Browsing by Subject "Cinema"
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Item Andy Warhol's cinema beyond the lens(2013-05) Weathers, Chelsea Lea; Reynolds, Ann MorrisThis dissertation examines a small selection of the hundreds of films made by Andy Warhol and his collaborators between 1963 and 1968. Each chapter contextualizes a particular aspect of Warhol's filmmaking in terms of the artistic and cultural circumstances that informed it. Through an analysis of the content of specific films, rather than just their formal or stylistic tendencies, I discuss how the filmmaking process might have functioned for those involved in the films' production, as well as how those films might have functioned for specific spectators. The first chapter is a speculation on how Warhol might have understood filmmaking as a method for creating concrete connections between feelings and things -- for collecting imagery with his camera in order to create a historical catalog of people and their emotions. This first chapter also considers how some art critics in the 1960s used Warhol's early silent films as exemplars for their own anti-formalist art-historical and critical discourses. The second chapter examines the relationship between Warhol's films and the proliferation of amphetamine use amongst his collaborators. Amphetamines functioned to perpetuate for its users a way of life based on an alternative conception of time, and often involved a continued engagement with bad feelings, which fueled much of the creativity of the artistic community whose locus was Warhol's Factory in the mid-1960s. As such, many of Warhol's films from this period exhibit what I term an "amphetamine aesthetic" -- visual clues that suggest the effects of long-term amphetamine use by its participants. The third chapter is an analysis of a single film, Lonesome Cowboys. Participants in the film's production used the conventions of the Hollywood Western film genre to create a circumscribed space for transforming their everyday lives and their relationship to contemporary politics in the late 1960s. All of these chapters explore the effects of Warhol's particular approach to filmmaking, which involved Warhol's own detached style of directing, as well as his cultivation of an ultrapermissive environment in which his collaborators -- actors, directors, writers, and technicians -- felt free to experiment. This environment was predicated on the idea that the boundary between the space in front of the camera and the world beyond it was simultaneously arbitrary and deeply imbricated. Such a fluid boundary between the world inside and outside the scope of Warhol's camera is in part why some spectators, watching his films a half-century after they were made, might still find new meanings for the present in the films themselves.Item Assembling place : Buenos Aires in cultural production (1920-1935)(2009-12) Poppe, Nicolas Matthew; Shumway, Nicolas; Bernucci, Leopoldo; Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Héctor; Pereiro Otero, José Manuel; Zonn, LeoIn works of cultural production, interpretations of the built, natural, and social environment engage a hierarchy of readings of place. Formed by a totality of interpretations—accepted/unaccepted, dominant/subordinate, normal/abnormal, and everything in between—this hierarchy of readings frames place as a social understanding. Interpretations of place, therefore, are social positionings: kinds of individual delineations of the meaning of place as a social understanding. Collectively, these social positionings compose and comprise our understanding of the meaning of a place. In this study, I examine the different ways in which the understanding of Buenos Aires as a place shapes and is shaped by the avant-garde urban criollismo of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry of the 1920s, the five plays of Armando Discépolo’s dramatic genre of the grotesco criollo, Robert Arlt’s dark and portentous binary novel Los siete locos/ Los lanzallamas (1929/1931), and three early Argentine sound films [Tango! (Mogila Barth 1933), Los tres berretines (Equipo Lumiton 1933), and Riachuelo (Moglia Barth 1934)]. To get at the mechanisms that drive the interaction between these works of cultural production, which are social positionings, and the social understanding of Buenos Aires as a place, I draw from Manuel De Landa’s notions of assemblage theory and non-linear history. Wholes such as porteño society of the 1920s and 1930s are assemblages of an almost limitless number of parts whose functions within the greater entity are not always clear. Place, therefore, is an assemblage whose meaning is made up of indeterminable interpretations of space. It is also a non-linear social understanding in that its meaning is irreducible to its components (i.e. social positionings). The mutual interactions and feedback within assemblages such as Buenos Aires are indicative of how meaning is ever changing through processes of destratification, restratification, and stratification in its components, including Borges’ early poetry, Discépolo’s grotesco criollo, Arlt’s Los siete locos/ Los lanzallamas, and the films Tango!, Los tres berretines, and Riachuelo.Item Children in post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema : visions of the future(2015-05) Houck, Kelly Lawrence; Atwood, Blake Robert, 1983-; Aghaie, KamranThis project focuses on children in Iranian cinema in the Islamic Republic era in order to examine how child characters reveal visions of their future in Iran. This analysis will help the reader understand how privilege functions in relation to citizenship in Iran. Prior research argues that children in Iranian cinema represent humanist themes and utopic images of Iranian society. My thesis builds on this work to argue that images of the child represent more nuanced imaginings of the future, dependent on their ability to confront problems successfully. This study does not consider children's films, but rather films with prominent child characters. It looks at child characters both as agents whose desires and anxieties drive the film's action and as objects with whom the audience can visualize the future. This project includes Children of Heaven (Bachcheh-hā-ye āsemān), The Mirror (Āineh), Where is the Friend's Home (Khāne-ye dust kojāst), Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bāshu gharibe-ye kuchek), Baran (Bārān), The Apple (Sib), Life, and Nothing More (Zandegi va digar hich), The White Balloon (Bādkonak-e sefid), and The Day I Became a Woman (Ruzi ke zan shodam). My thesis argues that the ways in which child characters interact with their environment highlight their level of privilege, revealing what types of individuals are best fit to thrive in Iranian society under the Islamic Republic. I argue that notions of citizenship and nationalism are integral to the characters' identities and indicated futures. Specifically, both ideal children and non-ideal children who maintain Iranian citizenship will have successful futures as participants in Iranian society, while non-Iranian nationals may not.Item Constructing Tibetanness from the 'in-between' : self-representations of hybrid identity in Tibetan fiction films(2016-05) Carlton, Scott Andrew; Frick, Caroline; Ramirez Berg, CharlesTibet is a contested and ambiguous concept perched precariously between multiple and contradictory sociocultural and historical discourses. In this thesis, I examine self-representation in the liminal space of Tibet through twelve Tibetan feature films in order to determine how the filmmakers, crew, and actors use the poetics of film to construe Tibetan individual, cultural, religious, political, and national identity. These films, with Tibetan directors, Tibetan actors, and largely Tibetan crews, have been described in the press as “Tibetan.” I adopt a neoformalist approach informed by postcolonial theory, especially Homi K. Bhabha’s conception of hybridity, to examine Tibetan self-representations in fictional feature films. The twelve films consistently make use of narrative structures in which protagonists embark on physical quests in order to locate ambiguous or unknowable entities. Their stories often take the form of road films, and emphasize internal yearning and development over external plot detail. Internal character development and identity are conveyed through cultural performance of songs, theater, and storytelling that serve as narrational devices for self-expression and identity articulation. Thematically, identity is represented on these journeys through paradigms of tradition and modernity, complex hybridity, and disenfranchised masculinities. The thesis concludes with an analysis of the career and films of auteur Pema Tseden, an internationally respected auteur. In Tseden’s films, the implications of liminality for Tibetan identity are dire, but the possibility for the processual and ongoing articulation and construction of Tibetanness through the medium of film are emphasized. This group of Tibetan film representations may not reveal an essential Tibetanness, but they do constituate an invaluable platform for critical deconstruction, formulation, articulation, and continual rearticulation of Tibetanness.Item Crafting digital cinema : cinematographers in contemporary Hollywood(2011-08) Lucas, Robert Christopher; Schatz, Thomas, 1948-; Strover, Sharon; Schiesari, Nancy; Hunt, Bruce; Hay, JamesIn the late 1990s, motion picture and television production began a process of rapid digitalization with profound implications for cinematographers in Hollywood, as new tools for “digital cinematography” became part of the traditional production process. This transition came in three waves, starting with a post-production technique, the digital intermediate, then the use of high-definition video and digital production cameras, and finally digital exhibition. This dissertation shows how cinematographers responded to the technical and aesthetic challenges presented by digital production tools as they replaced elements of the film-based, photochemical workflow. Using trade publications, mainstream press sources, and in-depth interviews with cinematographers and filmmakers, I chronicle this transition between 1998 and 2005, analyzing how cinematographers’ responded to and utilized these new digital technologies. I analyze demonstration texts, promotional videos, and feature films, including Pleasantville, O Brother Where Art Thou, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, The Anniversary Party, Personal Velocity, and Collateral, all of which played a role in establishing a discourse and practice of digital cinematography among cinematographers, producers and directors. The challenges presented by new collaborators such as the colorist and digital imaging technician are also examined. I discuss cinematographers’ work with standards-setting groups such as the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the studio consortium Digital Cinema Initiatives, describing it as an effort to protect “film-look” and establish look-management as a prominent feature of their craft practice. In an era when digitalization has made motion pictures more malleable and mobile than ever before, this study shows how cinematographers attempted to preserve their historical, craft-based sense of masterful cinematography and a structure of authority that privileges the cinematographer as “guardian of the image."Item Defining Nazi film : the film press and the German cinematic project, 1933-1945(2012-05) Le Faucheur, Christelle Georgette; Crew, David F., 1946-; Hake, Sabine, 1956-This dissertation analyses the roles and functions of the German film press during the Third Reich and explores the changes and tensions that characterized German cinema and, by extension, German society during that time period. A close reading of three major publications -- a trade journal, Film-Kurier, a popular magazine, Filmwelt, and the regime's official publication, Der deutsche Film -- first challenges the traditional view of a monolithic, top down control by the Nazi regime. I show the extent and the limits of the regime's utilization of culture and media and demonstrate how different parties used the film press to pursue different, but not mutually exclusive goals. By delineating the film press as a more dynamic public forum than previously assumed, this study secondly informs us about the multifaceted uses and functions of the film publications, and about the changing relationships between the film industry and the regime, as well as the theater, the music, and the press industries. I combine a media specific approach--demonstrating the central role of film publications in articulating the contradictions within film culture--with an exploration of the media convergence in place at the time. I thus firmly position the film press at the nexus of politics, business, film professionals, and the audience, and uncover a lively, albeit restricted, discursive system, with theoretical and practical discussions about film, its achievements under the new regime, its weaknesses and the need for improvement. I focus on the three most discussed issues: the relationship between film and theater, between film and music, and, as a correlation of the two previous topics, the need to train a new generation of film professionals, the Nachwuchs. This dissertation thus traces an important moment in German film history characterized by sustained debates about political, technical, aesthetic, and social aspects of film. More importantly, it uses the film press as a mirror to some of the tensions that characterized German society along several divides such as the masses and the elite, the past and the present, as well as the contradictions in its treatment and representation of gender and sexuality.Item Genital power : female sexuality in West African literature and film(2011-05) Diabate, Naminata; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Hoad, Neville Wallace, 1966-This dissertation calls attention to three important contemporary texts from West Africa that resist the tacit cultural taboo around questions of sexuality to imagine empowering images of female sexuality. Using postcolonial feminist approaches, queer theory, and cultural studies, I analyze two novels and a film by T. Obinkaram Echewa, Frieda Ekotto, and film director Jean Pierre Bekolo to retrieve moments in which women characters turn the tables on denigrating views of their sexuality and marshal its power in the service of resistance. I show how in these texts, women bare their nether parts, wield menstrual cloths, enjoy same-sex erotic acts, sit on men's faces, and engage in many other stigmatized practices in a display of what I call "genital powers." These powers are both traditional to the cultures analyzed here and called into new forms by the pressures of decolonization and globalization. Through more complex representations of female sexuality, these texts chart a tradition in which stale binaries of victims and oppressors, the body as an exclusive site of female subjugation or as a site of eternal female power are blurred, allowing a deeper understanding of women's lived experiences and what it means to be a resisting subject in the postcolonial space. By broadly recovering women's powers and subjectivities, centering on sexuality and the body, I also examine the ways in which this mode of female subjectivity has thus far escaped comprehensive theorization. In this way, my project responds to Gayatri Spivak's call to postcolonial intellectuals to unlearn privileged forms of resistance in the recognition of subjectivity, and to develop tools that would allow us to "listen" to the voices of disenfranchised women - those removed from the channels of knowledge production. However, my study cautions that the recognition of genital powers should not be conflated with the romanticized celebration of female bodies and sexuality, since West African women continue to struggle against cultural, political, existential, and physical assaults.Item Harboring narratives : notes towards a literature of the Mediterranean(2015-08) Lovato, Martino; Tissières, Hélène; Ali, Samer; Bonifazio, Paola; El-Ariss, Tarek; Harlow, Barbara; Bouchard, NormaThrough the reading of several novels and movies produced in Arabic, French, and Italian between the 1980s and the 2000s, in this dissertation I provide a literary and transmedia contribution to the field of Mediterranean studies. Responding to the challenge brought by the regional category of Mediterranean to singular national and linguistic understandings of literature and cinema, I employ a comparative and multidisciplinary methodology to read novels by Baha’ Taher, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Abdelmalek Smari, and movies by film directors Merzak Allouache, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Vittorio De Seta. I define these works as “harboring narratives,” as they engage with the two shores of the Mediterranean in a complex process of interiorization and negotiation, opening routes of meaning across languages, societies and cultures. As they challenge constructions of otherness that materialize in present-day conflicts in the region, the works of these novelists and filmmakers give voice to a perspective on the Mediterranean radically different from that upheld by the “paradigms of discord.” Whereas according to these paradigms there is nothing in the Mediterranean but an iron curtain, these works present migration and conflict, historiography and religion, intimacy and translation as experiences shared across countries and societies in the region. By following routes of meaning that draw together the linguistic, the geographical, the economic, the historical, and the religious, I study how these novelists and filmmakers establish relationships between “horizons of belonging” and “elsewhere,” selfhood and otherness. In so doing, I respond to Kinoshita and Mallette’s call for challenging the “monolingualism” inherent in our contemporary ways of reading linguistic and literary traditions. As I show how the routes of meaning opened by these novelists and filmmakers across the region lead to hope that one day we will rejoice in sharing a common Mediterranean shore, however, I caution against easy enthusiasms. These novelists and filmmakers urge us to respond to the challenge of the present-day conflicts they address in their works, and a shared Mediterranean shore will eventually appear on the horizon only after we overcome monolingual conceptions of selfhood and otherness, setting sail towards a shore we have never seen.Item It's all for naught : avant-garde cinema, regional history, and the South(2015-05) Malin, Sean Lowel; Frick, Caroline; Hutchison, ColemanAt the margins of cinema history are films that defy traditional strategies of production, narrative, and aesthetics. These "experimental" works are the subjects of their own histories concomitant to those in "mainstream" film studies. Media scholarship by the likes of David James and P. Adams Sitney has attempted to implement the avant-garde into wider filmmaking narratives. But histories and critical studies alike widely marginalize experimental works made outside of expected cosmopolitan centers, particularly when fringe films and their makers hail from the American South. This project argues that the near-elimination of the region's avant-gardists from media history prevents works of cultural import from disseminating into the national narrative. Through an interdisciplinary study of local experimental communities, with direct focus on New Orleans, it also contends that recovering these works is essential to more inclusive and thus emancipatory regional media narratives. The thesis concludes with an original taxonomy of archives and interviews for future critical Southern media scholarship.Item Josef Fares’ Zozo as accented cinema(2016-05) Alexander, Elizabeth Lindsay; Wilkinson, Lynn Rosellen; Ramirez Berg, CharlesIn 2005, the Lebanese-Swedish filmmaker Josef Fares, who had attained recognition in Sweden through the immigrant comedies Jalla! Jalla! (2000) and Kopps (2003), presented his third feature film and first drama, Zozo, inspired by Fares’s own migration to Sweden. Set in 1987 Beirut, Zozo portrays a ten-year boy who loses his parents during the Lebanese Civil War and who journeys to reunite with his grandparents already settled in Sweden. In Sweden, Zozo is forced to learn the host country’s language quickly and to understand the unwritten rules of his new culture. Like his grandparents, he will probably always have an accent and be recognizably the “other.” The film became Sweden’s national submission to the 78th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and its nomination not only raised questions on what Sweden and Swedishness mean in a contemporary global world, but it also reexamined the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory in a borderless Europe. In this essay I argue that Zozo is an illustration of accented film, which means the film is neither Swedish nor Lebanese, but a combination of both. Influenced by his deterritorialization from Lebanon and his current life in Sweden, the cinematographic stylistic choices of Josef Fares exhibit a “double consciousness” - multiple cultural identities at once. To further understand the Lebanese and Swedish elements in the film, I analyze how elements such as chronotopes (time-space), border crossing, epistolarity, and double consciousness are inscribed in the film. In addition, I use Laura U. Marks’ concept of fossils, radioactive recollection-objects. By employing Hamid Naficy’s accented cinema theory, I hope to explain how Josef Fares is neither Swedish nor Lebanese, but an individual with multicultural identities, which reflect in the elements of the narrative and cinematographic style.Item The new curators : bloggers, fans and classic cinema on Tumblr(2014-05) Cain, Bailey Knickerbocker; Frick, CarolineThis study examines the role of social media in maintaining interest in classic cinema in today’s media culture. Ethnographic analyses and case studies were performed within a robust classic cinema fan network on the social media blogging site Tumblr. The practices of these bloggers and their online platform are framed against the traditional structure of the curator and museum, indicating that they serve many of the cultural functions attributed to these institutions. This study further demonstrates that these Tumblr networks serve as a resource for young people to discover, share, and create communities relating to classic cinema. Due to the networking capabilities of Tumblr’s youth-oriented platform, these fan activities reach a broad range of individuals, exposing them to scenes and actors from classic cinema, stimulating interest in and acceptance of the cinematic framework of classic films. This content visibility and distribution potentially draws those outside the community into the extant fan network. These communities and practices represent previously unexplored methods by which classic cinema appreciation may develop and thrive within the fast-paced media culture of the 21st century.Item News on film : cinematic historiography in Cuba and Brazil(2016-05) Hahn, Cory A.; Salgado, César Augusto; Ramirez Berg, Charles; Borge, Jason; Leu Moore, Lorraine; Roncador, SoniaThis dissertation is a comparative project that traces the co-evolution of film realism and communications media in Cuba and Brazil. Beginning with the end of Italian Neorealist-inspired movements in both countries in the late 1950s, I examine the ways in which filmmakers from each tradition incorporate radio, print, and televisual journalism into their cinematic narratives. Foundational directors whose bodies of work span and connect the popular filmmaking booms of the 1960s and 1990s—such as Santiago Álvarez, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Eduardo Coutinho—expose the political and technological systems that form public knowledge and guide civic debate. My research dilates on two internationally celebrated periods of film production concurrent with two shifts in news media paradigms: from radio and print journalism to television and from television to the internet. I argue that the renewed interest in news technologies within Cuban and Brazilian films at the beginning of the twenty-first century orients the viewer not to material fact as it is captured on film or coded by digital cameras, but by laying bare the systems of power that control news media content.Item On witnessing : postwar cinema in Iran and Lebanon(2013-08) Kim, Somy; Ghanoonparvar, M. R. (Mohammad R.); Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth; El-Ariss, Tarek; Ali, Samer; Ramirez-Berg, Charles; Aghaie, KamranThis dissertation examines the particularly dynamic postwar cinema of Iran and Lebanon (1988-2007). Through a comparative approach, I consider the cinematic narratives that emerged from this critical period of national reconstruction in these two Middle Eastern countries. I argue that the precarious condition of the postwar, globalizing period allowed the untold stories of class and gender for instance, to appear from within the fabric of the discourse of war storytelling in particular ways. By comparing these two contexts I am able to draw from a shared visuality, and specifically the visual trope of the martyr that was popularized in Iran and Lebanon in the war periods. In Chapter One I trace the formidable production of the visual rhetoric of war in Iran and Lebanon through posters and cinema. In Chapter Two I highlight the emergence of an auteur filmmaking of the globalizing period in the Middle East, which emphasized the instability of representation and ‘true’ witnessing. In Chapter Three, I argue that an aesthetics of performing witnessing illuminated the class issues troubling cities like Tehran and Beirut. Finally, in Chapter Four I show how the generic conventions of popular genres like comedy and musical allowed for otherwise controversial social issues to be articulated in war films.Item (Re)membering the past WWII-the years of lead in contemporary Italian literature, theater, and cinema(2015-12) Mabrey, Beatrice Giuseppina; Raffa, Guy P.; Bonifazio, Paola, 1976-; Bini Carter, Daniela; Charumbira, Ruramisai; Lombardi, GiancarloA cursory investigation of contemporary Italian literary, cinematic, and theatrical works produced since the 1990s reveals a marked interest in revisiting the dominant events of the twentieth century. Among the many episodes discussed, World War II, the postwar period, the 1968 protests, and the terrorist movements of the 1970s emerge as topics of particular interest for writers, playwrights, and cinematographers. Like the lieux de memoire described in Pierre Nora’s groundbreaking historiography, these “sites of memory” work through the “reciprocal overdetermination” of history and collective memory to act as bastions of national identity. This study examines a variety of works that draw upon Italy’s rich tradition of the historical novel and its most recent incarnation as the romanzo neostorico. Specifically, it shows how these works approach these sites of memory to unveil and explore the intricate web of memories and traumas underpinning the often-silencing narratives promoted by social and political institutions. Building on recent scholarship that advances the notion of a return to an engaged postmodernism, the author argues that these texts encourage their readers or spectators to engage with the formative sites of Italian national identity and to renegotiate their place within their own experiences. She claims that works such as Ascanio Celestini’s Radio Clandestina, Cristina Comencini’s Due Partite, and Francesca Melandri’s Più alto del mare engender a critical rereading of history by creating new myths. For the author, this rereading takes place predominantly through an encounter with memory. Consistent with Toni Morrison’s conception of “rememory,” these innovative works use individual and collective recollections of the events cited above (experienced or “inherited” by many of the authors and readers themselves) to reassemble a “dismembered” past and open a space for the development and expression of nascent and marginalized subjectivities. This, in turn, creates spaces for confronting pressing sociopolitical issues in contemporary Italy.Item Sensational genres : experiencing science fiction, fantasy and horror(2010-08) Schmidt, Lisa Marie, Ph. D.; Staiger, JanetThis dissertation explores the embodied and sensory dimensions of fantastic film, those elements that are generally held up in contrast to and, often, in excess of, narrative structure. I suggest a departure from the traditional approach to genre study which has been preoccupied with narrative formulas, themes, and iconographies. My goal is not to dispense with those kinds of analyses but to complement them and, importantly, to point to some neglected dimensions of genre pleasure. I propose to transform the presumably excessive pleasures of the fantastic genre into something essential to it. First, I explore the disavowal or avoidance of embodied sensation within popular genre criticism. I then turn to critique existing models of film reception, focusing particularly upon a critique of the ocularcentric or visualist framework. From this critique, I am able to suggest some criteria for an alternative theoretical model based upon embodiment. I propose a theoretical framework based, first, on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who demonstrates that human subjects are constituted materially and culturally through their perceptual relations within the world. Second, I rely upon a further interpretation of this phenomenology by the American philosopher Don Ihde. Ihde’s work, configured as “postphenomenology,” draws variously from technoscience studies, the philosophy of science, feminist, and posthumanist theory, and sketches a system for the application of an experimental phenomenology. With this method, I explore various embodied, sensational aspects of fantastic genre films, i.e., spectacle, gore, musical genre conventions. I describe and relate these aspects of fantastic film to other cultural venues, exploring common themes and structures among them. From this, I draw some conclusions as to the nature of these sensational genre pleasures for embodied human individuals. Simultaneously, I consider the possibilities for embodied difference among individuals.Item Tras à memwa : the emergence and development of French Caribbean cinema(2010-05) Wright, Meredith Nell; Tissières, Hélène; Sherzer, Dina; Wilks, Jennifer; Staiger, Janet; Cauvin, Jean-PierreIn December 1899, the Italian camera operator Giuseppe Filippi, trained by the famous French Lumière brothers, arrived in Haiti and began conducting film screenings for local audiences. Within the next two years, his Caribbean travels led him to Guadeloupe and Martinique, where he left behind him a seed of interest in an art form that, as I will demonstrate, would alternately develop and wane over the course of the twentieth century depending on funding and the turbulence of the fluctuating French Caribbean political and cultural climate. Chapters one and two provide a thorough roadmap of the development of the French Caribbean film industry and conclude chronologically, arriving at the current state of cinema in these islands. Though the debate over the existence of the industry still carries on amongst local film professionals, particularly in Guadeloupan and Martinican circles, these chapters offer compelling evidence of distinct and verifiable cinematic production. The final two chapters consist of an analysis of a set of five films, chosen for their relatively recent release as well as their thematic, aesthetic, and structural variety. This set of films constitutes evidence of a wave of films unified by their preoccupation with memory, an orientation that mirrors and reinforces a contemporary cultural movement in these islands, and by their advancement of overt, contextually relevant postcolonial political agenda.Item "The world in miniature" : testing Bruce Conner's CROSSROADS(2016-05) La Brasca, Jana Lee; Reynolds, Ann Morris; Charlesworth, Michael JThe subject of this thesis is Bruce Conner’s 1976 film CROSSROADS, a 37- minute filmic portrait of the world’s first underwater nuclear detonation at the Bikini Atoll on July 25, 1946. CROSSROADS consists of 23 segments of declassified United States National Archive footage and two original soundtracks composed by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley. Documentary and aesthetic at once, the work invites a meditation upon the terrifying violence and evanescent beauty of a key 20th century icon: the atomic mushroom cloud. In this thesis, I examine CROSSROADS under the generative conceptual prism of the miniature as theorized by Claude Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind and Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. I expand upon the miniature idea flexibly throughout this paper: I find that it is equally relevant to nuclear weapons testing history, landscape, cinema, description, and the artwork of Bruce Conner. Remaining focused on questions of scale and making relevant comparisons to works of art, films, and contemporary visual culture, I structure my analysis loosely around episodes in the life of the film: the production of its source material in the 1940s, Conner’s process of modifying it in the 1970s, and the resulting work’s reception after its premiere in 1976.