Film and Media (Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies) Graduate Theses
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Item Architects of the New Hollywood: Analyzing and Confronting Revolution and its Absence in the New Hollywood Cinema of Mike Nichols and Arthur Penn(2024-09-25) Simpson, Daniel; Film and Media (Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies); Bertrand, KarineThe New Hollywood began in 1967 with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. Characterized by formal innovation, moral complexity, and defiance of the Motion Picture Production Code that had governed the content of American cinema since the 1930s, the era is among the most studied periods in American film history, lauded as a space for artistic expression and studied as a period of cultural and industrial transformation. This research contributes to the scholarship by examining the period as a revolutionary space through comparative analysis of the New Hollywood films of Mike Nichols and Arthur Penn. These interventions are necessary corrections to existing gaps in New Hollywood scholarship. Though much of the literature has used the word ‘revolution’ to describe the New Hollywood, no text has adequately defined the era’s revolutionary qualities or qualified its successes and failures as a revolution. Through a combination of revolution studies theory, film theory, literature review, and close reading, this dissertation extends beyond the ill-defined uses of revolution that have marked New Hollywood scholarship and provides are more complex understanding of the era as a revolutionary space. Focus on Penn and Nichols is a means to correct the lack of scholarly attention the pair have received in New Hollywood literature outside of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, with chapters dedicated to Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant (1969), Little Big Man (1970), and Night Moves (1975), and Nichols’ Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and The Day of the Dolphin (1973). Expanding beyond the New Hollywood’s originary films provides a framework for understanding the historical trajectory of the New Hollywood by tracing the artistic evolution of its progenitors.Item Beyond Love and Death: Defining Abject Aesthetics in 1980s and 1990s Anglo-Canadian Cinema(2024-08-28) Sanders, Emily; Film and Media (Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies); MacKenzie, ScottMy doctoral thesis examines 1980s and 1990s Anglo-Canadian cinema, and introduces the concept of abject aesthetics to define the particular formal and narrative similarities between features produced in this time. This thesis is informed by the practices and theory of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, and as the foundation of my thesis I rely on Julia Kristeva’s definition of the abject, as a place that disturbs “borders, systems, rules.” I locate these transgressions within the cinema of filmmakers such as Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema, Lynne Stopkewich, Guy Maddin, Clement Virgo, Bruce McDonald, and Srinivas Krishna, in which sexuality and death are configured through degrees of neurotic fascination that define the cinema at this time. From this position, I investigate the arrival of the abject as a transgressive aesthetic that re-thinks the concept of the Self, and by extension, renegotiates the myths and ideals of Canadian identity. Abject aesthetics I define through two features: too many/ too few bodies, and the dissolution between reality and fantasy. In expanding on these concepts of abject aesthetics, I combine the works of theorists such as Steven Shaviro, Leo Bersani, Elizabeth Grosz, Kaja Silverman, Laura U. Marks, Tsvetan Todorov, to think through the relationship between the body, the look, the screen, and the imaginary. As such, I demonstrate the ways that Anglo-Canadian cinema in this time period expands upon concepts of gender, sexuality, the materiality of the body, identity, and nationalism, through the themes of love and death. While my work resides in the domain of the 1980s and 1990s, I offer abject aesthetics as an emergent area of critical investigation in Canadian cinema.Item watth chhum baav kas - Experimentations at the Threshold of Image: Understanding Representation of Documentary Subjects from the Kashmir Conflict.(2024-07-08) Mehvish; Film and Media (Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies); Naaman, DoritThis research-creation PhD project is a combination of critique of existing documentary work in and about Kashmir, as well as an exploration of alternative and experimental modes for responsible documentary representation of people in conflict zones. The cornerstone of this research is understanding, learning, and finding ways to represent documentary subjects of this long-term conflict zone without victimizing them. Documentary cinema tends to either portray Kashmiris as terrorists/fighters or as victims. I argue that either stereotype is damaging. My PhD research is an experiment in understanding and showcasing conflict without the images of conflict that are traditionally associated with political movements and revolutions. The creative components of this dissertation portfolio attempt to side-step the fetishization and desensitization of, and through, images of conflict. The underlying aim is to experiment with representations of conflict that do not isolate the subjects within the conflict and trauma of political turmoil, but rather emphasize the fullness of cultural and communal life, despite, and because of, the protracted conflict. The research is presented as a portfolio, with three elements complimenting each other: 1. theoretical study focused on the fields of post-coloniality, audience studies, representational politics, conflict-based humour, documentary and ethnographic cinemas, and surveillance studies. 2. creation-based experimentation with documentary form in Kashmir through one feature-length documentary using humour strategically in an autoethnographic film; and a curated exhibition in the form an 8-channel installation, focused on silencing in neo-colonized spaces through surveillance infrastructure. 3. pedagogical dissemination of alternative forms of documentary filmmaking instruction, through workshops in Kashmir for young filmmakers – as part of the fieldwork.Item An Artist's Almanac to Research, Organization, Education, and Bookings(2024-05-17) Lochhead, Neven; Film and Media (Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies); Kibbins, GaryFusing together current discourses on contemporary artistic research, contemporary art theory, curatorial practice, organizational studies, sound studies, and educational theory, An Artist’s Almanac to Research, Organization, Education, and Bookings is a theoretically diverse dissertation-portfolio that interweaves methodological analysis with applied experimentation. Across four chapters, it examines the epistemological possibilities of art’s status as a form of knowledge, proposes a new theory of curatorial practice through the lens of organizational science, develops an educational philosophy driven by sonic phenomena, and launches a speculative academic discipline called Booking Studies. In its blending of disciplinary forms, which involves academic and conceptual writing, immersive exhibitions, performances, workshop designs, audio works, and films, a set of distinct methodological systems are built, each offering in their own way new perspectives on the possibilities of art-as-research. The author and artist invents, engineers, and implements a range of conceptual tools and vocabularies that help to comprehend and intervene on forces shaping the present regimes of artistic research, namely 'financialization,' 'professionalization,' and 'homogenization.' A consistent intervention upon these impasses throughout is the text’s emphasis on the role of the habitat or ‘scene’ in the trajectories of artistic knowledge, which is conceptualized by the author as an adaptive contextual medium that is always amenable to recalibration, capable of constantly proposing new frames of reference for the aims of practice-led inquiry. This contention is defended both theoretically, in the academic writing, and concretely, in a series of applied projects interwoven throughout the chapters. The nested documentation of these projects both amplifies and dramatizes the dissertation, through a formally varied body of work that reflects the author’s own embedded roles as an artist, curator, and educator. Lochhead's practice-led thinking unfolds as an always responsive process to a range of institutional sites, from which a multifaceted ecology of activity emerges, involving the coordination of artistic research teams and distributed learning environments. In its form and content, this work seeks to expand and reorient the thresholds of art's ‘doctorateness,’ working across platforms and modes of address to persistently evolve its voice into something else.Item The Mothership: Multiplanetary Becomings and Reproducing Worlds(2024-03-28) Okabe, Naomi; Film and Media (Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies); Norton, Jenn; Na, AliOn November 16th, 2022, NASA launched Artemis I, the first of multiple missions propelling humanity toward a multiplanetary future in which we will build new worlds, terraforming environments both physically and ideologically. These “moon to mars” missions mark a new era of deep space exploration, the first in fifty years since the Apollo missions in the 1970s. This time, NewSpace venture capitalists are playing a prominent role, particularly since the Obama administration quietly shifted funding toward private corporations in 2011 (Valentine). Space, as a critical territory, simultaneously presents us with an opportunity to consider our future celestial societies, as well as our terrestrial existence here on earth (Boucher). This moment in history encapsulates the hopes and dreams of the “Artemis Generation” and requires ethico-political discourse to avoid “terraforming as enforced terranormativity” (Oman-Reagan), or approaching space settlement with normative or colonial systems of knowledge. Utilizing an interdisciplinary research-creation approach, I engage in speculation as practice, putting science fiction texts and methods in conversation with critical theory. This project centres four space feminist “missions” or chapters that include a cultural geography of NASA’s current Artemis program, the history of women in the space agency, and the political, ethical, and technological entanglements of putting bodies in space. I also explore what I refer to as the “Space M/other” film genre and the social and ethical implications of reproducing in space. Finally, I consider the power of science fiction as a medium that attends to the ineffable in social discourse and contextualize my own audio-based research-creation experiment—a “speculative soundscape essay.” This project is an attempt to triangulate themes of space exploration, motherhood, and science fiction in order to consider a mode of cosmic futurity that is more gestative, symbiotic, and germinal.