Cinema & Media Studies
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Browsing Cinema & Media Studies by Subject "Aesthetics"
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Item Open Access Seeing the Spell: Baroque, Decadence, and a Cinema of Digital-Animated Liberation(2016-09-20) Morton, Malcolm David; Trifonova, Temenuga D.This dissertation draws on the artistic traditions of seventeenth-century Baroque and nineteenth-century Decadence in seeking to formulate an analytical vocabulary for the aesthetics of digitally-animated spectacle in contemporary cinema. The dissertation seeks to critique binary antinomies of narrative vs. spectacle, and instead propose a concept of narrativized spectacle whereby digital visual effects have brought about a profound liberation in cinemas capacity to envision narrative story-worlds, and depict their workings. It takes the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster as its chief subject for this inquiry, insofar as this is the filmmaking idiom most given to the embrace and deployment of digitally-liberated spectacle, and one which is frequently assumed to be largely bereft of formal and narrative sophistication. This dissertation argues, on the contrary, that the Hollywood blockbusters spectacular nature in fact bears complex utopian implications, and that the crudities which occasionally mar the form in practice are more the result of not being imaginatively hyperbolic enough, rather than being too much so. The dissertations invocation of Baroque and Decadent aesthetics provides a conceptual apparatus for describing this contemporary cinematic idiom of digitized blockbuster spectacle. It identifies a Baroque aesthetic in such stylistic traits as verticality, profusion, and the sublime, as well as narrative themes of transgression of limits, reverence before imposing scale and grandeur, and refusal to ennoble passivity and martyrdom. Likewise, it identifies Decadent aesthetics in stylistics which privilege the gaze, the enclosed and aestheticized space, and formal ritual, as well as narratives ordered around principles of perversity, self-consciousness, and interconnectedness. The ultimate intervention which this dissertation seeks to make, however, is to demonstrate the centrality rather than marginality of animation to cinema, insofar as cel animation has always possessed the graphic freedom to realize any imaginative vision, which digital effects have only recently extended to live-action cinema. All of the aesthetics of Baroque and Decadent blockbuster spectacle that the dissertation traces could be and, the dissertation seeks to show, were deployed in the animated feature years in advance of the liberation of representation that digital effects would bring to live-action.Item Open Access Smashed Typewriters and Sour Smoke: A Historical Poetics of the Screenplay(2018-05-28) Verner, Caroline Suzanne; Trifonova, Temenuga D.Screenplays typically provide the starting point for film development and production. They also draw on a rich history of literary conventions and aesthetic traditions that well exceed their technical blueprint function, as emergent attention being given to screenplays as reading matter by both casual and scholarly readers suggests. This dissertation proposes a historical poetics of screenwriting as a way of working through these conflicting ideas about the screenplay: what it is, how to read it, and how these concepts have evolved over time. It pursues an intensive analysisfrom the silent era scenario to the present-day master-scene scriptthrough several frames, including the historical implications of discourse for the screenplay concept, the linkages between screenwriting and earlier forms of lens-based prose, narrative voice and the rhetoric of the possible performance, and the closet, made-to-read screenplay as a class of literary fiction. Engaging theoretical traditions of narratology, authorship, and adaptation studies, the research illuminates how to read a screenplay aesthetically, invoking the fictional blueprint metaphor as a new interpretive strategy that views the script as independent and complete, outside any actual production reality.