition as an essential and powerful force of videogame experience before breaking down four permeable categories of videogame enemies. Through extensive examples, key texts, and gameplay experience, this project explores ideas related to how videogame narratives construct player identity, set aesthetic rhythms, and establish and manipulate narrative space and time. At issue is how games use enemies as narrative technique, how narrative in videogames emerge through cooposition, and how players co-create narrative phenomenon by “defeating” the game, productively. This is a first step towards a new theory of game narrative that emerges from gameplay experience, rejecting cognitive theories of literary narratology and suggesting new design strategies for game narrative that fully capitalize on coopositional dynamics.

Mobility, Modernity, and the Middle Class: Transmediatization and Brazilian Television examines the process of transmediatization in Brazil as a failed process of digital modernity. Following the pattern of diverse modernities and cultures of convergence, this dissertation argues that there are also multiple regimes of transmediatization. This dissertation provides a framework for analyzing the Brazilian regime of transmediatization through mobility, participation, and expansion, using the Brazilian telenovela Cheias de Charme (2012, TV Globo) as an extensive case study. Through an analysis of the telenovela and its transmedia extensions, industrial discourse, and sociohistorical context, I illustrate how the telenovela functioned as a site of transmediatizing modernity. In doing so, I seek to bridge the gap between theories of modernity and studies of transmedia. With mobility, I refer to the rapid circulation of people, goods, and ideas in modernity. I connect this with audiences moving across platforms and devices with transmedia engagement as well as the potential for social mobility through transmediatization. Participation refers to the increasing potential for democracy in modernity, and I correlate this with the democratizing potential of transmediatization. Finally, with expansion I bring together the nation-building of modernity with world-building in transmedia. These dimensions of transmediatization are not independent of each other but are integrally connected. I argue that the regime of transmediatization in Brazil is an era fraught with paradox and ambivalence. The process of social mobility through transmediatization also became a process of class discrimination. While transmediatization functioned as a process of empowerment and national integration, it was also exploitative and disciplinary as participants were shaped into ideal viewers and ideal citizens.

The Radical Archive of Performance: From Acts to Archives in Black Preservation explores issues of the archive and preservation in Black performance culture. This research project asks: if today’s professional archival and preservation practices are adequate for the identification, preservation, and accessibility of Black epistemologies materialized through performance; how strategies of resistance and improvisation work with or against notions of access and preservation in archival science; and if Tyler Perry Studios can be considered a radical archive of Black performance. After Cedric Robinson, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten, and in the spirit of the Black Radical Tradition, I argue improvisation, discordance, and trace as the conceptual reserves of Black epistemologies and demonstrates radical acts of preservation in performance. This project is conceptualized as a way of thinking through archival and curatorial challenges when working with

Black performance immateriality and ephemerality. Using archival science, production studies, and performance theory, I illustrate ways Black production cultures, from art exhibitions to Film/TV productions, navigate issues of materiality in the archive. In order to investigate the quality of preservation of Black epistemologies in contemporary Black performance, I use Tyler Perry Studios production culture as a case study to examine objects, rituals, and spaces using a Media Industries method.

This dissertation takes its heading from the work of AIDS activists in the 1980s and 1990s who took the abject narratives placed upon people with AIDS and trans and queer people and, instead of running from them into respectability, embraced and extended those narratives to fight back against the violence and scarcity of normativity and, most critically, to produce communities of care. These activists made use of their bodies as transmutable weapons against power. They transformed the ashes of loved ones into a spreading body of trans/queerness that could meld into the earth and commune with the bodies of any who encountered its particulates. “Alchemy of Matter: An Aesthetic Politics of Trans/Queerness” terms this aesthetic politics as matter where trans/queer labor can make things possible and can produce what is needed out of the scarcity of normative violence. This dissertation theorizes matter following the work of cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa who describes how bodies come into intimacy and relation with each other via the materiality of the universe. To become matter is to embrace the stuff of the universe and thus the relationality between I and You. To become matter is to become the tool, the energy, and the form that can build relations with another as well as generate who one is for oneself. Second, an aesthetic politics of matter demands a recentering of trans/queerness on the material lives and labors of trans and queer people. The radicality of transness and queerness within theory is only possible because trans and queer people enacted radical labor upon the world. Their bodies, their lives made things possible. A theory of trans/queer matter, therefore, argues for a theory of material life. This dissertation examines the abject, abstract, and relational artistic, archival, political, and theoretical work of trans and queer people to enact a material, communal, and transmutational aesthetic politics of trans/queer matter.

In the field of video game studies, meaningful action and flow are upheld as primary targets of game design, and key factors in many ontological definitions of what games can and should be. Yet, games are not all action. Within most games one encounters numerous pauses and interruptions of various kinds, including the much-maligned “cut-scenes” that lead or force the player out of an active role at certain moments. Furthermore, not all actions are goal-directed. If they are, they are not necessarily pragmatic. These pauses, interruptions, and nuanced goals are often overlooked, if not actively derided, in the field of game studies. In short, ideas about how players stop and reflect, how their goals and experiences take on emotional and/or moral valences, are under-represented. My work argues that moral reflection does occur even in mainstream games, and that it tends to happen in connection with the very moments game scholars often overlook—in the pauses before or after actions, in the moments of awe or realization, when the controller has been set down or the keyboard pushed away, and yes, even during cut-scenes. Such moments may invite the player into a state of moral reflection, but for this state of moral reflection to be poignant and memorable to the player these moments must also involve a consideration of differing values. Finally, how a game structures the player’s experience of time, from receiving quests to setting out into the game world, from pauses to demanding challenges, and even through the layout of video game spaces lends these points of reflection their crucial impact.

This dissertation is examining LGBTQ+ audiences and creatives collaborating in the creation of new media texts like web shows, podcasts, and video games. The study focuses on three main objects or media texts: Carmilla (web series), Welcome to Night Vale (podcast), and Undertale (video game). These texts are transmedia objects or intertextual commodities. I argue that by using queer gestures of collaborative authorship that reaches out to the audience for canonical contribution create an emerging queer production culture that disidentifies with capitalism even as it negotiates capitalistic structures. The post-millennial queer sensibility is a constellation of aesthetics, self-representation, alternative financing, and interactivity that prioritizes community, trust, and authenticity using new technologies for co-creation.

Within my study, there are four key tactics or queer gestures being explored: remediation, radical ambiguity and multi-forms as queer aesthetics, audience self-representation, alternative financing like micropatronage & licensed fan-made merchandise, and interactivity as performance. The goal of this project is to better understand the changing conceptions of authorship/ownership, canon/fanon (official text/fan created extensions), and community/capitalism in queer subcultures as an indicator of the potential change in more mainstream cultural attitudes. The project takes into consideration a variety of intersecting identities including gender, race, class, and of course sexual orientation in its analysis. By examining the legal discourse around collaborative authorship, the real-life production practices, and audience-creator interactions and attitudes, this study provides insight into how media creatives work with audiences to co-create self-representative media, the motivations, and rewards for creative, audiences, and owners. This study aims to contribute towards a fuller understanding of queer production cultures and audience reception of these media texts, of which there is relatively little academic information. Specifically, the study mines for insights into the changing attitudes towards authorship, ownership, and collaboration within queer indie media projects, especially as these objects are relying on the self-representation of both audiences and creatives in the formation of the text.

This dissertation explores post-authentic neoliberal animation production culture, tracing the ways authenticity is used as a resource to garner professional autonomy and security during precarious times. Animators engage in two modes of production, the first in creating animated content, and the other in constructing a professional identity. Analyzing animator discourse allows for a nuanced exploration of how these processes interact and congeal into common sense. The use of digital software impacts the animator’s capacity to legitimize themselves as creatives and experts, traditional tools become vital for signifying creative authenticity in a professional environment. The practice of decorating one’s desk functions as a tactic to layer creative authenticity, but the meaning of this ritual is changing now that studios shift to open spaces while many animators work from home. Layering authenticity on-screen often requires blending techniques from classical Hollywood cinema into animated performance, concomitant with a bid to legitimate the role of the authentic interlocutor for the character. Increasingly animators feel pressure to layer authenticity online, establishing an audience as a means to hedge against precarity. The recombined self must balance the many methods for layering creative and professional authenticity with the constraints and affordances of their tools, along with the demands of the studio, to yield cultural capital vital for an animator’s survival in an industry defined at once by its limitless expressive potential and economic uncertainty.