Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

Filmmakers seek to create story pieces that are visually beautiful and engage the full attention of their audience. They typically abide by a 3-step process moving through pre-production, production, and post-production. Within each step, there are a series of tasks that need to be accomplished in order to reach the completed film. A successful film requires careful planning and strategy in pre-production, timely and decisive execution in production, and minimal unforeseen retouching in post-production.<br/><br/>Even though filmmakers have continued to follow the same formula throughout the decades, the filmmaking process has remained largely inefficient. It is extremely common for pre-production planning to be undercut, for production filming to run far too long, and for post-production VFX and editing to send the project over budget. These instances can cause major issues as the project is being finalized. In many scenarios portions of the project need to be reshot, the box office revenue isn’t enough to make up for extensive VFX retouching, or the project may never even come to fruition. <br/><br/>The reason for this recurring theme of films being over budget and out of time is quite simply that technology has made filmmakers lazy. “Fix it in post” is a disgustingly common phrase used in the film industry. It describes the utter abuse of computer retouching in the post-production phase of filmmaking. Despite working in an industry that seeks to entertain the human eye, filmmakers have become blind to all of the small mistakes that could cost them hundreds of hours and millions of dollars in the long run.

This paper explores the intersection of female madness and Gothic space in four pieces of Gothic media: Jane Eyre written By Charlotte Brontë, "The Yellow Wallpaper" written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Carrie (1976) directed by Brian De Palma, and Midsommar (2016) directed by Ari Aster. In these texts, female characters find themselves driven “mad,” either by their own design or from outside influences. While the madness presents itself differently in each text, they all share common elements, especially in terms of Gothic space. Each text sees its madwoman affected by the environment around them whether it is explicitly stated in-text or not. Gothic space acts as both a metanarrative on the characters’ lives and emotions, and as literal, physical spaces that the characters inhabit and interact with. Oftentimes, what the character cannot express is told through the environment around her. Feelings of suffocation, misery, entrapment, and repression are represented in and through haunted homes, quasi-asylums, closets, schools, attics, and sun-lit fields. In analyzing all four texts individually and in relation to one another, this paper also argues for the presence of a paradox inherent in the cultural formation of female madness. In each text, all written/created across 200+ years, a common theme emerges. Though the expression of madness for the women in each text is a freeing and liberating experience, they also meet tragic and often violent ends. The madness exhibited in each text is both a response to and an expression of trauma - resulting in either victimization or villainization for the women who succumb to it. The end result depicts women who have been physically, mentally, and emotionally destroyed from their own madness. In freeing themselves, they unknowingly and unintentionally subject themselves to further pain and misery.

There exists a gendered difference in how sports films portray female protagonist athletes. This creative project closely examines scenes from four films, Bend It Like Beckham, Million Dollar Baby, Girlfight and Whip It, that collectively represent four gendered themes that are present within the female protagonist sport film subgenre. Each film provides representative examples for themes of exceptionalism, the explicit presence of gender or sexuality, paternal or romantic relationships with male characters, and the punishment or containment of the female athlete. These themes are then analyzed for their presence and meaning in the film genre, including how existing heteronormative film structures are present in female protagonist sport films and how such ideas are reflections of wider societal values. This exposes how the continued use of such heteronormative themes perpetuates stereotypes of female athleticism. After understanding how these themes take shape and what they mean for the genre, this paper then highlights examples of an emergent more feminist genre, promotes alternative filmmaking methods and progressive change to the portrayal of female athletes in sport film.

Through this creative project, I analyzed how COVID-19 has affected the theatre industry. I created a mini-documentary following ASU’s production of Runaways, which was performed without an audience. The final product was a combination of pre-filmed and self-taped scenes. I documented how students were still able to learn and cultivate their skills during a time where most things are virtual. In addition, I analyzed how the shift to filmed theatre has changed the definition of live theatre, including increased accessibility. I also explored the importance of theatre through analyzing the themes of musical theatre performances such as Rent and Runaways. During a time where people cannot gather, artists are still finding a way to create and tell stories.

This paper will analyze the two films Mississippi Burning and BlacKkKlansman, as well as some of the historical contexts surrounding them, in order to unpack the various aspects of police brutality, protest culture, and ideals of reform shown within. Furthermore, it will investigate the impact of diverging from history on the perception of policing units, and the importance of more accurate narratives like BlacKkKlansman in popular culture. <br/> To find evidence that BlacKkKlansman is a much more accurate narrative regarding law enforcement and the effects that sentiments seen in Mississippi Burning have on modern day events, a comprehensive research analysis was conducted. Both films were watched multiple times and analyzed thoroughly, and further research was done to understand not only the narrative elements of the plot, but how the visual aspects strengthen the arguments both films try to make. Scholarly articles on contexts surrounding the subjects of the film were also analyzed, including topics on the FBI, Martin Luther King Jr, and police brutality. Through this, it became evident that Mississippi Burning overlooked most of the reality of the events the film is loosely based upon in order to present a white savior story, whereas BlacKkKlansman addresses the existing prejudices head on while also showing the relation the events have to a more modern context, specifically surrounding the Trump administration.

Can You Hear Me is a short documentary which seeks to give voice to the experiences of trans and nonbinary students in ASU classrooms. What I present in this project are the direct spoken accounts of the feelings, thoughts and frustrations of transgender and nonbinary students as they navigate university classrooms at Arizona State University. Can You Hear Me serves as a representational platform for trans and nonbinary students to communicate their experiences to other students, staff and faculty in the hopes that it might help make classroom spaces more inclusive.

The depiction of female action heroes in modern blockbuster films has become more accurate throughout the years; however, the representation of women is still not as progressive as feminist scholars, actors, and viewers would like. This thesis explores two recent blockbuster films, Wonder Woman (2017) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and how each film deals with the representation of women. While one could look to many cultural forms to explore such issues, films, “the most accessible representations of the past, present, and future of our society,” are particularly fertile ground for exploring gendered representations and stereotyping (Haskell, 1974). For much of Hollywood history, action films have used female protagonists as either passive, venerated symbols of perfect femininity, or objects of fascination and sexual pleasure for their male viewers. Or, if the female hero does have a degree of agency that allows her to push the plot forward, she is subject to moral scrutiny and frequently masculinized. In fact, the representation of women often falls into binary categories: the angelic damsel in distress, or the morally reprehensible, often masculinized, female villain. While the history of women’s representation in film more generally and action films more specifically is a long and complicated one that is beyond the scope of this project, recent action productions have exhibited notable shifts, both in terms of female characters’ box-office and narrative strength. However, both Wonder Woman and Mad Max: Fury Road, present viewers with examples of female representation that break through many of the misogynistic tropes that have dominated the genre for far too long. The key distinction between how both films destroy gendered stereotypes lies in the degrees to which the films allow their central female protagonists, and more minor female characters, to dominate the narrative and inhabit the composition of the screen. Wonder Woman tells the story of one powerful woman, whereas Fury Road utilizes a multitude of women in its story to defy gender stereotypes. While both films can be interpreted as empowering for female viewers, Wonder Woman gives its audience an easily digestible example of female agency; this is due to Wonder Woman allowing its famous comic book hero to comment and reject traditional women’s clothing, but also insists Diana be limited to hypersexualized battle armour and implicates that women cannot have love, power, and family. On the other hand, Fury Road presents viewers with a more radicalized gynocentric world in which, after considerable struggle and not without compromise, female characters not only have power, but wrest it away from the men who have abusively held onto control in the past. These two films also paved new ground for women in Hollywood production terms: giving women more power at the box-office and destroying the old-aged notion that female-centric films do not sell and make money at the same rate as male-centered ones do. Both Wonder Woman and Mad Max: Fury Road, in their own ways, depict that there is space for female action heroes to be more progressive and feminist in future blockbuster action films.