UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item The Performance of Remastery in Theatre and Media(2023) Miller, Alexander Williams; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Within the field of mediatized performance, there are many terms that rely upon the “re-” prefix. Terms like remediation and remix have been utilized for the last two decades in discussions of how digital media has affected our perceptions of live performance. This dissertation analyzes the potential of a third “re-:” remastering. Remastering refers to the act of “touching up” older mediums, mostly vinyl discs and reels of film, digitizing the media they contain while improving the overall quality of sounds and/or images. With this sort of digital augmentation affecting the audience reception of media, the question emerges: how can we think of the remastering process as performative?This project centers on the notion that performance studies provide an excellent template to begin to answer the questions that arise surrounding remastering. It explores technical acts of remastering through the lens of performance and performativity to develop a working theory of remastery. This theory draws upon and expands previous conversations surrounding both digital media and performance. Starting with a discussion of the technical requirements that go into remastering in general, I develop a working understanding and theory of remastery. This theory centers remastery as a performative action that can shed light on the power dynamics that underpin our cultural interest in obsolescence, nostalgia, and technology. In discussing this theory of remastery, four case studies of remastered media are analyzed, each providing a different facet of my theory. The first is The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: a remastered collection of work from a defunct inter-war recording company that produced a wide variety of African American Artists and performers. The second is the various remastered versions of Star Wars and their effect on the prospects of authenticity and alteration within remastering. The third is Warcraft III: Reforged, a remastered videogame from 2020 that was met with critical and commercial failure. The fourth is Elements of Oz by The Builders Association, a live production of multimedia theatre that demonstrates the usefulness of remastery as a theoretical concept to bridge the gap between performance and technology.Item Insect Politics: Presidential Optics and the Promises of Manly Monsters in 1980s Horror Film(2023) Santos, James Nolan; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In their own terms, the intellectual and political spheres of the American 1980s spoke on conversations on gender through human bodies. Feminist theorist Sandy Stone wrote the foundational text for transgender studies in 1987 at the height of the Reagan Administration, which was defined by its own masculine politics. Between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, their White House Office of Communications staffers were tasked with upholding this image of masculinity, specifically upholding the physical bodies of men, going against 1980s feminist theorists that upheld binary views on gender. Horror filmmakers in Hollywood, however, more closely aligned with feminist thought regarding the flexibility of gender, and like the White House Office of Communications, used the bodies of characters onscreen to convey their ideas. This thesis is a comparative history of Washington and Hollywood in the 1980s, using the psychoanalytic framework of Julia Kristeva’s abject as a means to look beyond the gendered boundaries set by Washington and seeing how those same boundaries were manipulated by Hollywood.Item Picturing Island Bodies Under US Imperialism(2022) Robinson-Tillenburg, Gabrielle; McEwen, Abigail; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the end of World War II, the US has maintained the naval occupation of Okinawa,a small island off the coast of Japan. Across the globe in Puerto Rico the US operated what was at one point the largest naval station in the world during World War II and through the Cold War until ceasing operations in 2001. Islanders in Vieques, Puerto Rico face alarming cancer rates, speculated as due to pollution from offshore explosives. Women of Okinawa experience recurrent acts of sexual violence at the hands of US servicemen. In both archipelagos, public protests against US occupation have disputed land ownership and environmental damages. Taking a transnational approach to the survival of US imperial violence, this paper examines how contemporary video artists, Okinawan Chikako Yamashiro, Puerto Rico-based duo Allora & Calzadilla, and Puerto Rican Beatriz Santiago Muñoz picture island bodies both human and geographic. In Seaweed Woman (2008) by Yamashiro, Under Discussion (2005) by Allora & Calzadilla, and Post-Military Cinema (2014) by Santiago Muñoz, liminality, as a space between life and death—a condition particular to colonized bodies, is pictured as an aesthetic and durational refusal of death and destruction to the island body. The condition of liminality is portrayed through visual and sonic engagements of hyperrealism, that is the confusion between the artists’ reproduced images/sounds with the real experiences of island bodies. In Post-Military Cinema, liminality is used by the artist to produce a repossession of the island body, and in all artworks, to picture resistance. Broadly, this comparative study challenges notions of “American Art” and reflects on how US imperial ideology enacts violence, but via the creation of binary oppositions creates liminal spaces from which the island body resists and survives.Item The Surface of Things: Reading a Cinema of Decline(2018) Leininger, Derek Michael; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A declensionist imagination dominated intellectual and cultural discourse in American society through the late twentieth century. The 1970s and 1980s were punctuated by real declines of multiple sorts, but the alarmed debates about juvenile delinquency, rural blight, urban decay, and violent crime often obscured coterminous trends and the more meaningful critiques of the historical forces prompting the changes felt as decline. By looking at American films from the 1970s and 1980s focused on thematic decline of varied sorts, this project explores the postmodern social experience of the late-twentieth century and the cultural roots of overcriminalization in the United States. Reading between the filmic lines (or what film theorist Siegfried Kracauer called the surface expressions of cinema) provides clues into unpacking the often contradictory political, social, and cultural configurations taking shape at the end of the twentieth century.Item Framing Industry: Film-making to Place-making(2018) Shook, Timothy Scott; Abrams, Michael; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis looks at the relationship between film-making and place-making. More specifically, the cinematic techniques used in film and how to translate them into architecture. The thesis proposes a film institute that will celebrate the industry of film, as well as enhance post-industrial redevelopment and create a new mixed-use hub for Toronto, Ontario. The industry of film in Toronto is at a peak and continues to grow into an integrated asset for the city. This thesis explores the expansion of the city’s planned redevelopment to transform the Port Lands, along with the out-of-commission Hearn Generating Station, into a beacon for the city. The Port Lands Film Institute will invite film-makers and film enthusiasts, of all ages and professions, to participate in a unique place of production, education, and innovation.Item The Emergence of the Fascist Aesthetic in Early German Cinema(2018) Timmons, Wendy Cassandra Ellen; Baer, Hester; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My thesis explores the development of a fascist aesthetic in German films, examining three significant, active filmmakers between 1922 and 1939 (Fritz Lang, Arnold Fanck, and Leni Riefenstahl), whose works feature an aesthetic continuity before and after 1933. Despite political differences, formal and thematic similarities exist in the works of these filmmakers, which have sometimes been discussed in the context of a “fascist aesthetic” that was initially conceptualized in the Weimar era and became increasingly instrumentalized by filmmakers during the Nazi era. While scholars have long debated the idea and substance of a fascist aesthetic, renewed debates about the concept at the contemporary moment underscore the importance of reconsidering the topic at the point of its origin. I approach the problem by contextualizing this aesthetic in the forms it takes pre- and post-1933 and emphasizing that this aesthetic is comprised of motifs and images that are contextually specific.Item PERFORMANCE IN ONES AND ZEROS: NO-BUDGET CINEMA IN THE DIGITAL ERA(2018) Nixon, Adam Wayne; Frederik, Laurie; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Narrative feature filmmaking has traditionally been an elite art form practiced by moneyed, culturally powerful individuals through institutions in specific locations around the world. With the worldwide dissemination of the digital camera, however, non-professional self-financed, no budget, outsider filmmakers worldwide now practice the art form. This community of digital filmmakers numbers in the hundreds-of-thousands. They show their work in festivals ranging from fringe, smaller venues in places such as Jakarta and Milan, to massive international festivals in Cannes or Sundance. The dissertation examines the world of the no-budget DIY digital filmmaker and the festivals that display their work. I utilize the tools of the ethnographer to explore the meaning of film festival, to record red carpet performativity, and to track the accumulation of stature by digital filmmakers. The methodology blends practice-based research, surveys both quantitative and qualitative, archival database research, and an examination of the mediated with the embodied, looking at both the filmmaker and the digital film in festival space. The artists studied are building processes that stand apart from traditional “Hollywood” systems. Like the subjects of my ethnography, I work outside of Hollywood with little money, making digital films while I build my own performative and off-camera identity in festival spaces. The embodied performance of Filmmaker on the red carpet at international festivals, small and large, is a powerful and unique vehicle for identity creation. The digital camera allows outsiders—middle income, excluded, non-western, or non-professional artists—to perform identities once exclusively controlled by powerful institutions and by the individuals inside those organizations. This research project examines the performativity of film festival spaces, the archiving of these moments for purposes of building new identities and socio-cultural status, and the assertion of power outside of traditional structures. It is concerned with identity creation through the process of filmmaking (capture, representation, reinterpretation, revision, assertion) and the formation of a self-made, artistic sense of self.Item The Feeling American: Emotion Management and the Standardization of Democracy in Cold War Literature and Film(2017) Singleton, Kelly Anne; Auerbach, Jonathan; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines how strategies of emotion management influenced the development of American literature and film during the Cold War period. Focusing primarily on the High Cold War Period of 1949 to 1962, it argues that a government-funded postwar boom in the psychological and social sciences resulted in a “psychological turn” in American culture that sought to solve social problems by teaching Americans to manage their emotions in keeping with scientifically-established standards for democratic behavior. Proponents of emotion management believed it could accomplish the Soviet goal of creating a harmonious, classless society without requiring radical social revolution or totalitarian forms of control that would violate American principles of freedom and democracy. To that end, American policymakers used the findings of social scientists to develop narratives that: 1) modeled how to behave in the event of a nuclear attack, 2) equated happiness with the American standard of living, 3) made emotional malleability the foundation for a democratic personality, and 4) linked racism to deviation from the norms of liberal white psychology. The works of several mid-century American authors and filmmakers provide an important counterpoint to the optimism of this official emotion management narrative as they: 1) challenge the government’s sanitized representation of nuclear war, 2) document the unhappy effects of middle-class organization culture, 3) express anxiety over the alienating effects of emotional labor, and 4) reject the equation of mental health and American identity with specifically white cultural standards and forms. In contrast to emotion management’s conservative emphasis on individual psychological adjustment, these works suggest that only systemic structural changes can resolve the problems of American democracy. This historicist approach analyzes propaganda films, government bulletins, popular magazine articles, and period sociological studies alongside close readings of novels (Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow! (1954) and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955)), films (Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962)), and the story collections of African American authors Langston Hughes and Alice Childress.Item Screening Diversity: Women & Work in Twenty-First-Century Popular Culture(2016) Brunner, Laura; Bolles, A. Lynn; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Screening Diversity: Women and Work in Twenty-first Century Popular Culture explores contemporary representations of diverse professional women on screen. Audiences are offered successful women with limited concerns for feminism, anti-racism, or economic justice. I introduce the term viewsers to describe a group of movie and television viewers in the context of the online review platform Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Screening Diversity follows their engagement in a representative sample of professional women on film and television produced between 2007 and 2015. The sample includes the television shows, Scandal, Homeland, VEEP, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Wife, as well as the movies, Zero Dark Thirty, The Proposal, The Heat, The Other Woman, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and Temptation. Viewsers appreciated female characters like Olivia (Scandal), and Maya (Zero Dark Thiry) who treated their work as a quasi-religious moral imperative. Producers and viewsers shared the belief that unlimited time commitment and personal identification were vital components of professionalism. However, powerful women, like The Proposal’s Margaret and VEEP’s Selina, were often called bitches. Some viewsers embraced bitch-positive politics in recognition of the struggles of women in power. Women’s disproportionate responsibility for reproductive labor, often compromises their ability to live up to moral standards of work. Unlike producers, viewsers celebrated and valued that labor. However, texts that included serious consideration of women as workers were frequently labelled chick flicks or soap operas. The label suggested that women’s labor issues were not important enough that they could be a topic of quality television or prestigious film, which bolstered the idea that workplace equality for women is not a problem in which the general public is implicated. Emerging discussions of racial injustice on television offered hope that these formations are beginning to shift.Item Sonic Movie Memories: Sound, Childhood, and American Cinema(2016) Cote, Paul James; Auerbach, Jonathan D.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Though the trend rarely receives attention, since the 1970s many American filmmakers have been taking sound and music tropes from children’s films, television shows, and other forms of media and incorporating those sounds into films intended for adult audiences. Initially, these references might seem like regressive attempts at targeting some nostalgic desire to relive childhood. However, this dissertation asserts that these children’s sounds are instead designed to reconnect audience members with the multi-faceted fantasies and coping mechanisms that once, through children’s media, helped these audience members manage life’s anxieties. Because sound is the sense that Western audiences most associate with emotion and memory, it offers audiences immediate connection with these barely conscious longings. The first chapter turns to children’s media itself and analyzes Disney’s 1950s forays into television. The chapter argues that by selectively repurposing the gentlest sonic devices from the studio’s films, television shows like Disneyland created the studio’s signature sentimental “Disney sound.” As a result, a generation of baby boomers like Steven Spielberg comes of age and longs to recreate that comforting sound world. The second chapter thus focuses on Spielberg, who incorporates Disney music in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Rather than recreate Disney’s sound world, Spielberg uses this music as a springboard into a new realm I refer to as “sublime refuge” - an acoustic haven that combines overpowering sublimity and soothing comfort into one fantastical experience. The second half of the dissertation pivots into more experimental children’s cartoons like Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951) - cartoons that embrace audio-visual dissonance in ways that soothe even as they create tension through a phenomenon I call “comfortable discord.” In the final chapter, director Wes Anderson reveals that these sonic tensions have just as much appeal to adults. In films like The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Anderson demonstrates that comfortable discord can simultaneously provide a balm for anxiety and create an open-ended space that makes empathetic connections between characters possible. The dissertation closes with a call to rethink nostalgia, not as a romanticization of the past, but rather as a reconnection with forgotten affective channels.