Film

The Development of Sound Design in Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal
Presenter(s): Erika Sela
Advisor(s): Dr. Kelli Fuery
Cinema is often regarded as a visual medium, but Michel Chion’s "Film a Sound Art" emphasizes how films are much more than an exercise in watching, but instead an engagement in a process of “audio-viewing” (2009, Pg. 22). Jim Henson’s 1982 all-puppet film The Dark Crystal exemplifies the audio-viewing process by showcasing the power sound has in animating the whimsically fabricated world of Thra. By using the multi-track technology of the 1980s to create the immersive whimsical soundscapes such as swamplands, the call of the landstrider, and the menacing variation in the Skeksi voices, sound designer Ben Burtt was able to establish a sense of “auditory verisimilitude” for the viewer that was just as innovative as the very characters that inhabited the frame (2009, Pg. 71). In the Netflix revamp series, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, director Louis Leterrier carries on the Henson legacy, expanding Thra in all of its creative glory in order to meet the heightened expectations of an audience that grew up in the digital age. With the marriage of sound and image, the artifice of puppetry is recognized in a way that enworlds viewers by “confirming expected characteristics'' of this cinematic universe, forming a coherent believable blend between the aural fantasy of Thra and an artificially puppeteered world (Hearing the Movies, Buhler pg. 13). With the synchronous growth sound design and puppetry have experienced in the past forty years with the integration of Dolby and animatronic development, I aim to track the historical growth of sound and its emotional impact in the viewing experience of puppetry through the worlds of both Henson's and Leterrier’s The Dark Crystal. 


Boredom: How The Anti-Spectacle Frees the Spirit
Presenter(s): Kamla Thurtle
Advisor(s): Dr. Kelli Fuery
Few people enjoy or appreciate the feeling of boredom although those that do will understand its importance for a rich psychic life, exercising their creativity and coming in control of their existence. Through an existential phenomenological reading of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman 1975) and The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet 1968) I argue that film facilitates spectator grasp of boredom. I discuss how aesthetic “lack”, what I am referring to as the anti-spectacle – indicative of long run times, minimal editing, static shots, absence of plot – in cinema can enable the spirit and allow one to engage with boredom. Drawing on philosophical and critical theory via the works of Heidegger (1983),  Henri Lefebvre (1977) , Siegfried Kracauer (1963), and Mary Ann Doane (2002) I explore the nature of boredom and the positive properties it has in human life. While each author treats the phenomenon of boredom differently, it is critical to my work to couple the various approaches toward the mood, demonstrating its importance in everyday experience, and to bridge the psychic inner-world with the outer-world. Heidegger discusses how boredom leads to a greater sense of “being-in-the-world”, while Kracauer explores consequences of not engaging in boredom, and Lefebvre discusses the potentialities of everyday-ness. Cinema becomes the ideal mode for evaluating the mood of boredom because the cinematic anti-spectacle offers its spectator a heightened sense of viewing, confronting everyday-ness, and life-time. Doane helps to substantiate temporality and rethink dead-time, time that is “wasted”, and reformulate this as life-time, time that reflects lived, everyday time. I seek to articulate and exemplify the filmic anti-spectacle and life-time that facilitate mediation of our own time and come in touch with our psychic life and inner worlds, enabling creativity and freeing the spirit. 


Interruptive Ethics of an Ethnographic Film Artist: Chick Strand
Presenter(s): Valentina Pagliari
Advisor(s): Dr. Kelli Fuery
The ethnographic film art of Chick Strand clarifies the notion of an objective clinical assessment of a people. Within her ethnographies, Strand not only positions herself within the field of anthropology but also within film studies.  As a woman, she felt a special responsibility to provide an intentional and authentic representation of the experience of being woman through the film medium. Framed by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and its existential philosophy on being woman, Strand assumes authority in representing this experience as an ethnographic film artist. Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical thoughts from his book Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), discusses the correlation between ethics and representation and their relationship to ethical responsibility. These ideas are developed in Kristin Lené Hole’s Towards a Feminist Cinematic Ethics (2016), suggesting an idea of interruptive ethics that assess how ethics interrupts being from within Being itself and suggests a pre-ontological relation where the trace of other intrudes within our daily lives. Further contextualized by Strand’s personal essays, her work raises questions about the ethics of representation and authenticity which supports the possibility of considering her as an interruptive filmmaker. Strand places herself in an interruptive position that not only upholds an assumed authority to depict, document, and represent her subjects, but also works to create a new narrative for the contemporary women in her films. This raises critical questions concerning the ethics of representation in non-feature film and also concerning feminist ethics through her assumed calling as a woman film artist choosing other women as her subjects. Through a textual and aesthetic analysis of her films The Fake Fruit Factory (1986) and Soft Fiction (1979), this paper illustrates how Chick Strand’s agency as an ethnographer and her position as a film artist facilitates a critical questioning of the relationship between ethics and representation in rendering and studying the experience(s) of being woman.

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