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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This thesis defines the term exploitation as it relates to the style of a number of key American film titles that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, concurrent with the fall of cinema censorship. These productions presented spectacles of convincing corporeality and the adaptation of film techniques which may be labelled ‘realist'. The key films of this thesis will be argued to comprise a cinematic movement that can be labelled exploitation. The first part of this thesis will outline the time period of this study and the methodology used; based upon the historical and comparative writing on the classic Hollywood era of cinema initiated by David Bordwell. Drawing upon Bordwell and other scholars who have engaged with what the Academy recognises as the ‘new film history' (such as Eric Schaefer and his discussion of the classic exploitation film), I will introduce the work of André Bazin and argue that his writing on cinema realism can be attributed and understood as a style of filmmaking. This style is appropriated by exploitation insofar as similar, minimalist representations of modernity were brought to American cinema, albeit presented in generic narratives. The second part of this thesis will look at each of the key exploitation genres in detail: blaxploitation, exploitation-horror and sexploitation. I will engage with previous writing on what may be deemed ‘marginal' cinema and argue that each of the genres discussed in this thesis contain films that approach taboo subject matter with an oppositional approach to their Hollywood ‘other'. This point is especially relevant insofar as exploitation reveals images of physical horror and sexuality that the mainstream hides. In conclusion, this thesis hopes to bring a more contained and studied look at ‘marginal' cinema to the Academy and to give a definition of exploitation that will influence and inspire future studies of the form.

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

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

This thesis analyses multi-episode British drama programmes in the spy and conspiracy genres over a period from 1979 to 2010, investigating televisual issues of form and genre and interrogating a model of how television is considered to 'work through' the concerns and anxieties of the nation. Chapter One provides a literature review of the conventions of the spy and conspiracy genres. Chapter Two looks at a cycle of ‘prestige’ adaptations of spy novels beginning with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC2, 1979), considering the new developments they brought to form and genre, particularly in terms of complex serial narratives. Chapter Three analyses a cycle of 'authored' conspiracy serials emerging from traditions of 'radical' television drama across the 1980s, including Edge of Darkness (BBC2, 1985) and A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988). Positioning them in relation to the oppositional anxieties of the era, I argue that there emerges a greater tendency for such programming to engage with topical 'headline' issues, thereby playing a greater role in television's 'working through' than the more traditional spy series. Chapter Four takes a more longitudinal approach and examines how the spy series evolved over these decades, from The Professionals (ITV, 1977-83) to Spooks (BBC1, 2002-11), finding that these also display a greater tendency towards topical concerns but that the manner in which this is accomplished is substantially affected by the series form. Finally, Chapter Five analyses a revival of the conspiracy genre in the context of the 'war on terror', considering how programmes such as The State Within (BBC1, 2006) approach the same issues as Spooks but from an alternative perspective. Across the thesis, I explore how over time the formal and generic innovations introduced at the beginning of the period of study are absorbed into and managed by existing traditions and a growing generic self-consciousness, which comes to partially blunt the process of 'working through'.

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

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

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

The central goal of this thesis is to frame a widespread mode of practice amongst avant-garde filmmakers as a form of 'practical psychology,' rather than a form of artistry that masochistically rejects pleasurable aesthetic experiences - as it has been characterised by Steven Pinker and others in a cognitive context. I will suggest that, taking "sense as muse" (in Stan Brakhage's words), many avantgarde filmmakers introspectively draw creative inspiration from their own cognitive and perceptual capacities, and touch on topics explored by actual psychologists. These include narrative comprehension, memory, visual perception, synchronisation and synaesthesia; each of these themes will be considered in detail. I will also suggest that as practical psychologists, avant-garde filmmakers provide "lessons in perception" (in Michael Snow's words), offering psychological experiences that are largely unrehearsed in commercial cinema, and life in general. This practice will be framed as a form of 'expansionism.' In addition, I will advance the argument that avant-garde filmmakers provide spectators occasion to reflect on their own habits of mind and perceptual facilities by challenging them, rather than triggering well-rehearsed cognitive and perceptual processes which run beneath the conscious radar. My thesis is divided into three parts that focus, in turn, on cognition, visual, and audio-visual perception. In each, I will demonstrate how avant-garde films can teach us about the nature of our own minds. If the spectator is willing to engage with films that do not attempt to directly interface with pre-existing, wellrehearsed skills of comprehension, the avant-garde may reveal experiences and pleasures which develop the viewer's sensitivities and range of engagement skills. In a sense, my argument is an updated invocation of the Romantic model of the artist-as-prophet who enlightens the mind, in the context of modern research on cognition and perception.

This study utilises a variety of research methods in order to investigate aspects often overlooked within Scottish film criticism, and indeed film studies more generally, namely: pre-production, production experiences, marketing and distribution, and reception. To date, Scottish film criticism has exhibited a preoccupation with questions of nation, national identity and national cinema, and overwhelmingly scholars have privileged almost exclusive analysis of the film text. Spurred by Jonathan Murray’s (2007, 2011, 2012) questioning of the continued relevance of the national framework, this thesis goes beyond the frame of the film text in order to consider new ways in which a national framework might be of relevance when analysing Scotland’s cinematic output. Concurrently, the chosen case study is also used as a means of critiquing existing literature on collective identity and national cinema. As the title of this thesis suggests, analysis centres on the Dogma-inspired Advance Party initiative and its resulting films, Red Road (Arnold, 2006) and Donkeys (McKinnon, 2010). Devised by Glasgow-based Sigma Films and Denmark’s Zentropa, the cross border collaborative dimension of the Advance Party framework initially appears to challenge the appropriateness of the national framework. As this thesis demonstrates however, such a simplistic conclusion is reductive and overlooks the complexities of the film industry. Throughout this thesis, questions as to the intended and eventual function of the Advance Party framework arise, and these are revisited by means of the thesis Conclusion.

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

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

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

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

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

This thesis closely examines the representation of theatre in film, using insights derived from an ever-growing literature dedicated to the notion of intermediality, in order to understand film’s temporary disguise as another medium. With the realization that theatre is not just another object of representation in film, it becomes increasingly apparent that an analysis of theatre-in-film has the potential of serving as a catalyst for a complex reflection on the nature of mediation. The present dissertation studies the conditions under which this potential is realized. Throughout the thesis, I am integrating textual analysis with theoretical considerations, in an attempt to offer new readings of the chosen films and show how they cohere around four distinct problems pertaining to the issue of theatre-in-film. These problems can be spelled out as follows: the length and embedment of the theatrical inserts, the dual address of the represented performances, the relation between quoted theatre and theatricality and the problem of showing versus telling in the representation of theatre. The case studies were selected from a period spanning forty years; they range from Jacques Rivette’s 1968 L’Amour fou to Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 Synecdoche, New York. Through an in-depth analysis of these case studies, the chapters demonstrate that film is extremely versatile in the handling of theatre references, and that it is precisely this versatility that throws in crisis the existent intermedial discourse. I am arguing that staging a theatre event in film comes with its own set of challenges that need to be accounted for with the assistance of a suitable methodology. In a sense, I have devised my own methodology, by using intermediality studies in conjunction with concepts borrowed from narrative and drama theory, as well as with the analytical tools of film studies.

Comic mockumentaries have been a regular fixture on cinema and television screens since the early 1960s, and texts such as A Hard Day’s Night, This is Spinal Tap, The Thick of It and the work of Christopher Guest have all achieved mainstream popular success. However, current scholarship has side-lined virtually all discussion of these comic texts, which are both the most popular and the most common examples of the fake documentary form, in favour of those instances which exhibit an intense reflexive relationship with the straight documentary. This thesis proposes a critical and aesthetic re-evaluation of the comic mockumentary form, by using detailed textual analysis of a range of radio, television and film texts, to explore how they function critically and historically, and how the comedy within them works. I also argue for the consideration of the mockumentary as a genre rather than simply an aesthetic mode. My main contention is that the primary aspiration of the comic mockumentary is entertainment, rather than the construction of a reflexive critique of the straight documentary form. As a result, the mockumentary has begun to sever its direct links to documentary, and it is no longer useful to examine these texts solely in terms dictated by their relationship with documentary proper. By emphasising the role that comedy and tone play within the genre, I hope to open the form up to a wider range of critical approaches than current discussions have so far allowed. The thesis also highlights the centrality of performance, suggesting that the performative aspects of genuine musicians such as The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and the public personae of politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, are the focus of the mockumentary text. Examples such as This is Spinal Tap and The Thick of It can be seen to create an ironic critical distance, complicating the way that we understand the straight documentary through the comedic interplay of the real and the fictional.

This thesis deals with the issue of the everyday represented in the films of Japanese film director Ozu Yasujiro (1903-1963) from a socio-historical perspective. Recognised as one of the masters of Japanese cinema, Ozu is well-known for his depiction of the everyday life of Japanese people consistently throughout his long career. Ozu’s cinema, however, has been mainly studied from a formal point of view that pays attention to his particular cinematic styles. This thesis aims to revise this tendency by adopting the socio-historical methodology that actively draws upon the knowledge of modern Japanese history, and combining it with the analyses of Ozu’s films. Following a chronological order of the prewar, war and the postwar in Japanese history as well as in Ozu’s career, this thesis is structured to investigate two main issues – the modern and the postwar – at both textual and contextual levels. My discussion thus includes historical backgrounds of how these two issues defined Japanese society, their influences on Japanese film industry (especially with regard to Shochiku, where Ozu worked), and their interaction with Ozu’s films as appearing in the form of everyday lives of different kinds of subjects. The result suggests a much more multifaceted shape of Ozu’s oeuvre. Each of the different subjects I analyse exhibits contrasting aspects of the everyday in terms of both spatiality and temporality, which are closely related to the changing history of modern Japan. I also argue that Ozu consistently provided his representation of the everyday a critical dimension of Japanese modernity, which I conceptualise with the notion of ‘deviation’. This thesis thus concludes that Ozu, as a filmmaker of everyday life, was always conscious of his contemporary society, and in this sense, the everyday in his films is more dynamic than empty.

As a Japanese cultural genre, animated works for girls serve as sociocultural texts which articulate hegemonic social norms and ideologies regarding gender in Japanese society. This thesis aims to critically examine representations of 'magical girl' protagonists in Jpanese Magical Girl TV animation programmes (anime) for girls from 1966 to 2003, and to analyse female audiences' viewing experiences and understanding of those programmes in relation to the context of sociocultural and feminist movements in Japan. By using a combined methodology of close textual analysis of six Magical Girl TV anime and of qualitative research, in which individual interviews with female audiences and a focus group discussion among girl audiences were conducted, this thesis explores how representations of Western-oriented witches and witchcraft in the Magical Girl TV anime facilitated constructions of female gender identity and idealised 'self' and how actual female audiences in three different age cohorts understood, took pleasure in, consumed, negotiated, resonated with and/or reconciled with those representations. Although Japanese witch animation texts articulated Japanese normative moral values and hegemonic femininity as well as ideal gender equality, they served as sites in which female audiences took pleasure in constructing an ideal 'self' and self-assertion through negotiating, resonating and reconciling with Western-oriented fashionable female protagonists and their lifestyle, and attaining self-expression through 'textual poaching' or exercising imagined magical transformations in an all-female or solitary environment. This thesis attempts to contribute to uncovering little-explored but important Japanese cultural texts of Magical Girl TV anime and explicate the way in which actual Japanese audiences responded to this gender-segregated genre of Japanese TV anime.

Whilst the prominence of the sequel in contemporary American cinema is inarguable, little attempt has been made to identify its formal characteristics or to provide a comprehensive account of its historical development over the past century. Offering a corrective to this oversight, this thesis addresses three key research questions: what are the formal characteristics of the sequel in all its variations in American cinema?; to what extent have these formal characteristics changed over time?; and how are these changes related to the shifts in the economic and industrial structures of the American film industry? Drawing on a wide range of sources, the first four chapters trace the historical development of the sequel, from silent era features such as The Son of Sheik (1926) through to contemporary franchises. Building upon this historical context, the second half of the thesis is dedicated to an examination of the Hollywood sequel’s formal characteristics. Initially concerned with the manner in which the sequel form differs from and challenges the notions of closure which inform the Classical Hollywood paradigm, these chapters progress to a consideration of the dynamic between genre, stars, character and narrative as it plays out in sequels ranging from Bride Of Frankenstein (1935) to Rooster Cogburn (1975) and Rambo (2008). In placing equal emphasis on history and aesthetics, the thesis ultimately aims to both develop a typology of the sequel form, and to build a more complete picture of the many ways in which Hollywood has sought to repeat its previous successes, the historically specific conditions which have governed these repetitions, and the compositional norms which have resulted.

The relationship between television institutions and film in Britain has a complex history, influenced by profound changes in both industries over time. The involvement of public service broadcasters (PSBs) in British cinema has been a regularly-acknowledged, but under-examined phenomenon. There is a dearth of up-to-date scholarship dealing with the relationship, particularly as it unfolded over the turbulent decades of the 1990s and 2000s. This thesis updates and expands the existing field on the relationship between British television and film cultures. It does so by examining the ways in which PSBs have been involved in film culture, as producers, distributors and exhibitors. It also discusses the significant changes to this relationship wrought by the coming into dominance of digital technologies, and the responses of the PSBs to digitalisation. The body of the thesis is separated into two parts. Part One examines the relationship between television and film at the end of the analogue era, ending roughly in 2002. The first chapter explores the historical background to television films in Britain, discussing the semantic turn from describing single dramas shown on television as ‘plays’ and ‘films’. The second chapter outlines three case studies which explore the relationship between television and distribution. The third chapter discusses the industrial relationship between film and television, and the distinct discourses of ‘quality’ applied to each form. The second part of the thesis discusses the effects of digital technologies on the PSB’s role as producer, distributor and exhibitor of films. Chapter Four explores the position of the PSB as patron of low-budget, digital production schemes. In Chapter Five, the opening night and subsequent decade of broadcasting on the FilmFour digital television channel is analysed. Chapter Six takes as its subject the online film output of the BBC, particularly via its iPlayer platform, and its short film distribution network, the BBC Film Network.

This thesis concerns a very common, yet surprisingly under-examined, concept: the Hollywood ‘happy ending’. Focusing on an aspect of this convention that I call the ‘final couple’ (i.e.: an ultimate romantic union), the study examines movies from throughout the history of popular American cinema in order to interrogate common critical assumptions about ‘happy endings’. Chapter 1 questions the existence of the homogenous norm the ‘happy ending’ by attempting to define it – a task more challenging than the convention’s reputation would have us believe. Chapter 2 looks at the relationship between ‘happy endings’ and closure, arguing that, while some films succeed in making their final couples feel emphatically ‘closed’, others use different strategies to render the same convention comparatively ‘open’. Chapter 3 examines the connection between ‘happy endings’ and ‘unrealism’, considering firstly the traditionally close conceptual relationship between the ‘happy ending’ and fiction tout court, before, secondly, exploring the ways in which the final couple relates to debates concerning the ‘openness’ of life and the ‘closed’ nature of narrative. Chapter 4 addresses the ideology of ‘happy endings’ by discussing (1) what potential the concept of the final couple might be said to have for structuring viewers’ real-life romantic relationships, (2) the ideological implications of closure, and (3) the different ideological meanings that a final couple can convey in what is often taken to be an innately ‘conservative’ genre, the romantic comedy. The results of my analyses suggest that ‘happy endings’ are as conducive to variation as any other artistic convention – a fact that has significant ramifications for our thinking about Hollywood conclusions.

This thesis aims to shed light on the cultural and aesthetic implications of the relationship between Italy and India on and off the screens of Italy, following the expansion of Bollywood in Europe during the 90s. Bollywood's propagation abroad affected the identity of the South Asian diaspora, urban spaces and aesthetics which generated what Le Guellec - describing the arrival of Indians and Bollywood cinema to Paris - named as Bollywood/India mania. The study began with the exploration of the historical meaning of the term aesthetic in order to offer a contextualization on the sense of the aesthetic as a philosophy of art; furthermore, it established a background for further theoretical debate on South Asian diasporic identity formations within the entertainment industry of Italy. The research methods that predominated throughout this work were those of textual argumentation, aesthetic analysis, quantitative and qualitative questionnaires and interview data. The reasons for using different and interdisciplinary methods and approaches to offer an account on diasporic cultures, resided in the attempt to reveal the multiplicities of the "cultural and social" visible. The theoretical frame that this research intends to follow is through two quite distinct disciplines: aesthetic and cultural studies. The aim is to capitalise on the productive intersection of these two disciplines to analyse parts of the South Asian cultural text on the screen and beyond it as producers of transnational images imbued with melancholic memories and melancholically conceived spaces. This work will attempt to individuate the existence of representational patterns based on the aesthetic of melancholy with its nuances and metamorphoses, which represents, narrates and constructs South Asian and/or fused identities socially and culturally on the screens of Italy. The notion of semiosphere as elaborated by Jury Lotman, was utilised to define the cultural and dialogic dynamics of mainstream products that move constantly closer to each other generating original "formats" characterised by novel transnational and multiple identities. Throughout this thesis, the emphasis was placed on the "encounters", the "journeys" and the "sharing" of cultures, hence highlighting the possible conditions of belonging contemporaneously through multiple modalities: mentally, psychologically and experientially to multiplicities of cultures. In addition, the notion of "world culture" was contemplated in an attempt to practically support what Gilroy, in Black Atlantic, shaped as "inter-cultural" and translational formations.

There are three parts to this thesis, which explores how politicians, the public and broadcasters were affected by ‘antiestablishment’ BBC comedy between 1939 and 1973. ‘The Establishment’ is understood not just as the holders and loci of power, but something with social dimensions, too. Part one explores the immanent anarchy of humour by looking at controversies stirred by radio comedy before 1960. Key studies are ITMA and The Goon Show, two programmes at times concealing ‘antiestablishment’ attitudes. The chapter also discusses a BBC file, ‘Jokes Against Government’, which shows that listeners were detecting satirical intent and so-called political bias in variety as early as 1932. The implication is: if relatively innocuous comedy can disturb, those programmes which intentionally attack politicians may have quite some power. Such programmes are the focus of part two, which dedicates a chapter each to That Was The Week That Was; Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life and BBC-3. These were televised revue shows with much satirical, topical content. All three were produced by Ned Sherrin and all three, it is argued, had sustained political impact. The archival material presented suggests a worry by many politicians, both Labour and Conservative, about television’s role in political culture. This theme continues in part three. What were the Sherrin trilogy’s long-term effects? The contention is that the irreverence towards politics that marked out these shows was subsumed into some more ‘serious-minded’ BBC programming. One example offered is the 1971 documentary Yesterday’s Men, which examined the fortunes of the Labour Cabinet defeated in the 1970 general election. The presentational techniques of Yesterday’s Men, sometimes described as ‘satirical’, led to a row between the BBC and some of the documentary’s interviewees, analysis of which leads to some conclusions about the value of archival research into satire.

This thesis uses the concept of melancholy to extend and develop the critical understanding of the Western genre. It focuses on the various ways in which Westerns made in Hollywood between 1939 and 1962 can be said to express melancholy. It proposes that, during the period in which Western movies were an important and popular part of mainstream film production, the conventions of the genre were familiar and well-developed enough to permit a wide range of sophisticated expressive possibilities. The complex and ambiguous associations attached to the notion of melancholy make it particularly suitable for demonstrating this. The Review of Literature addresses the major perspectives through which Westerns have been conceived and understood within Film Studies, and assesses their relevance to the methodology employed in this thesis. It also considers some of the wider contexts that will be employed in the discussion of the genre and its conventions that will follow. The Introduction to Melancholy establishes a fuller cultural, historical and intellectual context for the particular focus of the thesis, and suggests some of its specific applications in relation to Westerns. The main section of the thesis is divided into four chapters. Each of these examines a particular feature of the Western genre that can be used to express melancholy. Chapter 1 discusses the conventions that are employed to frame our understanding of violence in the genre. The melancholy implications of these conventions, and the problems that arise out of them, are considered in relation to a number of films from the period. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with more specific and localised tropes which function as melancholy reflections of other aspects of the genre. Chapter 2 looks at the night-time town as an alternative melancholy space within the generic world of the West. Aspects of the previous chapter’s discussion of violence are developed in this context, through the detailed analysis of the use of the night-time town in Pursued, Rio Bravo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Stagecoach. Chapter 3 examines the figure of the old man as a melancholy counterpart to the Western hero. It demonstrates a long-standing connection between the two character types within the genre, and investigates how this connection is used to portray the hero in a melancholy light. The first half of the chapter examines the melancholy relationship between the hero and old men as supporting characters in Blood on the Moon and Yellow Sky. The second half develops some of the same issues further in relation to old men in more prominent roles in Man of the West and Ride the High Country. Chapter 4 considers the use of music to express melancholy in Westerns. Its particular focus is the Western title song, and the period of the early 1950s when it came to prominence. More broadly, the chapter looks at the effects of combining styles and conventions from Western movies and popular music, and the ways in which this combination can produce melancholy. The films whose title songs are examined in detail are High Noon, Rancho Notorious, Johnny Guitar and River of No Return.

This thesis examines the impact of writers, producers and directors on programming and production in several periods of US television drama history. I address the role authorship plays in shaping US television drama aesthetics and how creativity functions within its production cultures. I also address the personalisation of programmes through media and textual visibility and the place of authorship within the commercial and industrial contexts of US network television. My methodology involves textual analysis of a large viewing sample of programmes and a combination of archival research into original production documentation and analysis of US TV coverage in newspapers, magazines and trade journals. The thesis is divided into four case studies, each looking at the spaces for authorship, creativity and personalisation in key historical moments of US TV drama production and programming: early 1950s anthology writers, producers and directors (e.g. Paddy Chayefsky, Fred Coe, Delbert Mann); anthology producer-hosts of the late 1950s (e.g. Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock); executive producers of the 1980s-2000s (e.g. Steven Bochco, Jerry Bruckheimer); and guest writers and secondary producers in the 1980s-2000s (e.g. David Mamet, David Chase). The thesis aims to debunk the critical notion that authorship is present only in boutique quality television or that authorship is purely an invention of branding strategies and suggests new formulations of US TV authorship specific to historical production contexts. The thesis extends the author paradigm to include multiple authorship and a range of production roles and also revises several historiographical assumptions about authorship, programming and production. The thesis offers a model of authorship studies in television studies which frees authorship from quality prescription. It addresses the issue of industrial collaboration and incorporates it into our understanding of TV authorship. I relocate authorship studies from cultural mythology to aesthetics and production analysis, and provide more medium and industrial specificity.

The family plays an integral role in Hollywood films of almost every genre. Hollywood’s renditions of the American family, however, remain largely traditional and no longer reflect contemporary reality. This thesis explores how contemporary Hollywood deals with the family, posing the question: ‘Has Hollywood created its own monolithic family model?’ The thesis demonstrates that, rather than offering a solid monolithic family model, the Hollywood family displays a tension between traditional and liberal attitudes, wanting to move forward but unable to let go of the past. The thesis places Hollywood’s representations within a wider cultural framework, utilising social history, feminism and psychoanalytic discourses. This is done through three case studies exploring the nuclear family, and a fourth extended chapter that analyses Hollywood’s alternative families. Chapter One takes as its focus the father-daughter relationship in sequels and series. This relationship is symptomatic of a shift towards a new generation in Hollywood where masculinity is not necessarily the central concern. Although the father-daughter films indicate a renewed interest in women’s familial roles they essentially demonstrate a crisis of masculinity and a traditional, patriarchal model. Chapter Two analyses the mother’s role through the films of Meryl Streep. This chapter situates a discussion of the Hollywood mother within a postfeminist society and questions whether this new generation of Hollywood has promoted a diversification of the maternal role, finding that traditionalism still dominates as maternity and ‘traditional’ femininity remain central concerns. Chapter Three explores the superhero family. This unconventional family is a further symptom of Hollywood’s new generation. That said, the unconventional is used as a tool to promote the conventional – the nuclear family. Superheroics are used to recuperate dysfunctional families and provide an easy ‘fix’ for their troubles. Chapter Four examines the prevalence in contemporary Hollywood of alternative family models. Although these are many and varied, Hollywood’s alternative families (discussed here in terms of single-parents, divorce, gay and lesbian families, the working-class family and the Black American family), ultimately conform to the standards of the nuclear norm, giving further credence to the argument that Hollywood’s families are torn between traditionalism and attempts to embrace liberalism and diversity.

This thesis proposes that the temporality of the moving image is not just its basic condition, but also an alterable stylistic parameter. By analysing three broad stylistic categories of cinema - Classical Continuity-editing, Montage, and Long Take - it is demonstrated that the time of a sequence or shot operates as an active element within the formal fabric of the work. Beyond this, it shows that these film styles may in fact be defined by the characteristic ways in which they treat time. Methodologically, it adapts concepts from the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Hans Georg Gadamer, fusing them with close textual analysis to allow the theory to grow around the practical instance of its object. One of the primary goals is to establish a critical idiom capable of dealing appropriately and sympathetically with this neglected aspect of film aesthetics, to uncover a suitable vocabulary for talking about the expressive use of time in cinema. This study contributes to the existing body of research on cinematic time (which is primarily concerned with ontology and ideology) by addressing the distinct lack of critical and theoretical work that engages with the temporality of cinema at the microscopic level of the moment to moment passage of a scene, that is, the temporal stylistics of cinema.

This thesis examines the spaces of urban-industrial northern England within the context of post-industrial change. This work combines close textual analysis and an interdisciplinary approach, which includes an examination of sociological, economic and political contexts relating to de-industrialisation and the growth of the service economy. The thesis is organised into four chapters, each dealing with a different manifestation of northern space, including ‘The Red-Brick Terraced Street’, ‘The Council Estate’, ‘The Mill and the Mosque’, and ‘The Gentrified North’. I argue that within a range of texts, the representation of northern space reflects the fragmentation that is a key feature of both the post-industrial experience. Furthermore, it is argued that the gendered balance of northern representation has shifted, spatially and generically, back towards a feminine paradigm. Contrary to surface appearances, it is also argued that important elements of traditional hegemonic representations of northern space are seen to persist within the spaces of the new despite the fragmentation that characterises the post-industrial era.

Peter Lorre often described his acting as merely "face-making". This disparaging attitude is reflected within critiques which read the life of Peter Lorre as a tragic narrative of wasted opportunities and his career as a screen performer as restricted by the nature of his employment in studio-era Hollywood. Working in the United States, he was unable to escape from the notoriety of his first major role in the German film, M (1931), or from the murderous persona that evolved from his portrayal of a psychopathic serial killer. His status as an emigre positioned him as a European "artist" whose talent was misused by American filmmaking practices which typecast the actor in line with his nefarious public image. This thesis proposes to investigate the accuracy of these perceptions which approach the actor via a binary split between "person" and "persona". It will offer an alternative methodology for analysing the career of the screen actor which recognises that persona-based analyses can obscure complex negotiations between performance, image and the conditions of employment. Rather than attempting to reveal the "real" Peter Lorre behind the image, the context of Lorre's mutable position as an employee within the Hollywood industry and the misconstrued association between his screen labour and his public persona will be examined. The creative agency of the actor will also be examined in order to question Lorre's definition of himself as "face-maker" whose work was reliant upon performative gimmicks. This alternative approach to the screen actor will be pursued through a chronological investigation of Lorre's professional labour. Also necessary are an exploration of the features of Lorre's persona and an understanding of the role played by other media in the construction of this public image. My methodology will combine close textual analysis of Lorre's screen performances, archival research into the terms of his employment and extensive analysis of promotional discourses pertaining to the actor throughout his career. My historiography of Lorre will consider the relationship between the actor and a number of his employers to suggest that conditions of employment help to shape screen performance. Lorre's status as a "face-maker" will also be challenged through a demonstration of the actor's use of complex performative techniques within his film work. This thesis will demonstrate the limitations of interpreting Lorre's career as Hollywood's mismanagement of a problematic performer. Instead, his career can be considered indicative of industrial strategies that exist between acting labour, promotional personas and employers. One consequence of my research is the reevaluation of Lorre's persona as "extra-filmic" and his career as "transmedial". As such, this thesis highlights how the significant labour of a screen performer can potentially become superseded by the personas used by employers to promote actors away from the cinema screen.