Mila Zuo

This thesis explores the beach as a site of decoloniality, whose place in-between land and ocean complicates stable binaries of ownership and infuses a racially-Othered subjectivity in its materiality. In what I term littoral liminality, the possibility of a watery, fluid ontology defies the logic and structures of coloniality and the Anthroprocene in a powerfully subdued resistance. I analyze Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) whose beach is not simply the film’s setting, but also the instigator to the white colonial protagonist who desperately seeks his escape, and Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of this Sea (2008), which confronts the ownership of Palestinian beaches through a fluid embodiment to resist the hard lines and borders of the Israeli occupation. This paper is a careful mediation between two different spaces, time, and subjectivities through the shared site of the beach.

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According to contemporary scholarship the digital turn in cinema, or what Shane Denson terms post-cinema, elucidates a certain futural capacity through an ontological shift in moving-image technology. This thesis attempts to imagine a theoretical, metaphysical, and, at times, spiritual framework for understanding and interpreting these 'futural' images by drawing upon concepts from Jungian psychology, early film theory, and post-Deleuzian film-philosophy. A close reading of Steven Soderbergh's Unsane (2018) and High Flying Bird (2019), will illuminate both formal and narrative premonitions. Soderbergh evokes the violence Gilles Deleuze and Siegfried Kracauer identify in the German expressionist image through irruptions in genre filmmaking and digital aesthetics that illuminates a rise in fascism, not dissimilar from Siegfried Kracauer’s symptomatic reading of German expressionism.In his 2020 book Discorrelated Images, Denson argues that digital images engage in a futural processing of time as they are constantly engaged in computational processes whereby digital technology produces protentional images on a microtemporal scale, effectively destabilizing the strict subject-object relationship between the cinema and its spectator. Denson goes on to argue that the speculative execution of post-cinematic images disrupts the indexical or recorded nature of moving-images, they instead become “agents of dividuation that inject computational futurity into temporal becoming” (163). According to Denson, post-cinematic images are not tied to human subjectivity or perception but embody a non-human perspective. I argue the digital elucidates the futural potential of the cinema, drawing from a non-human collective unconscious.As Denson argues, post-cinematic images can shift from futural prediction to generation, constructing an algorithmically generated future effectively controlling, demarcating, or perhapseven stopping the flow of time according to the desires of capital. It will be argued that these post-cinematic images cannot be considered instances of synchronicity, as a causal agent is introduced in the proliferation of premonitory images. Instead, a turn to William Brown's digital film philosophy and his distinction between Supercinema and Non-cinema will illuminate what key differences between what I term as synchronistic-images and control-images. Ultimately this thesis forwards this novel image taxonomy in order to attend to the technological and philosophical implications of our (post-)cinematic visual culture.

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This thesis examines the rising trend of diasporic ‘return-to-roots’ narratives in contemporary Chinese and Korean transnational cinemas. I analyse the touristic travels featured in four films — Un Printemps D’ailleurs (2017), The Farewell (2019), Riceboy Sleeps (2022), and Return to Seoul (2023). As first- and later-generation immigrants, the characters are territorially, and at times, emotionally estranged from their motherlands. What, then, becomes of the diasporic sojourners who have no familiarity at all with their nation’s customs, language, and modes of interpersonal connection? I argue that their unmet expectations in the homeland may lead to psychic predicaments of loss and disillusionment, especially if they encounter multiple disappointments with familial interactions, geographic belonging, and self-image. Filmmakers draw from these painful processes of psychic paralysis and culminating anger within their communities to locate psycho-/somatic manifestations of racial unease on screen. Formal aesthetics are intentionally disjointed and deformed, meandering and rhythmic, fluid and experimental — whether through lingering long takes, extreme wide shots, unconventional cuts, or time jumps. Both travelling ‘back home’ and travelling ‘to home,’ the characters model strategies in counter-remembrance and offer up re-territorialized, embodied spaces that trouble the boundaries of nation and collective memory.

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What do we talk about when we talk about cinephilia? Until recently, we did not talk about it much at all in academic film studies: there is a longstanding bias against cinephilia in academia, and this has led to a noticeable gap in our literature. In this thesis, I seek to fill a niche within this gap by analyzing the representation of cinephiles in six primary film texts: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl" (2015); Todd Strauss-Schulson’s "The Final Girls" (2015); Wes Craven’s "Scream" (1996); Yorgos Lanthimos’ "Dogtooth" (2009); Chandlwrighter Levack’s "I Like Movies" (2022); and Bernardo Bertolucci’s "The Dreamers" (2003). I analyze these films through the lenses of genre film theory, spectatorship theory, and developmental psychology, ultimately arguing for the cinephilic film as an emerging subgenre in cinema: the cinephilm. In arguing for the validity of the cinephilm as a distinctive subgenre, I draw on such genre film theorists as Robert Altman, David Bordwell, John G. Cawelti, Carol Clover, Barry Keith Grant, and Linda Williams to sketch a history of the genre film, and then identify how the cinephilm both draws on this tradition and disrupts it. In particular, I examine how the cinephilm productively interacts with such established genres as the teen film, the horror film, and the arthouse film, while failing to reaffirm dominant ideology in the way that is so characteristic of the genre film. The cinephilm’s resistance to dominant ideology creates an interesting contradiction in terms of representation: all of the cinephile characters examined in this thesis are white and heterosexual, and the majority are male, an apparently clear case of a group of films that do not prioritize racial, sexual, and/or gender diversity. I thereby draw upon alternative modes of spectatorship proposed by Carol Clover, bell hooks, and José Esteban Muñoz, as well as Erik Erikson’s model of psychosocial development, to conceive of these films as diverse in an alternative way, presenting psychologically complex characters who provide a uniquely cinephile-addressed mode of representation. Possessing both generic conventions and an audience, the cinephilm is ultimately justified as an emerging subgenre.

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Kamistan, Qurac, and Abuddin mark just three of the innumerable fictional MiddleEastern countries that proliferate American media works, but why exactly have these nonexistentplaces become such inexplicable fixtures in Hollywood cinema, television, comic books,and video games? This thesis explores three of these fictitious nations—Aladdin’s (1992)Kingdom of Agrabah; Dune’s (2021) desert planet Arrakis, scenes for which were filmed inJordan; and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s (2019) Urzikstan—to begin to account for thisphenomenon. These case studies represent three prevalent mediums and styles for imagining theMiddle East: the magical ancient Middle East in animation; desert planets that proliferate sciencefiction; and the contemporary war-torn Middle East in military-themed video games.Each setting has been constructed from the “standardized molds” Edward Said details inOrientalism (26), bestowing each with familiar archetypes, stereotypes, and references thatWestern spectators identify. This mold, in turn, serves as a shorthand that assists with thespectators’ reading or understanding the milieux. Because the role that imagination and virtualityplay in constructing these fictional Middle Easts, the thesis reads each of the case studies asBaudrillardian simulacra, copies without originals, each representing single installments inlonger series of similar representations (the antiquated Middle East with genies, treasure, andmagic carpets; the Middle East as the Cold War’s Third World, home to powerful resources andcaught between competing empires; the Middle East as a site of instability and conflict).Plausibility and pleasure function as two throughlines that guide the paper. Plausibilityrelates to how the texts construct their milieux, operating within the standardized molds anddrawing on familiar signs to plausibly convey their Middle Easternness to spectators. These milieux construct both shared and unique pleasures, paramount of which is a sense of Westernauthority over these virtual Middle Easts, which are created by, influenced by, and ultimatelycontrolled by Western protagonists. Through these spaces, Western institutions create their ownvirtual Middle Easts to explore, manage, and liberate, unburdened by real-world contexts andcontradictions.

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On May 20, 2021, the K-Pop group BTS’s music video for their second English-language single “Butter” broke the YouTube record for most views in 24 hours with 108.2 million hits. The success of this video illustrates the devotion that BTS’s diverse fanbase has for the seven-member group. Though the intimacy that fans feel with the young men of BTS is experienced from a distance, the South Korean group has inspired profound emotional attachments among their fans despite the mediation of the Internet. BTS’s proficient use of social networking sites, and the feeling of hope that emanates from their work, have attracted a passionate following and intensified parasocial relationships beyond what have historically been experienced. Using a queer hermeneutics of hope proposed by scholars like Eve Sedgwick and José Esteban Muñoz, this thesis brings together the disciplines of authenticity, celebrity, social media, and queer studies to examine the role BTS as a public persona plays in contemporary constructions of online personalities. It chronicles BTS’s history of direct engagement with fans via various social media platforms and considers how BTS’s former image as an industry underdog has supported readings of the group as authentic. Through an analysis of BTS’s content, the dichotomy of ‘extraordinary’ talent and ‘ordinary’ person is also elucidated.Additionally, this thesis identifies the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as an impetus for the current shifts in the relationship between audience and celebrity. While COVID has fostered a sense of disillusionment regarding famous figures, BTS has managed to retain their image of authenticity, encouraging the parasocial relationships felt by their fans to become heightened. By positioning BTS’s art as an antidote to the isolation and hopelessness caused by the pandemic (and the general state of our world), this thesis argues that Millennial and Gen Z fans are employing BTS as a tool for visualizing a more queer and optimistic future.

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