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In this thesis, I theorise Contemporary Cinematic I-Witnessing as a critical approach to the production and viewership of autobiographical experience on film. The analysis utilises autobiography, film, and adaptation studies to develop an ethical framework that considers the representation of autobiographical experience on film as a form of testimony. The research reveals the codes and conventions of the autobiographical ‘I’ on screen, to identify and interrogate the cinematic and empathic strategies that invite the viewer to bear witness. Fundamentally, Contemporary Cinematic I-Witnessing describes the unspoken agreement between subject and viewer, underpinned by a singular shared objective: to bear witness to the subjective truth of a life. I argue that the subjective truth of autobiographical experience is conveyed on screen along a continuum of representation. The project begins by exploring selfreflexive film as self-witnessing, or autofilmic testimony, in the analyses of Arirang (Kim, 2011), Tarnation (Caouette, 2003) and Blue (Jarman, 1993), by mapping the first-person modes of address and documentary practices used in these films. The analysis moves on to explore The Tale (Fox, 2018) and Persepolis (2007) as narrative films that further constitute self-witnessing, whilst expanding the critical scope of autofilmic testimony to include the representation of traumatic memory and collective identity as advocacy. The thesis goes on to propose the cinematic adaptation of a literary autobiography as a secondary witnessing project, or auteurbiography, addressing questions of ethics, authorship, and fidelity. Using The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Schnabel, 2007) to advance the notion of an ethical ‘pact’ between the filmmakers and the autobiographical subject, I argue that fidelity is crucial to the testimonial tone of auteurbiography. The analysis develops to consider issues of cinematic construction, creative authority, and relationality, exploring the hierarchies of authorship, ownership and representation that emerge throughout the adaptive process. The thesis concludes with a comparative case study of Being Flynn (Weitz, 2012) and Julie & Julia (Ephron, 2009), which exposes the limitations imposed by gender, genre, and commercial concerns, and the ways these issues can compromise the testimonial agenda of Contemporary Cinematic I-Witnessing. Contemporary Cinematic I-Witnessing draws together and builds upon existing scholarship within autobiography and film studies, to advance an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of autobiographical and testimonial subjectivity on screen.

This practice-led thesis explores the creative techniques and philosophies used in composing feature documentary podcasts and how listeners engage with the material and make meaning from it. Podcasting as a medium presents a new and so far unexplored way of interfacing with audio documentary and this study works to demonstrate crucial differences from radio practice in terms of intention and expression,how material is made, consideration for its audience, and how its programmes are distributed. Using post-structural theory, specifically Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas on interconnected networks of affective transmission, podcasting’s relationship to radio is explored, as is how listeners make meaning through their interaction with both the heard material and the devices upon which it is accessed. These theories are then applied to the characteristically open remit of the audio documentary to study how speech, music, sound and silence may be understood to generate meaning, emotion and a sense of immersion in the listener. It is suggested that modes of programme access, listening customs, and interpretational symbolism work together to impart information vital to the ability to connote and denote what is being heard, and that in this way the composed feature can be situated very closely to musical practice and engagement. Taking cues from musical and cinematic analytical practice three podcast programmes are closely scrutinised for an understanding of their constituent material, structural shape, and potential affective transmissions, beforeinterviewswith their producers are presented to discuss conceptual intentions and execution. Six programmes are presented as the practice component of the thesis, each made to experiment with and reflect upon different aspects of creative or listening practice, with conclusions drawn concerning their implications and effectiveness.

Depictions of films being projected to an audience are ubiquitous in cinema. Yet the projectionist, as a figure of potential interest, has been as invisible to the academy as he or she strives to be in real life when running a film from the projection box. The present research addresses this by uniting, in a full-length study, films in which the projectionist is a protagonist. It aims to demonstrate that he (for it is rarely she as far as on-screen representation is concerned) enriches and complicates the ways in which films are reflexive. Research on filmic reflexivity frequently concentrates on representations of the film director, producer, writer or star. The projectionist can be analogous to these figures. Yet cinema about him makes visible his, and the ordinary viewer's, relationships to film and how films function as public objects. My starting point is the unique positioning of the projectionist as a spectator cum 'filmmaker' who makes the audience visible and raises a set of issues around watching film and its attendant practices and contexts. American comedies are examined in the first chapter. They explore the individual viewer's interaction with film through slapstick play with the screen. In contrast, the films of chapter two depict how collective audiences receive film. The dynamic relationship between films and how they are circulated, screened, received, reconstructed, or even ignored by the viewer in different contexts invite questions about cinema's social uses. Finally, chapter three's films are themed around the audience's retreat from cinema. The projectionist is a figure closely associated with cinemagoing as a declining practice and with the persistence of cinema as a problem. Apart from finding that movies with projectionist-protagonists are deeply concerned with film spectatorship, a distinction also emerges between ways in which a film may be for the audience and ways in which it is about them. This is a thematic concern of the films in my corpus. However, I examine how the films orient themselves towards their extra-diegetic viewer as well. Within this, the intertextuality of film illuminates the filmmaker's own viewing and addresses an initiated audience by means of a shared cinephilia. I attempt to distinguish the range of discursive strategies films deploy to reach audiences and to thematise cinema and its importance. I argue that a film's anticipated reception is often inscribed in the text itself and that films thus tell us how to watch them. I proceed by means of the close reading of films, which is sometimes maligned as a scholarly practice. In the light of this, I attempt to accomplish two main objectives with this study. Firstly, I argue that the concept of reflexivity is extended by analysis of films about exhibition and reception; how films reflect upon their reconstruction by the viewer describes a place for the audience, their reception of film, the exhibition context and the public sphere in discussions about reflexivity. Secondly, the study seeks, by means of its methodology, to re-state the case for film analysis as the indispensable business of film studies. The figure of the projectionist grants access to these related endeavours.

The origin of this thesis is, like many others before it, born from a sense of disjuncture between what I heard about something, and what I experienced of it. The 'something' in question is what is increasingly, and I believe somewhat erroneously, termed as 'new audio culture'. By this I refer to all scholarly and popular talk and activity concerning iPods, MP3s, headphones, and podcasts: everything which we may understand as being tethered to an older history of audio-media, yet which is more often defined almost exclusively by its digital parameters. Within this definition lies a dominant narrative, both popular and academic, which ties the digital to the anti-social. From the popularisation of the MP3 player (and in particular the iPod) onwards, digital or 'new' audio culture and technology has been more and more vociferously associated with the breakdown of shared social spirit, and a silencing of (assumedly) previously vibrantly social public and private spaces (Phagura, 2004; Mason, 2006; Bull, 2007; King, 2009). Certainly, earbuds and MP3s soon began to fascinate both mainstream and academic press, and to populate the cultural imagination with images of isolated, ignorant, socially untethered 'iPodders' and iPod 'zombies'. In popular press, the iPod formed the nexus of moral panics as varied as iPod-prompted muggings, traffic accidents and academic disengagement (as students plugged-in during classes), yet with a clear emphasis on the issue of anti-social, individualistic behaviour (de Castella, 2011; Wattanajantra, 2010). New audio-media is understood as both eliciting, and exemplary of, contemporary breakdowns in traditional societal values. In totality, popular discussion of new audio media has largely aligned developing digital audio technology with a new audio culture which seemingly threatens the very fabric of our society. Horror fiction podcasting frequently evidences a continued preoccupation with, and desire to connect to, older audio media technologies and cultures, in particular (though not exclusively) Golden Era (i.e. 1920s-50s) or 'Old Time Radio' (OTR). This is demonstrated through repeated, prominent tropes such as: aesthetic re-mediation of the podcast as older audio technology; re-make, homage and re-imagining of older audio texts and programmes; imaginative audience (re)location to domestic and shared settings; digital community building and co-imagined listening cultures; and revival and evolution of open-studio audio-theatre and in-house 'radio' audience. In these features, these programmes indisputably complicate, and arguably refute in totality, the notion of new audio media's inherent disassociation with traditional audio cultures, and culmination in anti-social, individualistic and 'anti-traditional' listening cultures. Through the exploration of horror podcasting's engagement with older audio technologies and cultures, then, this thesis argues that we may understand numerous, often competing, anxieties, desires and tensions within new audio media culture which take us beyond the commonly levied traits of antisocial, individualistic and privatised urban mindsets.

This thesis analyses stunts in the public life of late nineteenth-century New York, where 'stunt' developed as a slang term. Addressing stunts as a performative and discursive practice, I investigate stunts in popular newspapers, sports, politics and protest and, to a lesser extent, theatre and film. Each chapter focuses on one form of stunt: bridge jumping, extreme walking contests, a new genre of reporting called 'stunt journalism', and cycling feats. Joseph Pulitzer's popular newspaper, the World, is the primary research archive, supported by analysis of other newspapers and periodicals, vaudeville scripts, films, manuals and works of fiction. The driving question is: how did stunts in public life enact conceptions of value? I contextualise stunts in a 'crisis of value' concerning industrialisation, secularisation, recessions, the currency crisis, increased entry of women into remunerative work, immigration, and racialised anxieties about consumption and degeneration. I examine the ways in which 'stunt' connotes devaluation, suggesting a degraded form of politics, art or sport, and examine how such cultural hierarchies intersect with gender, race and class. The critical framework draws on Theatre and Performance Studies theorisations of precarity and liveness. I argue that stunts aestheticised everyday precarity and made it visible, raising ethical questions about the value of human life and death, and the increasingly interdependent nature of urban society. Stunts took entrepreneurial idealisations of risk and autoproduction to extreme, constructing identity as commodity. By aestheticising precarity and endangering lives, stunts explored a symbolic and material connection between liveness and aliveness, which provokes questions about current conceptualisations of liveness and mediatisation. I argue that while stunts were framed as exceptional, frivolous acts, they adopted the logic of increasingly major industries, such as the popular press, advertising and financial markets. Stunts became a focal point for anxiety regarding the abstract and unstable nature of value itself.

This critical review ascertains the development of the research into memory screens and the relationship between memory, history, the body and technology on film, television and related media experiences. The body of research develops from a consideration of the gendered body on screen. This theme is continued and refined throughout the research. I consider the conventional personification of technology as potentially threatening or recuperative in relation to concerns regarding bodily cohesion and individual identity in relation to history and memory formation. The main focus of the work becomes the negotiation of memory formation in relation to media at both a personal and social level and the relationship between viewers and film and television texts. I encompass and develop post-structural definitions of the body and the theoretical implications of engaging with contemporary media. The research also encompasses the experience of exhibition and fan activity in extending the process of memory screens and engagement with the media.

In this thesis I explore the contemporary American multi-protagonist film’s use of contingency and representation of the American Imaginary. The multi-protagonist film is a film form of increasing significance that moves away from the classical narrative cinema’s reliance on a psychologically motivated goal-oriented character and causally coherent narrative, and favours instead a formation of several lead characters and contingency as a way to create coherence in the narrative world. I exemplify why contingency should be understood in these films to mean the opposite of necessity and not simply standing for accidentality. Although accidentality has an important role in the multi-protagonist film, as the thesis highlights and the current scholarship rightly recognises, I explore the way in which accidents can bring forth a larger sense that the given order could have been otherwise. The American Imaginary is understood as a cinematic depiction of a complex intellectual and material framework informing the characters’ worldview. My focus is not on arguing how the American Imaginary presents itself in the society of the United States, instead I explore the way in which the chosen films represent and interrogate a set of ideas and values that they depict as specific to the U.S. With that being said, the films can also be argued to be empirical examples of social constructions of the U.S. I engage with the subject via close textual analysis of three multi-protagonist films – Thirteen Conversations about One Thing (Sprecher, 2001), Killing Them Softly (Dominik, 2012), and The Big Short (McKay, 2015). The films are chosen above all based on their deep interest in both contingency and the American Imaginary. While Thirteen Conversations and The Big Short are representative of the form and could be argued to be close to the generic core of the multi-protagonist film because they treat all their lead characters equally, Killing Them Softly is a less obvious example because it seems to favour one character over the others. Yet, the film is chosen because I see it as representing a tension common to all multi-protagonist films – a struggle of striking a balance between treating all characters equally and to some extent following the norms of the classical narrative cinema, which, among other devices, applies psychological complexity for creating coherence in the story-world. I make use of the thinking of Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek to highlight the chosen multi-protagonist films’ similarity to contemporary continental philosophy. The philosophers are chosen based on what I illustrate to be a “family resemblance” between some of the authors’ main ideas and the chosen films. I will explore how Rancière’s understanding of equality, its connection to contingency, and his thinking on the aesthetic regimes of art offer a way to rethink the central tension of the multi-protagonist film – that between the form’s interest in contingency and its own rigid structure. Žižek’s psychoanalytical thinking of the Real, the unsymbolisable, and its relation to ideology as the latter’s main structuring principle, can be seen to create a close parallel with the chosen multi-protagonist films’ profound interest in the contingent nature of all social structures. As such, the thesis departs from much of the current writing on the multi-protagonist film by demonstrating that the form’s interest in contingency is not restricted to an easy way of connecting the various lead characters nor is it simply a method through which the film form is aiming to reflect the increasing complexity of modern society. Rather, I show the example multi-protagonist films to be exploring contemporary American society with a particular emphasis on capitalism and neoliberalisation, understood by the films as a social process where business and financial logic comes to inform the most various aspects of life. Instead of recognising the contemporary American multi-protagonist film as only adapting to the rapidly transforming society, the film form is shown to actively contribute to a changing understanding of America and its role on the global stage.

This thesis argues for the centrality of kinaesthesia to the narrative structures and modes of address of contemporary serial television drama. Scholarly and popular accounts of ‘quality’ television privilege audiovisual aesthetics, valuing these programmes for the ways they seemingly depart from established televisual form. In objection to this dominant scholarly narrative, this thesis explores how these programmes can be theorised through their shared use of a kinaesthetic reading strategy, in which the movement and spatial dynamics of the body are fundamental for the construction of narrative meaning, emotional impact, and political engagement. The first chapter of this thesis considers what kinaesthesia has to offer our existing theories of televisual storytelling, aesthetics, and engagement, through a review of the critical literature. The following three chapters each focus on a different thematic element of the kinaesthetics of serial television drama. The second chapter discusses Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–) and Lost (NBC, 2004-2010) as examples of the ‘vast narrative’: massive, sprawling stories often explicitly concerned with journeys and mobility, which appeal to kinaesthesia as a means of making their vast storyworlds coherent. The third chapter considers how television dramas both reiterate and resist the normative elements of kinaesthesia, focusing on the embodied politics of gender identity and desire in Outlander (Starz, 2014–) and Transparent (Amazon, 2014–). The final chapter questions how kinaesthesia functions as a mode of empathetic engagement with television, and the extent to which contemporary serial dramas such as Hannibal (NBC, 2013-2015) and Sense8 (Netflix, 2015-2017) present it as a transformative mode of relating to other people. The thesis is invested in presenting kinaesthesia as a productive method for the analysis of television, in which attention to the embodied dynamics of narrative and engagement has much to offer our understanding of screen media, the embodied politics of identity, and the evaluative frameworks of television scholarship. Television has always been a medium defined and experienced through metaphors of mobility, a property that persists in the ways in which serial dramas exploit the storytelling potential of the moving body. By offering kinaesthesia as framework for understanding how serial television speaks to its audience, this thesis proposes a method that is attuned to both the storytelling strategies of these highly contemporary texts, and to the broader theoretical and evaluative history of the medium itself.

Voice is an inconstant yet constantly performative material; it is our internally-housed, liminal technology. ‘Processes of voice’ is the term I develop throughout the text of this thesis to articulate materialities of voice and methods of address within processes of practice in artists’ moving image that ‘give voice’ to material and non-material forms. I interrogate this in relation to key concepts in Philosophy of Mind to address the complex ways in which bodily skills and action inform perception and thought to explore an account of perception and process in relation to voice. I examine the liminal, inconstant, and uncertain in subjective experience, and the ways in which this is extended into the social through a politics of embodied practice harnessed in moving images. I make a case for the uncertain I-voice, which engages the fully embodied and openly subjective, to challenge established narratives and conventions of address, and the power and knowledge dynamics that structure them. I come to focus on the uncertain acousmatic I-voice in moving image, which through its presentness, intimacy and acknowledgement of uncertainty relinquishes the acousmêtre’s threat of control to share a liminal territory of destabilized authority with the viewer. This is also explored in and through my own moving image work, A Desire For Organic Order (2015), a single screen video, which contributes to the overall thesis.

This thesis examines the cinema of Jacques Demy through a variety of queer and feminist lenses. It aims to investigate and politicise Demy’s marginalisation in French film culture, and place his cinema in its social and cinematic context in a way that few previous studies have done. Demy’s films trouble hierarchies of cultural value and binary oppositions, and they often include multiple cultural registers and modes of address, and draw from diverse cinematic traditions. In order to account for the films’ hybridity, the thesis uses several methodologies. It performs close analysis on ten of Demy’s thirteen feature films, in order to make arguments informed by theoretical frameworks such as camp, feminist writing on the women’s film, and recent queer theory on failure. Through an engagement with the contemporary reception of Demy’s films, the thesis also investigates the reasons for his marginalisation. The case study of Demy’s cinema is thereby used to challenge and complicate the canons and narratives of French cinema, with the understanding that canon formation reflects the values of dominant groups. The first chapter outlines where the thesis fits in a fairly sparse body of scholarly writing about Demy, and highlights key theoretical and methodological texts. Next, the thesis turns to Demy’s place in the French New Wave canon. This chapter analyses Lola (1961), La Luxure (1962) and La Baie des Anges (1963), and draws out issues of genre and address. Chapter three, on Demy’s ‘failed’ films, acknowledges that most of Demy’s films were critical and box-office failures. It analyses two of these films, Model Shop (1968) and Parking (1985). Chapter four, on camp, uncovers the political project of Demy’s camp aesthetics, by reading Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) and L’Evénement le plus important depuis que l’homme a marché sur la lune (1973) through the lens of camp. Finally, chapter five argues that Demy’s use of Hollywood genres place these films in a specific and historicised emotional register. The case studies in this chapter are the sung melodramas Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Une chambre en ville (1982), and the musical Trois places pour le 26 (1988). This thesis is among the first scholarly works to consistently approach Demy as a queer filmmaker, informed by extensive archival research into his films’ reception. It therefore represents a significant contribution to an emerging body of work on a heretofore neglected filmmaker.

During its first decade, Game Studies debate mainly revolved around the juxtaposition between two perspectives: the one of ludology and the one of narratology, each positing a primary quality of video games against the other. The study of the relationship between cinema and video games got somehow caught in the crossfire between these two fields. In this work, I investigate the extent to which representation in video games is connected to cinema and its representational codes. A number of authors before challenged this assumption, theorising models that only partially connect the cinematic form to video games. Such investigations have always started from the ludologically educated assumption that video games are different from cinema and, therefore, for the premises of this comparison to be considered “vitiated”, only tangentially useful due to the irreconcilably different nature of the two media. The adjective “cinematic” is a concept constantly evoked in cultural discourses concerning video games. Magazines, reviewers, critics, but also designers, artists, users and commentators (even scholars) often summon the idea of cinematic games in the attempt of describing some peculiar features that share affinities with films and suggesting that video games possess the aura of the big screen. Cinematic games are born at the crossroads between interactive movies and video games, for which the cinematic expression is retained by means of audiovisual representation while keeping the action in the hands of the player. Due to the vast scale of the subject, my work focuses on relatively recent developments in game design which have yet to be fully investigated, and seeks to extend existing attempts to apply the tools of film theory to Game Studies. A secondary value of this work is an annotation on the disengagement of moving image scholars with video games, and it partly serves as an invocation for this to change.

This project asks what a fanvid (vid) is, and by extension, what vids are to television. Vids are derived from television and film sources but they are themselves neither television episodes nor films. These works approximate the music video in appearance and duration, but are non-commercial fan works which construct creative and critical analyses of existing media. Vids remake narratives for a deeply attentive fan audience who watch with a deep knowledge of the source text, or with familiarity of the codes and conventions of the vid form. This thesis is concerned with vids of live-action narrative fiction and covers technological changes from broadcast television, to VCR and the rise of home video, to digital viewership. The chapters focus on different aspects of the vid form in relation to current issues in television studies, with some recourse to the growing field of fandom studies to provide appropriate subcultural context. The first case study chapter addresses contrasting theoretical understandings of collections and archives to contextualise the kinds of archival work done by vidders as a form of historiography. Vids are created from personal archives of film, television and other media sources; vids bear traces of their archival origins, and their creation is the performance of the vidder’s knowledge of their own archive. This chapter includes vids from the VCR era, and has a particular focus on Star Trek. The next chapter addresses multifandom vids – a vid genre that draws together video clips from several sources to compare and contrast norms of representation – alongside critical work on found footage films, to analyse the visual pleasures of vids and their relationship with audience fascinations (of erotics, of spectacle, etc.). The final chapter is an intensive case study of a trilogy of Battlestar Galactica vids, to analyse both the vid’s relationship with adaptation and genre, and the central role of songs in vids. While vids rely heavily on their soundtrack to structure meaning within the work, they are not abstract illustrations of songs. Instead, the clichés and idioms of the chosen song’s instrumentation are vital in completing the vid’s reinterpretation of its source text. Television studies is an appropriate disciplinary frame for studying the vid, as it offers ways of thinking about audiences, sequential narratives and the textuality of video forms. The creators and audiences of vids are highly competent in the deep reading and careful viewing of both mainstream and cult television and film, and keep archives of media which they reframe and re-present.

This thesis is a qualitative investigation that explores how British Muslim civic actors within Muslim organisations perceive belonging, citizenship and negotiate tensions. Fifty interviews with civic actors from fifteen national Muslim civic organisations were undertaken across Britain during 2007/08. The theoretical debates which shaped the study, are based on Goffman's notion of stigma, dramaturgy and frame analysis. The findings suggest that although facing alienation and exclusion, Muslim civic actors increased their participation and exercised forms of active citizenship. This was based on their frames, religious values and principles in difference to liberal and national normative conceptions. They performed an authentic Muslim self to present a diligence to participation, civic duty and responsibility. The civic actors circumvented the 'them and us' approach by actively participating in the front stage, British civil society. The marginalisation, framing, as 'bad Muslim', stigma and Islamophobia they experienced did not prevent them from identifying with British citizenship identities. Britishness, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and social cohesion were seen as other forms of belonging. These did not present a sense of 'divided loyalties' to the civic actors. The religious notion of the Ummah was perceived as a core identity, which provided participants with a sense of belonging amongst the uncertainties they found within Britain. In the present neoliberal political context, the findings suggest a need to increase dialogue between the state and Muslim civic organisations to counter divides and dissolve the perceived boundaries of 'us versus them'. This thesis furthers the debates on citizenship, integration, belonging and multiculturalism in a contemporary British socio-political context.