Jafar Panahi: a conversation with humanity

Author
Lee Kit Ying Evelyn

Supervisor
Assoc Prof Stephen Teo Kian Teck

Year
2016

Abstract
In recent times of great conflict and intolerance in the world, Jafar Panahi’s films, focusing on the human being in Iran, strips away the boundaries we construct that divide and distinguish one human being from another. An unfamiliar culture and distant place becomes a real experience for us, and one film at a time, Panahi continues his ongoing conversation with humanity, even as he faces difficult restraints within his home country. This dissertation, in honour of Jafar Panahi and Iranian cinema, is a conversation with humanity alike, drawing from various scholarships and sources without discriminating time and place, to compare and supplement Panahi’s view of Iran and the human being, his love for people and the streets they cross every day.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66856

Image Credit
Featured image Jafar Panahi by Flickr user Aslan Media. CC BY 2.0.

The Marvel cinematic universe: uncovering the secrets behind its big bang

Author
Goh Si Han

Supervisor
Assoc Prof Stephen Teo Kian Teck

Year
2016

Abstract
Eight years since its inception, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the highest-grossing film franchise worldwide in the history of film. While critics have attributed the franchise’s commercial success to the rise of the comic book movie genre, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s exceptional popularity in a market saturated with similar superhero competitors cannot be explained by genre alone. This paper argues that the franchise’s comparative advantage comes from its world-building processes constructing a complete and consistent world that assimilates genre signifiers without disturbing audiences’ conceptual immersion and that is structured for synergistic growth, ultimately leading to the diegetic world’s applications in audience engagement that ranges from the self-conscious management of audience expectations to the transmedia extension of cinematic audience engagement. Concurrently, this case study also demonstrates how world-building concepts can be integrated with an approach to film genre to derive a more effective approach to analysing contemporary blockbuster franchises as the industry shifts towards world-building practices.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66682

The phantom referent: perceptual realism in cinema

Author
Aloysius Boh Chee Kai

Supervisor
Assoc Prof Stephen Teo Kian Teck

Project year
2016

Abstract
We live in an age where photorealistic objects in films do not necessarily have physical referents — look no further than the dinosaurs in Jurassic World (2015), and the wormhole in Interstellar (2014). Yet when people watch Jurassic World or Interstellar, their typical response is, “That looks so real!” This is an implicit attempt to locate real-world referents of the aforementioned cinematic objects. If we are to retain this persisting intuition that there is an indexical relationship between the photograph and the photographed object in the context of films, then a new type of referent has to be posited, called the “phantom referent”. This thesis offers an ontology of the phantom referent.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66858