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Item Kim Ki-duk and the Cinema of Sensations(2008-12-11) Min, Hyunjun; Wang, Orrin; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite the apparent usefulness for film analysis, the notion of "sensation" disappears in Deleuze's two Cinema books (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [1983] and Cinema 2: The Time-Image [1985]) published right after Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), which develops the idea of sensation. By tracing the conceptual origin of sensation from "event," "sense," and "affect," this dissertation answers the mystery of the disappearance of sensation in the Cinema books and clarifies the possibilities and limitations of using "sensation" in the analysis of film. It puts Deleuze's concepts of affect and sensation side by side with Korean director Kim Ki-duk's films so that they can initiate mutually beneficiary discussions. Among the fourteen films Kim made, Crocodile, The Isle and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring are analyzed in detail. Each of these three films represents each stage of Kim Ki-duk's own transformation as a director, and corresponds to Deleuze's own deployment of the event into affect, sensation, and becomings. In the Cinema books, the concept of "sensation" is retained through the discussion of signs and images, but buried under the notions of the "affection-image" and the "impulse-image" because of the way "sensation" is conceptualized in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation and because of the worry that "sensation" might be confused with the "sensational." While maintaining the conceptual thrust of event and sense, Deleuze reformulates affect and sensation in relation to movement in the Cinema books. Thus, "affect" appears when the movement decreases to a minimum, whereas sensation appears to mobilize the frozen movement. The understanding of Deleuzian usage of sensation prepares us to move beyond the conventional conceptual tools of narrative, symbolization, representation, and signification towards the flows of materials, forces and the virtual.Item Constructions of Violent Jamaican Masculinity in Film and Literature(2008-07-28) Harewood, Gia; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy sketch out what they see as an emergent postcolonial aesthetic percolating in the postcolonial artist's imagination. According to their analysis, postcolonial artists make meaning in their work through three critical motifs that help shape this aesthetic: "counterhegemonic representation, double or triple coding, and emancipatory or utopic visions" (19, italics in original). Counterhegemonic representation "rework[s] the center-versus-periphery distinction . . . to look beyond its strictures to new histories, new discourses, new ways of being" (24). Double coding combines "two or more fields of reference or idiom in any given work" pulling images from places such as "the East and the West, the first world and the Third, the colonial master and the slave" (26). And utopic visions are about "imagining possibility even when faced with impossible barriers" (30). My project is fundamentally interested in constructing healthy (masculine) identities and its arguments are ultimately guided by their first and third motifs. Using feminist theory, masculinity studies, cultural studies and postcolonial theory, I focus on the representation of black Jamaican men as violent criminal beings in three films (The Harder They Come, Third World Cop and Shottas), two novels (The Harder They Come and For Nothing at All) and one ethnographic travelogue (Born Fi' Dead). I argue that "real/reel" Jamaican masculinity is ultimately connected to gun violence and the most popular films out of Jamaica over the past thirty years only perpetuate this image. While not the only source for role models, visual images play a significant role in the lives of young men (and women) who are trying to live up to social standards of masculinity. With limited access to social mobility, they often emulate the shotta (gangster) glory that they see sparkling on the screen. Through close readings of these texts, I show how hegemonic masculinity is reinforced and reveal that non-violent models of masculinity do exist, despite being overshadowed by violent "heroes." I call for that "utopic vision," to excavate the vulnerable and intervene on behalf of peace to help young men and boys find alternative models of masculinity and ultimately create sustainable communities.Item The Life and Legacy of Laskarina Bouboulina: Feminist Alternatives to Documentary Filmmaking Practices(2007-10-17) Householder, April Kalogeropoulos; Fuegi, John; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)When Michael Moore won the Academy Award in 2004 for his film Fahrenheit 9/11, the documentary re-emerged as an important critical discourse in the making of culture. As a political consciousness-raising tool, the documentary fits squarely into the goals of independent media activism. With the development of digital videomaking technologies, a distinctive means through which to explore the issues of culture, class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality that have been neglected in mainstream documentary filmmaking practices has emerged. Specifically, this new methodological approach to collecting, preserving, and analyzing history provides a voice for the stories that have been under-- and misrepresented in the consumption and production of biographies of women in film and literature. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a series of social, political, cultural, and economic events convened in Europe which enabled Greece to spark the War of Independence. This national instability provided a space for the emergence of a heroine who broke all established gender codes in the area of politics and on the battlefield: Laskarina Bouboulina (1771-1825). Over the course of her life, Bouboulina owned a successful merchant fleet, became an international diplomat, and was the only woman to join the Filike Etairia, an underground organization that prepared the Greeks for the war with the Ottomans. She is the first woman in world naval history to have earned the title of Admiral for her command of the Spetses fleet in crucial naval battles. Her life represents an alternative history to the masculinist and nationalistic depictions of the Greek War of Independence, as told in both Greek and Philhellenic literatures. It is a radical re-imagining of gender and the Greek identity in the nineteenth century, and foregrounds the many contributions made by women to modern Greek history. It also provides an alternative to the images of Greek women in the historical imaginary of Hollywood and other dominant media practices. Using historical documents and artifacts, interviews with Bouboulina's descendants and specialists in the fields of Greek and Ottoman History, live footage, music and artwork of the period, as well as contemporary film and media as grounds for cultural comparison, this hour-long documentary video synthesizes multi-media artifacts to create a critical pedagogy that explores the margins of Greek history through the life and times of one of Greece's most important revolutionaries.Item Just a Click Away from Home: Ecuadorian Migration, Nostalgia and New Technologies in Transnational Times(2007-05-14) Mejia Estevez, Silvia; Harrison, Regina; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Focusing on three different narrations of migration from Ecuador to the United States, Spain and Italy, this documentary video and its study guide explore how new technologies such as the Internet, satellite communications, email, videoconferences, and cell phones have changed the experience of displacement. The two components of this dissertation propose that, due to the encounter with new technologies intent upon shrinking space and time, nostalgia is becoming digital -a quest for continuity of time and space through the simultaneity offered by digital media. Under these new circumstances, transnational businesses profit from nostalgic markets, whereas transnational families and organizations grapple with digital technologies to foment a "globalization of solidarity." As an aesthetic artefact, the project responds to the controversy within film theory regarding subjectivity and fiction storytelling procedures as defining features of documentary, a film genre traditionally marketed as objective and non-fictional. For this reason, the video is composed of what I call not three case studies but three stories of migration. The documentary starts out in Cuenca (Ecuador), where, speechless, Arturo and Mercedes see their children on the videoconferencing screen. It is their first "reunion" since the children left Ecuador and settled in New York City, eleven years ago. In another Ecuadorian city, Gloria -whose husband migrated from Quito to Madrid- promotes Internet access to rescue families torn apart by migration. Finally, we meet Carla, a journalist settled in Milan, who takes advantage of new technologies to report on the Ecuadorian community in Italy for readers far away. With a comparative and translocal approach -and theoretically based on Hall, Appadurai, Boym, Nichols and Portes among others-, this project explores multiple relationships with new technologies determined by gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, computer literacy, geographical situation, and socio-economic background. Through their differing and even contradictory discourses and practices, expressed and lived in geographical locations that coexist and overlap on the screen, the protagonists of this dissertation-documentary video show us to what extent they are inscribed in different places of enunciation that shape their experience of displacement and nostalgia in contrasting ways.Item Mapping Terrorism: Amorphous Nations, Transient Loyalties(2006-05-04) Saksena, Ritu; Ray, Sangeeta; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Terrorism has a predilection with nations and nationalism and it plays on the symbiotic relationship between nationalism and violence. But "forgetting" this violence and bloodshed was crucial to the perpetuation of the myth of civilized nations. While Postcolonial Studies has offered incisive justifications for anti-imperialist movements and the creation of new nations within the colonizer/colonized paradigm, there is now a need to critically examine terrorism with its demands for new nations with its narratives of violence. This dissertation, Mapping Terrorism: Amorphous Nations, Transient Loyalties is a comparative study of the narratives of terrorism in specific texts that invoke the re-imagining of the narratives of the nation and the re-configuration of national subjectivities. Furthermore, since globalization has extended the national imaginary beyond borders, it has forced us to engage with the implications of diasporic populations that have sometimes attributed to the formation of transnational communities of violence (both real and imagined). Through my analysis of fictional representations of terrorists, terrorism and terrorist acts in cinema and fiction and using the rubric of Postcolonial Studies, I locate these narratives within a discursive space framed by the interstices of dominant discourses, where nation and state do not collide. For my larger overarching argument in theorizing terrorism, I introduce a new category of (anti)nationalisms that includes all forms of variant nationalisms like sub-nationalisms, ethnonationalisms, counter-nationalisms, fundamentalisms, extremism, secessionism etc., each of which is uniquely different but all of which define themselves using the discourse of Nationalism as its oppositional 'Other'. Using this overarching category of (anti)nationalisms offers us a new space - an in-between space, to talk about variant nationalisms that are not necessarily congruent with terrorism. Doing so, offers us the opportunity to address each of these variant nationalisms in depth without having to engage with issues of ethical implications of these imaginings. It is my assertion that (anti)nationalisms are the geneses of all terrorist activities and conversely, terrorism can be argued as constituting the performative aspect of the political agenda of (anti)nationalisms. My dissertation thus addresses a broader need for theorizing terrorism through cultural representations within the framework of Postcolonial Studies.Item Journeys of Redemption: Discoveries, Re-discoveries and Cinematic Representations of the Americas(2006-03-01) Nogueira, Claudia Barbosa; Peres, Phyllis A.; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Journeys of Redemption utilizes the concept of redemption to consider how the Americas are contextualized topologically and chronologically, and, as such, how these spaces are given narrative meaning. By relying upon a definition of redemption that simultaneously considers spiritual deliverance with material recovery, the Americas become, at once, interpretable as contested grounds and promised destinations. Following Chapter One, the "Introduction" to this project, Chapter Two provides the methodological foundation, describing theoretical approaches towards a definition of redemption that will serve as the underlying basis for my argument. The following chapters all apply redemption in readings of films that may be categorized as captivity narratives. Chapter Three considers how Bruce Beresford's 1991 film, Black Robe, utilizes redemption in its depiction of a Jesuit priest's interactions with Indigenous groups (such as the Huron and Iroquois) in seventeenth-century French Canada. Chapter Four examines redemption in the Brazilian film Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1971). This film about a nameless Frenchman's captivity among the sixteenth-century Tupinambás, illustrates the ways in which redemption has functioned, and continues to function, as a foundational contributor to colonial and nationalist projects. Chapter Five focuses on Cabeza de Vaca (Echevarría, 1991), a Mexican film recounting Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's historic sixteenth-century trek across much of North America. The spiritual focus of this film is studied in terms of how it both challenges and corroborates the historical Cabeza de Vaca's own accounts of redemption. Chapter Six considers filmic representations of borders and border crossings, thereby examining how the Americas become shaped by distinction and congruence, how the terrain of this hemisphere becomes, at once, the ever receding Promised Land and a space in dire need of redemption and exorcism. The French film Le Salaire de la peur (Clouzot, 1953) is here compared to the German film Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Herzog, 1973) in an attempt to elucidate how both of these texts create senses of displacement through their associations of the Americas with perdition. Finally, Chapter Seven attempts to juxtapose my readings of redemption in the contexts of pilgrimage, the Americas, and film.Item SEEING AND THE SEEN: POST-PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHICS AND THE CINEMA(2004-10-18) Bergen-Aurand, Brian Keith; Wang, Orrin N.C.; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What is the relationship between cinema and ethics, especially an elusive ethics more concerned with responding to alterity than with establishing moral order? Seeing and the Seen addresses this question by demonstrating how three seemingly unambiguous cinematic moments (from nations with totalitarian histories) are structured by ambiguity and aporia. These uncertain structures evoke non-assimilative, non-totalizing ethical responses that counter monolithic interpretations of cinema. Previously, skeptical approaches to cinema have not focused on ethics. They have relied upon hermeneutic techniques to "interpret" elements and then discuss their relevance. Their concerns have been ontological and epistemological. Using the post-phenomenological thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, I argue, however, that skepticism connects cinema to an ethics of response. Chapter One introduces the ideas of post-phenomenological ethics, skepticism, and cinema, to show how their interrelationship actually challenges traditional views, such as Levinas's that see art as unethical. Chapter Two analyzes narrative absence and the ethics of alienation in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura. I compare ontological and ethical readings of this film to argue against interpreting it as tragic. The final caress between the film's protagonists is a metaphor for cinematic representations of ethical response. Chapter Three discusses the ethics of pornography in films by Pedro Almodóvar, who shows how pornography and non-pornography remain interdependent. Focusing on cinematic iterability, I demonstrate how pornographic and non-pornographic tropes oscillate between the two genres, rendering their borders uncertain. This uncertainty makes pornography more related to skepticism and ethics than previously imagined. Chapter Four outlines the "total criticism" of the ethics of law in Oshima Nagisa's cinema. Specifically, I examine how the freeze frame at the end of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence evokes an ethics of the cinema that exposes the gaps of total criticism. The freeze frame is the least discussed cinematic device; however, it provides the most concrete example of the elusive relation between skepticism, ethics, and cinema. The Conclusion argues that these examples are only starting points toward further investigations of how filmic uncertainty highlights the relation between cinema and ethics. In the end, I emphasize this point by responding to instances from contemporary documentary filmmaking.