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open access

No Way Out: A Historical Documentary

Description: No Way Out: A Historical Documentary is the written companion to a forty-minute documentary film entitled "No Way Out". The film deals with a 1974 inmate standoff at a prison in Huntsville, Texas known as the Carrasco Incident. The film examines the prison takeover through the eyes of those who lived through it. Composed of five interviews, "No Way Out" is a compilation of various points of view ranging from former hostages, members of the press, and law enforcement. The written companion for t… more
Date: August 2003
Creator: Holder, Elizabeth Suzanne

Our enemy, ourselves: Political conspiracy in American cinema, 1970-present.

Description: This thesis is an examination of "paranoid conspiracy" films, a film noir subgenre that emerged in mainstream American cinema in the early 1970s and turns on vast, shadowy conspiracies located within U.S. "power structures" (government agencies, the military, the media) and directed against the American public. Specifically, it focuses on the emergence of these films in the 1970s, their almost complete disappearance during the Reagan presidency, and subsequent reemergence in the early 1990s. P… more
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Date: August 2003
Creator: Budziszewski, Przemyslaw
open access

Journey for Jazz

Description: This written thesis accompanies a 32-minute documentary video, Journey for Jazz, which explores four Korean students who major in jazz at the University of North Texas in Denton. Detailed accounts of the pre-production, production, and post-production of the video guide the reader to understand the challenging and rewarding process of making this documentary. Theoretical issues are also discussed, including Bill Nichols's typology of documentary modes as a useful tool for analysis of hybrid doc… more
Date: May 2003
Creator: Ahn, Byungkyu
open access

Just $10 A Month: A Television Advertising Campaign

Description: This written thesis accompanies three television public service announcement spots. Two of the spots are 60 seconds and one of the spots is 45 seconds in length. I produced this public service television advertising campaign to highlight the issue of child illiteracy in Pakistan and to encourage expatriate and resident Pakistani's to donate to educational charities. A Website created by the filmmaker is promoted in the campaign. This Website provides information about various charities that edu… more
Date: May 2003
Creator: Mumtaz, Danish Kasim
open access

Side By Side: Reinventing Mother/Daughter Relationships

Description: Beginning with mother/daughter film classics such as Stella Dallas (1937) and Mildred Pierce (1945), and moving to consider recent mother/daughter texts, Anywhere But Here (1999) and "Gilmore Girls" (2000 -), this thesis, in both its written and visual components, examines the multiple and often contradictory ways in which mothers and daughters have been represented in popular culture. Challenging the discourses that singularly stress struggle and separation, this research highlights represe… more
Date: May 2003
Creator: Holzgraefe, Sandi
open access

"Time for Teletubbies": Childhood, Child Participation, and the Struggle for Meaning

Description: The children's television program Teletubbies and its concomitant controversies are analyzed along with the media attention surrounding the program. A textual analysis is presented, including the methodologies of narrative theory, semiotics/structuralism, and poststructuralism. The context is also analyzed, using a cultural studies and historical reception approach, in order to chronicle and analyze the show's controversies and elucidate how these arguments have affected reception and interpret… more
Date: May 2003
Creator: Cowart, Agatha
open access

Gender, Identity, and Influence: Hong Kong Martial Arts Films

Description: This project is an examination of the Hong Kong film industry, focusing on the years leading up to the handover of Hong Kong to communist China. The influence of classical Chinese culture on gender representation in martial arts films is examined in order to formulate an understanding of how these films use gender issues to negotiate a sense of cultural identity in the face of unprecedented political change. In particular, the films of Hong Kong action stars Michelle Yeoh and Brigitte Lin are s… more
Date: December 2002
Creator: Castillo, Gilbert Gerard
open access

Herb and Life: A Chinese Medical Family

Description: This written thesis examines the process of producing Herb and Life: a Chinese Medical Family, a thirty-minute documentary video that explores the producer's family members' relationship with Traditional Chinese Medicine. This documentary uses interviews, narration, music, and observational sequences to display documentary subjects' career choices and their experiences with Traditional Chinese Medicine. This written thesis reveals the development of this documentary, from the pre-production to … more
Date: December 2002
Creator: Yang, Hongyi
open access

Hildegard On Rubble Mountain

Description: Hildegard On Rubble Mountain is a cinema verité documentary about Hildegard Modinger's childhood. She grew up in Stuttgart, Germany during World War II and immigrated to the United States at the age of nineteen. This video follows her back to her childhood neighborhood as she recalls memories of that time in her life. The accompanying production book explains the production process: preproduction, production, postproduction, theoretical approaches, style used and a self-evaluation.
Date: December 2002
Creator: Mullins, Michael Bryan
open access

'Gimme That Ole Time Religion': Traditionalism, Progressivism and Popular Media

Description: This thesis examines the role of Christianity in contemporary American culture using 1990s popular media as cultural artifacts. Building on theories of ideological analysis and hegemony, this project uncovers a balance between progressive and traditionalist ideologies in American culture with progressive ideologies most often superficially acknowledged and incorporated into dominant traditionalist Christian ideologies through hegemonic negotiation. An analysis of the popular Hollywood films T… more
Date: August 2002
Creator: Turner-Reed, Laura

Memories of Motherland: Gender, Diaspora and National Identity in 1990s Indian Popular Culture

Description: This thesis examines the role of globalization, an open economy and diasporic experiences on the 1990s popular Indian culture, focusing on discourses of gender, national identity and family. Recent Indian beauty queens and international beauty contests are discussed in the context of gendered nationhood in 1990s India. Several popular films of the 1990s are discussed as narratives expressing longing for an extended family and a homogeneous national identity under the leadership of a traditional… more
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Date: May 2002
Creator: Sapre, Manasi
open access

A New Circle

Description: This reflexive documentary film explores the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Tribe of Texas and examines questions of cultural identity. The twenty-one minute film uses footage of cultural events, reservation landscape, photographs, and interviews to bring the viewer into the lives of the Alabama-Coushatta people. The written portion of this thesis details the entire processes of making the film, from the proposal stage to the post-production stage. This includes an examination of the film's evolution… more
Date: December 2001
Creator: Shutt, Jason
open access

"There's A Man With A Gun Over There": Cops And The Counterculture

Description: By 1960, television advertisers recognized the economic potential of American youth, and producers were expected to develop programs to attract them, while still maintaining appeal for the older audience members. This task was to prove difficult as the decade wore on. While continuing to link the nation's cold war concerns to the portrayal of good and evil, some shows, like 77 Sunset Strip, and The Mod Squad, explored alternative lifestyles, but still accepted American values. As the 1960s deve… more
Date: December 2001
Creator: Moellinger, Terry
open access

Two Fingers: Michael's Struggle

Description: This written thesis gives an account of the creative production of Two Fingers: Michael's Struggle, a twenty-nine minute documentary video that explores the life of Michael Alan Rasch who suffers from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. It explains in detail the process of pre-production, production, and post-production of the documentary. It also discuses the integration of theories applied in the documentary. Two Fingers shows that although Michael has lived with the disease almost his entire life, … more
Date: December 2001
Creator: Youm, Mi-jung

Teen ages: Youth market romance in Hollywood teen films of the 1980s and 1990s

Description: This thesis examines the differences between teen romantic comedy films marketed to Generation X teenagers in the 1980s and Generation Y teenagers in the 1990s, focusing on the presentation of gender roles, consumptive behavior, and family. The 1980s films are discussed within the social context of the Reagan era and the conservatism of the New Right. The 1990s films are examined as continuing a conservative sensibility, but they additionally posit consumption as instrumental to achieving an id… more
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Date: May 2001
Creator: Murphy, Caryn E.
open access

On Objects and Affections: Contemporary Representations of the Gay Man/Straight Woman Dyad in Popular Film and Television

Description: This project explores the representational strategies used to depict a gay male/straight female dyad across a variety of popular media. The study problematizes and critically evaluates how the narrativization of the dyad both challenges and reinforces stereotypes of gay men and at the same time circulates a troubling image of femininity in the figure of the straight woman. This line of argument is extended to the context of "Lifestyle Television" to demonstrate how the dyad implicitly structure… more
Date: December 2000
Creator: Pillion, Owen L.
open access

Cowboys, Postmodern Heroes, and Anti-heroes: The Many Faces of the Alterized White Man

Description: This thesis investigates how hegemonic white masculinity adopts a new mode of material accumulation by entering into an ambivalent existence as a historical agent and metahistory at the same time and continues to function as a performative identity that offers a point of identification for the working class white man suggesting that bourgeois identity is obtainable through the performance of bourgeois ethics. The thesis postulates that the phenomenal transitions brought on by industrialization … more
Date: August 2000
Creator: Murphree, Hyon Joo Yoo
open access

Gestalt Work For the Actor: A Documentary Video Production

Description: Gestalt Work for the Actor is a documentary about Dr. Renee Vincent's Gestalt acting exercise. Students are trained to recall powerful emotions and then employ the conjured passions into performance. This documentary examines the Gestalt acting exercise and what benefits it affords actors. The accompanying production book explains the production processes: preproduction, production, and postproduction, as well as the theoretical approaches used in the documentary.
Date: May 2000
Creator: Massey, Hugh Richard

The Luxury of Tears: A Secondary Survivor's Story

Description: As the written accompaniment for The Luxury of Tears, a twelve-minute documentary video exploring the emotional impact of sexual assault on male survivors and their partners, this document examines the visual texts of both the fiction and nonfiction genres. Specifically, I contend that fiction film manufactures male survivorship with regard to rape events in such manner which contributes to the thematization of social silence. Such silence perpetuates the feminization of rape as a social prob… more
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Date: December 1999
Creator: McKinney, Kelli
open access

Exhibit Eh: Canadian Dependency, U.S. Hegemony, and the Amorphousness of English Canadian Culture

Description: This thesis begins by examining the factors that have resulted in the dependent nature of Canada's political and economic structure, and proceeds to examine how this has contributed to the cultural amorphousness of English Canadian identity. The hegemonic authority of American and trans-national interests, established and maintained in the cultural sphere through the extensive monopoly of the distribution of cultural and media products, perpetuates the amorphousness of English Canadian culture … more
Date: August 1999
Creator: McIntosh, Andrew
open access

Girl Power: Feminism, Girlculture and the Popular Media

Description: This project is an interrogation of three examples from recent popular culture of girlculture, specifically texts that target young female consumers: the Spice Girls, Scream and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These examples are fundamentally different than texts from earlier female targeted generic models because they not only reflect the influence of the feminist movement, they work on feminism's behalf. The project's methodology grows out of feminist film theories and cultural studies theories. On… more
Date: August 1999
Creator: Smith, Ashley Lorrain

Harbor: The Act of Autobiography

Description: This written thesis accompanies a sixteen-minute documentary video, Harbor, in which the filmmaker explores her relationship with her father who has suffered a stroke. Detailed accounts of the pre-production, production and post-production of the video allow the reader to understand the challenging and rewarding process of making an autobiographical documentary. Theoretical issues are also discussed, including the validity, criticisms, artistic nature and ethical concerns of autobiographical fi… more
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Date: August 1999
Creator: Doeren, Catherine Wallace
open access

A History of Contemporary Independent Film Marketing in the United States (1989-1998)

Description: This study explores the reasons for the rise in independent film's popularity, which have created a unique Hollywood phenomenon, the successful "mini-major" independent studio, dedicated to both art and commerce. Chapters cover the history of independent film, characteristics of both independent and mainstreamfilms with regards to financing, acquisition, distribution and marketing, trends within independent film in the late 1980s and 1990s, crucial distributors and landmark independent films, a… more
Date: August 1998
Creator: Ahearn, John P. (John Patrick)
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