Browsing by Subject "Film"

*Designated as an exemplary master's project for 2015-16*

There is a scene in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale in which Offred, eponymous handmaid to the totalitarian theocracy that now governs America, is overwhelmed by the sudden need to laugh. Spasms wrack her body. She crams her hands into her mouth, she fears she will vomit, she imagines she is giving birth. Finally, well aware that her convulsions would register as subversion to a regime that polices bodies and supervises affects, Offred crawls into a cupboard in an effort to "compose herself." Laughter without Humor arose from this passage, from the inexplicable laughter that overwhelms Offred's disciplined body and demolishes her carefully composed self. The suspicion that laughter challenges the self-contained "I" has always been buried in our idioms: the subject "dissolves" in laughter, the individual proliferates suddenly into a "barrel" or "bundle" of laughs, ontological boundaries are breached as we "roar" or "bark" with laughter. In the twentieth-century, laughter appears across a wide variety of artistic forms as a vigorous affective force capable of convulsing being and exploding calcified structures of thought. This project examines the interrelationship between fictional depictions of humorless laughter and the dissolution and reconfiguration of the subject in poststructuralist theory.

The field of humor studies, which counts Aristotle, Kant, and Freud among its contributors, avoids laughter's irrational properties and instead offers scientific reasons--physiological, evolutionary, and psychological--as to why we laugh. In contrast, Laughter without Humor seeks to understand laughter on its own terms by posing an alternate question: what does laughter do? In four chapters, I consider four discrete strains of humorless laughter: the dankly corporeal flow of a specifically female "dangerous laughter" (Chapter 1), the blustering wave of "ecstatic laughter" associated with mystic experience (Chapter 2), an infectious "grotesque laughter" that tosses the individual back and forth between ontological categories with uncanny fervor (Chapter 3), and the shattering shriek of "atomic laughter" that indexes the experience of total nuclear annihilation (Chapter 4). In particular I focus on literary work from William James, André Breton, T.S. Eliot, Nathanael West, Henri Michaux, Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Kubrick, Margaret Atwood, and Steven Millhauser; and on philosophical texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément, Julia Kristeva, Édouard Glissant, Brian Massumi, and Eugenie Brinkema. I ultimately argue that the messy burst of laughter disturbs the intelligibility of both self and text. In so doing, it clears a space to imagine new, provisional models of personhood that are based on affective entanglement rather than rational self-containment.

This dissertation investigates the social, emotional, and ethical implications of looking at the suffering and death of African Americans. Drawing on film theory, visual studies, literary criticism, and semiotics, the study addresses events and images from 1834 to 2000 in which the humanity of the black body was called into question. The events discussed include: a nineteenth-century riot over the abuse of slaves; the mass media depiction of Hurricane Katrina survivors; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's 1935 antilynching art exhibition; James Allen's 2000 exhibition of lynching photography; the Emmett Till case; and the Spike Lee-directed film Bamboozled (2000). The project ultimately argues for a nuanced appreciation of looking relations that takes into account the ethics of the look, especially when that look is directed toward bodies that cannot speak for and in defense of themselves.

This dissertation explores and theorizes the work of American artist Matthew Barney through the concept of deadpan, and situates it in relation to themes of hybridity and animality in parallel histories of sculpture, performance art, and film.

Purpose: Radiochromic film remains a useful and versatile clinical dosimetry tool. While simple to use, current film options are single use, with no forms of reusable film available commercially. Here we introduce a novel 2D radiochromic sheet, derived from Presage material, which optically clears after irradiation and can be reused. We evaluate the sheets for potential as an economic alternative to radiochromic film and also as a radiochromic bolus with capability for dose measurement.

Methods: A novel derivative of reusable Presage® was manufactured into thin sheets of 5mm thickness. The sheets contained 2% cumin-leucomalachitegreen-diethylamine (LMG-DEA) and plasticizer (up to 25% by weight). A series of radiation experiments were performed to characterize the radiation response of the sheets irradiated with megavoltage radiation from a Varian medical accelerator over time and in different settings. The local change in optical-density (OD), before and after radiation, was obtained by scanning the sheets with a flat-bed film scanner and extracting the red channel of the RGB image. Repeat sheet scanning enabled investigation of the temporal decay of OD. Additional studies investigated dose sensitivity, consistency of response through repeat irradiations, intra and inter-sheet reproducibility, multi-modality response (electrons and photons), and temperature sensitivity (temperature range 22°C to 36°C) of the Presage® sheets. Clinical utility of the sheets was investigated through application to IMRT treatment plans (prostate and a TG119 commissioning plan), and a chest wall electron boost treatment. In the latter test, the sheet performed as a radiochromic bolus.

Results: The radiation induced OD change in the sheets was found to be proportional to dose and to decay to baseline after ~24 hours with a decay constant of 6.0 hours-1 (standard deviation 0.33). After this time the sheet could be reused and had similar sensitivity (within 1% after the first irradiation) for at least 8 irradiations. Importantly, the sheets were not observed to carry any memory of previous irradiations within measurement uncertainty. The consistency of dose response from photons (6MV and 15MV) and electrons (6-20MeV) was found to be within 1%. The dose sensitivity of the sheets was observed to have a temperature dependence of 0.0012 ΔOD/°C. For the IMRT QA verification test, good agreement was observed between the Presage sheet and EBT film (gamma pass rate of 97% at 3% 3mm and 99% at 5% 3mm dose-difference and distance-to-agreement tolerance, with a 10% threshold). For the TG-119 tests the gamma agreement was 93% pass rate at 5% 3mm, 10% threshold, when compared with Eclipse. For the electron cutout treatment, both Presage and EBT agreed well (within 2% RMS difference) but differed from the Eclipse treatment plan (~7% RMS difference) indicating some limitations to the Eclipse modeling in this case.

Conclusion: The reusable Presage sheets show promise as an economic alternative for film applications and as a radiochromic bolus for in-vivo dose measurement. The preliminary work presented in this thesis indicates that these sheets have the capability to improve care in the most well-equipped clinics in the world, as well as provide a fast, inexpensive, and easy to use dosimeter to clinics in low-income countries in desperate need of versatile resources. This work is still a preliminary study of feasibility, where the central current limitations include the narrow nature of application testing and lack of inter-batch comparison. Further work is recommended to establish use in a wide variety of clinical applications, establish a material more closely reflecting flexible bolus, and push the extent of the potential for reusability in the sheets.

Filmmakers shared in the social and political struggles that took place globally around the year 1968, by registering the movements and forging new approaches to filmmaking. Focusing on the cases of France and Italy, this dissertation explores how different sonic strategies were deployed at the time in the staging of the emerging voices—feminist struggle, workers’ fight—and to counter dominant discourses, particularly those broadcast on official media. Political films in the seventies often relied on the promise of Eisensteinian montage to awaken spectators’ consciousness. Yet, those years were also marked by a distrust and a critique of the visual: Laura Mulvey definition of the “male gaze” or Guy Debord critique of the “society of spectacle” amongst others challenged the frameworks of representation. I argue that some directors turned to the soundtrack of their films to stake a position within the political debates of the time. For Deleuze, this moment coincided with the advent of cinema into a true audio-visual media: sound emancipated itself from images. I suggest that this new autonomy closely tracks the emancipation of the repressed voices from institutions’ discursive codings. Interlacing film and sound studies with history, “The Sound and the Flurry of 1970s French and Italian Cinema” focuses on works by Chantal Akerman, Claude Faraldo, Marco Ferreri, Elio Petri, and Ettore Scola in their contexts. Analyses of this corpus mobilize the concepts of asynchrony and polyphony as investigative tools into both the relationships between sounds themselves and the relationship between sound and image. The use of asynchrony—as theorized by Pudovkin—allows for a representation of the social conflicts as collective experience while still rendering the individual struggle. The polyphonic dimension of soundtracks enabled directors to stage the conflicts and challenges carried by these emerging voices. The simultaneous diffusion of multiple and dissonant sounds allowed movies at once to grasp and partake in 1970s political, aesthetic and social tensions.

This thesis examines popular Indian and South Korean film and television media which depicts the nation in the context of postcolonial division. Specifically, it looks closely at portrayals of anti-colonial struggle and partition, cross-border encounters, and revisionist nationalist narratives. This analysis illustrates the potential of such media to simultaneously gesture towards reconciliation between populations that have emerged as enemies despite their origins as one nation, and fail to exceed the limits of post-colonial, post-partition ideas of the nation-state and its formation of citizenship. The possibilities of these portrayals lie in their ability to both predict and produce public sentiment, as they provide an outlet for national discourse negotiating exclusion and belonging.