Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- Language: Spanish
- Creators: Mcelroy, Isis
Description
This dissertation is a comparative study of three contemporary women filmmakers: Puerto Rican Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Chicana director Lourdes Portillo, and Brazilian director Helena Solberg. Informed by transnational theory, politics of location, feminism on the border, and approaches to documentary filmmaking, the study examines three filmic texts: Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994), The Devil Never Sleeps/El diablo nunca duerme (1994), and Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (1994). Each film is narrated by a female voice who juxtaposes her personal and transnational identity with history to tell her migration story before and after returning to her country of origin. An objective of the study is to demonstrate how the film directors vis-á-vis their female protagonists, configure a United States Latina transnational imaginary to position their female protagonists and themselves as female directors and as active social agents. Further, the dissertation explores how the filmmakers construct, utilizing the cinematographic apparatus, specific forms of resistance to confront certain oppressive forms. The theoretical framework proposes that transnational documentary filmmaking offers specific contestatory representations and makes possible the opening of parallel spaces in order to allow for a transformation from multiple perspectives. Through the utilization of specific techniques such as archival footage, the three directors focus on historical biographies. Further, they make use of experimental filmmaking and, in particular, the transnational documentary to deconstruct hegemonic discourses. Lastly, transnational cinema is valued as a field for cultural renegotiating and as a result, the documentary filmmakers in this study are able to reconfigure a transnational imaginary and propose an alternative discourse about history, sexuality, family structures, and gender relations. In sum, my dissertation contributes to Chicana/o and U.S. Latina/o, American Literature, and other Ethnic Literatures by focusing on migration, acculturation, and multicultural dialogue.
ContributorsValenzuela Pulido, Norma A (Author) / Hernández-G, Manuel De Jesús (Thesis advisor) / Foster, David W. (Committee member) / Mcelroy, Isis (Committee member) / Sanchez, Marta (Committee member) / Elenes, C. Alejandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The nature of the link between a literary text and its film adaptation has been a point of contention within academic thought since the inception of cinema due to the fact that film adaptation forms part of film history since the early 20th century. For most of the past century, the main concern of critics has been the level of fidelity that adaptations exhibit in terms of their relationship with the text, which was viewed as "the original" that directors needed to use as a model. In the last 25 years, however, the discourse of fidelity has been challenged by a number of intellectuals as a result of poststructuralist thought, which rejects the notion of an "original" text and proclaims the existence of infinite meanings within each text that are constructed by the reader, not the writer. The present investigation will take into account this type of epistemology as its starting point in order to review and defy a number of theoretical approximations from the last several decades that deal with the relationship between literature and cinema towards its main goal of overcoming the limitations of fidelity discourse. This will be carried out through an in-depth analysis of Latin American texts that have been adapted to film. Thematically both the literary texts and the films contain elements that portray the reality of marginalized groups that build their existence in opposition to the model of patriarchal heteronormativity. In current epistemological thought such a modus vivendi falls within the realm of queer theory. Another common thread that unites all the cultural productions is the presence of violence that showcases the high level of intolerance towards any subject who somehow seems to be different, hence threatening the dominant configuration of patriarchy. Furthermore, the different texts and films expose a general fragmentation within Latin American society, a result of the constant struggles among its diverse social groups, between the ones who occupy the position of socioeconomic power and those who are left outside of it; such a fragmentation also stems from the multiple clashes that occur within the marginalized groups themselves.
ContributorsKokalov, Assen (Author) / Foster, David W (Thesis advisor) / Mcelroy, Isis (Committee member) / Urioste-Azcorra, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011