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Following the coup that took place on September 11th, 1973, and until the beginning of the 21st century, the cinematic memory of the Chilean dictatorship rested in the hands of people who had directly experienced the Coup and the seventeen years of authoritarianism and who, for the most part, had fled into exile. Until the end of the dictatorship in 1990, theirs was a cinema of memory and resistance, focused on the victims and often silencing the executioners. However, the new century brought new filmmakers, people who grew up during the dictatorship and whose experience of it led them to film different stories from different points of view. The filmmakers in this thesis were all born after 1973, and all began producing after 1990: they are, in the end, children of the dictatorship and filmmakers of the democracy - a transitional generation of sorts. They produce a critical representation of both dictatorship and democracy, to the point where the limit between the two periods is no longer clear: this reveals a questioning of the concept of "democratic transition" in the Chilean context, as well as an attempt to represent the symptoms of trauma. Understood in this thesis as examples of post-traumatic filmmaking, the films of our corpus reflect upon the continuities of dictatorship in democracy. They also offer a meta-reflection on cinema's representation of atrocity and the traumatic past. This dissertation will explore a political and ethical reading of this generation's work. The adoption in the films of an aesthetics of trauma is the basis of an ethical discourse on both one's accountability in the present for the horrors of the past and on the social role of cinema and its (non)representation of trauma. Through this, the films invite the viewer to engage in critical spectatorship. The aesthetics of trauma thus leave abundant space for the viewer to participate in the film, and this active participation allows for self-reflection on the viewer's part. Offering an alternative reading to the apolitical interpretations of these filmmakers that have abounded, this thesis aims to present this generation's work as a different approach to political filmmaking.

This PhD by Publication focuses on the representation of motherhood on 'quality' American television and how that is intrinsically linked to women's political and economic oppression in society. Although this study focuses on contemporary television series, it is grounded in a history of how motherhood has been theorized, its cultural positioning and how this informs the representations of maternity, motherhood and mothering in quality American television drama. Arguing that, in order to understand how patriarchy subjugates women, we need to expose the way patriarchal norms related to motherhood work as, while 'we know that difference exists, ... we don't understand it as constituted relationally',1 I propose that cultural attitudes expressed through televisual representations betray a deep-rooted misogyny that ties women to their reproductive potential thus impacting their positioning in society, their employment prospects and a lifetime's wage prospects. With so many meshes of ideological carriers at work, I conclude that it is urgent to bring them into consciousness and wield that knowledge politically.2 My work brings what is invisible into discourse, what is unconscious into consciousness and teaches us much about the ingrained attitudes of a neoliberal western patriarchal society, how it views motherhood and the impact that has on women in society more broadly. My original contribution to this field acknowledges 'quality' television's soap opera roots, and, by analysing series from a feminist perspective, shows that much can be revealed about the patriarchal unconscious, how it views its mothers and how women are inevitably linked to their reproductive potential.

Politics and aesthetics in the cinema of Luchino Visconti 1943-1963 This thesis provides an innovative approach to the cinematic work of Luchino Visconti, from Ossessione in 1943 to Il gattopardo 1963. Visconti is known as a canonical figure in Italian cinema but it has been difficult to see the relevance of his work to current concerns in the field of film studies. The conventional view has been that Visconti's work should be understood through the frame of either neorealism or auteur cinema. Most scholars have focused on his themes of major political significance, or have argued that his visual language is best understood as an expression of high-culture references. But this thesis argues that these films from the earlier period in Visconti's career can be successfully used as a site for discussing contemporary issues: questions on the relationship between cinema, politics and national identity, on taste and gender, on the popular aspects of cinema, and on methods that focus more on cinema as an industry. A consistent focus of this research project is to scrutinise and disentangle the complex relationship between Visconti's attention to the aesthetics and politics of his films. The first two chapters of this thesis explore the details of the political and critical context in which Visconti worked and in which his work was received. In chapters three, four and five, I apply contemporary theories - theories of modernity and consumer culture, of decorative aesthetics and of actor performances - to challenge some of the most historically entrenched views on Visconti. Using archive material, interviews, and biographies, the first chapter explores how Visconti's relationship with the Italian Communist Party was based on a network of personal connections with Communist collaborators and senior party officials and shows how Visconti's films played an active role in the development of the cultural policies of the PCI. In chapter two I examine the debates that the films provoked, placing them within the Italian culture and society of the time, focusing primarily on their reception by the PCI and Marxist film critics. In chapter three I tackle the anti-decorative bias that has tended to categorise Visconti's aesthetics as regressive, and offer a new reading of Visconti's use of decoration and mise-en-scene. In chapter four I examine several examples in which Visconti's films engage with consumer culture and modernity, and show how these introduce complexities into the political messages of the films. In chapter five, I bring together a range of sources to draw conclusions about how Visconti chose and worked with actors - an area that has been almost entirely left out of the literature on Visconti.

This thesis considers the role of the male body in the construction of a Northern English place-myth in fictional film and television. As scholarship of the region's representation acknowledges, masculinity is dominant within the production of a Northern imaginary. However, critical discussion of this masculine coding frequently overlooks the male body itself. Consequently, this body has been produced as a taken-for-granted formation; an obvious figure carrying a limited set of meanings. In contrast, this thesis argues that representations of male embodiment are complex sites of meaning which must be read, textually, to be understood, culturally and historically. In its methodology, the thesis combines textual analysis with an examination of aesthetic, social and political contexts. By treating text and context as reciprocal, I chart how fictional representations of the male body both respond to and actively produce our sense of the North's meanings and values at specific points in time. The first part of the thesis establishes an intellectual and cultural history, by asking what precedent exists for describing representations of male embodiment as specifically Northern. In Chapter One's literature review, I demonstrate how the Northern male body has pervaded scholarship on the region as a concept with an implicit but influential presence. Chapter Two examines the relationship between male bodies and the production of historical narratives of the North according to a canon of film and television texts. This is a critically complex task which requires, firstly, reproducing a canonical screen history in order to map how male bodies have mediated changing notions of Northern identity, and, secondly, critically querying the representational politics of a 'Northern' canon. The second part of the thesis involves an investigation of contemporary representations of the male body. The primary field of investigation is the representation of male embodiment in texts produced between 2008 and 2020. This period has seen the re-emergence of the North as culturally significant in the mediation of a post-recession structure of feeling, in part through the popularity and controversy of releases such as I, Daniel Blake (2016), Happy Valley (2014 -), and God's Own Country (2017). Across three chapters, I examine three modalities of male bodily representation in this period, which I term, respectively: the deteriorated body, the youthful body, and the racialised body. By treating deterioration, youthfulness, and racialisation to be specific, if overlapping, processes in the representation of Northern masculinity, these chapters emphasise the rhetorical nature of these bodies and locate social and ideological meaning in the contradictions that result from this rhetorical specificity.

This thesis examines the portrayal and significance of science fiction in contemporary British theatre. Analysing twenty-two texts and productions in their original performance contexts, I make critical comparisons between their science-fictional narratives and the anxieties of the present moment, including social instability, accelerating technological innovation, institutional violence, neoliberal exploitation, and climate collapse. By exploring how theatre practitioners are increasingly intervening on matters of national and international urgency via the lens of a speculative tomorrow, this thesis ultimately argues that science fiction constitutes a new method of political engagement within twenty-first century British theatre. This thesis is structured as a series of case studies built around science-fictional subgenres, each of which is mapped across an interdisciplinary scholarly framework. My introduction lays out the broad theoretical concerns and organisational choices that underpin these case studies, before examining the (limited) existing publications in the field and and locating my approach within scholarship allied to the interests of science fiction, such as robots in performance, digital technologies, and the staging of political theory. Opening with an examination of post-apocalyptic plays, chapter one examines how these productions communicate intense social, political and economic anxieties by making links to the familiar yet alien landscape of the modern post-industrial ruin. Chapter two focuses attention on Anne Washburn's Mr Burns (2014) and draws on cultural memory to explore how the play's post-electric narrative intervenes on notions of remembrance, national identity and belonging. Chapter three considers the depiction of the android in contemporary theatre, framing this figure as a posthuman agent that troubles ontological binaries including human/nonhuman, biological/artificial and object/subject. Concentrating its gaze on RashDash and Unlimited's dance-theatre piece Future Bodies (2018), chapter four considers how this production utilised a range of embodied performance choices - including song, dance and movement - to interrogate and resist the technological erasure of the human body. Finally, chapter five examines the staging of dystopia in numerous recent productions by drawing on scholarship concerning precarity and systemic violence. Combining science fiction, theatre studies and wider academic discourse, this thesis both documents an expanding performance practice and pioneers a new interpretation of political representation within contemporary British theatre-making.

The aim of this project is to consider the ways in which the cinema of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) represents notions of 'Jewishness', tracking continuities and discontinuities with images of 'the Jew' that were conveyed in the Weimar Republic and beyond. The enquiry therefore includes films produced across the entirety of the Republic's existence, incorporating comparisons with Nazi cinema to highlight how tensions in Weimar society could be manipulated to suit the Nazi purpose. This is an atypical approach within Weimar Film Studies which has tended to consider 1933 as a caesura in German cinematic history. Examination of Weimar cinema in this way reveals that there was fear of an 'internal invasion', as a wide range of marginalised groups increased in visibility both on and off-screen. This fear of 'internal invasion' would eventually be presented as 'Jewish', with the films selected for this enquiry indicating that tropes applied to these 'othered' groupings would eventually become synonymous with 'Jewishness'. This enables reference to films that are not traditionally associated with ideas of 'Jewishness', for characters that are not explicitly identified as Jewish can step into a similar role as enemy of mainstream German society. As the Weimar period develops, so too do the representations of 'the Jew' on-screen, with representations of 'Jewishness' becoming much more codified as 1933 and Hitler's rise to power approaches. This research thus explores the notion of antisemitism as a socially generated projection formulated in response to the social experience of modernity, projected onto 'the Jew' as the ultimate enemy of the national community.

This dissertation fills research gaps in general historiography, film historiography and exile historiography alike by presenting the first ever monography on the German plurilingual multiple artist Walter Rilla (1894-1980) whose filmography of 200+ titles developed parallel to his similarly huge German-British stage, radio, literature and television work. My study period 1921-1957, politically highly charged, covers decisive decades of Rilla's professional career 1913-1978 during which he was likewise a musician, intellectual, publisher and political theorist. While primarily analysing Rilla's European and anglophone films - including their actant roles in contemporary ideological discourses - I equally outline Rilla's network and specify both his star rank and brand on the backgrounds of his press, audience and advertising reception. My original contribution to knowledge redresses the hitherto chronic research marginalisation of this NS-exiled artist via my transnational and transcultural theory approach which finally puts Rilla, consistently the equal of top star colleagues from both sides of the Atlantic, back on the map of top film artists of European, transcontinental and global fame, where this star actor, producer, director and musician belongs. My film exile and exile film definitions enable an exemplary litmus-test interpretation of Rilla's multifaceted transnational and transcultural work that challenges both nation-based culture models and exile research binaries. Not least due to his transnational European film network acteur position as unearthed by me, he retained his transcultural Weimar Cinema career level during and beyond his 23-year British exile. Most of his 110-112 films made in 1921-1957 alone, hitherto largely overlooked by research, were, as I have proven, aesthetic and commercial European to global successes, including transcultural adaptations I have identified amongst 30+ British export versions. As I have demonstrated, Rilla's hitherto largely dismissed wartime BBC German and Home Service radio propaganda work constitutes an outstanding contribution of global impact to Britain's war effort.

Images of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are the site of an acute crisis in photographic representation. The purportedly "authentic" UFO photographs that proliferated in the mid twentieth century are alleged to depict some unknown aerial activity operating just beyond the perimeter of scientific knowledge, yet courtesy of the visual ambiguities that maintain the UFO's essential unidentifiability, they typically reveal almost nothing of its actual nature. Despite these visual ambiguities, UFOs also quickly established themselves as an iconographical staple of popular entertainment cinema. Between their appearances in these two very different kinds of photographic image, photographic UFOs emblematise many of the key issues at stake in debates concerning the epistemology of photographic imaging. What is it we actually see in photographic images, and what can we hope to reliably learn from them? Why do some photographs seem innately comprehensible, perhaps even overburdened with association, while others seem to resist attempts towards their interpretation? Juxtaposing a range of competing approaches to photographic semiology from film and photography theory (including the modernist realism of Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film, and C. S. Peirce's conceptualisation of "symbolic," "iconic," and "indexical" signs), this thesis performs a theoretical examination of the unique aesthetic character of the photographic UFO, and what it is capable of revealing about the nature of the photographic image. Using close textual analysis of both still and moving, fictional and non-fictional UFO images, it is a consideration of how the UFO's self-reflexive semiotic unruliness functions variously favourably and unfavourably in the context of both art and evidence. Culminating with the formulation of a speculative theory of the photographic UFO's visual disruption, this thesis presents the UFO as an image that gestures to a range of representational possibilities beyond what are conventionally considered the limits of photographic representation and interpretation.

This thesis explores the ways in which the Italian illustrated press created and disseminated a visual cinematic knowledge in the period between 1950 and 1965. Through explorations of production sites and processes, and related editorial practices, it offers an in-depth analysis of the role played by major publishers like Arnoldo Mondadori and Angelo Rizzoli. The study focusses mainly on three weeklies that serve as case studies of the modern news magazine in the post-war period: L'Europeo, Oggi and Epoca (in the first years of its existence, 1950-1951). Rizzoli will also be considered in relation to its impact on film production. After addressing the broad context of the international press (chapter 1), the thesis examines the creation and function of new editorial environments within the expanding publishing industry of the 1950s-1960s. Analysis of photographic prints and illustrated pages of magazines reveals the various forms of storytelling related to cinema that ran through the different spaces of illustrated magazine and which shaped editorial work (chapter 3 and 5). The study is complemented by examinations of specialised units within publishing houses, such as documentation centres and marketing offices (chapter 4 and 5), which had a decisive impact on the circulation of filmic imagery. Drawing on the publishers' documentation centres, among other sources, this thesis delves into the complex institutional and inter-personal relationships that shaped the formation and perpetuation of a cinematic imaginary in the Italian press. Combining tradition and innovation, the magazines used cinema to extend the range of visual content that their readers were familiar with. By examining strategies for promoting directorial 'brands' that were considered to be consistent with journalistic values, the study highlights the fluid relations that obtained between journalism, advertising and visual documentation.

This thesis explores the ways in which Saudi women entrepreneurs are socially constructed in Saudi Arabian media by deploying a social constructionist epistemology. Drawing upon Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis, this thesis examines the discursive apparatuses through which the phenomenon of female entrepreneurship in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is forged. It also explores the contextual factors, such as the political, socio-economic and socio-cultural milieu, in addition to endogenous ones, affecting the representation and entrepreneurial practices of Saudi women entrepreneurs through qualitative in-depth interviews. Building on the extant literature, I challenge the ubiquitous entrepreneurship conceptualisations and discourses, and especially the Western, white, male entrepreneur, by shedding light onto Saudi women's entrepreneurial experiences in Saudi Arabia. The findings unveil the ideological paradoxes and shifting power relations that are embedded within, and underpin, the representation and experiences of Saudi female entrepreneurs. These paradoxes, arguably, are a manifestation of the current socioeconomic reforms in KSA amalgamating conventional, religious and nationalist values with a neo-liberalist and (state) capitalist structure. Such juxtapositions produce conformist narratives and counternarratives to the Western entrepreneur, as seen through this study's analysis. The findings reveal that there are Saudi discourses that chime with Western constructions of the entrepreneur such that of the individualistic, heroic and successful entrepreneur. However, there are other Saudi discourses on entrepreneurship that counter the Western entrepreneur as a rags-to-riches iconoclast and rather, offer elitist ascriptions instead. Another presumption that underpins the Saudi discourses is that although the Saudi women entrepreneurs are celebrated for their achievements, they are, in some instances, immanently essentialised to their new roles. Such complexities encapsulating the discourses of entrepreneurship are not merely a manifestation of the changing milieu and gender relations in Saudi Arabia, but also the malleable and fluid conceptualisation of entrepreneurship theories and practices. From a pragmatic stance, the thesis is concerned with advancing the knowledge on the entrepreneurial practices of Saudi females by understanding the contextual and institutional factors at play that affect their business endeavours. From a conceptual stance, it is concerned with widening the participants of the field to expand our understanding of entrepreneurship theory and practice.

This PhD thesis demonstrates how post-'9/11' US security discourses are co-constituted through Hollywood's superhero genre, specifically the productions of Marvel and DC. In doing so it contributes to important debates within International Relations and Critical Security Studies that address the connections between popular culture and world politics. My interdisciplinary and inter-textual film analysis reveals that artefacts of popular culture have to be seen beyond their merely representational potential; on the contrary, popular culture becomes an important site to make sense of political issues as part of the mundane and the everyday, increasingly blurring the line between reality and fiction. Looking at American history and the development of the American Monomyth shows how superheroes were not created on a blank slate but were already born out of a specific narrative of the American nation in the 1930s. For those past 90 years, superheroes have been constant co-producers of crisis and conflict, making sense of foreign policy to domestic and global audiences. Their reinvigoration since 2001, leading into large-scale productions of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, corresponds with the crisis of '9/11' and the 'War on Terror'. Throughout the presidencies of Bush, Obama, and Trump they have been shaping the discursive elements of US security and foreign policy. The thesis argues that by engaging with superhero films, not as trivial pieces of entertainment but as important cultural artefacts that co-constitute political reality, scholars might find new ways to make sense of violence and conflict and seek new paths to a more peaceful world.

Mexican screen melodrama, often located in the margins of Film and Television Studies, is frequently dismissed as lacking cultural value. This genre, however, should not be overlooked as it offers a unique opportunity to understand the social representations and dynamics of the country. This thesis by publication historicises and contextualises the evolution, production and development of key Mexican screen melodramas over seventy years to understand and mediate Mexico's ambivalence around socioeconomic background, race and religion, gender and worth, family and duty. Crucial titles outlined in this research include María Candelaria (dir. Emilio Fernández, 1943), Quinceañera (dir. Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1960), Quinceañera (prod. Carla Estrada, 1987-1988), Nada personal (Nothing Personal, prods. Carlos Payan, Epigmenio Ibarra, and Hernan Vera. 1996-1997), Mi pequeña traviesa (My Little Mischief-Maker, prod. Pedro Damián, 1997-1998), Primer amor ... a mil por hora (First Love ... at 1000 Miles Per Hour, prod. Pedro Damián, 2000-2001), Rebelde (Rebel, prod. Pedro Damián, 2004-2006), El estudiante (The Student, dir. Roberto Girault, 2009), and Miss XV (Miss 15, prod. Pedro Damián, 2012). The six publications that constitute this thesis demonstrate the importance of localised scholarly inquiry into Mexican audiovisual media that considers not only narrative discourses, content and textual analyses, but also industrial records and practices, marketing campaigns and press releases, archival research and interviews, multimedia synergy, and comparative analysis. For some time, research on Mexican melodrama has had a strong social focus, with several writings about audience engagement, but it is imperative to have more close readings of the texts themselves to understand their cultural context and industrial histories. The relevance of this research has been highlighted across three different journals - the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, Critical Arts and Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies - and will be published as a book chapter in the forthcoming Children, Youth, and International Television and within a special dossier for the Journal of Popular Television. This research exposes societal changes within Mexico by utilising one of its most omnipresent forms of popular culture and provides a deeper understanding of Mexico's primary media productions through the use of genre and remake theory. This research is an invaluable contribution to international scholarship on melodrama, Mexican screen media, telenovela remakes, genre studies, gender studies, quality television and streaming services.

This thesis examines the concurrent arrival of a burgeoning queer televisual culture during the post-2000 boom in Chinese TV format adaptation and innovation. It focuses on contemporary Chinese provincial station-produced variety shows that are originally based on global TV formats. Drawing on global TV studies, global queering theory, Chinese feminist theories and media and cultural globalisation research, I develop a 'queer-glocalisation' framework to doubly debunk the static polarity prevalent in global queer and TV studies. My theoretical approach works to explore the complex ways in which multiple forces and factors associated with the ideologies and power struggles of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality and class, at both global and local levels, are intertwined and co-constitutive in this process. I present a critical analysis of the Chinese glocalisation of TV formats in three often queerly connotated variety genres: talk shows, reality TV and impersonation shows. Using specific case studies from each genre, I ask why and how certain formatted programmes have become a queer female 'runway', so to speak, yet sometimes also a worrying and ambivalent one. In addition, the paradoxes and promises of contemporary Chinese lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) culture in its conversations and contestations with local normative ideologies and global flows of TV and queer knowledge are also interrogated. By so doing, I construct a comprehensive thesis for understanding the ways in which queer meanings emerge, reside in, contribute to and flow through predominantly heteronormative, patriarchal public culture and mainstream spaces. Ultimately, my research in this thesis reveals a dual process of contemporary Chinese queer-glocalist TV culture that has been enacted by and is continually negotiating with both the dominant industrial, technological and social-political forces of mainstream Chinese society and the nonnormatively gendered and sexualised desires and tactics of TV producers, performers, celebrities and audiences.

This thesis critically engages with the literary response to environmental degradation during late capitalism that entrenches further racial and class inequalities. The rampant exploitation of natural resources by neoliberal and neo-colonial systems has been registered in a number of fiction and non-fiction works. This project focuses on the treatment of the theme of environmental injustice by writers from ethnic minority backgrounds in the US and traces the connection between race and classbased inequalities and environmental dispossession. Environmental justice has been widely studied across disciplines in the last three decades. The scholarly interest in the topic has been piqued due to drastic environmental degradation, uneven distribution of natural resources and pollution, and the highly uneven impact of climate change. Although literary scholarship has shown keen interest in environmental justice, little attention has been dedicated to studying environmental justice with emphasis on ethnic minority writers and the strategies of resistance they offer through their works in a comparative fashion. Drawing on Jason W. Moore's world-ecological paradigm of capitalism and new approaches to environmental justice, I investigate the ways in which ethnic minority writers are structurally better placed to explore the damaging effects of environmental degradation. This thesis finds that, as in the civil rights movement, ethnic minority writers and artists are today at the forefront of the struggle against environmental injustice through their creative work and activism. Therefore, this project not only studies the creative response to conditions of environmental degradation, but also investigates the complex affiliation of "writer-activists" vis-a-vis the ethnic communities from which they originate, as well as the global literary market in which they must operate. The writers and artists under study engage in a form of truth-telling that allows them to function as nodes in a global struggle against environmental injustice, even as they secure often privileged positions within the circuits of the global culture industry. The thesis concludes that the complex positions writer-activists hold in return shape the aesthetic forms they deploy in their response to environmental inequality.

Dream ballets were a regular feature of Hollywood film musicals in the 1940s and 1950s, especially at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, but they have received limited academic study. An understanding and exploration of these dream ballets in the context of meaning created through dance and choreography is largely missing. There has been some critical debate about the nature of dream ballets within integrated film musicals but with limited understanding of dance as an abstract art form and its intention to communicate emotions. Mostly the existing scholarship offers psychoanalytic interpretation adapting ideas from Freud's dream theory. Focusing on dream ballets, this thesis will explore through primary research in American film archives and textual analysis, the creation of a new style of 'American' choreography and musical performance as core syntax within the integrated narrative musical. This research will examine how this new style and creative process impacted on the representation of male and female genders in dance, how it determined the internal dream protagonist's perspective, and how the complex layering of codes was employed to avoid the Production Code Administration regulations. The first dream ballet identified within the corpus is a ballet featured in the Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935) choreographed by Albertina Rasch. The final dream ballet identified within the corpus is 'The Small House of Uncle Thomas' ballet choreographed by Jerome Robbins for The King and I (1956). The corpus includes over twenty musical films that include dream ballets.

For the last decade, urban professional single women in China aged thirty-plus have been labelled sheng nü (translated as 'leftover' women in English), a term popularised by the media. This research analyses three recent Chinese films portraying 'leftover' women, together with online reviews of the films. I address how 'leftover' women are constructed in Chinese media, how these representations are read by the audience and how this links with wider changes in Chinese urban society. The latter include changes in gender relations, love, marriage, intimacy and family relations, as well as wider trends concerning choice, modernity, individualisation and consumerism. Using genre analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA) along with multimodal techniques, my thesis addresses the representations and readings of 'leftover women' through the following key themes: self-identity, choices in love, and intergenerational and social ties with families and friends. I argue that 'leftover' women are represented as having complex, mixed emotions; while proud of being independent professional women they also express anxieties about ageing and desires for a stable relationship. 'Leftover' women's search for love in the films is associated with several cultural components, such as concern with the remote consequences of one's decisions, cultural norms and consultation with family and friends. While marriage focused on men dang hu dui1 remains an acceptable and popular principle of a 'good match', the films also address individuals' personalities and socioeconomic status as important dimensions. Finally, tensions between life choices as an individual and life choices shaped by tradition emerge from the representations and their audience readings, with parental intervention simultaneously normalised and criticised, and friends' involvement emerging as a new form. Overall, I argue that the contemporary preoccupation with 'leftover' women reflects anxieties about the changing status of Chinese women and their quest for more agency and autonomy, as they navigate the tensions between choice and tradition.

This dissertation examines the cultural results of Italian decolonization in the process of national reconstruction which followed WWII (1945-60). It dialogues with recent scholarship investigating colonial legacies in modern Italy, although it presents some innovative insights concerning both the methodology adopted to dissect the formation of those legacies and the corpus of representations that will be considered. As far as the first element is concerned, this thesis will define a critical approach enabling the exploration of the ways in which film contents offered a renewed sense of national belonging - or Italianità. Not only does this work shed new light on the transition from Fascism to the Republic according to critical and postcolonial perspectives (chapter 1), but it will offer a systematic examination of a film corpus that has almost been neglected by previous scholarship, that is newsreels and documentaries about the Italian former colonies produced between the 1945 and the 1960. The political interferences which characterised the production of that footage will be dissected thanks to the study of original archival findings combined with the review of scholarship on the topic (chapter 2). The analytical chapters will tackle the extent to which the memory of the colonial past was either repressed or selectively recollected in order to redefine the discursive geography of national belongings (chapter 3) and the intrinsic benevolence of Italians working abroad (chapter 4). The following chapters will deal more specifically with the formation of an aphasic and a-grammatic form of postcolonial memory (chapter 5), and with the resilient ways through which uncomfortable recollections of that past were re-articulated in a new and positive presence of Italy in Africa (chapter 6). In so doing, this work suggests that the ambiguous connection between de-Fascistization and decolonization engendered unproblematized narratives and memories about the colonial period that reverberate in contemporary Italian society.

This thesis maps how the 1970s has been constructed in twenty-first century British culture. It analyses representations of the decade in British film and television made between the years 2002 and 2014. The thesis suggests that the repeated audio-visual return to the 1970s in contemporary Britain entails a recognition of the decade as a transitional period that saw the arrival of the changes that define our world today. It demonstrates how the manner in which the 1970s is remembered and understood is of considerable significance to how we understand the present. It also argues that the complexities and nuances of these representations have been largely unexplored. The thesis has four chapters. Chapter One situates the detailed textual analysis that follows within the broader concerns of the thesis and existing scholarly literature. This first chapter develops the contours of the thesis' argument and outlines the originality of the project. It argues that the nuance and complexity of the relationship between past and present in audio-visual histories is underexplored and subsumed in dichotomies that argue for their 'progressive' or 'reactionary' potential. This argument is developed through the proposition that insufficient attention has been paid to the formal, stylistic and narrational strategies used to construct the past on screen. The chapter proposes an approach which brings questions of tone, style, and point of view to the forefront of analysis. Chapter Two groups generic engagements with the 1970s, the spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011), the conspiracy thriller Red Riding (Channel 4, 2009), and the retro police procedural Life on Mars (BBC, 2006-8). The chapter considers how these texts interweave the historic with the generic. It also affirms the importance of tone in considering how the past is shaped in the present, as the case studies are viewed in conjunction with writing on melancholia and mourning. Chapter Three challenges the usual definitions of British cinema by including texts that are set in Northern Ireland. It explores difficult and traumatic associations of the 1970s in representations of the 'Troubles' on screen in Five Minutes of Heaven (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009), Shadow Dancer (James Marsh, 2012) and '71 (Yann Demange, 2014). Chapter Four considers questions of identity and consumerism by looking at two films that engage with music and youth culture in locations far from the metropolitan core, Anita & Me (Metin Hüseyin, 2002) and Good Vibrations (Lisa Barros D'Sa, Glenn Leyburn, 2012). Both films are marked as autobiographical or semi-autobiographical in nature and the chapter focuses on point of view and questions of retro and nostalgia. It explores how the texts facilitate a different relationship between past, present and future than previous case studies. The thesis thus brings together a range of films and television programmes set in the 1970s, and through detailed textual analysis pays attention to questions of tone and the articulation of temporality in history. It demonstrates that the 1970s are being made and remade with considerable sophistication and nuance in twenty-first century texts. Attention to the tone and point of view of these texts gives insight into the struggles over the history of the present.

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.

This thesis critically analyses twenty-first century televised performance magic, asking what aspects of its theatrical past practitioners have retained, and how they have used televisual elements in their work. It contributes to the field of theatre and performance by attending to the multiplicity of media within this underexplored genre of performance, analysing case study episodes starring magicians who have found success in Britain, namely David Blaine, Dynamo (Steven Frayne), and Derren Brown. This thesis builds on the work of scholars within theatre and performance and a range of cognate disciplines who have demonstrated the significance of technologically mediated elements in performance magic. It ultimately argues televised magic has generated its own discourses of reality and fiction, as remediated texts that are ambiguous about their fictional and real elements, and that further entwine notions of enchantment within everyday life. Blaine's 'street magic' shows and endurance stunts attempt to establish the reality of their spectacle, addressing both on-screen spectators and a community of viewers who are separated from the effects temporally and spatially, while remaining attached to notions of 'live' performance. The series Magician Impossible, starring Dynamo and influenced by Blaine's work, draws on discourses of reality and fiction from a variety of popular media genres to test the boundaries between these two categories. Brown's work more consciously refers to historical traditions of performance magic, producing hybrid texts that establish links to the past within the mediatized context of the present. The case studies considered in this thesis possess the potential for a range of engagements that include both belief and scepticism, adapting performance magic to astonish audiences in the twenty-first century.

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.

In the debate surrounding the possible displacement of Italian Fascism and an accompanying denial of memories of colonisation, some scholars assume that Italian filmmakers concentrated with few (predominantly auterurist) exceptions on the former colonised (countries) only after ca. 1980, a narrative which keeps alive two myths: that of a 'backwards Italy', and that of the italiani brava gente. Analyses of four commedie all'italiana suggest otherwise: In this study, I centralise several portrayals of characters that I identify as Black Others, in which we could recognise an embodiment of the former colonised. Physically and/or behaviourally contrasted to characters that are presented as italiani medi, these characters are marked as different from 'Italians' - illustrating italiani medi's attempt to present themselves as white. I use this binary as a heuristic tool in order to unravel underlying patterns of binary oppositions that reconfirm prejudices and stereotypes stemming from the colonial period and its accompanying narratives, present in the Italian society at the time of the making of the films, many of which echoing in our current society. The connection between the four films (1952- 1968/73) makes way for a continuous dialogue surrounding constructions of italianità and several forms of o/Otherness, as portrayed through the comedic approach of the grotesque. The object of our ridicule turns out to be not a presumed Black Other in the minstrel tradition, but the character of the italiano medio, who continuously demonstrates a desperate need to construct out a physical Other from the imagined community of Italy; through the latter's eyes, italiani medi can exist. As such, they are denaturalised as the norm. In every next film, the character identifiable as the Black Other gains in agency, in the end, framing, and dominating, the narrative of the italiano medio.

This thesis investigates the cultural economy of film distribution set against the backdrop of Philippine independent cinema. Considered as the business centre of filmmaking, film distribution is typically studied from an economic perspective and traditionally falls outside the remit of film studies. However, the role that economics play in filmmaking cannot be regarded as an exclusive object or subject in the field of business and economics and not of the arts, since film is both a cultural good and economic commodity. As such, this thesis offers a more balanced viewpoint by taking on a humanities perspective in analysing and understanding the complex interplay of culture and economics as applied to Philippine cinema. The project also provides an Asian context to a generally western-dominated approach to the study of film distribution and thereby contributes to the (now) growing literature on distribution studies situated in the larger area of film studies. This thesis employs in-depth interview and case study analysis in addressing the central issue of how the independent sector struggles to access the various film distribution platforms in an attempt to sustain itself. The first chapter positions my research in the field, surveys existing scholarship on independent cinema and film distribution, and sets up the theoretical grounding of this thesis on the cultural economy framework. The second chapter fleshes out the notion of independence in filmmaking and contextualises the study by outlining the historical development of Philippine independent cinema. The third chapter analyses the interaction between mainstream and independent cinema and the current shifting movements happening between the two sectors. The next four chapters examine the film distribution and exhibition practices in the Philippines and how these affect the relationship of the mainstream and independent sectors and address the sustainability issue of the independents. Chapter Four lays out the conceptual framework of film distribution and exhibition as intermediary spaces and maps out a historical landscape of film distribution and exhibition in the Philippines. This is followed by an overview of the film distribution economy spectrum, namely, formal, semi-formal, and informal. Chapter Five explores the formality of the traditional platforms of theatrical and non-theatrical distribution method, while Chapter Six discusses the formality of the emerging distribution and exhibition platforms that utilise new media technologies. Both chapters present the challenges that independent filmmakers face in passing through the layers of gatekeepers in order to bring the film to its audience. Chapter Seven sets out a clearer definition of the semi-formal distribution economy and cites different self-distribution methods to illustrate and support my claim. This chapter also looks into the informal distribution method of piracy and its constructive effects on independent filmmaking. It also explains how technology is changing the role of the audience from being a passive consumer to an active producer to a dynamic distributor. Lastly, Chapter Eight probes into the identity of the Philippine film industry and the role of the state, their implications on cultural or film policy development, and how these elements impact the overall state of Philippine cinema.

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.

Since the first General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947, France has insisted that cultural products are different from other traded goods and should be exempted from ongoing liberalisation of international trade – a principle known as the ‘cultural exception’. This exclusion allows France to implement policies in favour of its cultural industries, particularly a highly complex system of quotas and subsidies for the film industry which it maintains is essential to counter US market dominance and maintain cultural diversity. Over the past decade, the launch of video-on-demand services has revolutionised how films are delivered and consumed. Policy-makers have attempted to keep pace with these developments, expanding the scope of French support schemes accordingly. Adopting a mixed methods approach, this thesis analyses cultural diversity in the French film industry in detail, incorporating for the first time both the cinema and video-on-demand sectors and combining qualitative and quantitative data to understand the impact of French policies on diversity. Quantitative analysis reveals strong evidence of diversity in both sectors but that, while digital channels offer greater variety of choice, cinema is more balanced between films of different geographic origins. Employing a consistent approach to policy development in both channels, policy-makers have failed to take into account these and other differences, or to target measures at the emerging threats to diversity in the digital environment – potentially undermining the French defence of the cultural exception on diversity grounds. There is a surprisingly superficial use of the term cultural diversity in trade circles, leading to the conclusion that a more sophisticated approach is needed. Refining French policy in line with empirical data and actively using that evidence to demonstrate policy success will be a necessary part of this more sophisticated approach if France is to successfully defend the cultural exception in future trade negotiations.

This thesis explores how selected contemporary U.S. and Chilean films and television shows depict political torture, in relation to visual documentation of factual cases. The films explore the uneasy complicity in seeing or watching torture, which concerns both the spectacle of cinema, the nature of torture as well as the position of the audience or witness. Casting a wider net on the definition of torture, I suggest that these media products can help broaden our comprehension of the event torture, in its collective and emotional dimension, its long-term social effects as well as its links to other cultural concepts. Moving beyond dominant and limiting frameworks based on representation and identification, this thesis integrates affect, film and media theory with textual analysis. Some of these films and television shows offer a public and emotional space to explore subject positions crucial to acknowledge a sense of social pain, often missing in official accounts. These films’ heterogeneous aesthetic responses speak to a similar set of epistemological and ontological queries, which are fundamentally related to the truth claims of images. In its inherent need for an ethical stand and trust in documented truth, torture offers a research axis to discuss current anxieties regarding the reliability of visual evidence, coinciding with a historical moment that interrogates (moving) images’ powers and reliability to document the real. Ethical questions regarding documentation are reconfigured in epistemological terms. If vision is problematic as means of verification, how do the films pursue authenticity, and what kind of truth do they offer? Responding to current interventions regarding the nature of the cinematic medium, the films propose a new poetics of the real that does not rely primarily on visual evidence. I argue that in a situation of contested, censored or plainly missing documentation, these films produce a “cine-poetic archive,” images that highlight both their constructedness and their roots in the historical real. In this way, the films help understand something fundamental about how we relate to our current reality through our images.

This thesis examines the representation of home movies in UK and US feature fiction films released between 1939-2013. For the purposes of the thesis home movies are defined as a subset of amateur (i.e. non-professional) film concerned with the representation of home and family and intended for domestic consumption. Home movies are further distinguished from home video and domestic productions recorded digitally referring specifically to films shot on, or connoting, small-gauge film. Drawing on James Moran’s notion of the ‘imaginary medium’ (There’s No Place Like Home Video, 2002) and the scholarship on the Imaginary in media, this thesis advances the concept of the ‘home movie imagination’ to describe the way in which cinema constructs home movies in the process of representation. Using textual analysis, this thesis identifies a series of shifts in cinematic depictions of home movies. Accordingly, each case study chapter focuses on a selection of examples which best exemplify these transitions and continuing trends. Placing cinematic home movies in the context of the histories of amateur film and small-gauge technology, this thesis demonstrates that home movies in fiction films should not be perceived as a reflection on developments of the technology, but studied specifically as fictional stylisations. The first chapter explores the emergence of home movies as a motif in feature fiction films, interrogating the technology’s pervasive association with wealth and spectacle in films released between 1939-1949. The second elaborates on these concerns, observing an incongruity between cinema’s continued affiliation of home movies with affluence and the developments in the social history of amateur filmmaking following the Second World War. Chapter Three looks at films released between 1964-1980, investigating the dual role of home movies deployed as sentimental reminders of lost familial cohesion and a tool to challenge the family ideal. Chapter Four focuses on the adaptations of Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon (1981) — Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986), Red Dragon (Brett Ratner, 2002) — charting the impact which the advent of home video had on the representation of cinematic home movies. Home movie obsolescence is explored further in Chapter Five which interrogates the transition of home movies from an aim to memory (prop) to texture of memory (aesthetic). The final chapter focuses on the depiction of home movies in Super 8 (2011) and Frankenweenie (2012), investigating the nostalgia which they express towards the materiality of small-gauge technology. This thesis argues that home movies in feature fiction film constitute a unique, and widely overlooked, object of study. As films-within-films they frequently function as a self-reflexive device, a tool for filmmakers to reflect on their art. However, they are also specifically a domestic technology, focusing an inquiry into the role which media and mediation play in the cinematic construction of family narratives. Exploring the ways in which cinema constructs home movies in the process of representation the home movie imagination offers an innovative approach for studying the depiction of domestic moving image technologies, one which recognises their character as stylisations and responds to their historical variability.

This thesis develops a theoretically-informed approach with which to analyse the aesthetics of the adaptation of superhero comic books into blockbuster films. Pervasive modes of thinking present superhero blockbusters as artistically degraded products that are not worthy of aesthetic analysis. I demonstrate that exploring the ways in which superhero blockbusters adapt comic book style and form reveals aesthetic sophistication and multiplicities of meaning. Engaging with comic book and film history also enables me to identify ways in which superhero blockbusters have contributed to the development of Hollywood’s blockbuster filmmaking paradigm. My approach combines models and concepts from studies of adaptation that employ poststructuralist theory. This theoretical framework explains transformations that content may undergo as it is adapted between the different forms available to comics and film, and enables examination of dialogues occurring in the vast networks of intertexts in which superhero blockbusters are situated. After my review of literature establishes the thesis’ theoretical underpinnings, my chapters undertake close textual analysis of three distinct case studies. The selection of case studies allows me to continue to develop my approach by examining different superhero archetypes, alongside significant contexts, trends and technologies that impact Hollywood blockbusters. Chapter one looks at the first superhero blockbuster, Superman: The Movie (1978). I begin by outlining, and exploring relations between, the range of Superman texts released prior to the film. Doing so reveals the qualities of the intertextual networks that comprise a superhero franchise. I then analyse the strategies that Superman: The Movie deploys to adapt and enter the network of Superman texts, before situating the film in the context of the emerging blockbuster paradigm in 1970s Hollywood. Chapters two and three analyse films produced in the twenty-first century, as superhero blockbusters gained a central position in Hollywood production. Chapter two evaluates the aesthetics of the Spider-Man trilogy (2002, 2004 and 2007) in relation to two contexts that are often considered to have facilitated the superhero blockbuster’s twenty-first century success: the increasing use and sophistication of digital filmmaking technologies in Hollywood, and the contemporary sociopolitical climate. Looking at the representation of bodies and space elucidates the ways in which the films incorporate digital filmmaking technologies into their adaptive practices and offer a sociopolitical commentary. Chapter three examines the strategies that films produced by Marvel Studios, with particular focus on team film The Avengers (2012), deploy to adapt the model of seriality that superhero comic books use to interconnect multiple series in a shared diegesis. The analysis focuses on ways in which The Avengers uses bodies and space to compress the expansive diegetic universe into a single film, and interrogates how these strategies shape the film’s sociopolitical meanings. My case studies demonstrate that the approach developed in this thesis illuminates the complex and equivocal meanings that the adaptive practices of superhero blockbusters generate.

The thesis analyses representations of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ and dominant postapartheid themes in South African films between 1987 and 2014. The term South African films or cinema is used to encompass films that are co-produced between South Africa and other nations, as well as films that may find their South African articulation only in content and narrative composition. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ scholarship, the thesis sets out to explore whether a new structure of feeling can be identified in post-apartheid films. The thesis also engages trauma in the post-apartheid films about the ‘Rainbow Nation’. In being able to identify how new South African films show and grapple with post-apartheid identities as ‘acting out’, ‘working through’ and ‘making sense’ of the past, the thesis concludes that post-apartheid films are in some ways critical of the past and in other ways, hopeful for the future. However, the more the country settles into its new national identities, the more variations are present in filmic representations and the more possibilities exist for seeing the complexities of post-apartheid cinema. The thesis is divided into three sections and follows a thematic approach as well as a form of periodisation that has not been used in previous scholarship about South African cinema. Section One considers the moment before the end of apartheid in the films A Dry White Season (Euzhan Palcy, 1989), Cry Freedom (Richard Attenborough, 1987) and Mapantsula (Oliver Schmitz, 1988). Section Two is constituted of two chapters which focus on the representations of the end of apartheid, trauma, guilt and ‘acting out’ seen in the films Red Dust (Tom Hooper, 2004), In My Country (John Boorman, 2004), Forgiveness (Ian Gabriel, 2004), Zulu Love Letter (Ramadan Suleman, 2004), Disgrace (Steve Jacobs, 2008) and Skoonheid (Oliver Hermanus, 2011). Section Three explores the possibility of a new structure of feeling through analysis of the representations of youth identities and coming to terms with the past in Hijack Stories (Oliver Schmitz, 2001), Tsotsi (Gavin Hood, 2005) and Disgrace (Steve Jacobs, 2008). In the final chapter, the films Disgrace (Steve Jacobs, 2008), Fanie Fourie’s Lobola (Henk Pretorius, 2013) and Elelwani (Ntshavheni wa Luruli, 2012) are analysed to show how traditions and rituals are fashioned as important, unexpected vehicles, through which to navigate emergent post-apartheid South Africa and its identities.

This thesis investigates the children’s horror film in Hollywood cinema. Children are typically thought of as being innocent and vulnerable, and horror – usually considered a genre for adult viewers – is one area of the media from which children are often thought of as needing protection. However, evidence shows that children’s viewership and enjoyment of horror films dates to least as early as the 1930s, while violent imagery has been used as a pedagogical tool in fairy tales, cautionary tales and other children’s stories for centuries. The number of horror films made specifically for and about children in US cinema has been steadily increasing since the 1980s, with recent releases including Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012) and Frankenweenie (2012). Despite this, scholarship dedicated exclusively to this rich and intriguing area is scarce. One intention of the research, explored predominantly in Chapter One, is to chart the development of this subgenre in Hollywood, explore how it differs aesthetically, formally, narratively and thematically from ‘adult’ horror, and how it mediates its content in order to be recognisably ‘horrific’ while remaining ‘child-friendly’. Following the review of scholarly literature in Chapter Two, the thesis is then divided into three case study chapters which focus on how horror films which are both addressed to a child audience and about child characters utilise iconography and conventions of the horror genre to represent specific fears and desires associated with children and childhood. Chapter Three examines texts which feature ‘monstrous’ children. These child characters’ ‘monstrosities’ are presented in a way that can be read as pleasurable and potentially cathartic for a child audience. As such, these representations largely subvert the common depiction of children as demonic antagonists in adult horror films. The chapter is also framed by societal fears that children may become ‘monstrous’ threats should they be exposed to horror in order to argue that these films offer critiques upon the relationship between children and the horror genre. Chapter Four explores texts from the late-1980s to early-1990s in which children must protect themselves and their communities from evil vampires, witches, and other monsters. These predatory ‘risky strangers’ are read as reflecting contemporaneous concerns about child abuse which were particularly prevalent during this period in the US. As such, the chapter queries whether these texts address adults’ fears about or for children more than actual children’s fears. Chapter Five examines films set in the home, which is presented as an uncanny and threatening space in which to address childhood fears and anxieties concerning maturation, independence, identity formation and familial relationships. It is argued that by facing their fears, the child protagonists of these films undergo beneficial experiences and emerge better prepared to face life ahead. This thesis argues that children’s horror films, by providing safe and pleasurable spaces in which to experience fear, can be read as offering positive and beneficial experiences for child viewers. Far from being ‘unsuitable’ for children, the imagery and conventions of the horror genre are in fact highly suited to addressing the fears and experiences of childhood. Simultaneously, however, this thesis questions the problematic ideological aspects of children’s horror films which may be ‘bad’ for children: that is, in showing children how to overcome their fears, what, or who, do these films imply children should be afraid of?

This thesis examines representations of the courtroom trial in Hollywood cinema produced between 1934 and 1966. The primary method is close textual analysis, which has been neglected in previous work on trial sequences in cinema. However, I argue that a rigorous engagement with both the conventions of the courtroom trial form and individual films’ use of these conventions requires close attention to the text. The introductory chapter identifies the dominant conventions, meanings and ideology underpinning Hollywood representations of the courtroom trial by looking at the treatment of space, character, procedure and drama in a number of films produced between 1957 and 1962 that serve as a representative sample of the conventions of trial representation in Hollywood cinema. I conclude that the narrative scenario of the courtroom trial tends to dictate a set of formal strategies that respect and affirm the American adversarial trial system. However, I also use this chapter to begin mapping out the ways in which individual films are able to nuance their representation of the courtroom trial despite its multitude of fixed components. My subsequent chapters examine how different genres and modes inflect the dominant representations of the courtroom trial as I look in detail at trial sequences in, respectively, the social problem film, the woman’s melodrama and film noir. This method involves firstly engaging with existing criticism on each genre and considering how previous definitions and identified conventions, meanings and representational strategies might be said to affect that particular genre’s representations of the courtroom trial. My second chapter examines representations of the courtroom trial in the social problem film, which I argue cleaves relatively closely to the representational model outlined in my introductory chapter. However, through close readings of two case studies, Dust Be My Destiny and Pinky, I also demonstrate the differences in how both films handle the didacticism and resolution that the trial form offers the social problem film, and identify competing voices in the text that complicate what could be viewed as a solely affirmative depiction of the court system. My third chapter examines representations of the courtroom trial in woman’s melodrama, employing as primary case studies Peyton Place and Madame X. My analyses of these films demonstrate how the female-centred melodrama can, to different degrees, challenge the patriarchal structures of the court by emphasising the female protagonist’s viewpoint. My final chapter looks at courtroom trial representations in film noir. I provide close readings of trial sequences in Stranger on the Third Floor and The Lady from Shanghai. Here I argue that noir’s use of the courtroom trial exemplifies the genre’s oft-situated difference from conventional forms in Hollywood cinema of the period. Noir trials consistently challenge notions of the adversarial trial system as the correct one for seeking justice.

The idea of the auteur as the sole creator of a film has, from its inception, been of central importance to Film Studies. In this regard, we will resituate these debates in the context of a historically unique case study; that of the 'Lubitsch touch.' Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) bears the distinction of having been a director central to two national cinemas – early German film and classical Hollywood. Yet as an auteur, Lubitsch is a paradox. Arguably, his 'signature' was written over his films with such distinction that they soon became associated with the so-called 'Lubitsch touch.' However, theoretical debates about authorship have never focused on Lubitsch. What is more, while the 'Lubitsch touch' has acquired a central position in the writing on Lubitsch, it has never been questioned, let alone investigated, in terms of how, as a concept, it came about or in what ways it has informed our understanding of this key director. Here, we will therefore consider the author, rather than as an actual person, as a cultural and period specific construction in order to place the ‘Lubitsch touch’ at the centre of our research study. It is necessary to approach the term through para-textual rather than textual analysis. Thus, this project relies upon a large variety of material comprised of historical newspaper reviews, portraits and interviews, posters, press books and trailers. Focusing on the period 1923 – 1947, we will examine how the 'touch' was first introduced and defined, and explore the arguments that have emerged on the basis of critical and commercial negotiation. In taking a historiographical approach, we will place Lubitsch’s films in the context of multiple discourses, such as those of national cinema(s), genre, continental sophistication and self-censorship, collaboration and stardom and the workings of the studio system. The 'Lubitsch touch,' precisely because it is contested territory, offers a site of negotiation for various key discourses and then as now foregrounds what is implicit in the construction of every author. The example of Lubitsch will therefore enable us to examine the extent to which criticism and historiography have contributed to our idea of a text as the work of a single creator, but the implications of this thesis on Lubitsch and his 'touch' will reach out not only beyond the Golden Age of Hollywood, but also beyond the field of Film Studies.

This thesis proposes a new approach to film authorship that is compatible with the postmodern theory of Linda Hutcheon. By taking up, building on, and combining the work of Peter Wollen, Michel Foucault, and Will Brooker I develop a theory of film authorship that moves away from conceptualisations of the author in terms of self-expression and instead conceives of the author as a text. Additionally, I identify four different genres of authorfunction: The Romantic, modernist, feminist, and commercial genres of author-function. These four genres of author-function provide a framework and critical vocabulary for the accurate description of the ways in which author-texts are constructed. The characteristics of these four genres of author-function are derived from the major trends in theories of film authorship identified in the review of literature. In addition to these genres of author-function, I also develop my own postmodern genre of author-function. The characteristics of this postmodern genre of author-function are derived from the analysis of existing literature on two key directors of postmodern film, David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. In particular, the postmodern genre of author-function adapts and expands upon Peter Brooker’s and Will Brooker’s affirmative reading of the role played by generic reworking in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). The characteristics of the postmodern genre of author-function are further refined through its application as a critical framework in two case studies focusing on Tony Scott and Sally Potter. Scott and Potter serve as contrasting case studies. In addition to operating in the very different contexts of Hollywood action cinema and art cinema respectively, Scott and Potter occupy very different positions in regards to authorship. The Scott author-text is largely constructed in terms of failed authorship. In contrast, the Potter author-text is apparently more secure in its authorial status. There are, however, a number of overlaps between the Scott and Potter case studies. Firstly, films across both the Scott and Potter oeuvres exhibit stylistic features associated with postmodern film. Despite this, Scott and Potter are not included within the central canon of postmodern cinema, and occupy a more marginal position. The Scott and Potter oeuvres are also characterised as fragmented and fractured rather than in terms of unity. This further limits the possibility of constructing Scott as an auteur and suggests that the Potter author-text is more precarious than at first appears. The thesis opens with a review of literature tracing the developments of theories of film authorship. The first chapter begins by examining the place of authorship in postmodernism as conceptualised by two key theorists of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon. This is followed by the development of the new approach to authorship outlined above, and its demonstration through the meta-critical analysis of existing literature on Lynch and Tarantino. This analysis also facilitates the development of the postmodern genre of author-function and provides the initial characteristics of that genre. The postmodern genre of author-function is further refined and tested through the case studies. Each of these case studies follows a similar format, beginning by situating Scott and Potter in their respective contexts. The second stage of the case studies involves determining the genres of author-function in play in the construction of the Scott and Potter author-texts. The final stage of the case study focuses on the analysis of three films by each director from the perspective of the postmodern genre of author-function in order to determine what readings are yielded by this approach, and how they compare to existing approaches. The development of a postmodern genre of author-function facilitates a revaluation of postmodern cinema. The Scott case study demonstrates one aspect of this reappraisal, the revaluation of texts previously classified as meaningless spectacle in terms of a re-inventive impulse and a critical reworking of genre conventions. The Potter case study demonstrates both the political and critical potential of such a de-constructive engagement with genre, while also showcasing the ways in which adopting the postmodern genre of author-function as a critical perspective allows for texts to be reorganised around a new centre, and for new patterns of meaning and significance to be traced across the oeuvre.

This thesis explores the films of post-war Japanese director Suzuki Seijun (1923-), who has yet to be the subject of an extended study in the English language. The thesis aims to provide a close textual analysis of several of Suzuki’s films, with an emphasis on his crime and gangster films of the 1960s. At the same time, it aims to discuss and determine the significance of these films, and the consistent stylistic features that emerge from them, in multiple historical, ideological, and theoretical contexts. For example, while the thesis emphasises the importance of Suzuki’s films to formal and ideological developments in Japanese cinema from 1950s to the present day, it also claims significance to these films in reference to major issues in contemporary film theory, such as modernity, genre, masculinity, identification, reflexivity, violence, spectatorship, and masochism. The thesis begins by claiming that a ‘differential aesthetic’ is evident in Suzuki’s films, defined by a variety of textual features such as editing discontinuities, non-diegetic colours, graphics, and theatrical effects, repetitive structures of narration, and inter-textual references. Such features were highly unconventional, and in many cases deemed unacceptable, in the context of Japanese studio genre production in the 1960s. The rest of the thesis proposes to fully explore this ‘Suzuki difference’ in a variety of historical and theoretical contexts. I have chosen the concept of negativity and the ‘negative aesthetic’ to unify the thesis as a whole, arguing that the Suzuki aesthetic is not merely differential, but attempts a negation of formal and ideological conventions of studio filmmaking for the purpose of a wide-ranging, satirical critique of post-war Japanese culture. In several respects, the negative aesthetic links Suzuki to global tendencies in the transformation of cinematic form and narration in the 1960s, and his films can contribute to an understanding of these transitions.

This thesis investigates various forms of historical reassessment in contemporary American cinema (2005-2013), with a particular emphasis on the role that digital technologies play in re-framing, re-negotiating, and re-vivifying historical figures and events. The focus of this work concerns questions relating to cinema’s relationship with history, and how this has been achieved through changing narratives and film aesthetics. It uses critical analysis to propose that a new range of practices and tools have been utilised to address and challenge conventions of specific historical genres, such as the historical epic, the gangster film, and the biopic. The complex and ambiguous notions of historical narrative and experience, together with continued discourses concerning representation, verisimilitude and accountability, make recent historical cinema particularly suitable for demonstrating this. The Review of Literature addresses three major areas through which this thesis has been conceived and conducted: historiography, historical cinema, and film technologies. It considers a broad range of literature in order to acknowledge some of the wider contexts that will be employed in the discussion of the historical film, and establishes the more specific conditions under which my analysis takes place. The main section of the thesis is divided into three chapters, each of which examining a particular sub-genre of the historical film. Chapter One introduces some of the key issues surrounding historical cinema, discussing the conventions of the historical epic in order to frame our understanding of issues of spectacularity and subjectivity in the genre. I use The New World and Che as case studies to examine the differing practical, aesthetic and narrative approaches to the historical epic, considering the implication of technology in terms of style, approach and implication. Chapter Two deals with the gangster film, using Public Enemies to consider issues of immediacy and immersion within the genre. I also compare modern iterations of the gangster film with its classical, revisionist and retro antecedents, making extensive comparisons with Bonnie and Clyde. Similarly, in my study of the biographical film in Chapter Three, I use Citizen Kane as a contrast to the modern form of the “unconventional” biopic embodied by The Social Network. This genre is considered in light of its aesthetic approaches, generic deviations and developments, the public-private dynamic, and the notion of the American Dream. The thesis concludes with an overview of the aesthetic and narrative approaches studied in this work, and draws attention to the contemporary shift in filmmaking practices and technologies. Given the isolated period of study, I propose ways in which the study could be extended in generic, transmedial and methodological terms, as well as acknowledging the importance of the historical film at the levels of expression, representation, and discourse.

Alfred Döblin’s famous 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz has often been discussed in terms of the appropriation of film poetics by the medium of literature and is said to abound with examples of literary montage. In most post-war discussions of literary montage in Berlin Alexanderplatz, however, the device is regularly understood as an umbrella term for anything of stylistic interest. Deploying 1920s and 1930s literary and film criticism I demonstrate that this regularly leads to anachronisms and terminological over-inflation. I thus offer a historically informed definition of literary montage in precise narratological, stylistic and experiential categories. Montage rests on the identification of intradiegetically unmotivated ready-mades and the perceived experiential similarities between the novel, Soviet montage films, and Dadaist photomontage. The lack of motivation affords the experience of disruption which, I demonstrate, has within the Benjaminian “modernity thesis” too often been extrapolated to characterize all film editing. My analysis shows that contemporary critics regularly discriminated between different types of editing on at least three experiential axes – tempo and dynamism, confusion, and disruption. My proposed definition of literary montage thus also allows me to analyse the novel in terms of the key narratological novelties that literary montage introduces: the global proliferation of heterodiegetic zero-level narrators accompanied with the local elimination of zerolevel narrators altogether. In other words, Döblin accomplishes in literary fiction what holds for film fiction in general – the absence of a narrator held to be fictionally in control of the whole of the text. Conversely, through the use of intertitles and the particular type of voice-over interjections, Fassbinder’s adaptation endeavours to emulate the reciprocal commonplace of literary fiction – the narrator’s continuous presence. Paired with Fassbinder’s film, Jutzi’s adaptation demonstrates how visual and sound film montage both differ from literary montage. Whereas literary montage hinges on disruptive stylistic shifts, film montage rests on disruptive spatio-temporal dislocation.

This thesis analyses Chilean documentary films and videos of the post-dictatorial era from the restoration of democracy in 1990 until 2011, focusing on the audiovisual treatment of contested memories of the dictatorship and its legacies. The main argument is that documentary performs a trajectory of a revelation of bodies, oscillating between – at times intersecting with – the bodies of 'direct victims' and the film's body itself. Such an itinerary is deeply intertwined with Chile's own democratic transition. The study aims to transcend Chilean documentary's self-evident testimonial value and restrictive readings of the films as works about trauma, as these eclectic artistic reactions to the military coup present a broad range of affective responses. It establishes connections and disjunctions between different generations of documentarians and heightens the visibility of a number of under-researched productions. To unpack these heterogeneous documentary responses and their aesthetic features, close textual analysis of selected sequences from an extensive corpus is performed. This thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach informed by the 'haptic turn' in film studies, trauma and memory studies, cultural studies, history and gender. After examining the strategies deployed to reveal the past and its atrocious images, the study reassesses the cinematic homecomings of exilic directors as key precedents of the current rise of first person documentary. The ensuing evaluation of younger directors' productions indicates that whereas childhood memories are mobilised to explore the (im)possibilities of recalling a past only tangentially experienced, a nostalgic approach to the 1980s seeks to claim an active role in the redemocratisation process. Two recent cases featuring rather disturbing voices (of a former agent of repression and of Pinochet’s supporters) shed further light on the transformations experienced both by non-fiction and Chile itself. This thesis thus illustrates a documentary shift from articulating a 'cinema of the affected' to a 'cinema of affect'.

This thesis investigates the way in which cultural elements are rendered in subtitling by analyzing the translation of culture-specific references, such as proper names, with the case studies from three American and Thai films: Annie Hall (1977), Juno (2007), and The Iron Ladies (2000). The structure of this research is based on Toury (1995)’s Descriptive Translation Studies framework. The methodology consists of 1) situating the preliminary norms of Audiovisual Translation in Thailand, which includes the overview of foreign film import and screen translation practice; 2) proceeding to analyse the cultural transfer strategies used in the subtitles in relations to their polysemiotic co-texts and contexts and present descriptive examples; and 3) from the analysis results, comparing the ways American and Thai culture is transferred/transformed to the target audience and explaining the significance. This research aims to take interdisciplinary approach into subtitling, in hope that it will bring more insights about Audiovisual Translation not only as a language transfer, but also as a complex socio-cultural activity, surrounded by norms and many influencing factors. Therefore, the study will combine text analysis and interviews with translation practitioners in order to present subtitling in the real world situation.

This thesis examines lesbian costuming and dress in contemporary British and American film and television, offering analyses of sartorial constructions of gay female identities in modern media. It uses close textual analysis and interviews with producers and consumers to examine the production, texts, and reception of selected representations, outlining current social rituals of lesbian style. Interviews were held with Cynthia Summers, Lesley Abernethy, Niamh Morrison, Catherine Adair, Janie Bryant, Tina Scorzafava and Mary Claire Hannan about their designs. Spectators answered questions and responded to photographs and a transcript. The thesis argues that the modern-day designer of lesbian costuming is subject to a contradictory triangle of demands, encompassing the need for costume to support character, resistance to stereotypes, and the recognition and perceived positive politics of identifiable lesbianism. Chapters covering Lip Service and The L Word; Desperate Housewives, Deadwood, and Mad Men, and Gillery’s Little Secret and The Kids Are All Right examine differing results of these pressures. The thesis argues that while anxiety over ‘butch’ stereotypes and heteronormative mainstream demands for assimilation play a part in the overwhelming ‘femininity’ of many examples, an increase in lesbian visibility has also paradoxically instigated a shift away from specificity in media representations through dress because lesbianism is no longer seen as a ‘story’. It suggests that lesbian authorship and using real-life lesbian styles as costume inspiration may offer a way out of the stereotype vs. ‘authentic’ imagery impasse without erasing recognisably lesbian iconography. Finally, the thesis concludes that the production, text and reception of contemporary lesbian images at times comprises a complete circuit of communication, with production decisions and everyday practices of lesbian dress both echoing and informing one another.

This project sets out to scrutinize three decades of feature length fiction films about the British Empire produced by American and British filmmakers beginning in the 1930s through to the end of the 1950s. It compares British and American film in these three decades because such a comparative study has yet to be done and situating such a study within the changing historical contexts is important to chart shifting patterns in filmmaking in these two cultures. Focusing on film narratives that favour sites of modern colonial conflict as setting, namely India, the African colonies and Ireland, the project will chart how American and British filmmakers started from significantly different positions regarding the British imperial project but came to share increasing homogeneity of approach during and after the Second World War. This thesis shows that the relationship of American and British filmmakers to the British Empire changed dramatically after the Second World War and followed political developments. The new special relationship which grew strong after the war had far reaching consequences to the colonial and former colonial nations: the way in which American and British filmmakers portrayed this transition has important implications within film history.

This thesis seeks to interrogate the mutual relationship between representations of organized crime and commitment in Italian film (cinema d’impegno). Since the Second World War, images of bandits, mafiosi and criminal rackets have been central to some of the most important political films released, including In nome della legge (Pietro Germi, 1949), Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi, 1961) and A ciascuno il suo (Elio Petri, 1967). The ‘mafia film’ in Italy thus has a rich heritage of powerfully engaged cinema that remains a far cry from its glamourized international counterpart. Yet this ‘filone’, like cinema d’impegno widely, has suffered from the endemic political apathy that accompanied advance of postmodernity. Drawing on recent scholarship on postmodern impegno, as well as on some of the most important contemporary mafia films that have led critics to announce a ‘return’ to this heritage of engaged cinema, this thesis will interrogate the image of organized crime today and its problematic mimicry of this past. It will employ a historically comparative approach, beginning with an analysis of the important waves of committed cinema in the post-War years. It then turns to the social role of the cinema since the 1990s, when, despite the disintegration of political ‘grand narratives’, the constant renewal of the trauma of organized crime has continued to produce boldly political cinematic denunciations. A secondary aim of the thesis is to bring into question the very notion of impegno. As the discourses that are analysed in the first half show, the Marxist core of many of the political mafia films has led to a narrow understanding of the organized crime imagery. Building on Marxist theorists, from Lukács to Jameson, and extending a better critical appreciation of the spectator, this discussion seeks to bring into focus the importance of genre cinema in the dialectical creation of a political mafia image.

This thesis examines the tourist films, a cycle of Hollywood films made between 1948 and 1964 in which an American travels abroad to Europe. The films share an experience of Europe that is organised around spectacular visual experiences, encounters with European antiquity – architecture, rituals, foods, older forms of transport – and other classic aspects of tourist experience. While many scholarly approaches to postwar Hollywood and its relationship to Europe have focused on industrial and political issues, this thesis takes a different tack, looking closely at the film text and examining its representations of European space. I find that these films give a complicated picture of America’s perceptions of its own rising geopolitical power. The approach is primarily ideological, investigating how the tourist film texts both embody and repress various aspects of postwar ideology including imperialism, race and gender. It accomplishes these ideological readings through the use of strategies adapted from postcolonial scholarship, including those from literary studies and the visual arts as well as film studies. I investigate how the tourist films mobilise representational traditions in colonial art to position America as the new imperial metropole – and Europe, conversely, as a peripheral space. I thus argue that classical Hollywood cinema, like the 19th-century British and French novel, must be read as a primary popular art form generated by a society undergoing a period of expansion and imperial growth. The tourist films take cues from diverse Hollywood genres. Each chapter is accordingly structured around the question of how a particular genre is altered or expanded when the narrative is moved to European space in the postwar context. The travelogue, film noir, women’s melodrama and musical comedy, I find, each depict Europe in a very different light, yet in each case the genre’s logic is extended in ways that place Americans in a position of domination over Europe’s landscape and inhabitants. Integral to this work is the question of spatiovisual gendered subjectivity – the differences in how male and female characters (often associated with particular genres) inhabit, traverse and gaze upon cinematic space. I find that patriarchal and colonial hegemonies, rather than functioning monolithically together, often contradict and jostle in complex ways that point to the contradictory, incoherent nature of hegemonic ideologies.

The thesis explores the construction of gender in the Hollywood Teen Movie, often perceived as 'the odious norm' of Hollywood cinema with little to warrant serious analysis.[1] Although Timothy Shary's work has done much to promote the genre as an area of academic enquiry, there have been few sustained textual analyses of the Teen Movie. Through close textual analysis of seven representative case studies, this thesis stages an encounter between Butler's work on gender and the Teen Movie. Butler’s theorisation of performativity denaturalises and deconstructs the assumption of heteronormativity, enabling a detailed analysis of the genre's 'sexual coming-of-age narrative'.[2] Further, the textual analyses complicate and augment aspects of her theories. Following a review of the literature on the Teen Movie, and an examination of Butler's oeuvre, the thesis is divided into three sections. Firstly, the prom is explored as a typical narrative conclusion to the School Film. Secondly, the following chapter analyses star performance and film acting in the youth delinquency film. The final chapter examines the genre’s construction of the past in the "nostalgic" teen movie. The original contribution to knowledge is twofold: the thesis significantly expands existing work on the Teen Movie, and uses the depth and range of specific examples from the case studies to complicate Butler's work. Textual analysis of each film’s construction of heteronormativity demonstrates that this normative and mainstream genre offers a more complex and critical presentation of heterosexual norms than previously appreciated. The thesis rethinks the norm by demonstrating the complexity of normative culture, which demonstrates a range of examples that call for a reconsideration of Butler's theorisation of gender norms.

This thesis analyses individual 3D texts to explore how stereography inflects the representational strategies synonymous with the various modes of cinema to which it suggests that those films are indebted. It argues that the stereoscopic spectacles of emergence and deep stereospace can be integrated into a narrative. The thesis represents an original contribution to knowledge in demonstrating that stereography can be understood as another element of mise-en-scène contributing to meaning construction in those specific films studied. The literature review considers film theory’s understanding of how the spectator’s ‘participation’ has been inflected by previous technological alterations to the cinematic image’s width and depth and the extent to which 3D has been read as an expressive element. Four case studies, each of a different contemporary stereoscopic film belonging to a different cinematic tradition, then demonstrate how that tradition is stereographically re-inflected towards expressive ends. Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) demonstrates that 3D works alongside the continuity style of the contemporary spectacular blockbuster, renegotiating its relationship to the spectator, encouraging engagement with narrative themes. Jackass 3D’s (Jeff Tremaine, 2010) stereography accentuates the ‘vaudeville aesthetic’ discernible in slapstick comedy and emphasises an exploitation of the frame similar to that found in the cinema of Buster Keaton. It argues that 3D enables an inclusion of the spectator within a carnivalesque narrative of camaraderie. Step Up 3D (Jon M. Chu) demonstrates how 3D reinforces the utopian participation of the audience typical of the Hollywood musical, to which it is indebted. The Hole in 3D (Joe Dante, 2009), re-inflects representational strategies synonymous with horror cinema to articulate a narrative about violence whose meaning construction is dependent upon a stereographically-embodied spectator. This thesis, then, argues for a more sensitive understanding of 3D’s expressive potential than has largely been the case by demonstrating how that understanding might be reached.

This thesis examines Hollywood narratives of married life produced between 1934 and 1948. Using Stanley Cavell’s seminal Pursuits of Happiness as a point of departure, I compare the depiction of benign domesticity across four chapters. Combining textual analysis, genre criticism and studio archival research, I re-evaluate Cavell’s notion of ‘films in conversation’, and suggest that narratives of marriage call for an approach that considers intertextuality, audience address and the interaction of star personae. My first two chapters focus on MGM’s six Thin Man films, discussing an ongoing series’ portrayal of a continuous marriage. In my analysis of The Thin Man, After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man, I argue that the mystery plots of these films inform and inflect the depiction of marriage in private and public space. In contrast to previous studies that view Shadow of the Thin Man, The Thin Man Goes Home and Song of the Thin Man as signaling the onset of domesticity and the format’s decline, I view these films as proposing alternative ways of attending to the problem of the male child. The third chapter compares Penny Serenade and Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House, films in which the happiness of a family is made contingent upon the construction of a home. In this chapter, I suggest that building a home for one’s daughters permits the films’ mise-en-scene to be invested with possibility of renewal. My fourth chapter discusses three films in which a partner returns to marriage after a period of absence – My Favourite Wife, The Best Years of Our Lives and Tomorrow is Forever. With particular attention to the role of ‘the other woman’, I note ways in which these narratives propose the future of their couples.

This thesis engages with representations of social crisis in Argentine fictional cinema during 1998-2005, a period when Argentina experienced a deep economic crisis that brought about significant changes in politics, culture, society and the arts. My emphasis is upon the ways in which cinema interpreted both present and long-established dialogues with national and social discourse, while re-assessing notions of national identity, culture and social class. The study contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Argentine film which has no precedent in history. In particular, works published in English over the last five years have offered fresh reflections upon a field that has remained dominated by narrative and aesthetic, rather than analytical, approaches By combining close textual analysis of films to the study of their cultural context my research argues that cinema addressed predominantly middle-class Argentine audiences with critical questions concerning the transformations they were experiencing over those years of crisis. As works of fiction, the films also offered ordinary people the possibility to identify with their own lives and values, stimulating critical reflection and emotional engagement, as well as enjoyment and laughter. The modes through which these films addressed Argentine audiences are themselves as rich and complex as their narrative representations of crisis. Amongst the most compelling achievements of recent Argentine cinema are the diversity of its modes of address, its strong themes, interesting styles and captivating narrative strategies. These films offered domestic audiences both reflective and divergent views on social reality that, without any doubt, enriched the cultural arena in which Argentineans could reflect on their past, their daily life, their values and their relationship with social minorities. In this sense cinema helped Argentine people to learn to live in democracy.

This thesis investigates the way in which film as a specific medium is capable of communicating a subjectivity that is troubled or otherwise compromised by mental illness. It is traditionally held that the written word is a far more suitable medium for communicating interiority than the medium of film, as the word is characterised as complex, abstract and conceptual, whilst the image is characterised as straightforward, obvious and concrete. This thesis will argue, however, that the medium of film is entirely capable of dealing with the abstract and conceptual, and can in fact construct extremely complex frameworks of subjectivity due to its multitrack character. Using detailed textual analysis, I will interrogate the way in which film utilises the multiple channels available to it (the visual, verbal, and aural) to create complex systems of meaning. Due to the tendency of filmmakers to appeal to literary sources for guidance when conveying mental states, the issue of adaptation is crucial to my entry into this discussion. My corpus primarily consists of films that are based on literary accounts of troubled subjectivity (either biographical or fictional). My thesis will compare and contrast filmic and literary conveyances of mental illness to establish the symbols, metaphors and analogies that communicate complex interiority. My key case studies are: A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, 2006), Clean, Shaven (dir. Lodge Kerrigan, 1993), A Beautiful Mind (dir. Ron Howard, 2001), Fight Club (dir. David Fincher, 1999), Secret Window (dir. David Koepp, 2004), The Hours (dir. Stephen Daldry, 2002), and A Single Man (dir. Tom Ford, 2008). This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by generating alternative readings of these films that take into account the multitrack character of the medium. These readings will highlight the specific techniques and vocabularies that are drawn on and developed to communicate disordered interiority.

This thesis examines the representation of the American president in fictional films and television programmes, as well as documentary film and photography. It engages broadly with the subject’s entire history, but focuses particularly on the past two decades (1992-2012). Its primary method is close textual analysis, departing from pre-existing studies that are largely preoccupied with questions of verisimilitude and historical accuracy. The construction of the cinematic and televisual presidencies requires a simultaneous negotiation of the ‘real’ political/historical record, and the desire to reproduce and reinforce the representational genealogies inherited from cinema and television’s own histories (not necessarily all explicitly ‘political’). My research has found the presidency to be overwhelmingly reliant upon mythological discourses about American national identity, and traditional conceptions of masculinity. How these constructions impact upon the representation of the president in relation to the contexts from which the films and programmes emerge is of crucial importance. The conception of the presidency has undergone enormous change since the early 1990s. The end of the Cold War, the increased scrutiny of the mass media, 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’, and the economic crisis, have either challenged or reinforced the notion that the president is an omnipotent force, able to bend the world to his will. The strategies cinema and television have employed to address these changes is of crucial significance to this thesis. This thesis will establish the manner in which techniques of mainstream film and television production – genre, visual style, iconography, and narrative – have impacted upon the reinforcement or critique of the presidential myth. As the presidency has suffered relative decline in a more diffuse geopolitical environment, this thesis demonstrates the extent to which the myth of the presidency has required the intervention of mainstream cinema and television to ensure its preservation.

This thesis uses a range of recent television and film texts to interrogate postfeminist media formations of masculinity. In particular, this work focuses on increasingly prevalent media narratives that are about producing men as suitable romantic partners for postfeminist women. Arguing that existing literature on postfeminism ignores or trivialises the issue of masculinity, this thesis addresses new cultural formations of masculinity that are linked not only to postfeminist discourse, but also related cultural and economic shifts such as post-industrialisation and the rise of neo-liberal cultural politics. Analysing texts from the mid-1990s to 2012, the work argues that such representations are rife with tensions and contradictions. They represent in part an ungendering of previously feminine arenas (such as the makeover, and the home) yet are also marked by a discourse that requires the reassertion of sexual difference and the maintenance of heteronormativity. As such, the urge towards coupling becomes central to these formations, across the range of texts discussed within this thesis. The thesis argues that postfeminist media representations of masculinity are often characterised by an interplay between dominant, residual and emergent formations. In the makeover show, the mission is to improve a man to satisfy his existing partner (perhaps as preparation for a proposal) or to ready him for entry into the dating market. In the lifestyle show, the advice given on how to manage domestic labour is committed to encouraging harmony between the heterosexual couple. The homebuilding sitcom focuses on the challenges of the transition between youth and the establishment of a family unit: finding the right partner, settling down, building a home, having children. The Hollywood romantic comedy, even in its recent, male-centred incarnations, still presents successful coupling as integral, essential, and inevitable, even if its attitude to the union is sometimes ambivalent. In all of these television and film genres, there is a considerable focus on how men must change in order to become, and stay, "marriageable". This emphasis on coupling is paired with images of singledom as failure, a pathologisation which, this thesis argues, is rapidly becoming ungendered. The example texts' reinforcement of compulsory heterosexuality, their focus on a particular 'life-stage' (the early stages of independent living) and the increased focus on men's private lives means that domestic space and the home become key sites in which these tensions and battles are played out. This thesis examines the central role of the home, its decor, arrangement and labour, as both one of the major negotiations of coupling and as an aesthetic strategy for representing different formations of masculinity and postfeminist dilemmas of masculinity within this group of texts.