Cinematizing genocide : exploring cinematic form and its relationship to the hidden voices of the Kurdish genocide of 1988

Throughout the last two decades, the Kurdish genocide of 1988 has become a significant material in a variety of contexts. Kurdish filmmakers have tried to represent the tragedy in various formats. By comparing their work with the unique testimonies of survivors’ that I have collected through many years of work, it is clear that the impact of the genocide has not been dealt with adequately in contemporary Kurdish cinema. The survivors’ voices are still hidden because their feelings, personal lives, and true stories have not been represented in the works of Kurdish filmmakers. This practice-led research study tries to explore this gap through these significant questions: 1.How can the hidden voices of Kurdish victims of the genocide campaign be cinematized in ways that are currently not explored within Kurdish cinema? 2.In what ways can the victims’ oral testimonies be used to develop a cinematic language that can reveal the hidden impact on survivors? By exploring cinematic form and cinematizing the catastrophe’s impact on the survivors of the 1988 Kurdish genocide campaign, this project tries to reveal out hidden perspectives on the entire tragedy. This study aims to find new methods of representing the Kurdish genocide through different experimental film practice exercises, which aim to create opportunities to expand knowledge on the theme of cinematizing the genocide. I also aim to develop a cinematic language that might create new opportunity for Kurdish filmmakers to articulate themselves through the medium, in particular, to formulate a new approach to the concept of transcendental structure. By reflecting on these experimental pieces of work, I will explain how these exercises will shape the final project: two screenplays and visualisation strategies for one scene a short feature film screenplay, in addition to a documentary based on survivors’ testimonies

The evolution of regional planning and regional economic development in Malaysia

This article explains the evolution of regional planning and policy in Malaysia and discusses the implications of the underlying regional economic theories and regional policies for the socio-economic development of Malaysia. Regional economic development in Malaysia is due to several factors, including the integration of geography and physical features, the need for cooperation beyond local jurisdictions, and the needs of local and national economic development. A review of the literature suggests that the achievement and development of regional planning would differ depending on the country’s pattern of development and growth. However, the basis of regional planning remains the same: to promote competitiveness, create economic opportunities, and achieve balance in the socio-economic development of a country. In a way, regional planning is a tool to achieve sustainable development in a countr

Above the Still Lake: Lyrical Sensibilities in Visual Art -Thinking through photographic practice: Pathos, Eastern Asian aesthetics and the language of emotion

Drawing from Western and East Asian philosophical traditions, this thesis aims to compare different concepts of ‘Pathos’ as present in Chinese, Japanese and European traditions of art, and in particular photography. The overarching methodology is that of translation between different languages and cultural contexts, and the verbal and visual. Using methods from comparative literature and including case studies from East Asian and European poetry, film and artistic practice, the research looks at the tradition of the representation of ‘Landscape’ from Eastern and Western perspectives. This is a practice-led PhD and I explore these concepts associated with Pathos and landscape through the media of photography, moving image, object making and book-making. I draw parallels between my photographic practice and traditional Chinese landscape painting with respect to the framing, tonality, and non-specificity of place. My investigation of lighting, printing techniques and surfaces are methods for researching the space of the photograph. This thesis pivots on three related concepts; the Greek concept of Pathos, one of the three rhetorical appeals; Yi jing, an ancient Chinese artistic concept; and Mono no aware, an eighteenth-century Japanese aesthetic principle. The project begins by looking into a specific period of historical artistic changes in China and Japan during the Pictorialism movement, including a re-examination of the visual representations of photographic work of Chinese and Japanese periodicals from 1910 through to 1937. This research is inspired by an awareness of and an interest in the lack of scholarship on Eastern and Western notions of aesthetics as they apply to the accounts of photography during Republican China. This examination of Chinese photography is then framed through a reappraisal of Japanese aesthetics

Terministic Screens and Partisan Audiences: A Burkean Cluster Analysis of Clint Eastwood's American Sniper

After its 2014 release and box-office success, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, a war film dramatizing the life of Navy Seal Chris Kyle, became a controversial picture for both conservative and liberal partisan audiences. The film, however, put forth a predominantly anti-war argument, depicting the futility of war and the damage it inflicts on both Americans and Iraqis. In this study I examined scenes and dialogue in the film, using Kenneth Burke’s cluster analysis method, to explain the anti-war argument in the film. Further, I show how specific key terms resonate with partisan terministic screens, explaining the misreading of the film. I discovered that the most significant key term in the film is Family, and its antithesis is War. Any terms that cluster around War, even terms meant to uphold Family, ultimately prove destructive to Family. The film relies heavily on showing how War destroys Family. However, I also discovered that what deflects the anti-war message for partisans is the character of Chris Kyle, a conservative who continually adheres to his right-wing ideology as justification for war until it almost destroys him and his family. This depiction of a conservative viewing the Iraq War as a black-and-white conflict between “good” and “evil” taps into conservative vocabularies and liberal vocabularies: conservatives identify with Kyle’s language, and liberals abhor it. Both partisan audiences, through this selection, deflect the anti-war statement in the film

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, and Cinematic Narration in the Digital Age

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch Project stood as harbingers of new narrative currents in global cinema. This dissertation looks closely at these two films, reading them as illustrative of two decidedly millennial narrative styles, styles that stepped out strikingly from the computer-generated shadows cast by big-budget Hollywood. The industrial shift to digital media that coincides with the rise of these films in the late 90s reframed the cinematic image as inherently manipulable, no longer a necessary index of physical reality. Directors become image-writers, constructing photorealistic imagery from scratch. Meanwhile, DVDs and online paratexts encourage cinephiles to digitize, to attain and interact with cinema in novel ways. “The New Reflexivity” reads The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project as reflexive allegories of cinema’s and society’s encounters with new digital media. The most basic narrative tricks and conceits of puzzle films and found footage films produce an unusually intense and ludic engagement with narrative boundaries and limits, thus undermining the naturalized practices of classical Hollywood narration. Writers and directors of these films treat recorded events and narrative worlds as reviewable, remixable, and upgradeable, just as Hollywood digitizes and tries to keep up with new media. Though a great deal of critical attention has been paid to both puzzle and found footage films separately, no lengthy critical survey has yet been undertaken that considers these movies in terms of their shared formal and thematic concerns. Rewriting the rules of popular cinematic narration, these films encourage viewers to be suspicious of what they see onscreen, to be aware of the possibility of unreliable narration, or CGI and the “Photoshopped.” Urgent to film and cultural studies, “The New Reflexivity” suggests that these genres’ complicitous critique of new media is decidedly instructive for a networked society struggling with what it means to be digital