Independent film in the United States, 1980-1999.

This dissertation pursues a study of independent film, from 1980 to 1999, as an emergent system of representation. Independent American and non- American films distributed in the United States have evolved into a distinct cultural site, formulated as points of intersection between principles of mainstream popular film and the traditions of the avant-garde. Contemporary independent film's identity as a commodity stresses its differences from Hollywood's output; the independent industry is not ruled by the same economic, political, aesthetic and historical imperatives as Hollywood cinema. Arguably, this creates an autonomous filmic enterprise able to represent alternative political views and aesthetic perspectives. But simultaneously, the independent industry is driven by familiar marketplace demands and competition for consumers. My study focuses on films released theatrically in the U.S. by nonstudio distributors, such as Miramax, Fine Line, Goldwyn, October, and so on. The films considered will have received some measure of widespread play, permitting an analysis of how these specific texts, their distribution, and their reception conform to and diverge from the institutional and discursive practices of a dominant Hollywood industry. The dissertation analyses both the material, concrete aspects and the discursive dimensions of independent film. For instance, under the purview of the independent industry a division exists between 'art films' and 'political films'. A frequent attribute of work in the art category is formal experimentation. Political films tend to be those made by representatives of subcultural groups and marketed as such to their 'specialised audiences'. They may or may not exhibit formal experimentation. On the one hand, in a kind of tyranny of the formal, art films continue to be defined by their aesthetic variations without a corollary questioning of whether they are indeed 'alternative' at the level of narrative signification. On the other hand, political films are promoted as an acknowledgment to underrepresented communities --- what the industry should be providing --- and as a marketing strategy for product-starved audiences to whom these films often sell well. In other words, political films may be chosen for their subject matter or for the audiences they specifically address, but they remain specialised, without the 'universal' appeal of films accorded the label of art. This investigation traces the extent to which and how independent films represent the stories, perspectives, and experiences of a pluralistic, multicultural society. This research project develops a discursively-based methodology in which films are analysed as the functions of multiple, simultaneous, layered, and interacting discourses: representational, institutional, interpretive, and cultural/historical. The study offers a contribution to the field in its exploration of contemporary independent film as a distinct cultural formation, in its expansion of theoretical work on narrativity and the representation of subcultural groups, in its development of discursive analytical procedures, and in its integrated approach towards cultural theory, cultural politics, and cultural production

The Rebirth of Utopia in 21st-century Cinema: Cosmopolitan Hopes in the Films of Globalisation

Esta tesis doctoral explora discursos utópicos cosmopolitas—ecológicos e igualitarios—en el cine en lengua inglesa del siglo XXI. El primer capítulo examina el estado de la cuestión de la utopía en los estudios utópicos, la sociología y los estudios fílmicos. El segundo capítulo aborda una revisión de expresiones de utopismo cosmopolita en películas de tres periodos históricos distintos con el fin de contextualizar el renacimiento de la utopía en el cine contemporáneo. En concreto, se analizan una selección de textos fílmicos del periodo comprendido entre los inicios de la industria cinematográfica a finales del siglo XIX hasta la década de 1920, el cine reivindicativo de los años sesenta y la inclinación antiutópica del cine producido desde 1970 hasta el fin de la década de los noventa. Los tres capítulos siguientes combinan el análisis teórico y textual de películas contemporáneas, partiendo de perspectivas concretas—espacial, ontológica y política. El capítulo tres trata el renacimiento de horizontes utópicos cosmopolitas en los espacios ecocríticos de películas apocalípticas contemporáneas como Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). El capítulo cuatro se centra en protagonistas fílmicos que representan transformaciones ontológicas guiadas por ideales ecológicos y de compromiso social, como es el caso del personaje principal en The East (Zal Batmanglij, 2013). Por último, el capítulo cinco analiza estrategias políticas ecofeministas y cooperativas en la serie fílmica The Hunger Games (2012-2015) dentro del marco contextual de los movimientos sociales globales contemporáneos. En su conjunto, la tesis argumenta que, tras un fin de siglo marcadamente antiutópico, cinematográficamente hablando, un gran número de películas contemporáneas articulan discursos utópicos cosmopolitas que plantean la necesidad de desarrollar marcos sociopolíticos, modelos de progreso y modos de comportamiento individuales que nos conduzcan a un futuro global sostenible e igualitario. Este horizonte cosmopolita se presenta de forma recurrente en las películas analizadas como una alternativa a filosofías y paradigmas político-económicos neoliberales y patriarcales, basados en lógicas dialécticas, opresivas y extractivas.<br /

The Tiger Vol. 99 Issue 3 2005-09-16

https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/tiger_newspaper/2497/thumbnail.jp

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 63 Number 1, Summer 2022

16 - SHARED DREAMS Meet incoming University President Julie Sullivan, the first layperson and woman selected to lead SCU. Leslie Griffy 20 - BD KNOWS BEST Discovering who you really are, being grateful, and dinosaurs with BD Wong. Lauren Loftus. 22 - SWEPT AWAY Being homeless in Silicon Valley is particularly deadly. One professor explores why so many die in a land of such excess. Leslie Griffy . 28 - ON THE OUTSIDE A first-person account of being wrongly convicted, as told by Arturo Jimenez. 30 - BOOKED AND BUSY The secret behind the Hollywood success of so many Bronco women. Lucy Nino ’22. 34 - TRACING THE WOLF A tattoo as an act of reclamation reminds not only of one’s ability to survive but also of vulnerability. Maggie Levantovskaya. 40 - HOW DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER? A lack of diversity among therapists creates an unhealthy cycle where people can’t find the help they need. Lauren Loftus and Tatiana Sanchez ’10 .https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/sc_mag/1139/thumbnail.jp

The Unnaming of Aliass

The Unnaming of Aliass performs a paradoxical quest for wildly “untold” stories in the company of one special donkey companion, a femammal of the species Equus asinus and, significantly, a registered “American Spotted Ass.” Beast of burden that she is, this inscrutable companion helped carry a ridiculous load of human longings and quandaries into a maze of hot, harrowing miles, across the US South from Mississippi to Virginia, in the summer of 2002 -- all the while carrying her own onerous and unreckoned burdens and histories. Over two decades, the original journey evolved -- from the cracking-open of a quasi-Western novel-that-never-was by an implosive pun, into an ongoing philosophical and assthetic adventure: a hybrid roadside- and barnyard-based living-art practice, wherein “Aliass” un/names something much harder to grasp than the body of a lovely little ass: protagonist, setting, and traditional Western narratives turn inside-out around this “name-that-ain’t.” Through a deeply dug-in questioning of its own authorial assumptions, The Unnaming of Aliass makes space for untold autobiographies and bright dusty lacunae, tracing ineffable tales through the tangled shapes and shadows that interweave in any environment

Return with Honor: An Investigation of the Reentry Experiences and Discourses of Returning Missionaries in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Reentry is one of the most difficult and important periods of a traveler’s journey – a time to reflect on and integrate new experiences, identities, and perspectives into life at home. This period is often bittersweet and marked by a host of challenges and symptomology. Religious language and practice may function to alleviate or exacerbate these routine reentry challenges, or introduce a host of new concerns. Situated in the nexus of religion and tourism, the purpose of this critical-constructive qualitative inquiry is to (a) investigate the experiences and discourses of returning missionaries in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and (b) explore how these experiences and discourses influence the well-being and religious commitments of emerging adults. Primary data were collected via interviews with fulltime missionaries (n = 16) who had returned to a southeastern stake of the Church between January 1, 2015 and December 31, 2016. Additional data were collected from social media posts; archival membership data; news stories; Church sermons, periodicals, handbooks, curriculum, and multimedia; and scholarly literature crossing a range of disciplines. These additional data points were used to inform discourse analyses and contextualize responses. Review of the literature, coupled with results from multiple layers of analysis (i.e., Willson\u27s approach to narrative analysis, Braun and Clarke\u27s approach to thematic analysis, Gees\u27 building tasks of critical discourse analysis), provide evidence that religious and secular discourses influence reentry via multiple points across the missionary cycle (i.e., recruitment, training, departure, mission, and return) and subsequently alter or anchor their religious identity and commitments. Specifically, feelings of alienation, loss, interpersonal discontent, and anxiety may be a product of or worsened by discourses related to the Significance placed on the mission, the Practice of dating and marriage, Identification as a returned missionary, the Sign Systems that privilege returned missionary knowledge and contributions, the Politics that make priesthood advancement and temple marriage more likely realities for returned missionaries, and the Relationships and Connections sacrificed via the adoption of alternative social discourses that elevate individual autonomy and engage with anti-Mormon ideals. As Church leaders prepare missionaries for and help them respond to the challenges of reentry and the transition to adulthood, they may wish to more intentionally steer the discourse of reentry via Church sermons, trainings, and more proactive social and multimedia campaigns. Church leaders also need to balance organizational goals (i.e., retention) with individual needs (i.e., the well-being of emerging adults). More broadly, reentry scholars and practitioners may wish to look beyond outdated anthropological theories of cross-cultural adjustment (i.e., theory of reverse culture shock, cultural identity theory) to enrich understandings of reentry. For example, evidence from this study indicated that the theory of place attachment, social comparison theory, and human development scholarship may all help explain the challenges and opportunities associated with reentry

News from Now/here: Ed Dorn, Lawrence, Kansas, & the Poetics of Migration - 1965-1970

The stylistic variety of Edward Dorn's poetic career, from the 1950s through the 1990s, has been criticized as lacking cohesion, and deemed his work's fundamental shortcoming. The earlier poetry's somber lyricism has been pitted against the caustic epigrams of the later writing, and these modes are set on either side of Gunslinger, Dorn's mock-epic of the "sicksties," which has received disproportionate scholarly attention, to the detriment of Dorn's manifold, contemporaneous work. While formal experimentation and the development of a multi-voiced perspective might provide a context for approaching Dorn's stylistic diversity, instead those objectives have been critically cemented to an embittered tendentiousness, a resistance, insufficient to address either the biography or the writing. Due to the fragmentary displacements of these assumptions, this thesis seeks an integrated reading that celebrates, rather than condemns, discrepancies in Dorn's unmoored political/poetic identity. Through unpublished archival materials, it reexamines the Gunslinger era--part of which Dorn spent among the countercultural tumult in Lawrence, Kansas--when Dorn's interest in geography expanded to address both "the landscape of the imagination," and the inevitable constraints of an ideologically-infused language

Living Aloha: Portraits of Resilience, Renewal, Reclamation, and Resistance

When Native Hawaiians move away from the islands, they risk losing their cultural identity and heritage. This dissertation utilizes a Hawaiian theoretical framework based in Indigenous research practices and uses phenomenology, ethnography, heuristics, and portraiture to tell the stories of leadership, change, and resilience of five Native Hawaiians who as adults, chose to permanently relocate to the United States mainland. It explores the reasons why Kanaka Maoli (politically correct term for Native Hawaiians) leave the \u27āina (land; that which feeds) in the first place and eventually become permanent mainland residents. Some Hawaiians lose their culture after relocating to the United States mainland, giving in to societal pressures demanding conformance, assimilation, and acculturation. Some who have lost their cultural identity are able to later regain it, yet others, resilient, found a way to retain their cultural identity despite the traumatic transition. This study focuses on those who have retained or regained their Native Hawaiian identity after relocating to the United States mainland, and questions, “What caused them to relocate?” and “How do they maintain cultural practices far away from the \u27āina?” I begin by situating myself as the researcher, review the literature, offer an historical chronology of events that occurred in Hawai‘i, and explain the research methodology. Four Native Hawaiians who have relocated to the mainland United States as adults and have continued Native Hawaiian cultural practices were interviewed. I painted their individual portraits as well as my own—using the art and science of portraiture—which includes aesthetic writing that focuses on the “good” that is found in within context. I constructed the portraits with data from the interviews, observations, pictures, music, poetic sayings, video clips, sound bites, and my own reflections. The phenomenon of “walking in two worlds” is explored. This study provides examples of leadership in portraying how Native Hawaiians perpetuate ‘ūlelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian language, poems, songs), mo’olelo (stories, myths, folklore), mo’ok ū’auhau (genealogy), hula (Hawaiian dance), and many other cultural practices far away from home. The electronic version of this dissertation is available in the open access OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/et

Living Aloha: Portraits of Resilience, Renewal, Reclamation, and Resistance

When Native Hawaiians move away from the islands, they risk losing their cultural identity and heritage. This dissertation utilizes a Hawaiian theoretical framework based in Indigenous research practices and uses phenomenology, ethnography, heuristics, and portraiture to tell the stories of leadership, change, and resilience of five Native Hawaiians who as adults, chose to permanently relocate to the United States mainland. It explores the reasons why Kanaka Maoli (politically correct term for Native Hawaiians) leave the \u27āina (land; that which feeds) in the first place and eventually become permanent mainland residents. Some Hawaiians lose their culture after relocating to the United States mainland, giving in to societal pressures demanding conformance, assimilation, and acculturation. Some who have lost their cultural identity are able to later regain it, yet others, resilient, found a way to retain their cultural identity despite the traumatic transition. This study focuses on those who have retained or regained their Native Hawaiian identity after relocating to the United States mainland, and questions, “What caused them to relocate?” and “How do they maintain cultural practices far away from the \u27āina?” I begin by situating myself as the researcher, review the literature, offer an historical chronology of events that occurred in Hawai‘i, and explain the research methodology. Four Native Hawaiians who have relocated to the mainland United States as adults and have continued Native Hawaiian cultural practices were interviewed. I painted their individual portraits as well as my own—using the art and science of portraiture—which includes aesthetic writing that focuses on the “good” that is found in within context. I constructed the portraits with data from the interviews, observations, pictures, music, poetic sayings, video clips, sound bites, and my own reflections. The phenomenon of “walking in two worlds” is explored. This study provides examples of leadership in portraying how Native Hawaiians perpetuate ‘ūlelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian language, poems, songs), mo’olelo (stories, myths, folklore), mo’ok ū’auhau (genealogy), hula (Hawaiian dance), and many other cultural practices far away from home. The electronic version of this dissertation is available in the open access OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/et