Browsing by Subject "Documentary films"
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Item American political documentaries: Structure, agency, and communication of meaning(2012-05) Borua, Shankar; Stoker, Kevin; Chambers, Todd; Sparks, Johnny V.; Langford, Catherine L.This dissertation advances inquiry in the area of documentary filmmaking as a cultural act of meaning-creation and recognizes the process of meaning-creation enabled by an American documentarian through the production of a political documentary. The project identifies deliberate choices that a filmmaker makes in a pre-meditated strategy to use resources of sounds and moving pictures to convey meanings in the American public sphere and highlight contentious issues that tend to polarize public opinion. Using structuration theory and textual analysis, this study examines the concepts of structure, agency, and reflexivity that enable communication of meaning through the film text as well as transformation of the documentary structure. The documentary structure enables agency of a filmmaker and the production of a documentary (the filmmaker interacting with the documentary structure) further reproduces and transforms the structure. The structure provides agency to a filmmaker to engage in a discourse on a politically charged issue in American public space and highlight his/her interpretation of the American condition and experience. Using "found material" and documentary conventions, a filmmaker constructs an argument to communicate meaning and provides "evidence" in the narrative to authenticate it. By examining American political documentaries through the prism of structuration theory, this dissertation offers interpretive insight into the deliberate process of meaning-creation actively enabled by the structure of documentary film and highlights the ongoing transformation of the documentary structure.Item Crisis of representation : experimental documentary in postwar Lebanon(2008-05) Westmoreland, Mark Ryan, 1971-; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-This dissertation investigates the social world of contemporary filmmakers in the Middle East and the way they use visual media to re-imagine existent forms of identity, envision new modes of social agency, and transform public culture in the face of dramatic instability. In the wake of the Lebanese civil war and through the tenuous postwar period, video art and experimental documentary have critiqued the politics of representation and negotiated the theoretical and structural difficulties in representing the war. These artists have activated intersections where experimental media has generated a vibrant visual culture by both building on local notions of cosmopolitanism and by participating in transnational sites of postcolonial representation. Methodologically, I employ ethnography to grapple with the public culture of Beirut as a site of avant-garde experimentation, but also to examine the city as a contested site affected by periods of rapid growth, intense violence, and urban reconstruction. To explain this cultural phenomenon, I advance the idea of 'post-orientalist aesthetic' to describe a mode of intellectual critique and artistic style that goes beyond Edward Said's critique to give greater attention to self-representation in the post-911 period. This aesthetic interrogates western representational practices and also develops a localized critical analysis of Middle Eastern visual culture. This aesthetic informs a better understanding of postwar subjectivity, particularly in the way memory and lived experience becomes mediated through the materiality of objects, images, and architecture affectively inscribed with destruction and violence. The notion of the archive or the personal collection becomes of particular interest here; especially in the way these artifacts embody personalized narratives and testimonials that push back from abstracted notions of a monolithic historical narrative. Drawing on visual anthropology, media ethnography, and nonwestern film theory, this text examines the way these artists challenge realist modes of representation by utilizing both ethnographic and artistic approaches to grapple with the experience of everyday violence. In order to explore methodologies for conducting visual research in conflict zones, I conclude with an experimental auto-ethnography that appropriates these aesthetics in an effort to interrogate my positionality as an American researcher in the Middle East.Item That thing you do(2011-05) Albala Cardemil, David; Schiesari, Nancy; Lewis, Richard; Ramírez-Berg, CharlesThis report outlines the process of creating and producing the documentary film “That Thing You Do” based on the TV series “1+1=Infinito” (1+1=Infinite). The series and the film provide a better understanding of the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and shows how people can incorporate CSR into their daily lives. The film production was financed by “PROhumana Foundation” (Chile) and shows how three Chilean people: Rodrigo Alonso, entrepreneur, Catalina Valdés, chef, and Javier del Río, architect, are trying to make a difference in their specific fields in terms of environmental impact, saving and using energy properly, and the importance of conscientious eating. The documentary film has taken the concept of CSR and attempted to present it to a massive audience in order to suggest the idea that all of our actions eventually come back to us. Any imbalance in the system that surrounds us and which we are a part of will affect us. In contrast, any improvement to the system will benefit us. The film thus attempts to showcase testimonials by the main characters suggesting small changes we can make in our daily lives in order to work toward this goal.Item Voice-over documentaries: synchronization techniques in English-Spanish and English-Polish translation(2014-09-29) Sepielak, Katarzyna