Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2015, Film (Fine Arts)

This thesis studies the cinematic representation of transnational women workers in contemporary American and European fiction films including Bread and Roses (2000), Dirt (2003), Spanglish (2004), and Amreeka (2009). The research considers this representation as it articulates issues in the current state of global migration, immigration laws, and women's reproductive labor. Since the early 2000s, the growing numbers of women from the so-called `developing' countries have been immigrating, alone or with their children, to `developed' countries. Most often they are destined for employment in low-wage service jobs. This process, termed as the “feminization of migration” in the United Nations study (2006), has been addressed by filmmakers such as Ken Loach, Gregory Nava, Nancy Savoca and many others who have made films centered on the immigrant women protagonists. I argue that the cinematic impulse to portray the lives of underrepresented women and to appropriate their marginalized point-of-view signals a necessary turn to a transnational subjectivity determined by contemporary global economic and power relations.

Committee: Ofer Eliaz (Committee Chair); Katarzyna Marciniak (Committee Member); Louis-Georges Schwartz (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies; Fine Arts; Gender; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

Kurdish cinema represents a vital transnational and global art form that bridges the Kurdish community, uniting a stateless people through cultural expression. This dissertation explores common narrative threads of Kurdish cinema relating to identity, statelessness, trauma, and women's issues, despite the differences between Kurds of various nationalities in both the ancestral Kurdistan region and the diaspora. The first chapter examines how these artworks confront issues of identity, exile, and homeland. The second interrogates depictions of individual and collective trauma in Kurdish cinema, especially generational trauma resulting from racism, conflict, and displacement. Chapter 3 analyzes Kurdish cinema from a comparative perspective through the lens of Indigenous studies, examining how Kurdish cinema confronts settler-colonial oppression. The fourth and final chapter addresses the portrayal of Kurdish women's issues in Kurdish cinema, contrasting how male and female directors represent these issues and emphasizing the vital contributions of Kurdish women filmmakers especially with regard to telling Kurdish women's stories. Ultimately this work positions Kurdish cinema as a powerful artistic movement spanning national and international boundaries driven by the efforts of a distinct filmmaking community united in the desire to represent Kurdish identity and culture through cinematic storytelling.

Committee: Charles Buchanan (Advisor); Andrea Frohne (Committee Member); Ghirmai Negash (Committee Member); Nukhet Sandal (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies; Middle Eastern Studies; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2021, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

This dissertation offers a close examination of the treatment and influence of mandatory hijab in contemporary Transnational Iranian Cinema. Through a detailed analysis of three Iranian films, this project investigates how Iranian filmmakers address the social ramifications of mandatory hijab laws in their work. In addition, this dissertation seeks to analyze the impact of abiding by said laws on film production and narrative cinematic storytelling in Iran. These films are: Hush! Girls Don't Scream (Derakhshandeh, 2013), Offside (Panahi, 2006), and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Amirpour, 2013)

Committee: Erin Schlumpf (Committee Chair); Garret Field (Committee Member); Rafal Sokolowski (Advisor); Andrea Frohne (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies; Fine Arts

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, English

Origin Stories traces the emergence and political potential of a slow aesthetic in contemporary transnational cinemas of the hemispheric Americas in the new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Starting from the vantage point of the global South, this dissertation examines five major filmmakers associated with slowness: Lucrecia Martel (Argentina), Alfonso Cuaron (Hollywood/Mexico), Natalia Almada (US/Mexico), Kelly Reichardt (US), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand). Slowness in cinema has popularly and academically been theorized from an aesthetic or national perspective since Matthew Flanagan first coined the term “slow cinema.” However, to theorize slowness as a global aesthetic flattens the political textures of cinemas that arise from marginalized markets with their own film histories. The recent steady growth in international co-production, as well as historical movement of film within and between markets, also indicate that national definitions are increasingly inapplicable to transnational cinemas. Latin American cinema is an example of historical and current transnational production as films circulate between nations in the home market and internationally on the film festival circuit, as well as cultivating a unique character outside Hollywood's cultural dominance. Looking at slow cinema from its geopolitical context reveals the critique of current and past global systems that contribute to iniquity including the erasure of Black and Indigenous peoples from Latinx histories and identities, entrenched racial hierarchies of coloniality, and how these structures inflect and reflect attitudes toward the natural world. Expanding the hemispheric Americas to the Asia Pacific, another site of conquest and US imperial ideation, experimental film translates the personal to the political in an intimate portraiture of human and natural ecologies. Bringing together cinema studies, decolonial, and Indigenous studies approaches, this dissertation charts the intersect (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jian Chen N (Advisor); Margaret Flinn C (Committee Member); Thomas Davis S (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative; Ethnic Studies; Film Studies; Latin American Studies; Mass Media

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2012, Film (Fine Arts)

This thesis, with the particular focus on Taiwanese films set in Taipei, investigates how the Taiwanese cinema, through its diverse treatments of history and memory, enacts its role as a cinematic interpretation of the envisioning of Taiwanese national identity within the transnational context. The first chapter centers on the Taiwanese New Cinema's portrayal of “The Taiwanese Experience,” which refigures Taipei as a site of cultural hybridization, and further contends against the Kuomintang's configuration of Taipei as a site coherent to the nationalist One-Chinese narrative. The second chapter examines the instability of recollection, and the artificial and invented quality of history and historiography through the emerging Post Taiwan New Cinema's utilization of collage of fragmentary shots that shuttle between Taiwan's past and present. The third chapter explores the Post Taiwan New Cinema's depiction of “The Taipei Experience,” which transfigures Taipei as a postcolonial city of layers of historical inscriptions, and therefore suggests an alternative route to locate Taiwan and the Taiwanese identity within the transnational context. With the concentration on the context of postcolonialism and the awareness of what Taiwan is and has been, this thesis discovers that the cinematic layerings of different phases of Taiwan's past and present can illustrate the emergence of “The Taipei Experience” through the erasure of “The Taiwanese Experience.” This thesis therefore reevaluates “The Taipei Experience” as an alternative embodiment of “The Taiwanese Experience,” which in consequence paves a way for an innovative perspective to (re)imagine and (re)negotiate the Taiwanese sense of self.

Committee: Louis-Georges Schwartz PhD (Committee Chair); Ofer Eliaz PhD (Committee Member); Michael B. Gillespie PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian Studies; Film Studies; Fine Arts; History; Motion Pictures

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2011, History

This is a comparative study between the film industries of Nazi Germany and the United States in World War II. I examine the governmental influence on the cinematic industries and how that affected the people. I also show that the Nazi government had more influence than is generally thought over the United States and the film industry in Hollywood. The emigres that had to flee the Nazis brought new ideas to Hollywood, creating new genres of film. The use of Government documents, diaries, memoirs, films as well as secondary sources are the major sources. The government documents were obtained from the Motion Picture Artists Association Archive, and deal specifically with the Office of War Information. The OWI created rules for filmmaking in the war years and oversaw many productions, including Army training films. The diaries are those of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and I include an appendix of statements he made regarding films. In looking at certain emigres and stars in both Hollywood and Germany, I use autobiographies and biographies detailing the lives of the famous in the pertinent years. Many of the secondary sources are previously written works about the creation of cinema, Hollywood history and the German cinematic industry. I use many films to illustrate the ideas that were being expressed to the public, as well as entertaining the people. I specifically use the film Casablanca to illustrate the importance of the fleeing emigres from Europe to the United States, and how so many of these actual emigres being cast in the film made it stronger. The results of my study include that both governments were heavily involved in the cinema in the time of war, creating guidelines that must be followed, and heavily censoring everything. The Nazis copied Hollywood films and ideas after Germanizing them, and the Hollywood took exiled cinematic workers from Europe. The exiled actors, directors and writers brought a new creativity with them that gave birth to Fil (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Beth Griech-Polelle PhD (Committee Chair); Rebecca Mancuso PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; European History; History; Modern History