Browsing by Subject "Film studies"

1. At the Conflux

At the Conflux is a three part musically driven time-lapse film that tours Japan by road and rail. It is an exploration of its sprawling nocturnal cityscapes crisscrossed by thruways, its urban grid illuminated by fiery-hued highways pulsing through the city like arteries circulating blood, its towering skyscrapers watching over all, unmoved—soaring sentinels of steel and glass, its patterns of people rhythmically engaging with the machinery of modern life. A spacious Japanese flavored soundscape contrasts with the frenetic energy of the imagery. Piano, violin, trumpet, trombone and upright bass lines are decorated with snippets of field recordings captured in Tokyo and Osaka.

2. Craft and Expression Entwined in the Music of Martin Bresnick

The music of Martin Bresnick is filled with allusions to literature, history, politics, and music of the past. These extramusical references are often combined with complex musical structures. Symmetries and serial operations are staples of his craft. These two aspects of his work often exist in different conceptual realms. However, from the early 1990s onwards, there is a trend in Bresnick’s music in which technical elements entwine with expressive aims. This short article explores the relationship between compositional technique and referentiality through two exemplary works, the String Quartet No. 2, Bucephalus (1984) and The Bucket Rider (1995) with a brief exploration of the aesthetic of Arte Povera, an avant-garde art movement of the 1960s and 1970s Bresnick used as the title of the set of pieces to which The Bucket Rider belongs.

This dissertation examines the pair subject-subjectivity embedded in the problematic of the end of art, as it is figured in exemplary fashion by film and literature. The analysis examines critically the problem of the subject vis-à-vis subjectivity by opening a dialogue that allows the necessary double terms of this discussion to emerge in the first place from the encounter with selected filmic and literary texts: Jacques Rivette's La belle noiseuse and Samuel Beckett's Film, The Unnamable and The Lost Ones. These texts are analyzed on an equal footing with the thought of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gianni Vattimo, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze who have written on both subjectivity and art. The study thus proposes a real movement - in terms and through art - that treats the metaphor of anamorphosis on the level of praxis: the image of subjectivity appears on the screen that is the filmic or literary text as the result of a passage in terms. The subject that emerges at the end of the analysis puts in perspective a certain practice of metonymic reading as renewed political potential of subjectivity.

Border Images and Imaginaries: Spectral Aesthetics and Visual Media of Americanity at the U.S.-Mexico Border, proposes an emerging aesthetic of spectrality in visual media about the U.S.-Mexico border that challenges the power of militarized and racialized visibility. The visual media projects I work with, including cinema, electronic performance art, site specific video installation, and photography generate an aesthetic of spectrality as they try to conjure and express the socially invisible through sensual elements like affect, sound, kinaesthetics, and full embodiment. This aesthetic elicits the perceptions of our other senses beyond only the visual and makes visible the social flesh of the movements and socialities of migration rather than racialized, migrant bodies. The border, I claim, is an important site for understanding the continued deployment of visibility in the neoliberal legacies of what Quijano and Wallerstein call, Americanity, a term denoting the development of the modern capitalist system in the Americas which relied upon the imbricate logics of colonialism, racism, and the deification the modern. Images of spectrality are intermediaries between what Diana Taylor calls, archive and repertoire, being both documents and sites of embodied engagement that produce both certain and uncertain knowledges of race and migration at the border. The visual media projects in my dissertation cultivate spectral aesthetics to theorize an alternative visibility and the changing production of public memory. By making visible the social flesh of heterogeneous encounters with media, spectral aesthetics reforms collective memory making it a process of democratic editorialization that privileges experience as the site of a multivocal history. This project reclaims the image as a terrain for the multitude's inquiry and imagination about the US-Mexico border, and puts the imaginaries generated by these images in dialog with activist projects happening in relation to immigration.

This dissertation seeks to position the music of American arranger-orchestrator-composer Conrad Salinger (1901-62) as one of the key factors in creating the larger camp aesthetic movement in MGM film musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. The investigation primarily examines Salinger's arranging and orchestrating practices in transcriptions and conductor's scores of musical numbers from MGM films, though some scores from Broadway shows are also considered. Additionally, Salinger's style is frequently compared to other arrangers, so as to establish the unique qualities of his music that set it apart from his contemporaries from both a technical and an aesthetic standpoint and that made it desirable as an object of imitation. By inquiring into his musical practices' relationship to his subjectivity as a gay person in the era of "the closet," this analysis both proposes and confirms Salinger's importance to the MGM camp aesthetic. With the concept of "musical camp" thus established, the dissertation subsequently demonstrates its capacity to produce new readings of the politics of national belonging and gender that manifest in various musical numbers.

The relationship between China and Hollywood has been a contested subject as a result of complicated historical trajectories. Whether during the Republican era or during the post-1994 period when Hollywood films were reimported to the Chinese market, Hollywood’s “dominance” seems to be the prevailing narrative, a narrative that describes one party’s (Hollywood’s) position of dominance over the other (the Chinese market). From the perspective of marketization, Hollywood and the Chinese film industry are entangled in an intense competition. From the perspective of culturalization, though, such a black and white binary is not entirely applicable, because culture itself is always undergoing continuous negotiation and reformulation. This thesis takes two recent Chinese films—Wolf Warrior II (2017) and The Great Wall (2016)—as my case studies to discuss two of the major forms of representation in the current Sino-Hollywood relationship, namely: “chollywooding” and “pandering.” I seek to highlight the dynamics of cultural negotiation and accommodation occurring between the two parties. Inspired by Prasenjit Duara’s concept of “circulatory history,” I challenge the idea of the “exclusiveness” of Hollywood, or the stationariness of any cultural form. I argue that Wolf Warrior II represents a new cultural space—a “Chollywood cinema” (that is, “Hollywood cinema with Chinese characteristics”) that combines Hollywood filmmaking techniques with Chinese ideology. I show that, while Chollywood cinema is particularly appealing to Chinese audiences, it is viewed much less favorably by overseas viewers. By contrast, The Great Wall employs a strategy of pandering that is less successful in terms of both its domestic and international receptions because it deviates from both “Hollywood” and “Chollywood/Chinese” ideologies. The aim of this thesis is twofold. On the one hand, I demonstrate that, from a cultural standpoint, the Sino-Hollywood relationship must be characterized as one of “negotiation”: both parties are not simply in a competitive relationship but also a collaborative one, whether they wish to be or not. This reveals a dynamic global-local interplay between “chollywooding” and “pandering.” On the other hand, the growing popularity and success of “Chollywood cinema” indicates how “chollywooding” will take on an increasingly significant role in reformulating Sino-Hollywood negotiation in the foreseeable future.

This dissertation asks how the theological anthropologies of T. F. Torrance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Willie Jennings help Christians diagnose and subvert the idolatry of our current racial imagination. It concludes that an idol we can call “whiteness” competes with Christ to function as the mediator of social identity, our goal and ideal human, and the icon held between us. This idolatry interferes with our ability to become the people we are meant to be together in Christ by the power of the Spirit. This theological anthropology enables us to identify the idol of whiteness at work in popular media like blockbuster movies, and it equips us to undermine this idol through our engagement of the arts, popular or otherwise, so that we might together develop a new, healthier, and holier imagination.

This dissertation revisits a neglected archive of avant-garde Cold War-era Latin American and Spanish films which use baroque, excessive aesthetic strategies inspired by popular religious ritual: the experimental documentaries and expanded cinema inventions of Spanish filmmaker-mystic José Val del Omar; the Mexican psychedelic exploitation epics of Chilean polymath Alejandro Jodorowsky; and the Cuban revolutionary films of Manuel Octavio Gómez. This corpus of filmmakers grappled with the problem of cinema’s role within the global system of capitalist media spectacle. Drawing on Guy Debord’s 1967 theorization of spectacle as the culmination of the West’s privileging of vision above all other senses, I contend that the ultimate end of capitalist spectacle’s offer of seemingly limitless pleasure is sensorial numbing. My project tracks a growing recognition during the 1960s that the ubiquity of imported Western media images within the global south doomed subjects to passive consumerism and worse, to the extinction of older epistemologies based in the non-visual senses like touch, hearing, taste, and smell. The films I examine counter ocularcentric rationalism with the sensorial immersion of ecstatic experience. By contrast to the better-known militant anti-colonial films of the period that depict armed struggle, these films experiment with forms of ritual in order to reconstitute the body’s senses as a major ground for decolonial epistemic resistance where the rationality of political discourse fails. In doing so, these filmmakers reconstitute the cinema as a key site for immersive, collective experience.

This thesis seeks to demonstrate that by intentionally integrating Christian-based movies and shows, faith leaders can encourage members of their communities to initiate, establish, grow, and sustain a relationship with Jesus Christ. Visual arts and the ingenuity the genre offers in reaching people spiritually, psychologically, and informatively need to be explored and presented as a resource for spiritual formation. This thesis seeks to provide a practical understanding of how Christian-based films have the potential to be practiced as a spiritual discipline for spiritual growth and to cultivate a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ. As a spiritual discipline, the storytelling through film can stimulate an internal response to nurture disciples and make more disciples as Christ commissioned. In my research, findings, and analysis, I will provide the spiritual and film formation foundations and spiritual discipleship strategies to use Christian-based films in spiritual formation.

This dissertation examines diegetic music as a rationale for the juxtaposition of traditional and modern idioms in operas by Giacomo Puccini. Through this perspective, I consider the resulting unevenness of style in Puccini’s works as an expression of the music’s dramatic function, rather than a consequence of any compositional shortcoming. Originally proposed in relation to film, diegetic music identifies music that exists within a portrayed world and is therefore recognized by fictional characters as music. In these pages, I argue that Puccini regularly steps into the world of his operas, adopting the persona of a fictional entity to compose in an old-fashioned Classical style that is distinct from his usual late Romantic idiom. I also propose and employ a tripartite analytical methodology for identifying and assessing diegetic music in opera, complete with a new definition for diegetic music that is specific to this genre. Approached in stages, this methodology first considers textual analysis of the words characters sing and the stage directions published in the score to establish a hypothesis for the presence or absence of diegetic music in specific passages. Musical analysis then aims to confirm or refute this supposition through clearly defined Classical forms that are otherwise absent in Puccini’s musical texture. Finally, dramatic analysis seeks to resolve any discrepancies between the textual and musical evidence, as well as assess the music’s contribution toward the plot and/or themes of the opera.

The study aims to elucidate and address the problem of cross-cultural encounters and artwork interpretation by exploring the philosophical concepts of “the Logos and Dao.” Through the examination of Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s thoughts on “Logos” and referencing Daoist thought, the essential meaning of “the logos and Dao” is gradually explained with the notion of “Enframing” (Ge-stell), which denotes a mechanism that gathers and sends over. The structure of “Gestell” not only supports the fundamental function of the “house of language,” but also plays an important role in the question of modernity and technology. Through a detailed analysis of the film work Yellow Earth, the study illustrates how technology, while presenting challenges to the essential relation between humans and beings, also holds the potential to unveil the “Enframing” force of “the Logos and Dao.” This revelation fosters a reimagined understanding of cross-cultural dialogue in the age of modern technology, and it also urges us to rethink the relation between humanity, language, and technology.

This project examines how African diasporic writers and filmmakers from Zimbabwe, Martinique, Britain, and the United States inscribe into their works a sense of anticipation of release from subjection, as if to experience in advance the feeling of unequivocal bodily relief. Charting its appearance in both descriptive content as well as aesthetic form—such as metaphor, narrative structure, and aspects of cinematic editing—“Fugitive Time” shows how this recurring form of utopian time-consciousness distinct to African diasporic cultural expression evolves from the 18th century slave narrative to the contemporary novel, and how it mutates across disparate global geographies. In epic poetry, autobiography, experimental film, and historical novels, the project isolates this fugitive anticipation of the outside of black subjection and the persistent memory of violence that engenders it. In these works, utopia, however elusive, lies in that moment when the body at last finds release.

The “Hans Zimmer-effect” has become shorthand in both popular and academic discourses to describe a dominant mode of composing for Hollywood films that relies on digital tools to produce highly repetitive blockbuster scores. Likewise, pop-inflected soundtracks and hagiographic musical biopics have become ubiquitous to the point of parody, suggesting an overreliance on simple nostalgia and a formulaic approach to musical storytelling. The low cost of digital production tools has led to a drastically condensed production model and a reliance on temp tracks in the editing booth, leading to prognostications about film music’s fading relevance within an increasingly digitized audiovisual culture.

In contrast to these concerns and the factors that have engendered them, I submit that Hollywood’s digital era has proven to be more acoustically diverse than was once feared, reveling in the interplay between the sound and music of disparate eras. Through the lens of “hauntology” as coined by Jacques Derrida and developed by Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, this dissertation considers how the persistence of analog devices and practices within a digital mediascape invites consideration of cinematic music as something caught between the folds of time itself, reflective of a dynamic and ever-changing relationship to past modes of representation.

Reinterpretations of classic film genres make use of the gray area between music and sound design to distort time itself, relaying epistemological confusion through means that transcend the digital-analog binary. Likewise, scores that foreground instrumental timbres usher in a new relationality between the vibrations of material sound and the embodied experiences of character and spectator alike. In auteur-driven cinema, the use of anachronistic music plays an active role in historical revisionism, problematizing the perceived value of “historical fidelity” in Hollywood practice. And finally, the tensions between live and recorded performances staged in music-centric historical films reflects the uneasy conflation of historic recordings and the historical “record.” The diversity and breadth of these examples give way to a paradox: the material foundations of cinematic music were never completely certain, and yet, they remain more powerful than ever.

The media texts explored include Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019), Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2018), Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2016), Inglourious Basters & Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2009 & 2012), Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2014), and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe, 2020).

This dissertation considers the production of video films by Nàgó–Yorùbá creators along Bénin’s southeastern border with Nigeria. There they find themselves at the margins of three better-funded arts industries with contrasting attitudes toward Nàgó–Yorùbá culture and aesthetics. In Nigeria, much of the Nollywood video film industry supports belonging to global religious movements, such as Pentecostal Christianity and Reformist Islam, all the while portraying indigenous religion as diabolical. The art-film scene of Bénin often dismisses West African video films as amateurish. Finally, Bénin’s state arts programs promote the Vodun religion of the coast as a tourist attraction yet deny Nàgó–Yorùbá people compensation for the state’s appropriation of their religious arts into the category of “Vodun.” Against this backdrop, video filmmakers use movies to celebrate indigenous religion and culture, to promote religious ecumenism, and to seek new sources of material support. Nevertheless, Nigerian media saturates the marketplace in Bénin so that very few local video films can earn a profit. My study thus seeks to determine how Nàgó–Yorùbá media practitioners persist in the face of such precarious conditions. I ask how the production of media becomes a forum to debate and establish norms of community and religious practice, how national identity, religious affiliation, and professional prestige affect negotiations over religious attitudes and conceptions of community, and how the open style of production in Bénin allows a diverse group of people—media professionals and others—to participate in the debates and discussions that shape media projects.

My work is based on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Bénin–Nigeria border. During this time, I learned moviemaking from video filmmakers directly, acting in their productions, learning camerawork and editing, and eventually producing my own video film. I argue that Nàgó–Yorùbá video filmmakers make video movies because doing so is a community-sustaining endeavor. These efforts grant video filmmakers a prominent status in their communities as recognizable and relatable faces, and as the conveners of social activities on sets and in studios where they mingle and discuss productions with colleagues and audience members. This intimacy turns video filmmaking into what I call a production public, a group whose activities not only create media, but also negotiate the audiovisual aesthetics by which religion and culture are shown on screen. In the face of disappearing profits and intense competition, their activities are precarious, but as long as this public continues to make media, video filmmakers assume the role of moral authorities in the community while working with audiences and patrons to shape attitudes toward religious ecumenism, morality, and ethical engagement with regional and global forces. The public crafts an image of ideal community behavior that supports indigenous Nàgó–Yorùbá religion, rejects religious strife, and looks for ways to export its moral outlook to others.

Plastic Recognition traces a critical genealogy of the human face in cinema and its afterlives. By rethinking the history of film theory through its various investments in the face, it seeks to intervene not only in the discipline of film studies but more broadly within contemporary political and scientific discourse. This dissertation contends that the face is a privileged site for thinking through the question of recognition, a concept that cuts across a range of aesthetic, political, philosophical, and scientific thought. Plastic Recognition examines this intimate link between the face and recognition through a return to "classical" film theory, and specifically to the first generation of European and Soviet film theorists' preoccupation with the face in silent cinema. In the process, it recasts the canonical debate over cinematic specificity between Béla Balázs and Sergei Eisenstein as an antagonism between two opposing conceptions of the face in film: transparent universalism versus plastic typicality. Of these two conceptions, this project contends that the "Balázsian" idea of a transparently expressive face assumes cultural dominance in the latter half of the 20th century by virtue of its essential commensurability with the political and social ideal of mutual recognition that has come to prevail in the United States and Western Europe in the context of neoliberalism. Alongside and against this dominant tendency, the "Eisensteinian" insistence upon the plasticity of aesthetic form provides a radical alternative to the idealist metaphysics of immediacy underlying both the "Balázsian" notion of the cinematic face and the ideal of mutual recognition it exemplifies. That insistence forces into view the ways that recognition itself is always contingent upon aesthetic and technological practices, even (or especially) when it is brokered by that seemingly most immediate of images--the human face. By adopting this approach as its basic critical orientation, this dissertation attempts to restage the problem of recognition as fundamentally about the historicity of plastic form. The project concludes by turning to a scientific scene of recognition in which the "Balázsian" conception of the face makes an uncanny reappearance. The final chapter examines several studies in contemporary neuroscience that use representations of the human face as experimental stimuli in an effort to establish a neurophysiological basis for the mutual recognition of empathy.

The basic question of "Political Cinema: The Historicity of an Encounter" is whether or not it is possible to think a concept of political cinema while affirming the autonomous capacities of both cinema as an art and politics as the thought of collective self-determination. Is it, in other words, possible to elaborate a relationship between cinema and politics that would at the same time establish a separation between the two and thus refuse to reduce one to the other. Such a relation of separation is called an encounter. Cinema encounters politics insofar as politics affects it and insofar as cinema can produce certain political effects, but also only insofar as cinema itself is immanently capable of configuring this relationship to politics. Following this conviction, the question of political cinema has to be considered at a distance from questions of genre, where political cinema would be merely one among other cinematic genres, and distinguished from the problem of political instrumentalization of cinema (propaganda). Political cinema refers to real cinematic inventions that happen in relation to processes of human emancipation.

"Political Cinema" tests this basic conviction through four separate case studies. These case studies are limited and local analyses, which nevertheless cover a broad historical background and are, furthermore, meant as concrete points from which more general theoretical questions can be addressed and formulated. The introductory statement (Chapter 1) sets up the theoretical stakes of the dissertation. Part I analyzes the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's appropriation of several elements of laughter - comedy, militant humor, carnival, caricature and satire, etc. - as specifically cinematic means Eisenstein used to bring his films as closely as possible to the revolutionary process of the October Revolution and the break the latter introduced into the history of humanity. Part II of the dissertation (Chapters 3 and 4), presents a discussion (primarily on the example of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times) of the figure of the worker as a forceful cinematic symbolization of the existence of the modern proletarian masses, through the creation of which, however, cinema does not give up the effective autonomy of its expression. Part III, which consists of an analysis of the work of the Palestinian director Michel Khleifi, shows how the filmmaker's strategy of blurring the boundary between documentary and fiction is an artistic procedure (a cinema of "documentary fiction") that makes visible the complexity of Palestinian historical experience and memory, but does so at a distance from any direct political discourse on the question of Palestine (Chapter 5). And finally, the Conclusion to the dissertation, presents an analysis of the recent Romanian film, which renders visible striking new ideas of political cinema that are, however, produced in the absence of anything more than mere traces of what deserves to be called politics (Chapter 6)

How does gay pornography inscribe gay identity, and what might that inscription reveal? Pornographesis asks how gay pornography has come to organize the feelings, desires, pleasures, memories, attachments, and identifications of the male homosexual subject. LGBTQ scholarship tends to forego a rigorous study of gay erotic media altogether in favor of less sexualized, more recuperable objects. As a result, the representational histories and media cultures of gay pornography remain largely obscured from contemporary discourse. This dissertation examines regimes of gay pornography that make visible its shifting contours. Unlike other studies that take pornography as their subject, mine does not aim to reduce pornography’s meaning to monolithic postures of either pleasure or harm, but rather locates the possibility for vexed in-betweens, discontinuities, and ruptures. The central question of Pornographesis is not just how gay pornography inscribes gay identity, but how that inscription changes over time and according to circumstance. Across four sequential eras, I examine notable shifts in the narrative structures, cultural position, and reception practices of gay pornography. I link these shifts to changes in media, from 8 and 16mm film to video, print, telephonic, theatrical, and digital technologies.

Situated as an Americanist project, Pornographesis engages the historical materialism, media shifts, and narrative dynamisms that attend its development from the 1960s to today. Following Laura Kipnis’s notion that pornography is one of culture’s honored sites for working through social problems, I approach gay pornography as an engagement with the “problem” that homosexuality has been thought to constitute. In each era, gay pornography inscribes identity around a different set of relations to produce figures that range from necessarily clandestine, to defiantly perverse; from obsessively technophilic, to exploitatively entrepreneurial. Moreover, each era reveals the many and changing demands that the producers and viewers alike place on pornography: that it be beautiful, liberated, narrative, risky, safe, carnal, political, elegiac, honest, authentic, masculine, interactive, and so forth. As such, this dissertation argues that there is not just one uniform gay pornographic culture, but many. The mercurial quality of gay pornography delivers not just pleasure, but critical intervention in political crises, alternate imaginings of social structures, and valuable contestation of the rigid demands of heteronormative masculinity. Pornographesis makes the case that the study of gay male pornography is not merely instructive, but is in fact crucial for comprehending modern gay identity.

Regeneration Through Laughter critically examines narratives about the power of US comedy to act as an antidote to the nation’s political problems. The project explores how post-9/11 film and television comedy develops a comedic utopianism, rooted in the notion of a distinctly national comedic spirit, which is then positioned as a tool to respond to major contemporary political issues, such as the degradation of democratic discourse, national polarization, and the War on Terror. Reading this comedic utopianism alongside political theory, national fantasy discourse, and scholarly commentary on US humor, this work evaluates the political efficacy of comedy in forwarding a vision for redeemed US nationhood. The analysis of comedic utopianism’s efficacy centers on the relationship between culture and politics, as this utopianism recasts political problems in culturalist terms and appeals to cultural forces (i.e., the aesthetic, the affective, civil society) to propose solutions to these problems. Regeneration Through Laughter argues that the culturalization of political problems ultimately undercuts comedic utopianism’s political potential by producing a bind in which the activation of cultural energies is only possible at the expense of depoliticizing the social issues this utopianism hoped to address.

This project explores the concept of domestic space as depicted in the films Small Talk (2016) and The Moon Palace (2007), alongside philosophical and cultural insights. Through an interdisciplinary lens that incorporates cinema studies, philosophy, and cultural analysis, we examine how these filmmakers navigate the complexities of familial relationships, societal norms, and individual identities within the context of domesticity.

Small Talk by Huang Hui-chen provides a deeply personal exploration of domesticity, shedding light on taboo topics such as sexual identity and domestic violence. Meanwhile, Qiu Jiongjiong's The Moon Palace offers a fragmented yet profound portrayal of domestic space, challenging conventional boundaries and inviting viewers to contemplate the interplay between physical architecture and emotional resonance. Drawing from philosophical, this project expands understanding of domestic space as a liminal entity shaped by both tangible structures and intangible narratives. Through the lens of these filmmakers, the analysis interrogates the narratives embedded within the walls of our homes, gaining insight into the complexities of the human condition and the enduring power of familial bonds.

Ultimately, this thesis project argues that the study of domestic space transcends mere architectural analysis to encompass a deeper interrogation of human existence itself. By engaging with cinematic representations of home, we gain a deeper appreciation for the multiplicity of meanings that reside within the spaces we call home, offering valuable insights into the complexities of modern life and the human experience.

This dissertation uses film to explore shifts in conceptions of race, cultural identity, and national belonging in Germany from the 1950s West Germany to contemporary reunified Germany. Through the analysis of several German productions featuring black characters in major narrative or symbolic roles, it identifies narrative and cinematic techniques used to thematize and problematize popular German conceptions of race and racism and to utilize race as a flexible symbolic resource in defining specific identity borders. The dominant discourse around the concept of race and its far-reaching implications has long been impeded by the lack of a critical German vocabulary. This gap in mainstream German language is in large part a consequence of the immutable association between “race” (in German, Rasse) as a term, and the pro-Aryan, anti-Semitic dogma of National Socialist ideology. As Germany struggles to address racism as a specific problem in the process of its ongoing project to rehabilitate national identity in a post-colonial era indelibly marked by the Second World War, the films discussed in this work — Toxi (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), Gottes zweite Garnitur (P. Verhoeven, 1967), Angst essen Seele auf (R.W. Fassbinder, 1974), Die Ehe der Maria Braun (R.W. Fassbinder, 1979), Alles wird gut (Maccarone, 1998) and Tal der Ahnungslosen (Okpako, 2003) — provide evidence of attempts to create counter-discourses within the space of this language gap.

Using approaches based primarily in critical race and film studies, the following work argues that these films' depictions of racism and racial conflict are often both confined by and add significant new dimension to definitions of Blackness and of conceptions of race and racism in the German context. These attempts at redefinition reveal the ongoing difficulties Germany has faced when confronting the social and ideological structures that are the legacy of its colonialist and National Socialist history. More importantly, however, the films help us to retrace and recover Germany's history of resistance to that legacy and expand the imaginative possibilities for creating coalitions capable of affecting social change.

“Scoring Star Trek’s Utopia” investigates music as articular of the Star Trek franchise’s shifting discourses. This study focuses on the role of the fanfare from The Original Series title theme in foregrounding, concealing, or initiating Trek’s ideological tensions. By analyzing how the fanfare is complicit in Trek’s narrative and philosophical efforts—that is, its part in scoring a futuristic utopia—this dissertation uncovers continuities and discontinuities within the franchise’s fifty years of production. Star Trek has become one of the largest brands of the twenty-first century: thirteen films, six television series, interactive concert performances, and thousands of fan creations. The contributions of the fanfare, a near-constant presence, are both lacking in study and vital to a more nuanced understanding of the growth of Trek's brand.

Using previously unstudied archival sketches and scores, the filmic texts themselves, and viewers’ reactions to them, this study grounds an analysis of Trek’s musical-ideological developments within the practice of media consumption. Through archival research and close viewing of Star Trek’s films and television series—arguably its most well-known media—this study traces music’s crucial role in building the franchise’s ubiquity for American audiences. It examines choices made during the filmmaking process, such as where the fanfare appears, how it is altered, musical material derived from its characteristics, and its audiovisual placement. Over thirty different composers have contributed to Trek’s scoring (not to mention the directors, screenwriters, and actors involved), increasing the directions the franchise has taken. Drawing on scholarship that considers the construction of meaning, memory, and nostalgia in music, "Scoring Star Trek's Utopia" argues that viewers can and do retain awareness of the fanfare’s past and present manifestations. Even as Star Trek reifies its past, the potential within its multifaceted directions offers an enduring, yet malleable legacy for the present and future. In so doing, “Scoring Star Trek’s Utopia” approaches an understanding of franchised film and television scoring as well as illustrates music’s integral role in branding an ever-expanding media universe.