نشریه نامه هنرهای نمایشی و موسیقی
پیاپی 35 (زمستان 1402)

Graduate theses have consistently held paramount significance as pivotal reference sources within academic and scientific spheres. This article adopts the methodology of thematic analysis to delve comprehensively into 215 Master's theses encompassing the domain of Music Composition. These theses were conducted during the period spanning from 2011 to 2021 in two Iranian state universities: the Faculty of Music at the University of Art and the Department of Music, Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran. This research aims to address the following questions: 1) In what thematic categories are the theses in the field of composition classified? 2) Which types of research methodology have been utilized in this field? 3) What are the most and least researched topics in the field of Music Composition? and 4) Which keywords have been predominantly employed in the theses? Similar prior research has critically analyzed thematic content in theses and articles within Iranian universities, primarily focusing on humanities, arts, and engineering sciences. The required information for the present study including titles, abstracts, and keywords, has been collected through a library-based approach. Using a descriptive-analytical method and based on the content of the theses, thematic categorization and methodology classification have been undertaken. By examining titles, abstracts, and content analysis, the theses have been categorized into six main groups, which are as follows: "Analysis of Compositional Works", "Interdisciplinary Studies", "Musicology", "Composition Sciences", "Music Pedagogy", and " Miscellaneous Topics”. The outcomes of the analysis indicate that topics such as "Analysis of Compositional Works" and "Historical and Comparative Music Studies" have garnered the most attention. On the other hand, subjects like " Interdisciplinary Studies in Sociology and Music" and "Interdisciplinary Studies in Fine Arts and Music" encompass the least represented titles. Thesis research methods leading to five categorized methods Descriptive, Historical, Experimental, Casual Comparative and Correlation. The descriptive method was the most commonly used. Keywords such as "Harmony" and "Form" are prominently repeated over 20 times, indicating that harmonic and formal analysis are of particular interest to students in the field of music composition research topics.

This article examines the approach of lighting design in dealing with the positive and negative transformation of the main character. The main objective is to understand the way in which the quality of lighting design influences the portrayal of the main character's upward or downward trajectory. The films “Verdict” (1982) and “Godfather” (1972)  are analyzed to achieve this goal. The research method employed is qualitative-observational data analysis. The analysis of both films is conducted in parallel, first by identifying the main steps of the main character's transformation using Jennie Jarvis's theory of personality development, and then by examining the lighting design from the perspective of its mood-setting function. Based on the conducted analysis, it can be said that the cinematographers have paid attention to the world before and after the main character's transformation and have crafted their lighting states in a way that enhances the transformation experienced by the character throughout the narrative within a visual landscape. In the positive transformation, the character overcomes their inner flaws, leaves behind bitter memories and false beliefs, and evolves by the end of the story. Therefore, throughout the film, the lighting quality for the character and the surrounding environment transitions from semi-hard light, positioning the key light in shadowed positions, low light intensity, and fast fall-off (high contrast), to increasing softness and intensity of the key light, using fill light, reducing shadows, and adopting slow fall-off (low contrast), thus inducing the positive transformation of the character. However, in the negative transformation, the character is unable to abandon their false beliefs. Consequently, instead of moral growth throughout the narrative, they experience a downfall. Therefore, the lighting state induces the character's downfall by placing the key light in shadowed positions, reducing the softness of the key light, not using eye light, eliminating fill light, and employing fast fall-off (high contrast).

In the entertainment industry, globalization occurs when the activities of domestic media companies reach beyond their national borders and attract audiences and consumers in other countries. Movies are one of the most important entertainment industries. Movies have become a powerful medium that accelerates the phenomenon of globalization. Out of all the films produced, the list of the biggest box-office hits includes the films that have achieved the highest worldwide sales in history. But what are the components of the movies that have made these sales? The aim of this study is to find the most important features of the world's blockbusters. To this end, along with documenting the characteristics of the films, the stories of the films have been explored with a qualitative and descriptive analytical approach focusing on George Polti's 36 dramatic situations. The statistical population of this study is the list of the highest-grossing films of history, sampling of them includes the first 12 films of the list. The results show that daring enterprise and self-sacrifice for an ideal are the two main plots of these films. The superhero and apocalyptic ideals of these films are not limited to a certain land or country, but to save the entire planet and humanity. Although the heroes of these films have western faces, they show well the human emotions that are not specific to a particular region. All the films have used at least one world famous actor and in choosing the name of the film, differentiation has been the most important strategy of these films. Action-adventure and science-fiction genres, production and distribution by the global "big six companies", reproducing previous successful films, using acting stars, participating in various art festivals and winning awards, and having a budget higher than usual for each Genre have been the most important features of blockbusters. The production and distribution companies of these films have focused on people who are constantly watching the film. Analysis of the findings also shows that these feature films form a concept of the universe that is consistent with ideological beliefs by presenting an alternate version of reality.

The unthinkable things prompt us to think and determine the boundaries of the thought. Thinking will play its role in the best way when it has the power to face all kinds of new concepts and images in its time without any effort to search for a specific or predetermined method to understand or order the world. Technology and art, with all their power and speed of transformation, have provided this possibility to humankind through various ways and tools. In art, we face affection in its purest form, which seeks to create new ways of thinking and influencing. Also, nowadays, various technological possibilities can help us think better, and by showing the repeatability of functions and thoughts, we can face the repetition of mechanisms differences and provide a basis for creating new techniques to help humankind. Therefore, as a meeting place of technology, art, and thought, cinema can offer many possibilities to represent modern thinking and its accompanying issues. The issue discussed in this article is the way of creating new concepts and analyzing them through cinema in the context of art technology, and always looking at the existence and impact of two concepts, namely transformation and unthinkable affairs. With research related to these fields, Deleuze considers cinema to be one of the most efficient methods to create and understand concepts in today's world and emphasizes its ability to create new possibilities and ideas. This article, to measure the limits of the action power of the art of cinema about the modern way of thinking and its technological tools, seeks to answer these questions in the framework of the theoretical current of humanism and whether it is possible to create from the perspective of creation. Could we take the cinema director as a philosopher? Or is a cinematic work dealing with a new issue or issues as reliable as a philosophical work or concept created with its argumentative method? And finally, to what extent is knowledge of today's technology necessary for thinking in our contemporary world? In this descriptive-analytical research, the latest available library and internet tools have been used.

Philosophers have always tried to provide a suitable answer for the question “what is the nature of death?” Death, like any other phenomenon, has various spectrums and has been studied with different approaches and depicted in different ways in works of art. The aim of the research is to examine the relationship between death and Being in this animation, considering the theme of the story, in order to answer these questions: The concept of existential death can be analyzed in relation to what concepts and with what intensities in the work? What formal features have helped to show the existential death and connected concepts of the characters? The current research is theoretical and qualitative in terms of type, and it was written through descriptive-analytical method and documentary research. Its approach is based on existential death and its related concepts in the book of  Bein and time, which considers the impact of death on the meaning of life, parallel to the discussion of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher. Examining the necessary concepts makes it possible for each of the characters to know their existential dimensions more through the analysis of activities, anxiety and degree of boredom and intensity of existential death. The results of this article show that the main characters of the narration, experience existential death on the way to reaching the character arc. From the investigation and analysis of the character arcs of the main characters of the mentioned animation, it was concluded that the existential death of the Parr family is caused by the legalization, severe laws, identity crisis, and their absorption in everyday possibilities. By feeling the types of boredom, anxiety and intensity of existential death, i.e. impossibilities they succeed in finding their existence or knowing who they are. Without a sense of existential death and the dependent concepts, they are deprived of who they are and their true power. At the same time, by becoming who they are, they can experience existential death as a found for rising to possibilities in new light and color. In the same way, the design and the formal features of the body and the colors of their clothes will change.

The little prince written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a story in praise of common understanding: no one is perfect and to achieve peace and friendship, we must understand each other. It is not strange that this idea came up during the chaos of World War II; as it is still considered a deeply new subject. But The Little Prince, despite its poetic values and high human concepts, in its plot needs some reforms, especially for dramatic adaptation. In this article, the dramatic capacities of this story have been investigated with a comparative study of its film adaptation by Mark Osborne, emphasizing the narrative theory and the opinions of Linda Hutcheon and Deborah Cartmell in the field of adaptation. The result of the research show that the aforementioned anime film tried to present a modern adaptation of the work and by presenting the issues of today's childhood in the face of personal and social life, the story of Saint-Exupéry goes beyond the level of a symbolic story. In this movie, all three levels of Cartmell are noticeable. First, it has been transferred from the novel's narrative medium to the visual medium of the film, and the expressive means of the destination medium have been used to objectify it, which raises the considerations of adapting from the narrative form to the visual form, as considered by Linda Hatcheon. Secondly, this transition was accompanied by "commentary", because in it, a new interpretation of the story was presented according to the audience and the time, and the role of the school institution in capitalist societies in killing children's creativity and turning them into "great people" was criticized. Is. Finally, the director is not content to simply present an adaptation of The Little Prince and leave the comparison to the intertextual process of the narration. Rather, the film, with the parallel narration of the story of The Little Prince and the story of a modern-day little girl, has provided the possibility of "comparison" between them. In this way, the movie adaptation can be evaluated as a success.

Cinematic opening sequences and posters serve as advertising-artistic tools, in addition to their role in introducing films. Nowadays, typography is utilized in film opening sequences and posters to enhance the artistic and commercial prominence of the title. Typography adds a visual-artistic dimension to the text. Typographic titles in films and posters contribute to the formation of meaning in two ways: extratextual interaction and intratextual interaction. Extratextual interaction refers to how the title interacts with its surroundings, including music, adjacent images, and moving visual plans in the background. Intratextual interaction, on the other hand, involves the interaction between the reading aspect and the visual aspect of the title or its typographic form. This article specifically focuses on intratextual interaction in the titles of children and youth films. This analytical-descriptive study aims to explore the interaction of meaning between the two reading and visual aspects of typographic titles in the opening sequences of films and cinematic posters. The approach of this article is based on the Scott-Nikolajeva theory of the five-fold interaction of text and image, which addresses the interaction of writing and the intertextual reference of the image (extratextual interaction). However, this article innovatively focuses on intratextual interaction (the dual visual and reading aspects of the text) by employing their classification method. The examples chosen for this article have been purposefully selected and include the titles of seven films and cinematic posters for children and the youth: "City of Cats," "Tall Girl," "The Elephant King," "The Secret Life of Pets," "No Fly Zone," "Dolphin Boy," and "Up." These examples were chosen not only for their innovation and artistic significance but also because they cover all types of the Scott-Nikolajeva classification. The prevalence of typographic play in the titles of children and youth films and posters, along with the existing research gap in this area, necessitates this investigation. Based on the findings of this study, in the opening sequences of films and cinematic posters, the film title plays a role not only through external interaction with neighbors such as music and background visual plans but also through internal interaction in five diverse styles of meaning-making: symmetrical, complementary, expanding, combined, and contradictory.