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This thesis explores how some recent French films engage with the problem of correlation in their post-cinematic context. Drawing on the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux, I argue that film reflects and reflects on the way it correlates both with the world, and with the Other of correlation, i.e. the humans involved at the various levels of the cinematographic experience. In order to theorize and analyse the affects emerging from the possible assemblages of these two distinct correlating correlates at work in the making of the post-cinematic real, I focus on a selection of contemporary French digital cinema (2009-2014). I analyse how these films reflect on their relation to consciousness, time, space and causality, and on their ability to produce novelty. I first discuss Enter the Void (Gaspard Noé, France/Germany/Italy/Canada/Japan, 2009) and Vous n'Avez Encore Rien Vu/You Ain't Seen Nothin'Yet (Alain Resnais, France/Germany, 2012) as two films that assume that consciousness is necessary and explore the impossibility for cinematic thought to think what is out of thought. I analyse how these films suggest that the world is unthinkable if not experienced by a consciousness with which it correlates, and that novelty is necessarily relative and develops in a closed system as the eternal return of affects. Chapter 2 focuses on films that suggest that this correlation is, however, not an absolute and that the way human consciousness processes the real could be radically other. The chapter focuses on Les Garçons et Guillaume, à Table/Me, Myself and Mum, (Guillaume Galienne, France/Belgium, 2013) and Ne Te Retourne Pas/Don't Look Back (Marina de Van, France/Luxemburg/Italy/Belgium, 2009), two films that play with the facticity of correlates, i.e. the fact that the laws according to which the real (time, space, bodies, affects) emerge can vary, and novelty can be produced. Chapters 3 and 4 radicalize facticity further by exploring the possibility of the facticity of becoming, i.e. a time without becoming, and engaging with filmic times that resonate with Meillassoux's concept of Hyperchaos. Chapter 3 discusses Rubber (Quentin Dupieux, France/Angola/USA, 2010) and Bird People (Pascale Ferrand, France, 2014) and develops the principle of unreason - i.e. Meillassoux's concept according to which only contingency is necessary - and its ethics. Finally, Chapter 4 explores Hyperchaos further, as a time without becoming that develops as a non-whole, by drawing on scenes from Holy Motors (Léos Carax, France/Germany, 2012) and Réalité/Reality (Quentin Dupieux, France/Belgium/USA, 2014).

This thesis is a philosophical engagement with the popular, low, and vernacular theories of History performed and expressed within contemporary Japanese manga ('comics') and anime ('limited animation'), and most importantly, in the global production and consumption of otaku ('manga and anime fan') cultural and media ecologies. My project is rooted in a reading of the post-structural theoretical inquiries of Gilles Deleuze in parallel with what media theorist McKenzie Wark calls 'otaku philosophy' to examine how both high and low theories articulate anxieties and fascinations with the global theoretical discourses on 'the ends of History' and the imminent demise of industrial modernity. The first portion of the thesis is dedicated to a reading of the Japanese counter-cultural manga movement called gekiga ('dramatic pictures'). In traversing gekiga's post-war lineages to its revival in the medievalism of otaku artists Miura Kentarō and Yukimura Makoto, the first part postulates on what an anti-modern, anti-historical approach - or what Deleuze and Guattari call a nomadology - might look and feel like as it is mediated in the manga form. The second portion of the thesis examines the way in which Japanese anime mobilises the philosophies of nomadology in its filmic form and transmedial properties. In a critical assessment of the anime works of the otaku-founded media corporation Type-Moon, this section explores the Fate series alongside Deleuzian film and media philosophies to explore the infinite potentialities and recursive limitations of otaku nomadologies as they materialise beyond the screen. By reassessing the rise of otaku culture as a vernacular, global, and cosmopolitan rise in the critique of modernity and History, this thesis hopes to explore how transcultural and transmedial fan philosophies of historicity, memory, and temporality can be recontextualised within current academic debates about the efficacy of post-national historiographic pedagogies explored in the fields of postcolonial studies, comparative studies, global studies, and media studies.

This thesis aims to investigate the industry restructuration of the Chinese film industry in the context of China integrating into the global neoliberal capitalist system since its WTO entry in 2002. By interrogating the power dynamics between the Party-state, domestic capital and transnational media capital, this thesis explores respective roles each of the three stakeholders have played in shaping the commercialization and marketization of the Chinese film industry. Methodically, this thesis primarily relies on elite interviews with industry professionals, together with critical discourse analysis of one key policy document, and secondary data collected from news outlets, trade publications, industry reports, etc. Drawing on the empirical data, I present four main arguments. First, in light of China's culture system reform and the evolution of film policies since 2002, the Party-state continues to utilize film as an ideological instrument for consolidating the Party's hegemonic rule and sustaining its legitimacy. The Party-state proves ingenious in governing the Chinese film industry at the discursive level as China experiencing the integration into global neoliberalism. Second, despite the installation of the market mechanism in the film sector, the Party-state manages to retain control over the Chinese film industry, not only on the ideological front, but also in the economic sense by partaking in the competition with private capital, domestic and foreign. Third, the Chinese film industry has been profoundly transformed by the trend of conglomeration driven by other capital-intensive industry sectors in China, in particular the internet sector. Riding on their explosive success in the new century, several key tech giants seek to build Chinese media conglomerates that are competitive on the global scale. This process is further complicated by the keen participation of transnational media capital, mainly Hollywood players. Co-production film projects best epitomize the transnational collaboration which however, haven't achieved much success. Fourth, the Chinese film workers have developed professional skills that enable them to navigate between political imperatives, commercial demands, and personal fulfilment. The mental struggle of balancing individual artistic vision with political and commercial constraints is palpable for film practitioners on a daily basis, though to varying degree. One way of coping with the challenge is exercise agency in a highly depoliticized manner, channelling creative energy into filmmaking activities that are either considered politically safe, or in accordance with the official ideologies, in some cases pandering to the Party-state. The fact that Chinese film workers actively transform themselves into depoliticized subjects in their professional work, indicating neoliberalism as a national hegemonic project at its core.

This dissertation examines the case of two satellite concentration camps of Buchenwald in the German towns of Altenburg and Meuselwitz and the fate of the - mostly female - prisoners, forced to work in the factories of the arms manufacturer HASAG. The dissertation itself consists of two parts: In the stage play "Flieder, 1945 / Lilac, 2015", I investigate the history and memory of the camps, factories, and the community which produced those through the frayed relationships of three generations of German women and a group of prisoners attempting to survive the camp. The commentary "Visibility, Memory, Gender: Writing and Re-imagining National Socialist Atrocity for the Stage" addresses the history of the camps in Altenburg and Meuselwitz, documents the creative process, and engages with various theatrical and filmic representation of National Socialist atrocity. Particular focus is placed on questions of visibility of atrocity, the role of the 'bystander', and the female experience of atrocity, as well as the implications of the legacy of National Socialism for next-generation Germans.

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.

This study deals with the influence of film form in fiction in terms of narrative discourse, focusing on issues of genre, narration, temporality, and the imitation of cinematic techniques. It provides a theoretical analysis of different methodologies (intermediality theory, semiotics, narratology, genre theory) which are useful to assess how a cinematic dimension has found a place in literary writing. This research, in particular, puts forth the idea of a 'para-cinematic narrator', a 'flattening of the narrative relief', and a 'para-cinematic narrative contract' as constitutive items of strongly cinematised fiction. These three theoretical items are subsumed in the concept of 'cinematic mode in fiction', which describes a distillation of characteristics of the film form on the written page. This research therefore represents a theoretical attempt to demonstrate how the cinematic component integrates the stylistic and generic traits of novels and short stories relating to different periods, styles and genres of the twentieth century. The proposed theoretical model is tested on a corpus of American, French, and, especially, Italian case studies. The remediation of film that emerges from these texts points to a complex interconnection between cinema and literature which still requires full acknowledgment in literary history.

This thesis explores how a series of Hollywood films allegorised the contradictions of American foreign policy between 1999 and 2009. These contradictions are underlined in pictures that use military intervention as a subtext. My argument considers the role of allegory in an array of genres, including war pictures, Westerns, and comic book adaptations. The case studies I analyse allegorise a bipartisan consensus surrounding military intervention. I postulate that this consensus was crystallised in the Kosovo War of 1999 and later became apotheosised in the 2003 Iraq War. I contend that, in pictures as diverse as There Will be Blood (2007) and The Dark Knight (2008), political allegory critiques the bipartisan allure of both neoconservatism and liberal interventionism’s promises of exporting American democracy. Moreover, these narratives examine the ideas of International Relations theorists as diverse as Walter Mead, Walter McDougall, and Joseph Nye. The theories propounded by these authors become embodied in different characterisations, leading to storylines that connote ideological friction and philosophical inconsistency. Consequently, Hollywood cinema during this period highlights a contradiction in American foreign policy, a theme that is further encoded in narrative elements that focus on the strained politics of coalition building and winning hearts and minds.

This thesis asserts the importance of cinemas as influential sites of public emotion within mid-twentieth-century England. It argues that, as institutions, they offered much more than a recreational experience, allowing the formation of emotional communities within an environment which, on an affective level, differed from many other forms of public leisure activity. It combines approaches from the history of emotions and the history of space to introduce a novel methodological approach which allows a reassessment of the role of cinemas in twentieth-century life. The intersection between space and emotion is strengthened by using the records of Mass Observation, an archive imbued with powerful emotional narratives. In conjunction with two case studies of cinemas in Brighton and Bolton, which offer vivid local perspectives on historical cinema-going, the thesis argues that cinemas allowed cinema-goers to enhance, suspend, or even invert, their emotional comportment. This was permitted within a physical environment which fostered a hazy emotionality attractive to many people wishing to escape the dominant social codes of the age, such as the much-debated "stiff-upper-lip". The thesis suggests that whilst cinema-going was a universal activity, the economies of different towns affected the types of cinemas and the emotional landscapes within. It also highlights how cinemas were caught up in contemporary debates on working-class passivity, the considerable strains affecting the emotions of the nation's youth, the face of the modern, and the value of emotional authenticity. Public emotion within the cinema auditorium was moulded by many factors, including gender, the darkness of the space, the reactions of one's fellow patrons, film taste, and the emotional ambiguity of the space. The case of mid-century cinema-going reveals how public emotion developed in England within the context of mass culture, straddling a permeable line and oscillating between the private and the communal in spaces such as the cinema, allowing people to develop and contest their sense of emotional self.

Ontological Narratives is a research project that explores philosophy through film making practice. The project is concerned to extend and complicate notions of practice as research, through the production of a group of films which both represent and interrogate theoretical issues raised by specific philosophical texts. It aims to both pursue specific research themes - questions concerning ontology and its relation to film narrative - and to question what we mean, and might mean, when we talk of practice as research. The project has forged interdisciplinary connections between film and philosophy through practice as research, carving out a unique position in the field. The project has made this intervention into philosophy from a position of creative practice, and from a feminist standpoint, which interrogates philosophy ontologically and epistemologically. In terms of philosophical content, the films from Ontological Narratives contain subject matter derived from readings of philosophers that are transformed and interrogated viafictional stories. The project has resulted in three fiction films, a monograph and two journal articles, alongside video documentation, research sketches and a personal journal. The fiction films produced sit between the genres of drama, documentary, artcinema, experimental film and essay film. The research process for Ontological Narratives was an organic one that responded through iterative cycles to developments and outcomes within the sub-projects and the films resulting. In this way knowledge generation is derived from process and outcome, evident in the artefacts created and also expressible through associated commentary. Ontological Narratives has been disseminated through public screenings, conference presentations, exhibitions and online distribution.

This thesis identifies and analyses the function of violence in the films of screenwriter-director Pablo Trapero. It does this by examining different understandings of the concept of violence itself — with a particular emphasis placed on Slavoj Žižek’s concept of objective violence — and how it is represented on-screen in Trapero’s films. The work is divided into two parts, each consisting of two chapters. Each of the four chapters focuses on a pair of the director’s films; in each case the first film analysed introduces motifs and themes which the later film then expands upon and intensifies. Part I locates violence within the context of what Althusser defines as the State Apparatus, focusing on the diverse manifestations of the State’s power generally. Further, this section analyses the way in which Trapero’s films demonstrate the State’s manipulation of its subjects through repressive and ideological means for its own benefit. Part II tightens the thesis’s focus, examining Trapero’s representation of one specific ideological apparatus: the family unit. This section approaches different manifestations of the family and, using Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of Oedipal and rhizomatic families, considers the ways in which the family structure itself can be used as both a means of repression and, in certain cases, a means of resistance. This thesis contends that, through his representation of objective violence, Pablo Trapero has emerged as a distinctly political filmmaker. By focusing on several previously under-studied elements of Trapero’s films this thesis highlights the ways in which the director’s work represents present-day concerns about social inequalities and injustice in neoliberal Argentina on-screen. Finally, this work examines how Trapero combines aspects of Argentina’s long tradition of political film with elements of Nuevo Cine Argentino to create a unique political voice.

This thesis examines the subtitling of films depicting the French banlieue into English. The banlieues are housing estates situated on the outskirts of large towns and cities, and are primarily home to the underprivileged, and immigrants to France or their descendants. The sociolect spoken in the banlieue differs from standard French in terms of grammar, lexicon and pronunciation. Three films released between 2000 and the present day are studied; La squale (Genestal, 2000), L'esquive (Kechiche, 2003) and Divines (Benyamina, 2016). A new integrated methodology is developed, which examines the films within their broader contexts of release, and in light of paratextual material contributing to the context of reception, and to the viewer's understanding of the topic at hand. Directors representing the banlieue on screen generally do so with a view to provoking thought or public discussion in relation to the banlieues. In addition to macro- and micro-contextual analysis of the films and subtitles, the work is underpinned by an examination of the subtitling situation, encompassing the views and experiences of subtitlers working on banlieue film, and technical analysis of the subtitles in terms of readability. Through interviews of professional subtitlers, and close technical analysis of the subtitles, this research is contextualised within the industry, and within current conventions and guidelines. Close analysis of subtitles and the translation solutions they present reveals that some of the socio-political messages presented in the films may not be evident to a non-French speaking viewer of the English-subtitled versions. Although the informal nature of many conversations featuring the langage de banlieue is sometimes clear in the subtitled version, the unique sociolect of the characters is not. In two of the case study films, a dialect-for-dialect approach was adopted, where African American vernacular English was used in the subtitles to demonstrate the use of non-standard language. However, it is argued that ultimately, this dialect-for-dialect approach, combined with cultural similarities between the French banlieue and American street culture, could lead the British Anglophone viewer to negotiate the banlieues and those who live there via their knowledge of American street culture. This could contribute to American cultural hegemony, and does not convey the specificity of France's banlieues as cultural melting pots.

This thesis is my attempt to establish a foundation, based on the philosophy of Objectivism as it was developed and elaborated by the Russian-American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, for the construction of an Objectivist aesthetics of cinema. After contextualizing and explicating Rand's philosophy, I make the case that, propaedeutic to the construction of a new aesthetics of cinema, it is incumbent upon film scholars to refute the irrational and immoral philosophical premises that have long been destroying the philosophy of art in general and the discipline of film studies in particular. Due to the troubling combination of its contemporaneity, extremism, and considerable influence, I focus initially on the philosophical school of poststructuralism - which I contend has, since the 1960s, served as the default philosophical foundation for film scholars - before ultimately moving on to refute what I call the Kantian aesthetic tradition, of which I demonstrate poststructuralism is a deadly symptom. Upon clearing away this philosophical debris, I set about arguing for the probative value of an Objectivist aesthetics of cinema by reigniting long-dormant debates about the validity of interpretation and the role of evaluation in film criticism. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate the value of an aesthetic orientation which I term aesthetic perfectionism, for it is my contention that perfectionism - which has recently emerged at the heart of key developments in film studies through the work of Stanley Cavell, which I argue motivated Rand's philosophical enterprise, and which I argue should motivate the philosophical enterprises of all scholars who strive to do justice to all that the cinema has to offer - is the key to unlocking an Aesthetics of Life capable of transforming the discipline of film studies.

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.

The history of the Hong Kong-based film production company Milkyway Image from its inception in 1996 to present day examplifies the metamorphosis of the contemporary Hong Kong film industry to an era characterised by Hong Kong’s integration into a Chinese national context and the transnationalisation of world cinema. Drawing upon literature that studies film companies, this thesis adopts an integrative research framework that primarily combines industrial and discourse analysis to investigate Milkyway from a range of perspectives. It looks into the company’s ownership and organisational structure and the constitution of its creative team, comparing its similarities and differences to previous Hong Kong film companies and discussing how Milkyway bases itself on contemporary industry and its production models, business experiences and human resources from established studios such as the Shaw Brothers. Secondly, I explore Milkyway’s business and production practices in Hong Kong and mainland China by examining its genre films, including crime thrillers and romantic comedies, illustrating the Hong Kong film industry’s cooperation, negotiation and resistance in the process of Hong Kong cinema’s mainlandisation post-transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty from Britain to China. I then examine the discourse regarding Milkyway both inside and outside of Hong Kong, focussing on how the company and its work are received by various players in the film industry and community. The Hong Kong cultural community’s interpretations of Milkyway’s films represent an effort to maintain local cinema’s independence and local culture’s autonomy. International cultural bodies, such as film festivals, distributors and critics, receive Milkyway’s productions against the background of the increased globalisation of cinema and the development of the film industry and film institutions. Milkyway’s image changes as the company’s films travel across contexts and as various cultural forces provide multiple understandings of contemporary Hong Kong cinema. In shaping the discourse about Milkyway and its work, the company plays an active role by taking advantage of transnational platforms, such as film festivals, and interacting with film journalism and academia.

This thesis considers images of the falling body after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, starting with Associated Press photographer Richard Drew’s photograph of a person falling to their death from the north tower of the World Trade Center. From this specific photograph, this thesis follows various intersecting lines in what I am calling a meshwork of falling-body images. Consequently, each chapter encounters a wide range of examples of falling: from literature to films, personal websites to digital content, and immersive technologies to artworks. Rather than connecting these instances like nodes, this thesis is more concerned with exploring lines of relation and the way the image moves along these lines. This thesis will argue that the falling-body image offers an alternative topology of the attacks: as enmeshed in the unfolding lines of life of web users, artists, directors and writers alike. In this way, this thesis outlines the ways we have lived with the image of falling, and the event itself, and how we continue to experience its unfolding consequences.

This thesis comparatively and critically examines the connections between Shakespeare and the drama of Samuel Beckett that have been established in British adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays for the stage, screen and page. Beckett’s distinct dramatic style has become an alternative method for the interpretation of such Shakespeare plays as King Lear and Timon of Athens for stage and screen. The first part of this thesis focuses on the assimilation of dramatic elements characteristic of Beckett’s theatre into four productions of King Lear and Timon by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The affinities between Shakespeare and Beckett’s theatre established at the RSC gained significance in relation to wider theatrical contexts. Chapters Three and Four form the second part of this thesis. These chapters examine the various ways in which the Beckettian method employed at the RSC was further explored and used in different media. The Beckettian overtones in Brook’s film of Lear (1971), and Jonathan Miller’s television adaptation of Timon (1981) indicate a strong affiliation between these adaptations and stage traditions associated with the RSC and Beckett’s absurdist theatre. Chapter Four investigates the Beckettian influence in two Hamlet offshoots produced in the 1960s: Charles Marowitz’s Hamlet, and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The intermingling of Beckett’s theatre with Shakespeare’s plays across different media not only reveals distinct modes of engagement with the Shakespearean plays, but also provides a broader understanding of how audiences respond to and interpret diverse methods of adapting Shakespeare.

This thesis explores how contemporary global cinema represents the relationship between humans and nature. Drawing from the philosophy of Georges Bataille, especially his notion of transgression, I argue that certain contemporary films attempt to transgress the limit between human and nonhuman realities. I call these films limit cinema because they operate at the boundary between thought and world: they interrogate the lines between nature and culture and reframe our relationship to aspects of existence in excess of human thought. In taking a film-philosophical approach, I explore not only what philosophy might be able to say about ecological aspects of contemporary film, but also what films can contribute to philosophical discussions of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. To that end, I bring Bataille into conversation with more recent discussions in the humanities that seek less anthropocentric modes of thought, especially film ecocriticism, speculative realism, and other theories associated with the nonhuman turn. I approach the limit between human and nonhuman realities in a number of ways. The films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Ben Wheatley are interpreted in relation to a Bataillean understanding of the sacred, in which nonhuman reality is posited as immanent to this world but beyond human understanding. Two films, Jauja (Lisandro Alonso 2014) and Tectonics (Peter Bo Rappmund 2012), are analysed through the unlikely pairing of speculative realism and apparatus theory; these films demonstrate that the same representational structure can simultaneously implicate us more and less in anthropocentrism. Human subjectivity therefore cannot be cast aside so easily, and I argue that film ecocriticism cannot do without a theory of cinematic subjectivity. I begin to lay out such a theory in relation to Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013) and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), arguing that these films evoke subjectivity as an unstable process of turning inside out. I conclude by considering love as a way of relating to the nonhuman, using Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog 2005) and Konelīne: Our Land Beautiful (Nettie Wild 2016) as examples of cinematic expressions of love for nature. Though I argue that it is finally impossible to see beyond our finite human perspectives, limit cinema pushes against the boundaries of thought and encourages an ethical engagement with perspectives beyond the human.

My doctoral research analyses contemporary North American romantic films and the meanings brought to and made from them by socially and economically diverse audiences in London. It does so in the context of a historicised and ideologically alert account of connections between biological, psychoanalytic, anthropological and sociological theorisations of romantic love and its screen depictions. In particular, my audience-led textual analysis of discourses of Euro-American romantic love is driven by an engagement with three claims: First, that neoliberal or late-capitalist individualism has engendered a ‘crisis of romantic love’ which has reshaped the social and personal promises of coupledom and intimacy. Second, that popular film, the prime contemporary medium of representation for romance, cynically portrays this supposed crisis in an effort to capitalise on audience fears; and third, that audiences of these films experience the ‘crisis’, fashioning their romantic identities and practices in its shadow. Methodologically, the study involved a reflexive and recursive textual analysis of five North American films: Blue Valentine, (500) Days of Summer, Don Jon, Her, and Once. Using these films, I carried out 36 group interviews with (87) inhabitants of the multicultural Borough of Hackney, in East London, the results of which then fed into and informed my readings of the films. Subsequent thematic coding of group interviews revealed overlapping areas pertinent to the project: Technology, class, gender and coupledom. Findings include the suggestion that both romantic films and their audiences in Western Europe are currently adapting strategies, practices and ideas of romantic love and relationships to a new environment of precarious intimacy, technological mediation, and anxiety over economic, professional and personal stability. My analysis concludes that while intersections of class, race and gender continue to inflect audience experience and meaning-making, the current romantic environment that audiences are navigating - and that romantic films purportedly represent - is indeed markedly different from that of the last century. However, claims about the crisis of romantic love are not only greatly exaggerated, but usually also erroneously conflate the pain, anxiety and frailty of contemporary relationships and intimacy with a narcissistic, ego-centric definition of love as a form of consumption.

The most important and celebrated chapter in the history of Bangladesh is its nine-month long Liberation War (Muktijuddho in Bengali) of 1971. My research explores the ways in which memories and histories of the war are shaped by the gender dynamics of nationalism in different periods through examining war-themed films of Bangladesh. By covering both mainstream and alternative war films produced just before, during and after the war, from 1970 to 2011, I trace the various ways in which men and women are represented in war films and construct the idea of nation. I also aim to unpack the politics and aesthetics of war films, contextualizing them as they intersect with the socio-historical contexts. Employing textual and visual analyses with using solid theoretical scholarship, both from the East and the West, concerning cinematic representation of the past, women and nation, I argue that the different power structures of men and women constructed in war films are in accordance with the dominant ideology of the society. The Liberation War was a people’s war, involving manifold participation of both men and women from different classes, religions and localities. Despite this reality, cinematic representations of the War have always portrayed the combat experience as an exclusively masculine enterprise. By contrast, women have been constructed in the films as passive victims or in subordinate roles. Woman is valorized in one instance, in her idealized portrayal as the ‘mother-nation’; this iconic projection of woman, however, highlights men’s heroic defence of their motherland. On the other hand, female rape victims in the war are framed as shame or dishonour for the nation and are offered a customary exclusion by suicide, death or occasionally by some other means at the end of the war films. I have argued that war films exclude the raped women from the narratives in order to maintain a perceived purity of the nationalist discourse, following the national politics, culture and historiography of Bangladesh.

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.

This thesis asserts a revival of the traditional craft workshop in modern independent film production, as a reaction to tensions introduced by digital technologies, such as unpredictable workflows and shifts in craft authority. Using participant observation, the thesis builds a framework of deep texts grouped around the production of the award-winning independent film Notes on Blindness (2016). Digital tools have transformed filmmaking practice, disrupting processes, increasing output volume, and expanding the expert base. What has changed very little is the prescribed form of organisation in filmmaking. The filmmaking community maintains a traditional perception of film craft whilst new technologies are imposing paradigm-shifting changes onto filmmaking organisation and processes. This research responds to the need to gain a better understanding of how digital workflows facilitate shifts in the 'locus of control' of craftspersons, and how they mobilise to cope with the effects of these shifts. Independent filmmakers, caught between the opposing trends of high-end industry and the new digital economies, shield their enterprise by committing to in-house production models, best described as craft workshops. This research further draws a parallel between the twenties studio system and today's in-house craft specialist units. Although hugely different in scale, both organisation structures share the same organisational impulses. By singling out two particular filmmaking roles, this thesis also explains the individual experience in the context of disintegrating craft boundaries. The researcher - a technically versed industry insider - observes the reciprocal influence between craft individuals' and the technologies they operate. While the position of the cinematographer is a typical example in depictions of the authority shifts, this research concentrates on postproduction roles. The findings show the editor role exhibiting less authority over the editing process, predict the disappearance of the DIT, and observe a surprising inflexibility in the colourist role.

This commentary documents the compositional process of writing film music for the classic expressionist silent film Metropolis (Lang, 1927), using MIDI-based orchestral sound resources. Metropolis was chosen from within other possibilities, such as Battleship Potemkin or Nosferatu, not only due to the belief that the film’s surreal eerie mood and machine-like characters could be represented well by the Second Viennese School’s musical style that I intended to adopt, but also due to a judgment that leitmotivic transformation and use of themes as character links fit into a work so rich with characters’ showing subtle psychological states. I set out to compose an original orchestral score for Metropolis with the idea in mind, that film music should contribute to the audience’s integration with the drama and reinforcement of dramatic tensions by strategically supporting the film’s plot and narrative, and that an agreeable conceptual blending between film and music would be crucial to a successful composition. For this task, a thorough review of the leitmotif and related literature about music semiotics and meanings, together with a brief discussion of the MIDI sampler orchestra, proved to be necessary. Metropolis, a pioneering masterpiece of sci-fi, which contains a gloomy portrait of the futuristic world, encouraged me to experiment with the diverse possibilities not only of the leitmotif, but also of kaleidoscopic sound originating from various combinations of virtual instruments of the MIDI sampler orchestra and ultimately to show my musical process. The document traces the leitmotif as a primary compositional device for thematic manoeuvre in both film composers’ scores and major scholars’ discussions; it also incorporates current scholarly research about music semiotics and meanings, which has guided choices in each stage of my compositional process. I have revealed how I applied such lessons as Ennio Morricone’s microcell technique, Danny Elfman’s transformation approaches to thematic material, Howard Shore’s reflection of meaning onto music, and Ilan Eshkeri’s use of themes as character links to my Metropolis. I organized the main character’s associate themes using microcell and transformation techniques and contextualised them as character links. For instance, I produced tunes for cold-hearted characters, such as Rotwang, robot Maria, and high buildings, with the twelve-tone technique, poignant dissonances through interval-classes 1 and 6, recursive rhythmic patterns, or their combinations; I also adopted two distinct types of an octatonic scale to describe contrasting personalities of the two characters and a chord based on 2nd intervals to express the moment when Rotwang’s evil reaches its zenith. Metropolis serves not only as an artistic repository for numerous symbols, but also as a web of leitmotifs towards musical and filmic unity.

This thesis aims to identify the extent to which popular music functionality in UK and US film can be regarded as a developmental process, and, in particular, the importance of the contribution of the 13-year period bounded by the films A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, UK, 1964) and Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, USA, 1977) to this. It also explores salient cultural, historical and industrial factors which may have influenced development. Both these areas have been largely neglected to date. Within the period identified above, three key phases have been recognized which each contributed to specific innovations and developments. These have been labelled ‘The British Invasion Phase’, ‘The New Hollywood Alienation Phase’ and ‘The Disco Phase’. For each of these a primary film text (A Hard Day’s Night, The Graduate and Saturday Night Fever respectively) is analyzed in detail, with reference to the work of Claudia Gorbman and Jeff Smith on the principles of musical function in film. In addition, these chapters are prefaced by an examination of a further stage, ‘The Classic American Musical Phase’, covering a period of relative inactivity, in respect of developments in popular music function, prior to the ‘British Invasion Phase’. Examples of two of Elvis Presley’s films, Girls! Girls! Girls! and It Happened at the World’s Fair, are examined to illustrate why innovation was lacking at this time. As this thesis is not only concerned with what innovations occurred but also why they manifested specifically during a particular phase, individual chapters extend beyond pure film analysis into a study of crucial elements of cultural and popular music history associated with aspects of The British Invasion, New Hollywood and Disco.

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.

This thesis proposes a new analytical perspective to the interplay between the entertaining escapism afforded by spectacular action sequences and the expression of cultural themes in the 2000s-present contemporary superhero film cycle. In the introduction I give a review of the spectacle and narrative debate to explain how current studies on popular action film have tended to primarily focus on the way spectacular displays support narrative progression by driving forward the film plot’s narrative chain of cause-and-effect over time. However, the review then explains that whenever the cultural themes invested in these action film narratives are concerned, there is often an assumption that thematic values only surface intermittently as symbolic motifs at certain moments, and so do not really benefit from this kind of storytelling momentum to the same extent. The introduction then sets up my claim that spectacle not only aids the progression of plot by energising narrative causality and temporal progression, but spectacle also contributes other rhythmically kinetic arcs of narration able to developmentally evolve thematic tales of cultural conflict, which I term as narrativised spectacle. I explain my method as one combining a genre theory framework to uncover the cultural contradictions invested in action narratives alongside a neoformalist analysis of the rhythmic components of physical motion, editing, framing, composition and digital visual effects that express these thematic tensions. Examples are then given to show why contemporary superhero films depend on such kinetic kinds of spectacular rhythm, and provide a key case study to work with. Each chapter finds evidence for my claim by analysing how different kinds of kinetic arc are generated by the audio-visual rhythms of spectacle: able to introduce, challenge, destabilise, conflate, reinstate and eventually reconcile a series of conflicting cultural themes akin to an evolving tale. In the first chapter I explore the physical and spatial spectacle of action sequences. In the second chapter I look at the melodramatic theatrics of performance techniques. In the third chapter I critically interrogate the violent action of the superhero film alongside the themes of masculinity invoked therein. In the final chapter I deal with superheroines. Although these heroines employ these same thematic rhythms as male superheroes, the kinetic arcs are noticeably far more interrupted, due to being burdened with themes of androcentrism. The conclusion then summarises exactly what narrativised spectacle contributes to existing debates on spectacle and narrative, and why it is particularly useful for studying the contemporary superhero-action film.

This thesis elucidates current industrial and representational tendencies in South Korean films that depict Asian others. Asian others such as migrant workers, marriage migrants, overseas ethnic Koreans and North Korean defectors have become increasingly important in South Korean filmic discourse and practice since 2003. This thesis examines how contemporary Korean cinema has responded to the multicultural society and how it seeks to articulate Korean nationalism in the globalised era through the appropriation of Asian others. Such films are intertwined with governmental policies of multiculturalism and discourses on globalisation and thus reflect historical formations both inside and outside South Korean cinema. In particular, this thesis places the celebration of multicultural identity in Korean cinema into dialogue with existing debates on nationalism and sub-imperialism. Through case studies of selected films, this thesis investigates the tension between a changing society and emerging sub-imperial perspectives. The specific interest of this thesis lies in the examination of historical, geopolitical and socio-cultural trajectory in the representation of Asian others, since this discursive structure has been formed around Asia and its regional socio-political history. In doing so, this thesis aims to shift the discursive sphere of these films, which is limited to the discussion of multiculturalism and globalisation, to an expanded sphere which embraces historical and regional perspectives.

This thesis examines the work of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa as a paradigm of recent developments in production and consumption practices in contemporary art cinema. With a notable problematic relationship with industrial film production and with a pragmatic approach to distribution, Costa’s working methods have sustained an evolving narrative of production that negotiates between interstitial filmmaking, and different authorial and collaborative practices, which helped his work to circulate in different circuits of consumption. Scholarly study of Costa’s work has stressed particular stylistic tropes within his films, yet little attention has been given to the authoring processes and production contexts of his oeuvre, or to the mediating factors that impact on his work’s multifaceted exhibition and circulation. These practices come to impact, to considerable extent, in Costa’s filmic style, and to define his agency as a filmmaker – both as a creative practitioner and a linking agent in different fields of production and circulation. This study emphasises the importance of Costa’s agency as a salient factor in the negotiations shaping contemporary art cinema. It maps the cultural, industrial and economic contexts from which the Costa’s working practices emerged, and how these contexts formed a production blueprint that came to support both the production and consumption of his films.

This thesis explores the youth film genre in Russia and Serbia since the 1990s. Youth film is not only an essential means of tracing changes in cultural perceptions about young people and their lives in the post-communist period, but I argue that the genre serves as a means of representing society as a whole. The youth film genre, as an overarching framework dictated by the age of a film’s protagonists, encompasses and adopts a wide variety of sub-genres. This flexibility in youth film allows for an innovative study of the position of one genre as part of a wider sphere of genre film-making in the post-communist period. In particular, I demonstrate that global genre theory can be used as a means to examine the different genre types that have appeared in the cinema of Russia and Serbia in the post-communist period. The film industries of both nations were required to undergo vast changes in the transition from communism to capitalism, making film genres and audience preferences more significant than before. The films I analyse in this thesis borrow extensively from Hollywood genre types, using deviations and national-cultural references to appeal to their domestic audiences. However, I also contend that genres were an important part of the film industries of the Soviet Union and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and that these genre histories must be considered. My close analyses of six youth films provide the communist and post-communist context for their genre usages, placing them within a wider canon of films from particular genres. This thesis contributes not only to the understanding of the youth film genre and the different ways in which these films are made, but also to knowledge of the use of genres in recent Russian and Serbian cinema as a whole. The chapters of this thesis examine how youth films and youth audiences have become increasingly important to post-communist film industries. I demonstrate that youth film allows directors not only to depict the trials and tribulations of growing up during the transition from communism, but how these youth films often reference the suffering of adults in this period. Young people are situated in a historical limbo, between the communist past and the capitalist future, and as such become a poignant metaphor for the wider experience of transition in these two nations.

The construction of suspenseful sequences has been a crucial component for filmmakers to engage the viewer, especially within the thriller and horror genres. This thesis takes a new approach to understanding cinematic suspense by creating a psychophysiological model to measure cinematic suspense and subsequently viewer experience. To date, film scholars and media psychologists have defined the process of suspense in terms of specific story case studies, rather than first independently identifying the components of suspense. Such theories become selective and open to subjective interpretation and have provided misinterpretations of the phenomenon of suspense (Friedrichsen, 1996: 329). Suspense then by existing definitions is not measurable and makes it hard to quantify any discussion of cinematic suspense in relation to viewer experience. Although film scholars and media psychologists recognise that the experience of suspense involves cognition, emotion and physiology, only media psychologists have carried out empirical studies with viewers. Even taking this into consideration there have only been a few psychophysiological studies about the experience of suspense (Kreibig, 2010: 408). Furthermore there is a methodological dilemma, with film scholars preferring a qualitative approach, often via film textual analysis, and media psychologists primarily taking a quantitative approach, analysing data sets using statistical models, which film scholars see as offering little contribution to the complexities of film analysis (Smith, M. 2013). The differences between these methodological approaches raise the question of whether we can gain a greater insight into viewers’ experiences of suspense by drawing elements from both research methods and identifying the most appropriate methods, procedures and techniques to defining cinematic suspense. One strategy for achieving this is to turn to the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) which often uses mixed methods approaches to resolve such interdisciplinary differences, especially in gaining a deeper insight into user/viewer experience of narrative trajectories (Benford et al. 2009). This thesis takes an inter-disciplinary approach that combines film studies, media psychology, HCI and psychophysiology. By drawing from film studies and media psychology it will identify the components of cinematic suspense and create a framework to measure suspense. Taking an HCI experiment approach in designing and analysing the findings of the ‘Terror & Tension’ film experiment, 20 viewers watched 32 short film clips from 8 horror films, dispersed through 4 sub-genres and 4 suspense narrative structures, defined by film scholar Susan Smith: vicarious, direct, shared and composite (Smith, S. 2000). Triangulation was used as a mixed methods approach to capture and analyse three data sets which include: firstly, viewer physiological responses, which were measured in terms of anxiety durability and intensity level by recording viewers’ skin conductance responses (SCRs), a component of electrodermal activity (EDA). The findings were then tested to verify the physiological framework to measure viewer experience of suspense. This led to the development of an EDA model of suspense. Viewer feedback was captured through verbal self-reports, which were recorded after watching each film clip. These physiological responses and feedback were then analysed alongside textual analysis of the film clips in a series of case studies to provide a deeper insight into how cinematic suspense is constructed through narrative elements, cinematography, sound and mise-en-scène. The research findings demonstrate that the EDA model of suspense makes a valuable contribution to film analysis and understanding viewer experience of suspense and offers psychophysiology a new framework to measure suspense in terms of anxiety durability and intensity.

Through a heterogeneous set of contributions from film studies, psychoanalysis and critical theory, including Leo Bersani and Laura Marks, Jacques Rancière and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, the dissertation confronts spectatorship, film theory, and their relation, on the issue of emancipation and of its discursive regulation. Against the pedagogical forms of film theory and the authoritarian framing of the spectator’s position that can be seen to be integral to the functioning of the cinematographic apparatus, this work suggests that we consider theory as an internal aspect of film experience, rather than as its external explanation. Arguing for the fundamental emancipation of the spectator together with the heteronomy of the subject and the discursivity of film experience, the dissertation addresses what, in film experience, resists being reduced within intellectual mastery, metapsychological structures, and the logic of interpretation, and rather remains radically incommensurable with the principles of its intelligibility. Indeterminacy and a lack in mastery are thus taken to be the constitutional ground of spectatorship as a praxis and of the spectator as a site of tensions and dissensus. More specifically, three basic dimensions and categories of this “wayward” ground of film experience will be examined in their correspondences and connections: contingency, free association, and embodiment.

In this thesis, I offer a reappraisal of direct cinema through a study of documentarian D.A. Pennebaker's mature-period direct cinema. This is an unexamined period in Pennebaker's career that offers new perspectives on an often-maligned form of documentary. The period under study ranges from 1968 to 1970 and encompasses a range of films, commercials, abandoned projects and personal works. I focus on three films: Eat the Document, Sweet Toronto and One P.M. By shifting the critical focus away from the early and classical period of direct cinema, as well as its ‘canonical' films, I ask: How does direct cinema engage with the world in its later stages? What can be understood about direct cinema by examining works that do not circulate in ‘the canon,' and how does this analysis change our perception of it? Two further questions guide my study of Pennebaker: What are the aesthetic properties and ideological preoccupations that characterise Pennebaker's mature period? What is the political address of this set of films and how does that reposition the politics of direct cinema as a whole? Methodologically, I employ a close textual analysis of the films and an historical analysis of the period, conduct personal interviews with Pennebaker, and engage with intellectual debates within documentary studies to answer these questions. My study builds upon recent trends in direct cinema scholarship, which have opened up new critical horizons by returning the critical focus to the film texts themselves and the cultural and social contexts in which they were produced. I contribute knowledge to documentary studies by focusing critical attention on a neglected period in a key documentarian's career. Additionally, I perform a textual analysis of the period's films that focuses on the materiality of sync sound – the crucial, but largely neglected, aesthetic characteristic of direct cinema – as a means of investigating my ideological and political line of questioning. I also develop two key concepts: the performative documentary, which builds upon existing definitions by Waugh ([1990] 2011), Nichols (1994) and Bruzzi (2006; 2013) and furthers the concept through an application of Brecht's alienation effect; and ‘kinetic progressions,' which, I argue, is Pennebaker's cinematic process of signification that exploits classical direct cinema's emphasis on present-ness and found symbolism to further formally evolve the language of direct cinema in a way that fulfils its potentiality for political discourse.

This thesis is an exploration of the tomboy figure across a range of literary and cinematic texts from the nineteenth century to the present day. The tomboy may seem to be a familiar cultural archetype, but my study also examines lesser-known, often marginalised aspects of the figure, with the intention of bringing to light new dimensions of tomboys and what they signify. Reaching beyond well-known stories, I have looked at tomboy representations outside the Eurocentric and North American versions, bringing in examples from the Caribbean, South America, Asia, and from within the postcolonial diaspora. Exploring these various hidden tomboy histories has meant engaging with work on how the tomboy figure might ask us to rethink settled notions of childhood gender identity, of the queer child, and the very concept of childhood itself as a queer temporality. Moving from a study of Wuthering Heights and nineteenth century children's fiction, I consider more recent tomboys in a small number of international films (drawing here on concepts of embodiment, materiality and the sensuous experience of cinema) before investigating how tomboy figures relate to questions of ethnic subjectivity in novels by Jamaica Kincaid and Catherine Johnson. By covering such a wide range of historical periods, genres and texts, the aim is to trace the complexities of the tomboy, a child figure that has always had strong connotations of gender transformation and gender rebellion, and is often associated with a playful and empowering otherness while conversely carrying with it the suggestion of reaffirming patriarchal, binary gender identities.

This thesis examines cultural policy for film in Scotland, from 1997 to 2010. It explores the extent to which the industry is shaped by film policy strategies and through the agency of public funding bodies. It reflects on how Scottish Screen, Scotland’s former screen agency, articulated its role as a national institution concerned with both commercial and cultural remits, with the conflicting interests of different industry groups. The study examines how the agency developed funding schemes to fulfil policy directives during a tumultuous period in Scottish cultural policy history, following the establishment of the Scottish Parliament with the Scotland Act 1998 and preceding the Independence Referendum Act 2013. In order to investigate how policy has shaped the development of a national film industry, a further two case studies are explored. These are Tartan Shorts, Scotland’s former flagship short film scheme, and the Audience Development Fund, Scotland’s first project based film exhibition scheme. The first study explores the planning, implementation and evaluation of the scheme as part of the agency’s talent development strategy. The outcomes of this study show the potential impact of funding methods aimed at developing and retaining Scottish filmmaking talent. Thereafter, the Scottish exhibition sector is discussed; a formerly unexplored field within film policy discussions and academic debate. It outlines Scottish Screen’s legacy to current film exhibition funding practices and the practical mechanisms the agency utilised to foster Scottish audiences. By mapping the historical and political terrain, the research analyses the specificity of Scotland within the UK context and explores areas in which short-term, context-driven policies become problematic. The work concludes by presenting the advantages and issues caused by film funding practices, advocating what is needed for the film industry in Scotland today with suggestions for long-term and cohesive policy development.

In considering the once highly visible and vibrant amateur film club culture of the United Kingdom the 1980s is arguably a pivotal, but controversial, historical decade in accounts of marginal film history. These years witnessed the end of the Scottish International Amateur Film Festival, a perceived sense and feeling of decline in club membership and vitality, and even a displacement of the film medium itself, with the arrival of domestic-level, narrow-video technology in the form of Betamax, VHS and other multifarious magnetic formats. Distinct feelings of loss are evident in amateur film journals of the time, while memories of the era among surviving practitioners are often characterised by senses of watershed and narratives of betrayal and distrust with manufacturers and consumer technology. This thesis through the discovery, analysis, and criticism of original visual and written empirical material will counter such understanding of the 1980s amateur cinema period, by exploring changing nomenclatures, technologies and leisure trends in this era. It will begin to define an increasingly diffuse, ambivalent and problematic narrative of this period, where many assumptions about traditional cinematographic, celluloid technology, the arrival of magnetic recording, and digital editing can be challenged. ‘Common-sense’, popular and individual accounts of this transitory era tend to argue that video was a predominant factor in the overall cultural amnesia that the amateur social world experienced. The critical endeavour of this thesis will be to construct a sophisticated and nuanced narrative of this time that counters and challenges elements of these accounts. Rather than asking what magnetic recording, or video, limited, I will discuss what it inspired and what it promoted in a scene that contrary to popular belief actually flourished, and was invigorated, by the new narrow technology on offer. That there is such discordance between different methodological processes also poses a series of larger meta-historiographical concerns around the primacy of oral history and assumptions of reliability. Questions around the diffusion and dissemination of novel technology into existent specific cultural practices will also be at the forefront of analysis. This project collates amateur film texts (archival and internet-based) and amateur journal material (Movie Maker, Making Better Movies, Videomaker and Amateur Film Maker) in providing an alternative narrative of these developments. Emphasis will be placed on both a specific canon of amateur videos identified within the holdings of the IAC Film and Video Institute Library, and by a collection of interviews with prominent amateur film-makers, whose practice has been permanently shaped by their experience of the transitions in the 1980s. Conjunctural readings of film form, technology, genre, aesthetics, production behaviour, and practice will be developed and illustrated through reference to this canon, with a view to extending the existing historiography of amateur cinema in the UK. Focus will be placed on periodising the amateur’s transitory practice, behaviour and language from the film, to the video, to the digital era, and challenging assumptions of decline, contraction and anachronism. Questions centre on three distinct phases of amateur cinematography and new practice indexed by technological innovation: the obsolescence of film technology in the late-1970s; the impact of early three-way video systems in the 1980s and; the use of computer editing software in the mid-1990s. Considering the prior status and vitality of UK amateur film-making, the thesis will expose a hidden history of amateur film-making post-celluloid, and place considerable emphasis and value on this under-researched and burgeoning area of interdisciplinary scholarship. In conclusion, the thesis will provide an important examination of the transitory stage between film and new digital technologies, and promote further public and academic engagement with this lost leisure community. With a recent focus on digital humanities, the bridge that early narrow-track video technology creates, between amateur cinema's celluloid-past and digital future, remains a significant area for exploration. Three narrative arcs follow, each containing an illustrative micro-historical case study, alongside critical writings on language, behaviour and practice specific to video technology and the magnetic image. These arcs will explore and extrapolate the larger attitudes and values of a social world that underwent technological shifts, not necessarily perceived as positive, or progressive.

In recent years, more and more Chinese films have been exported abroad. This thesis intends to explore the subtitling of Chinese cinema into English, with Zhang Yimou’s films as a case study. Zhang Yimou is arguably the most critically and internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker, who has experimented with a variety of genres of films. I argue that in the subtitling of his films, there is an obvious adoption of the domestication translation strategy that reduces or even omits Chinese cultural references. I try to discover what cultural categories or perspectives of China are prone to the domestication of translation and have formulated five categories: humour, politeness, dialect, history and songs and the Peking Opera. My methodology is that I compare the source Chinese dialogue lines with the existing English subtitles by providing literal translations of the source lines, and I will also give my alternative translations that tend to retain the source cultural references better. I also speculate that the domestication strategy is frequently employed by subtitlers possibly because the subtitlers assume the source cultural references are difficult for target language subtitle readers to comprehend, even if they are translated into a target language. However, subtitle readers are very likely to understand more than what the dialogue lines and the target language subtitles express, because films are multimodal entities and verbal information is not the only source of information for subtitle readers. The image and the sound are also significant sources of information for subtitle readers who are constantly involved in a dynamic film-watching experience. They are also expected to grasp visual and acoustic information. The complete omission or domestication of source cultural references might also affect their interpretation of the non-verbal cues. I also contemplate that the translation, which frequently domesticates the source culture carried out by a translator who is also a native speaker of the source language, is ‘submissive translation’.

This thesis examines how early cinema’s social function was mediated by local and national institutions as well as civic agencies in Scotland between c. 1896 and 1933. It proposes a social-historical approach that is based on extensive archival research of documents such as local newspapers, town council minutes, education authority minutes and Scottish Office records. As an empirical and historical study it focuses attention on the social-historical circumstances of cinema exhibition and reception as proposed by New Cinema History. The thesis’ main argument is that institutional responses fell into two categories – constraining and constructive strategies to negotiate cinema’s role in Scottish society. Parts 1 and 2 discuss strategies of control which sought to limit cinema’s social impact as a commercial institution while the third part is concerned with attempts to redefine cinema’s social purpose through the creation of alternative film cultures and exhibition practices. The first part identifies for the first time the specificities of the legal and administrative framework within which cinemas were allowed to operate in Scotland before 1933. It contends that the legal basis of the framework was determined by the Scottish Office’s relationship with Britain’s central government, and that its application by local licensing authorities depended also on the dynamics of municipal power structures. A further argument is that Scottish licensing authorities were more resistant than their southern counterparts to interfere with the content of film shows and exercised control mainly through the regulation of the cinema space and negotiations with local cinema trade bodies. Part 2 analyses British national debates about the legitimacy of cinema as well as film’s potential for education, providing a discursive context for the practices explored in the first part. Centring on the 1917 and the 1925 Cinema Commissions, it focuses especially on the perceived link between cinema-going and juvenile crime and film’s usefulness as a teaching aid. These themes are explored from a Scottish perspective incorporating local debates from Edinburgh and Glasgow. This part maintains that the discourse about the negative effect of children’s cinema-going and the debate on the potential teaching value of films were connected in that they both constructed the child as an impressionable spectator that required institutional guidance and protection. Part 3 considers two constructive endeavours to shape early cinema’s social role in Scotland. It engages with the field of Useful Cinema and argues that this must not be confined to particular films or technologies but must include cinema exhibition practices that were religiously-, educationally- or politically motivated. First, municipal cinema is discussed as an alternative exhibition practice that tried to expand the role of the municipality as public service provider and match the ambitions of its organisers with the taste of local audiences. Second, the diversity of attempts to mediate cinema’s social role is once more illustrated in the case of the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society’s cinema and film work. This is explored diachronically and demonstrates that the Society’s engagement with cinema corresponded to broader contemporary debates discussed throughout the thesis. This part illustrates that the boundaries of cinema’s social function were constantly shifting during the period under consideration and that constructive strategies to define it anticipated characteristic strands of cinema culture emerging in Scotland subsequently.

In this thesis, I explore the ways in which cinematic representations reconstruct and maintain the symbolic power of the global city. Using London as a paradigmatic example, I situate the research in the 1997- 2007 period, the height of the New Labour era in Britain. I investigate the ways in which London’s symbolic power was produced and maintained during this period, using a sociological-thematic analysis of several London-set films, which I categorised by theme. The analysis, which incorporates elements of discourse and social semiotics, demonstrates how these films, with both negative and positive portrayals of the city space, are central in the construction of London as a symbolically significant global city. I discuss the consequences of this symbolic construction of the city in relation to its global image and indeed the ways in which the city is changing as a result of the blurring boundaries between the cinematic and ‘real’ cities. My analysis shows that ‘Glamorous London’, one of the thematic categories I devised, paints a picture of the city through the lens of class and racial homogeneity, and gender normativity, where the principles of neoliberal capitalism dominate the landscape. ‘Glamorous London’ is an exclusive and exclusionary place in which only certain types of individuals who fit these normative stereotypes, are welcome. At the same time, films which relate to the ‘Multi-Cultural London’ thematic category, provide a more bleak and gritty image of the city, where asylum seekers and economic migrants live ‘cheek by jowl’, struggling to survive in the city’s unforgiving underbelly. My analysis shows that Multi-Cultural London films are equally central in painting a picture of a diverse global city which is dynamic, exciting and full of possibilities. The films in this thematic category show the ‘other side’ of London’s global city identity and, more specifically, the city’s success as a global centre for capitalism and, correlatively, the city’s symbolic power as multi-faceted and full of contradictions. This thesis also provides evidence from non-cinematic media as well as from the city’s evolving landscape, to demonstrate that these cinematic trends have farreaching implications beyond cinema and indeed beyond the time period in which the film analysis is located.

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) is remembered as one of Russia's most influential and celebrated filmmakers. Over the course of his career he released seven feature films: Ivan’s Childhood (1962); Andrei Rublev (1966, USSR release 1971); Solaris (1972); Mirror (1975); Stalker (1979); Nostalghia (1983); and The Sacrifice (1986). Drawing on a history of post-war Soviet cinema, this thesis brings his films into contact with the concepts outlined in Gilles Deleuze’s two radical books on film: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Deleuze's Cinema books provide a system of classifications – what he calls a taxonomy or geology – of cinematic images. While their primary focus is on Western-European and American cinema, this thesis re-conceives Deleuze’s approach to film outside of that narrow context. My approach is informed by the specific historical, cultural, and industrial contexts of Tarkovsky's films, establishing the first sustained encounter between Deleuze and post-war Soviet cinema. In doing so, I offer a fresh perspective on Deleuze’s cinema concepts by re-conceiving the division between his 'movement-image' and 'time-image' in the context of the post-war Thaw, the development of the Soviet space programme, Stagnation, and the escalation of nuclear threat following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

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.