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"Creature from the Unconscious"

Description: Creature from the Unconscious is a reflexive genre hybrid film that follows the process of the director's journey of navigating the process of self-acceptance and self-love in the wake of trauma.
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Date: December 2023
Creator: Powell, Madison Keely
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"The Gordita's Guide to Body Positivity"

Description: "The Gordita's Guide to Body Positivity" is an autobiographical documentary reflecting on society's expectations of the female body image and how it affects Latinx women. Through personal recollections, media content, and archival material, the film explores beauty expectations, body discrimination, and body positivity. The document analyzes the documentary styles such as autoethnography and narration incorporated into the film and provides historical and theoretical context to body image in th… more
Date: December 2023
Creator: Calderon, Jessica Andrea
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"Thank You" Parts I and II

Description: "Thank You" Parts I and II is an experiment that attempts to break new ground in the field of anthropological cinema through the reflexive methodology and experience of myself. My establishment of a new theoretical film approach called meta-anthrochaomediacy and its evolution into radical autoethnographic mediation is explored throughout this thesis. I exercised my theory by producing and documenting a reflexive experience built on fostering emotional bonds and social relationships that provide… more
Date: December 2023
Creator: Hensley, Dylan
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"An Encountered Moment"

Description: This MFA graduate thesis explores the intersection of therapeutic photography, generational trauma, and Christian spirituality in promoting spiritual healing in disabled veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Drawing from personal experience, rigorous biblical training, and extensive research, I argue that incorporating faith-based practices and beliefs can complement existing PTSD support and enhance spiritual and mental well-being. Through the lens of generational trau… more
Date: July 2023
Creator: Thomas, Aaron Mahlon
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Forbidden Pleasures: Queerness and Cannibalism in Film and Television

Description: The trope of the queer cannibal recurs throughout fiction as well as film and television. While literature scholars such as David Bergman and Caleb Crain have written about this figure in American literature, the queer cannibal remains unstudied in the realm of media studies. This thesis analyzes six media texts that feature queer cannibals: Hannibal (2013-2015), Ravenous (1999), The Terror (2018), Yellowjackets (2021-), Raw (2016), and Bones and All (2022). Through these analyses, this thesis … more
Date: July 2023
Creator: Hadley, Kristen M.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Views from the Beach: Spectator Positions and the American International Pictures Beach Party Films

Description: The American International Pictures (AIP) Beach Party Films were a major American cultural phenomenon in the early 1960s and continue to play a significant role in the American cultural imagination. The AIP Beach Party Films, despite their popularity and influence, have been largely ignored by academia and a thorough academic examination has yet to be written. This thesis attempts to change such an academic precedent. At first glance, the Beach Party Films are frivolous and chaotic (perhaps exp… more
Date: July 2023
Creator: Leavy, Mark
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"Doble Identidad"

Description: Doble Identidad conveys my experience as someone who struggles with their cultural identity. Through the expository modes of self-reflexivity, participatory, experimental, and poetics, the film displays the factors that molded my cultural identity. My childhood memories and interactions with my loved ones help me tell the story of how my cultural identity has and continues to leave me with feelings of inadequacy of not being Mexican or American enough.
Date: May 2023
Creator: Huerta-Ortega, Katherine Leilani
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Netflix Strategy in France: Local Language Productions, Teen Audiences, and Instagram Marketing

Description: The relationship between France and Hollywood is rooted in a deep history that dates to the late 1800s. French Cultural elites and policymakers have regulated Hollywood to prevent the American ideals that are depicted in Hollywood movies from infringing on French culture, restricting free trade distribution practices to limit audiences' accessibility of imported, non-French media. These import regulations have strengthened French exceptionalism, which is an ideal that recognizes France as being… more
Date: May 2023
Creator: Kite, Rachel
Partner: UNT Libraries

"Joe on the Bus"

Description: Joe Phillips, born in London to two American psychologists, worked for almost a decade as a solo motorcycle response unit in London before making the life-altering decision to change his path. Joe sold all of his belongings and purchased a traditional Red Routemaster double-decker bus to live and travel on in the United States. After the year-long bus journey, Joe chose to stay in the United States and purchased 22 acres of land in Coldspring, Texas where he is building his eco-paradise.
Date: December 2022
Creator: McChane, Lia Mackenzie
Partner: UNT Libraries

"The '91 Roos"

Description: The ‘91 Roos is a sports documentary focused in Killeen, Texas. exploring the 1991 Killeen Kangaroos high school football team and their journey to their city's one and only state championship in football. Killeen is a small central Texas town that is directly adjacent and provides support to Ft Hood, one of the world's largest military bases. With the Persian Gulf War raging in 1991, soldiers that lived in Killeen were being sent off to fight, leaving the city almost like a ghost town. In Octo… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Graham, Derwin Anthony
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"Access Points"

Description: Access Points explores the different relationships that humans have to land, focusing on the various ways that the area known as the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge is used, appreciated, and preserved by disparate groups. The natural beauty of this Wildlife Refuge and its striking appearance amidst encircling plains makes it a popular destination for many groups of people, including the local rock-climbing community and generations of indigenous peoples whose connection with this land is as d… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Dye, Aaron Charles
Partner: UNT Libraries

Consider the View (La Due)

Description: Visual impairment/blindness is not often discussed in a media space, and the community is often left out and forgotten otherwise in the course of history. Through documentary filmmaking, Consider the View (La Vue) provides an artistic exploration of blindness by using the camera as optical power and other forms of art. Viewers experience a new perspective of what it means to be visually impaired.
Date: August 2022
Creator: Jordan, Tamia Chantel
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"Visceral Data"

Description: Visceral Data is a short documentary formatted for 360-cinema (commonly referred to as virtual reality or VR) that explores the integration of art and science, and how aesthetically creative treatments of raw data are an engaging way to interpret complex information. With Roger Malina, executive editor of Leonardo, the world's foremost academic journal for the intersections of art, science, and technology, providing a narrative overview of the subject, six art-scientists/science-artists discuss… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: DiFalco, Elaine Celleste
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"Mending the Gaps"

Description: Mending the Gaps examines the failures and deficits that have occurred in education both historically and today. These gaps that already existed in learning, equality, opportunity, and technology have all been made worse after two years of a global pandemic. Focusing on students in the state of Texas, which has the 2nd largest economy in the United States, but currently ranks 34th in quality of education, now students face the reality of the COVID 19 health crisis in an already overburdened pub… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Muller, Mark D.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Mutant Database: Media Franchise Authorship, Creators' Rights, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Description: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) is a massive ongoing franchise that began as a 1984 self-published comic book created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. Its history is intertwined with the creators' rights movement and the Creator's Bill of Rights (CBR), which rejected work-for-hire contracts, wherein creative laborers—creative authors—cede authorial control of their labor. Because the production of comic books and their franchises is highly collaborative, intellectual property (IP) rights a… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Cardenas, Jen
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"Bad Paper"

Description: Bad Paper follows the lives of former military service members, who have received an other-than-honorable discharge, but also have service-connected post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Due to the "suck it up" culture of the military, many of these veterans would not report any psychological troubles in fear of being labeled "weak" and potentially affecting their promotions. With no outlet for their PTSD, drugs and alcohol became a way of "self-medicating," which led to their dismissal from… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Beard, Daniel Lee
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Crying for Change: Examining the Use of Period Melodrama and the Melodramatic Mode in Contemporary Queer Representation

Description: This thesis illustrates how Melodrama and the melodramatic mode have been adapted within contemporary cinema as both a means of commenting on prior LGBTQI representation, and of exposing mainstream audiences to the issues still faced by many within this spectrum. Through my analyses of Carol (2015), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and A Single Man (2009), I examine how filmmakers have drawn on Melodrama as both an aesthetic form, and as a reference to the broader field of generic history and critici… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Bonthuys, Justin
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

What Does It Mean to Go Super Saiyan: Gender Identity and Fandom in the Toonami Release of Dragon Ball Z (1998-2003)

Description: The intention of this thesis is to analyze the representations of masculinity in the anime series Dragon Ball Z as it aired on Cartoon Network's programming block Toonami, specifically the nature in which they were framed and how oppositional interpretations in the fandom became prevalent as a result. The series emphasizes the evolution of its central characters Goku, Vegeta, and Gohan into performing a sensitive masculinity, but there are a prevalence of images in the series that discredit thi… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Liverett, Nicholas
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Where Have All the Cowboys Gone? Creating the Post 9/11 Westerner

Description: The intention of this thesis is to analyze the figure of the post 9/11 Westerner as a modern character created from the preexisting archetype of the classic Westerner. 3:10 to Yuma (dir. James Mangold), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (dir. Andrew Dominik), and There Will Be Blood (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson) were released in 2007 and featured post 9/11 Westerners dealing with issues of fatherhood, demonstrating the prevalence of this figure within the modern western g… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Possoit, Dylan
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Chronicle of the Online Culture Wars: Reactionary Affective Publics in Neoliberal Postmodernity

Description: The Age of Trump witnessed the visible rise of intense culture wars and polarization in the United States. While culture wars are not new phenomena, the current iteration has digital media acting as new discursive structures and mediating battlegrounds for all sides of the cultural conflict. This project chronicles these online culture wars, demonstrating how within a neoliberal and postmodern socio-cultural condition, the rise of ambivalent, profit-driven digital technologies and platforms str… more
Date: May 2021
Creator: Montalvo, David Rafael
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

King of the Merchandise: How Showa Era Paratexts Forever Changed the Godzilla Franchise

Description: The Godzilla media franchise is one of the longest running media franchises, which means the character himself has gone through many changes throughout the years. However, in American pop culture, the characters of Godzilla is perceived as a hero, a friend of humanity and defender of Earth. This reputation comes from the Showa Era, where Godzilla often fought on the side of humanity, rather than trying to destroy them as depicted in the original Gojira. In recent years, Toho, Godzilla's corpora… more
Date: May 2021
Creator: Cooper, Dalton
Partner: UNT Libraries
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