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This thesis explores some of the possibilities of the relationship established between a movie, its main character(s) and the viewer in terms of distance. I treat distance primarily as an aspect of point of view, and it is in relation to the body of literature in film studies pertaining to point of view that this account positions itself in its first chapter. I offer there a series of arguments that reject i) the need to postulate a cinematic narrator for all or even most movies, ii) the over-privileging of the camera in theorizations of point of view, and iii) accounts of point of view built too centrally around characters, with a too-narrow emphasis upon either optical POV shots or characters-as-narrators. I present a more holistic approach to point of view and distance. My three case study chapters are structured according to Robin Wood’s suggestion that the films of Max Ophuls achieve a balance between ‘the audience-participation techniques of Hitchcock and the clinical objectivity and detachment of Preminger’ (Personal Views 126). Each chapter chiefly offers a critical account of point of view and distance in a single movie. First, I discuss Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958): I describe the techniques it employs to encourage the viewer to share its protagonist’s emotional experiences. Next, I discuss Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959): how the movie achieves emotional detachment in its viewer, and to what end. Finally, I discuss The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949), and demonstrate how the movie, whilst rarely leaving its protagonist’s side and maintaining a sympathetic view of her, is committed to revealing the limitations of her perspective on events. My first chapter constitutes a contribution to various longstanding debates within the study of filmic point of view. I view this thesis mainly as a work of film criticism, and therefore as a contribution to our understanding of the directors and films studied within it – and of Hollywood cinema more broadly. I also view this account as a demonstration of one methodological approach we might usefully adopt in the study of film and point of view – a comparative approach rooted in detailed textual analysis.

My doctoral thesis conducts an analysis of post-imperial Paris and London, as represented in the cinema. More specifically, this study develops a narrative of the intimate connection between the cinema and the city that parts ways from the founding story of the filmic city, which revolves around the birth of the modern metropolis and mobilities of the flâneur. This thesis engages in the exploration of the largely untold story of the relationship between empire and the cinematic city in Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu (2000) and Caché (2005), Claire Denis’ J’ai pas sommeil (1994) Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002) and Tony Gatlif’s Exils (2004). This study investigates the lingering traces of imperial histories, spatialities, narratives and figures that can be located in more contemporary cinema. The first chapter of the dissertation entitled ‘Post-Imperial Paris’ is divided into two sections. The first investigates the construction of ‘post-imperial topographies’ in J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu, while the second posits dwelling spaces and their interiors as a form of city space specifically in relation to Caché. The second chapter, called ‘Post-Imperial London’, situates Dirty Pretty Things within a wider historical continuum of ‘migrant London’. This film is examined in relation to filmic depictions of Caribbean migration and settlement, in order to ascertain the way in which an older historical imaginary of the cinematic London can be detected in Dirty Pretty Things but also some of the salient differences between this film and its predecessors as related to the representation of space and place. The final chapter, titled ‘On the Road: The Journey to the City Narrative’ posits another narrative of the cinematic city concerning the depiction of migrant journeys to the city as represented in In This World and Exils.

This thesis through practice attempts to develop and articulate a theory and practice of contemporary acting and actor training from a Korean perspective by utilizing practices and underlying principles based primarily on DahnHak. DahnHak is a relatively recent form of Korean meditation developed by Seung-Heun Lee in the 80s systemizing tradition of Korean bodymind cultivation. Ki occupies a central position in DahnHaKs practice and philosophy. According to DahnHak, ki is a fundamental life force of the universe, and in relation to the body and mind, it refers to a linking state between them. This thesis examines a: psychophysical process in developing an· awareness and control of ki as an actor's creative asset along with the body and mind. Four practical projects were analyzed. In The Bald Soprano Project and The Water Station Project. I examine the psychophysical process as an actor. The Godot Project in Exeter and Seoul are examined from the perspective of facilitator/director.

This thesis offers a reading of the relationship between the cinematic image and the promotional process in the context of emerging digital technologies. Asserting that computer generated image forms now function as a single currency across multiple audiovisual economies, this thesis posits a new understanding of digital attractions as constituting a 'cinemas of transactions'. Neither a singular, unitary'cinema' nor a singular 'transaction', the cinemas of transactions constitutes a complex and multiply interrelated system of textual, technological, aesthetic and economic developments whereby computer generated attractions and promotional practices span many media and textual forms. While Anglo-American film theories of the twentieth century separated the study of film form from those of spot advertising, the contemporary context, characterised by a wane in Marxist aesthetic discourse and a rise in theories of converging new media, offers a moment in which to question this separation. In this theoretical context, the relationship between the computer generated attraction and the promotional process is explored through the analysis of a broad range of media texts which all feature spectacular digital special effects. Through case studies of Hollywood films, trailers, net attractions and spot advertisements this thesis expands the work of film theories conducted in the 1980 and 1990s into the expanding domain of new media discourse.

This study addresses the relationship between the veil and the constitution of what I have tenned the Muslim female subject in the field of visual and popular culture, with a special emphasis on film. My case-studies range from European historical texts to contemporary visual culture and social practices with reference to the Middle East. The study draws on postcolonial and feminist literature to explore the productions of the Muslim female subject within the discourses of (post)colonialism, nationalism and Islamic patriarchy. It examines the Muslim female subject in relation to the paradigms of veiling and unveiling in a cross-cultural yet context-specific differentiated analysis. The aim is to interrogate the mobility of the veil and the manner in which it can be evaded, substituted or transferred without transgressing the codes of Islamic female modesty. It identifies different manifestations of the veil's mobility, which I contend challenge Islamic hegemonic discourses whilst simultaneously transcending the colonialist paradigm of unveiling. The material I discuss ranges from (de-)colonial cinematic texts, Iranian cinema and advertising for Saudi Arabian Television. I look at canonical texts such as Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Abbas Kiarostami's 10 (2002) in view of their significance in scholarship relating to the Muslim female subject within film studies. I also examine manifestations of the veil in the field of fashion and make extensive reference to paradigmatic representations of the Muslim female subject in contemporary art and curatorial projects.

This thesis aims to re-examine the industrial and cultural landscape of Scottish cinema since the advent of public funding institutions for the support of indigenous filmmaking. This period in Scottish cinema has been described by historians as one in which subsidy bodies have created the conditions necessary for the unprecedented flourishing of internationally high-profile national cinema production throughout the last twenty-five years. By taking a 'bottom up' approach to the period and closely analysing six films in relation to their production and reception contexts, the thesis seeks to break from the survey formats which have dominated Scottish cinema historiography and to more thoroughly explore the relationships that have existed between key films from this period, the funding bodies that have supported them and the audiences that have consumed them. In so doing it attempts at various points to supplement, qualify and critique a number of assumptions and arguments that have dominated the field of Scottish cinema studies, all while providing detailed critical and historical treatments of a number of important and sometimes overlooked films from the period.

The impetus for this project was to consider how the digitalisation of television stood as an important moment to re-evaluate key concepts and debates within television studies. To this end, my focus is on public service broadcasting and television studies' textual tradition. I examine how linear models of the television text are challenged, usurped and at times reinforced by interactive television's emergent non-linear, personalisable forms. In so doing, I am concerned to analyse interactive television's textual structures in relation to the BBC's position as a public service broadcaster in the digital television age. Across these two concerns I aim to historicise the moment of digitalisation, drawing on longer positionings of television's technological and cultural form as a 'window-on-the-world'. An introduction is followed by section 1 of the thesis that includes a review of key literature in the field, focusing particularly on work on the 'text' of television studies. The chapters in section 1 mix this review with an historical argument that understand the current digital television era as one of 'excess', placing television at the boundaries of new and old media concerns that can be usefully understood through the presence of a dialectic between television's position as window-on-the-world and its emergent position as 'portal'. Section 1 demonstrates how this dialectic is called up by the prominence of discourses of 'choice' in new media practices and textualities and, more importantly, the debates about public service broadcasting's role in the digital age. As I go on to show in section 2, this dialectic evidences a tension between the 'imaginative journeys' television's window offers and the way in which these are then 'rationalised'. The second half of the thesis maps out emergent textual forms of interactive television by analysing the way choice and mobility are structured, providing a series of case studies in non-fiction television genres. Chapter 4 demonstrates the persistence of key discourses subsumed within the window-on-the-world metaphor in the formation and 'everydaying' of interactive television, elucidating key institutional and gendered tensions in the way these discourses are mobilised in the digital age. In turn, Chapter 5 connects the kinds of mobility promised by interactive television's window to longer historical practices of public institutions regulating spectator movement. Chapter 6 examines how television's window has been explicitly remediated by interactive television, placing it within the 'database' ontologies of computing. Finally Chapter 7 demonstrates the way in which television's window increasingly comes to function as a portal through which to access digital media spaces, such as the Internet. Across the chapters I am concerned to connect the textual and discursive form of each case study to the academic debates and public service concerns of the various applications' generic identity. Although I am interested in the challenges television's digitalisation poses to both public service broadcasting and traditional television studies approaches to the text, a more important motivation has been to re-affirm the role of both in the digital television landscape. Thus through close textual analysis that connects aesthetics with production and regulation, the thesis aims to demonstrate the relevance of television studies and the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, as an 'old media' becomes a 'new' one.

This thesis considers the role of spectacle in two modes of filmmaking in the French and American 'classical' cinemas of the 1930s. I examine the relationship of spectacle to the emotions and drama of musical films, and to the 'history-telling' of biopics, war films and other genres of historical cinema. One reason for the comparison is the hegemonic position of classical Hollywood cinema in film scholarship. Although I am respectful of the insights offered by the concept of a 'classical' cinema, a more central motivation for this study is the failure of much criticism to account for the relationship of spectacle to a concept denoting an unobtrusive, self-effacing style. An introduction is followed by a chapter surveying key literature in the field, focusing in particular on work on classical French and American cinema, cinematic spectacle and filmic, particularly generic, categories. The second chapter is divided roughly in two. The first half examines the various theatrical roots of French and American musical films of the thirties. The second half examines the 'utopian' feelings (Dyer, ([1977] 1992) musical spectacle serves. This division uncovers the greater ambivalence of French musical films, and their more circuitous approach to spectacle. Chapter three examines historical films through categories inspired by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche ([1874] 1983). I examine the prevailing 'monumental' approach to historical subjects, but also two key varieties of spectacle: the 'spectacular vista' and the 'decor of history'. I conclude by reflecting on the possibility of a critical historiography within French and American film of the thirties. Though the balance of my attention favours French examples in the chapter on musical films, my intention throughout is to compare and, where fruitful, contrast the two national cinemas. The thesis develops theoretical but, even more, practical understandings of particular kinds of spectacle; they are susceptible of the practice of close textual analysis. This is my central method of investigation. I attempt, throughout, to place the examination of films within their wider historical, industrial and critical contexts.

This dissertation is a study of the representation of money on screen, in its textual and contextual constructions. Money, itself a representation, has a complex status: it is both an abstract concept, a symbol of value, a social convention, and a concrete object in its embodiment as gold, metal or paper. This study then is that of a representation of a representation. Its starting point is the very paradox of money as both an object endowed with great value while at the same time not worth much more than the substance it is made of or the numbers referring to it in newer forms of electronic money. The paradox is particularly salient in a medium that works through images while at the same time requiring itself so much money. The distinction between the two Latin words moneta and pecunia offers an understanding of money in its main properties and functions, as an exchange tool in constant circulation and as an object of hoarding, as belongings. This distinction is operative in the present study and runs through the thesis, together with the Marxian concepts of use-value and exchange value. The objective is to analyse patterns, peculiarities and meanings linked to the portrayal of money. This thesis does not encompass a comprehensive survey of money represented in all of cinema. Instead, the study is conducted in four groupings of films that are not necessarily thought of in connection with their images of money. Four chapters examine films from different contexts, periods, genres or trends in the cinema of various countries. The groupings are suggested partly by issues outside of money and partly by periods and kinds of money, and focus on case studies while simultaneously referring to a larger corpus. The first chapter examines the issues raised by the topic and surveys the existing literature. The second chapter undertakes an analysis of gold and gold mining in the context of the pioneering West in US films. The third chapter considers paper money and its meanings in neo-realist films. The thesis then proceeds to study films from the 1970s and 1980s. The fourth chapter concerns money in French films on high finance, and the last chapter looks at money as it appears in horror films. The thesis ends with a discussion of the recurrent patterns at work in the representation of money.

This thesis examines the representation of society in British and French cinemas of the 1980s. In this comparative study, the choice of this particular decade was motivated by the coming to power of the Conservative Party in Britain and the Socialist Party in France. Since the two governments adopted 'extreme' policies increasing the strengths and weaknesses traditionally found in their film industries, British cinema struggled even harder while French cinema enjoyed a strong financial support from the state. A significant feature of these two national cinemas in relation to films about society was the predominance of the realist vein in Britain and the comedy genre in France. This generic discrepancy was highly influential in the way the two national cinemas referred to social issues in the 1980s and most scholars have argued that British cinema widely discussed the state of its society whereas, on the whole, French cinema avoided to do so. What this research hopefully demonstrates is that, despite different generic approaches, British and French cinemas equally contributed to depict their contemporary societies. To analyse how these two societies were represented on screen, three main areas are studied thematically: first people in power (public institutions and individuals), second the world of work, and third the family. After a brief summary of social issues in Britain and France in relation with the aforementioned themes, discussions of their filmic representations are based on the films themselves, the textual analysis of films taken as case studies and their critical reception. I will argue that in the 1980s, British cinema offered the overall image of a class-bound society where individuals - living side by side - were unable to escape their social fate. The paradox of this cinema made by a majority of left-wing filmmakers was that ultimately it favoured a rather traditional view of society. By contrast, my research shows that the idea of friendship and solidarity prevailed over economic and social hardship in French cinema. Although this depiction of society was largely consensual, it nevertheless opened the debate for social alternatives.