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This thesis examines strategies of anticipation in contemporary post-cinematic art. In the Introduction and the first chapter, I make the case for anticipation as a cultural technique for the construction of and adjustment to future scenarios. This framing allows analysis of constructions of futures as culturally and media-historically specific operations. Via anticipation, constructions of futures become addressable as embedded in specific performative and material economies: as regimes of prediction. The hypothesis is that cultural techniques of anticipation do not only serve to construct particular future scenarios, but also futurity, the very condition for the construction of futures. Drawing upon the philosophical works of, in particular, Vilem Flusser, Jacques Derrida and Elena Esposito, and the theory of cultural techniques, I conceptualize anticipation through the analysis of post-cinematic strategies. I argue that post-cinematic art is particularly apt for the conceptualization of anticipation. The self-reflexive multi-media interventions of post-cinematic art can expose the realisms that govern regimes of prediction. Three cultural techniques of anticipation and their use as artistic strategies in post-cinematic art are theorized: enactment, soft montage and rendering. Each of these techniques is examined in its construction of futures through performative and material operations in art gallery spaces. The second chapter examines strategies of enactment in post-cinematic installations by Neïl Beloufa. My readings of Kempinski (2007), The Analyst, the Researcher, the Screenwriter, the CGI tech and the Lawyer (2011), World Domination (2012) and Data for Desire (2014) propose that enactment allows for an engagement with futures beyond extrapolation. With Karen Barad's theory of agential realism, the construction of futures becomes graspable as a political process in opposition to a mere prolonging of the present into the future. The third chapter focuses on the strategy of soft montage in works by Harun Farocki. I interpret Farocki's application of soft montage in the exhibition Serious Games I-IV (2009-2010) as a critical engagement with anticipatory forms of organizing power and distributing precarity. His work series Parallel I-IV (2012-2014) is then analyzed as a speculation on the future of image production technologies and their role in constructing futures. The final chapter analyses the self-referential use of computer-generated renderings in works by Hito Steyerl. The installations How Not To Be Seen (2013), Liquidity Inc. (2014), The Tower (2015) and ExtraSpaceCraft (2016) are read as interventions in the performative economies of contemporary image production. I argue that these works allow us to grasp the reality-producing and futurity-producing effects of rendering as anticipatory cultural technique. My thesis aims to contribute to the discussions on a 'turn towards the future' in contemporary philosophy and cultural criticism. My research thus focuses on the following set of questions. What can we learn about the operations of future construction through encounters with post-cinematic art? How are futures and future construction framed in such art? What realisms do future constructions rely on? And how can anticipation as a cultural technique be politicized and democratized?

In this project I examine how we, as film spectators, build an understanding of characters in fiction film narratives and how this could be said to relate to the way in which we build a sense of selfhood in the real world. I conduct detailed case studies of six films, which in different ways engage with issues of selfidentity in a way that can be said to highlight the inherent fragility of our sense of self. I bring together contributions from theoretical film studies, cognitive psychology, and philosophy in order to both link ideas from these different areas of research as well as linking seemingly disparate films through their respective approaches to character portrayal. My aim is to build on the existing discourse that predominantly falls under the banner of cognitive film theory, with particular emphasis on audience affect and character portrayal. I offer alternative readings and approaches to certain films which feature unconventional character development and which, to varying degrees, deviate from established cinematic storytelling norms. The idea I wish to advance is that there is an inherent aversion to imagery and / or cinematic storytelling styles which highlight (either implicitly or explicitly) the artificiality of what we are seeing, particularly if the example involves a breakdown in the clarity of character identity. The view I offer is that an aversion to or frustration with such instances is not solely restricted to our sense of confusion stemming from a perceived lack of clear storytelling. Behind this lies the potentially discomfiting sense that the fabricated nature of characters points towards something similarly fragile about our own 'real world' identities, which can be the case particularly if the subject matter complements the avant-garde style of the film in question. When character identity dissolves it may impair our ability to comprehend a film narrative, but a negative viewer response may also be generated by the suggestion that our sense of self might be more vulnerable that we care to admit. I argue that our appreciation of certain kinds of 'difficult' films require a revision of not only how we approach films more generally but how we understand selfhood itself.

This PhD is a genealogy and critical examination of the writings and films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, spanning the period from the early 1960s to 1980s. Despite the prominence of their texts, there has not been a book-length study of either body of writing, nor an overview of their overlap and mutual influence, in what was their most productive period. Nor has there been an extended account of the important connection between their theory and their practice as filmmakers. My thesis undertakes these tasks. I interpret and challenge existing scholarship, while simultaneously examining in detail for the first time lesser-known works, drawing on archives and interviews. Through close readings I elucidate Mulvey's interrogation of the patriarchal fantasies structuring cinematic and artistic forms and her feminist appropriation of classical Hollywood melodrama; I map the related issues Wollen's texts activate, of cinematic signification and materialism, the buried potentialities of the historical avant-gardes, and their connection to the avant-garde film contemporaneous with his writings. Their moving image works, I demonstrate through detailed analyses, bring these ideas into dialogue and work them through in a more open, exploratory vein. I trace key notions like 'counter cinema' across films and writings by both authors. Shifting between writings and films allows me to investigate authorship and collaboration, while their designation of their films as 'theory films' opens the question of the interconnection of theoretical and aesthetic discourse. I track their output through the era's pivotal intellectual movements (semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism) and political currents (the New Left, May '68 and its aftereffects, the women's movement). In doing so I also provide a picture of the radical, experimental film culture that thrived in Britain from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and the broader left-wing counter-culture of which it was a part.

This thesis explores the thematic and stylistic patterns across the previously unexplored fiction and non-fiction work of the modernist author Bryher. More precisely, this study focuses on Bryher's three autobiographical novels: Development (1920), Two Selves (1923) and West (1925), and the film criticism she published in the film journal Close Up (1927-1933) and her volume Film Problems of Soviet Russia (1929). Influenced by her experiences as a young woman at the turn of the twentieth century and World War I, Bryher formulated strong opinions on women's social status, education, and patriarchal society. These opinions and the style of prose that articulated these ideas in her novels translated into her film criticism and informed the author's understanding of the film medium and film art throughout the 1920s and 1930s. By placing Bryher's texts in the context of the modernist writing produced by others in her close circle, this thesis compares her work to the novels and film essays published by the Imagist poet H.D. and the novelist Dorothy Richardson. Thus, it highlights Bryher's crucial role as an editor of the film journal Close Up and challenges previous explorations' tendency to attach her ideas to the opinions about film articulated by other Close Up critics, such as her long-term companion H.D. or Close Up's chief editor, the Scottish artist Kenneth Macpherson. Finally, this thesis's comparison between Bryher's novels and her film criticism traces the interpretation of these themes and the style of the author's prose across different genres and contexts. The variety of the texts' topics and registers expands Bryher's commentary of early twentieth-century society to early film culture and establishes her as a key figure of early British film criticism.

This thesis introduces the concept of the multisensory film experience through a cognitive model of experiential film aesthetics in which we argue in favour of the idea that spectators can have perceptual experiences of film in the realm of thermoception, nociception and the vestibular sense-all of which are senses outside of the classic senses of sight and hearing examined in the context of film studies. We examine each of these senses in relation to the work of three contemporary film directors who have taken stylistic and experiential advantage of these senses to build their own authorial voices, namely, Gus Van Sant, Ki- duk Kim and Knut Erik Jensen. We employ a combination of arguments from the field of multisensory studies (neuroscience) and cognitive film theory and from our own analysis of the stylistic elements of film. We call this a model of 'experiential film aesthetics' because of the intersection between stylistic elements and spectators' own perceptual mechanisms. Experiential film aesthetics are, therefore, a film experience that involves not the conventional idea of watching film in a perceptually detached manner but rather the idea of perceptually participating with senses that have no direct stimulation but rather indirect stimulation through visual and aural information. In this sense, we explore our proposed viewpoint, which is characterised by the apparent paradox that the film medium in its conventional audio-visual form is a sensory gateway to a multisensory experience. These experiential film aesthetics can serve as a useful introduction to further investigations of the experiential nature of film and across sensory modalities that have not yet been examined in film studies.

Over the past few decades, the relationship between film and philosophy has been an object of an intense debate among film scholars, revitalizing some basic theoretical questions about cinematic representations and their meanings. As a result of this debate, many recent works in film philosophy, adopting the approach identified with the term 'Film as Philosophy' (FaP), have considered film as capable of its own philosophical thought. from this specific research perspective, the thesis proposed a new methodological strategy in maintaining FaP. The main aim of this thesis is to develop a hermeneutic method for the interpretation of film philosophical thinking. Starting from the fundamental relationship between film and filmgoer, the proposed method is founded on the concept of the film world. This concept is particularly effective because it identifies the film both as a world to be percieved, which emotionally involved the filmgoer, and as a world to be interpreted, which calls for a philosophical enquiry into its meanings. Moving from the theoretical perspective of phenomenological hermeneutics, combining Merleau-Ponty's and Ricoeur's philosophies, and reconsidering Goodman's theory of worldmaking, the film world becomes the hermeneutic horizon from which film philosophical thought can emerge. The definition of the method proceeds via a detailed examination of Ricoeur's philosophical thought, especially with regard to his hermeneutics of text and logic hermeneutics. Ricoeur's hermeneutic methodology has the potential to provide a valuable resource for film studies by inviting scholars to consider film interpretation in terms of film world hermeneutics, but only on the condition that an open and self-critical dialogue with different perspectives is part of the interpretive process.

In a period of proposed crisis and disruptive transformation to media, journalism and criticism, this thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of English-language film criticism by offering an empirically-grounded study of observations and interviews with some of the world’s foremost film critics and editors from influential publications such as Cineaste, CinemaScope, IndieWIRE, The Guardian, Reverse Shot, Sight & Sound and Variety. These expert opinions are not only situated in the wider context of historical perspectives on criticism from ancient and modern origins, but also positioned against on-going debates into journalism and digital media which often denote a landscape characterised by both continuity and contestation. The findings are drawn from extensive fieldwork in the UK and North America taking place at two major international film festivals in Edinburgh and Toronto, supplemented with additional interviews with film critics from each of these regions. This thesis relies upon a great deal of published literature, from text books and media coverage to film criticism. These materials detail a crisis in criticism and in the culture at large, a prehistory of existing media, concepts around literary and arts criticism in general, and provide the means for a detailed model on Six Schools of Contemporary Film Criticism to be posited. A combination of desk research with participant observation and in-depth interviews has led to and strengthened the overall findings which conclude that film criticism in the contemporary digital age is defined by more continuity than disruptive transformation. While this prosaic – but not myopic – approach to film criticism highlights the habits and norms of film critics it also notes the significant changes taking place through the interactions of individuals and institutions with technologies. However, while transformations are acknowledged and new events specified – indeed the theme of change gives shape to the findings chapters in terms of a chronology of the new, newer and newest – in print, then online and subsequently towards convergent media forms – it is argued that the long view best serves to counteract hyperbolic discourses on film criticism as dead or inhabiting a new golden age. These empirical findings, in the face of transformative digital idealism, redress the balance and argue the case for evolution rather than the often mooted digital revolution.

My written thesis modifies George Romero’s zombie in an effort to exhume the critical potential of melancholia. The notion of melancholia as a dissenting condition has been rendered obsolete within contemporary culture. I equate the shift from melancholia to depression with the emergence of the postmodern climate that collapses radical opposition from the outside by assimilating dissent within its own operations. The subversive qualities of melancholia are superseded by the classification of depression as a dysfunctional inability to assimilate the logic of capitalist production. I initially formulate my own psychoanalytical term – undead melancholia – to describe the figure of the zombie. I then use the notion of sublimation to rewrite undead melancholia as a utopian phantasy of transgressive subjectivity in which life willingly acquiesces to an emancipatory marriage with death. This fiction of a radical new strain of zombie is understood as a melancholic phantasy of an oppositional critical strategy that has now been lost within contemporary homogeneity. I then discuss the zombie as an abject walking corpse that collapses Symbolic meaning altogether. This reading of the zombie undoes my own formulation of undead melancholia as a transgressive subject position, and re-articulates it as a haptic materiality beyond subjectivity instead. I finally propose a performance practice that might ape the materiality of undead melancholia by interrupting the formal and normalised protocols of contemporary culture. This performative melancholia, as a haptic antagonism, would refuse to consent absolutely to the status quo, asserting that the homogenous procedures determining contemporary cultural production are contingent negotiations rather than essential conditions. My recent performance practice involves staging unexpected musical interventions at various conferences, symposia, art events and exhibitions to which I have been invited as a guest speaker. This work confounds the professional protocols and the normalised codes of behaviour associated with these events.

A wealth of research has highlighted the importance of understanding individual differences in the uses and effects of the mass media. However, significantly less attention has been paid to the role of individual differences in the area of film use and preferences. This thesis sought to provide more insight into the area of movie consumption, whilst investigating the links between individual differences, movie- watching motives and film preferences. The thesis also sought to amalgamate some of the more common methods of analysing individual differences with a new measure, namely the Uses of Film Inventory, a self-report questionnaire which was designed to assess individual’s choices for specific genres of films. The investigation aimed to make a contribution to research in two areas. The first was within the field of individual differences research, by providing a more methodical understanding of how film preferences can be accounted for as a function of important psychological needs. The second is within the applied field of media psychology, by providing researchers with an understanding of both the uses and effects of the mass media, as well as interpretative methods in understanding consumer behaviour in film. The theoretical chapter comprised of a thorough literature review of the theoretical and methodological foundations to the scientific understanding of the psychological determinants of individual differences in film preferences. The experimental chapters explored several possibilities in which established personality traits and movie- watching motives may be linked to preferences for a variety of film genres. Overall, it was concluded that when all of the psychological measures were considered, a number of variables could account for the role in predicting movie preferences. Thus, taken as a whole, this thesis demonstrates that a number of personality variables and movie-watching motives can, to some degree, predict film preferences. However, it must also be acknowledged that although these variables are an important factor in predicting consumer choice in film, other factors must be essential. Thus, further research is essential to answer the outstanding questions generated by this relatively new field of research.

The thesis sketches-out three main and general philosophical, analytical and utopian-strategic areas: Initially, the project begins with a cumulative overview (i.e. drawing upon a collection of authors and publications) of the Marxist philosopher of hope and utopia Ernst Bloch, and, the Blochian philosophical framework. I focus upon, and, analyse several specific philosophical areas within the Blochian framework, notably, those of the chaos of the trace, and Bloch's unifying (unfolding, trans-historical) category of Hope and Utopia. In order to navigate this difficult philosophical terrain, the thesis proposes several conceptual and neologistic "inventions" - associated with chaos and complexity - so as to invoke a potentially useful (neo )-Blochian philosophical vocabulary. The project then applies Bloch and the Blochian utopian framework to the specific area of popular film/cinema (and, within this, the portrayal of "beautiful monsters"). The neo-Blochian concepts are then applied to utopian cinematic metaphors, images and themes concerning "beautiful monsters"; in exploration of this, I embark upon several contra-punctive Blochian (and, neo-Blochian) analyses of the films: E. T., Edward Scissorhands, Monsters Inc., and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. This is to highlight the theoretical use, and, application of, the different (and refracted) areas of neo-Blochian theory. The conclusion proposes the potential for a cinematic utopian strategy, based upon the notion of anarchogogy and the complex-temporal trace connections that can be prompted by popular cultural (cinematic) sources.

Since the early 1950s the concept of the individual cinematic genius has been widely accepted as a legitimate status of the successful auteur, and its most renowned advocates have been Cahiers du Cinema of that period - 'the age of the auteur'. Despite being historically questioned and refuted by the other arts of the last century the concept of the genius auteur has survived the 'linguistic turn' of the 1960s and 1970s, and has since been maintained most prominently in the figure of Alfred Hitchcock. The thesis discusses the ways in which historical constructions of genius have been justified by outlining how the concept itself has evolved from notions of divinity prior to the invention of cinema as an art form, to the politicized terms of its contemporary use. Of particular import to this study is Cahiers du Cinema's early justification of cinematic genius that the thesis proves reducible to their understanding of G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy. However, developing an understanding of Hegel' s philosophical texts only serves to further undermine the concept of individual genius revealing a paradox, in that Hegel himself refuted the idea of the singular divinely gifted individual in his Phenomenology of Spirit 1807. The thesis' in-depth analysis of the relationship between genius, cinema and philosophy, through the new lens of Film-Philosophy, shows the concept of the genius auteur to be in many ways inconsistent with the source of its original philosophical justification in Hegel; and incompatible with the very collective nature of a true science of knowledge. In response to this the thesis illustrates the suitability of the critical tenets of Film- Philosophy in confirming the hypothesis that film can philosophise, and can do so autonomously in the sense that it already holds the philosophical ideas within its final product. In investigating the 'myth of total cinematic genius' from this Hegelian perspective against a variety of ancient and historical cultures and beliefs, the thesis' initial study develops the sense in which the signifier genius has evolved from its etymological roots and focuses on its subsequent politicisations. The second study is a more complex development of the ways in which Hegel's concepts of logic and teleology have been historically appropriated into a language of genius associated with the auteur forming the necessary grounds to conduct a critique of Cahiers du Cinema of the 1950s. Studying these early historical expressions of the journal in this larger context develops a more objective understanding of their subjective ideas of the auteur, their practice, their product, as theoretically restrictive on these terms, and their critical appraisals understood in the wider objective context of Absolute Spirit, the thesis returns to 'historical' film discourse on these more interrogative terms of political justification and philosophical misrecognition. On the basis of this revised understanding of Hegel' s oeuvre and its central concepts of Absolute Knowledge and Absolute Spirit, the third study drawing on Hitchcock as the model auteur fully illustrates the autonomy of the philosophical idea in the moving image and thereby relegates the work of the auteur genius to historical forces in a final confirmation of a philosophizing film. The final case study in illustration of this idea of an unconscious transference of the philosophical idea in the moving image in many ways explains how genius has been displaced onto the flesh and blood film-maker by focusing on one individual shot from Hitchcock's 'signature film' Rear Window 1954. Returning to this film and the critical and philosophical climate in which it couched with the hindsight of Film-Philosophy proves a successful means of reducing the genius, film and Hitchcock's film to products of a systematising culture of film and philosophical study that has traditionally discussed the film in the immediacy of their understanding of Hegelianism and cinema. As such, the thesis purports the subsequent necessity to return, not only to the film, shot or sequence in question, but also taking into account the practices and methods of analysis pertaining to how these historical objects have been understood and embalmed in this language of genius. This outline serves to obviate the necessity for a more detailed and measured focus on how these cultural objects have been reduced entirely to the individual under the auspices of the auteur, as well as the ways in which Hegelian philosophy had become a formal and misappropriated endorsement of the auteur genius. Referencing this particular period of the journal and the philosophical climate in which it is couched, the evidence formulated in this thesis will be used to illustrate a final Hegelian understanding of film and cinema that will expand our understanding of authorship and the experimental, as well as developing the ways in which this approach can cause us to rethink film history with a particular emphasis on its inherited notions of cinematic genius.

The purpose of this project is to take the first steps towards a philosophy of the screenplay. More specifically, the project attempts to clarify our present concept of the screenplay in two regards-in terms of what the screenplay is and what kind of a thing it is. In doing so, it makes the following three arguments in each of its three parts, respectively. (1) The screenplay is an artifact concept and, therefore, an essentially historical concept, the boundaries of which are determined by the collective practices of the creators of screenplays. Therefore, any plausible definition of the screenplay must be an intentional-historical definition of some variety. (2) Because early Hollywood screenwriting practices intelligibly emerged out of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century playwriting practices (which are acknowledged art practices), Hollywood screenwriting can plausibly be identified as an art practice and at least some Hollywood screenplays can be plausibly identified as artworks. Other screenwriting practices and screenplays can plausibly be identified as art in virtue of their intentional-historical connection to acknowledged, prior art. (3) Through their collective creative and appreciative practices, practitioners (and others who ordinarily deal with screenplays, like readers) determine the facts about what kind of a thing the screenplay is. Any plausible account of the ontology of the screenplay must, therefore, be strictly constrained by those practices. Furthermore, an analysis of those practices shows that the screenplay must be the kind of thing that is creatable, multiply instantiable, finely individuable, and destructible. The master argument is that because the screenplay is a kind of artifact its boundaries are determined collectively by screenwriters, and its ontological nature is determined collectively by both writers and readers of screenplays. Any plausible theory of the screenplay must be strictly constrained by our collective creative and appreciative practices.

The Spectator of Modernity is a practice based thesis that investigates the process of Film Reception from the perspective of the film as experienced by the individual and her/his apprehension of the interaction between the fictional world on screen and the everyday world. The written component of the project positions the historical context and explores the theoretical notions for the understanding of film-viewing as a decidedly modern activity of special significance for the individual's permanent quest for meaning. Accompanying the written element, an original audiovisual piece amalgamates the real life testimonials of memorable film experiences which form the qualitative analysis of the research, with the story of a fictional character wandering in the location of the city. The activity of the character, driven to investigate the memorable film experience and in permanent search for a way to reengage in a meaningful relationship with everyday reality, is argued that is analogous to the activity of film-viewing. Following the considerations of the theory and the findings of the qualitative analysis of the project, the audiovisual piece suggests that watching a film is as a form of flanerie carried out inside the cinema, through which the individual seeks to assign meaning to the transient and fragmented events of modern life.

This PhD “Film by Practice” sets out to question and explore the nature of film poetry. The poetry of the cinematic image is described by the filmmaker Jean Epstein as the “unveiling of the magic inherent in the visual object beyond the capacity of words to define” (Epstein, cited in Sitney, 1978: xxiii). This is a daunting task that the study interprets through the moving image with particular reference to the magical temporal art of trance possession, which is processed within the genre of experimental ethnographic documentary and intercultural film. This thesis is an experiment in form, taking the filmmaker Maya Deren’s notion of film as comprising of “narrative horizontals” and “poetic verticals” (Deren and Sitney, 1971: 178) explored through a practical investigation of movement and time in space both beyond and within the film frame, studied through the art installations Divine Horsemen (2005) and People Inbetween (2007). It is focused through a reading of Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian philosophies of cinema as “movement-images” and “time-images” (Deleuze, 1989: xvi, xvii), exhibited as multi-screened video art installations that evolve within the space and hence exist in a perpetual state of “becoming”. Whether this is the sounds and images that change depending on where they are viewed, or the narrative theme of the works as “becoming other”. The themes of “in-betweenness” and the “mix” are investigated through these two video documentary artworks; first, by a third party restaging/remixing of the experimental ethnographic footage of Haitian Voodoo trance possession shot by Maya Deren, unfinished and posthumously released as Divine Horsemen the Voodoo Gods of Haiti (1985); and second, diaspora and the intercultural are explored through the first person personal. Intercultural documentary and experimental ethnography filtered through me with specific reference to my own triangular ethnicity, being British, Sri Lankan, though classified as Dutch Burgher, a “lost white tribe” (Orizio, 2000: 2): a journey into racial “becoming” as an “in-between” belonging to a diasporic community.

Repetition is inherent to cinema. From the complex interweaving of genre cycles and Hollywood stars to the elementary mechanism of film projection (twenty-four times per second): cinema is repetition. It is perhaps little wonder then that psychoanalysis is often thought of as one of the discourses with which to write about film in the 20th century. However, this thesis problematises both cinematic repetition and psychoanalytic film theory, stressing that each is haunted by a spectre: the remake, and the film-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, respectively. Despite its critical opprobrium, I explore the remake not only as a viable object of cinematic scholarship, but one necessary in moving past the impasse of film studies identified by Timothy Corrigan (1991) as ‘historical hysteria’. My research turns to Deleuzian film theory as a counterpart, rather than replacement, of the predominant Lacanian model. This is, however, neither a defence of the remake nor of psychoanalysis, but, rather, an attempt to submit both to a radical reassessment that, as Lacan says, aims at giving you a ‘kick up the arse’ (1998:49). Eschewing the ‘example’ as a remnant of film theory’s current collapse in form, I suggest two ‘case studies’ for consideration, augmented by a cache of film references: (1) Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake (1998) of Alfred Hitchcock’s original Psycho (1960) as a ‘symptom’ of Hollywood’s self-cannibalisation; and (2) George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1993), a Hollywood ‘auto-remake’ of his own Dutch original, Spoorloos (1988), as a ‘fetish’ of Hollywood’s desire in the European ‘Other’. Rather than expose Deleuze to a Lacanian framework I subject the one to a reading of the other in a möbius relation, turning them inside-out, so to speak. Mediating these two thinkers is Slavoj Žižek, a cultural theorist whose own ‘filmosophy’ is revealed from amongst his often frenetic writings. In so doing, I expose a dark underside to Hollywood repetition, one which provides some new tools for understanding the popularity of cinema’s most critically neglected discourse.

This dissertation proposes a new film theory that embraces a philosophy of technology. It argues that, while digital culture efficiently combines functions (i.e. of phone and camera), this novelty has been given undue attention - for example in theories that celebrate remediation and convergence. Research shows that mobile phone and internet use gives rise to changes in how we think about our relation to space and time. I argue that these, along with notions of status and identity, are affected when technology mediates interaction. Extending McLuhan's prediction about instability in these phenomena, I propose that changes in perceptions of space, time and identity are key conceptual markers, which operate in a framework of 'affect'. Defined as an intense 'immersion' in automated functions, the space of affect has a media history in which the moving image is central. I explore a willingness to interact with the moving image apparatus by users in production or consumption frameworks. In contrast to a sadistic model of consumer immersion in film narrative that draws on psychoanalysis, I argue that a masochistic motive operates in the space of affect. Applying Gilles Deleuze's notion of an "abstract assemblage of desire" and drawing on concepts proposed by Actor Network Theory, discussion of examples of affective interaction are shown to prefigure the immersion seen in users of games and the internet. Submission to hybrid agency in the moving picture apparatus ranged from the pre-studio picture personality through the classical Hollywood period to the games avatar. By mobilising the raw material of identity and masochistic desire in the pre-studio picture personality, users of the apparatus employed the arrangements afforded by technology to form a prosthetic bond. The result was the star system, an assemblage of desire that metamorphosed the birth of moving images into an 'affective' hybrid agency extending outside the cinema. This dissertation argues that mechanisms of the birth and metamorphosis of moving images may be adapted to an understanding of digital culture in a continuum of conceptual change.

This thesis uses concepts of narrative identity to assess the functions and characteristics of storytelling in the articulation of personal and cultural identity in four French literary and filmic autobiographical texts from the 1980s and 1990s: Azouz Begag's novel Le Gone du Chaäba (1986), Claire Denis' film Chocolat (1988), Annie Ernaux's book Journal du dehors (1993) and Dominique Cabrera's film Demain et encore demain (1998). Synthesising various accounts of narrative identity expounded by a range of philosophers, sociologists, psychologists and historians (including Paul Ricceur, David Carr, Jerome Bruner and Adriana Cavarero), the thesis argues that they offer a fruitful approach to autobiographical discourse in terms of the temporal configuration of lived experiences, the blend of historiographical and fictional modes and above all the intersubjective basis of autobiographical identity. The enquiry focuses on evaluating the texts' critical interrogations of the storytelling mode alongside their own uses of narrative. Structured in two parts, the analyses in Part I focus on textual narrative approaches to the intersections and tensions of contested myths and histories in the constitution of hybrid postcolonial identities. Chapter One argues that using a narrative approach to lives and selves to analyse Le Gone du Chaäba yields insights into the formation and expression of identities by individuals located between conflicting traditions and discourses. Chapter Two, on Chocolat, broaches similar territory, but with a greater emphasis on memory processes and the visual dynamics of identity. The analysis probes the film's depiction of the narrative underpinnings of imperialism and its remembrance, as well as how the text develops alternative narrative practices which undermine the totalising knowledge of History in favour of a subjective positioning which foregrounds its own European perspective and limitations. Part II shifts attention to two diaristic works as a means of assessing the validity of the concept of narrative identity regarding texts which appear to eschew the narrative form as the best means of representing lives. Chapter Three, examining Journal du dehors, contends that a spontaneous narrative impulse is crucial to the text's responses to everyday experience and urban public life, and is ultimately expressive of the author's autobiographical identity. Chapter Four focuses on the twofold narrativity of Demain et encore demain: that of living (during the filming), and that of textual revision (during the editing), arguing that the interplay of these two levels and mediation of documentary and fictional registers are central to the therapeutic value of the project. The thesis concludes that while the four texts share a certain scepticism regarding the ideological uses of narrative, they also all express desires to understand and articulate the narrative fabric of lives.

This thesis examines the confusion of reality and unreality in contemporary media discourses, and focuses specifically upon the medium of cinema. The art of our time, cinema reflects the postmodern fusion between machine and culture. As such, a crucial concern of this work, which addresses the impact of digital and visual technological developments in western societies and examines how such advances have come to supersede the historical and cultural imperatives, is precisely this resultant confusion/fragmentation. The thesis analyzes how audiences interpret the current cinematic evolution, based on computer generated imagery, and how their subjectivity influences and impacts upon knowledge, ideology, culture and society as a whole. The creation of (un)realities in fictional spaces is most apparent in such concurrent places as the Internet, videogames and Virtual Reality, spaces which are certainly of interest to this thesis. However, it is also crucial to note that recent years have seen a proliferation of films based on the confusion between reality and unreality; and, further, that these have enforced a fear of being deceived by technology. Indeed, such post-classical films as Total Recall (Verhoeven, 1990), The Lawnmower Man (Leonard, 1992), The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999) and eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999) materialize this fear cinematographically; a fear which is arguably then assimilated by the spectators because this fear is projected onto their lives. In this respect, it is essential to be aware of the creation of new spaces, identify related boundaries and understand our own creations in order to have control over our destiny. Concepts such as (un)reality, a hybrid of reality and fiction, are essential to refer to the inventions, contexts and information that appears in a world where atoms and a binary of 0s and 1s constitute a dual code to which our lives conform. The production of an original film, Luna (Diaz Gandasegui, 2007), works in synergy with the written text to illuminate the complexities of (un)reality and the vital influence of technology on its confusion.

This thesis investigates the frequent labelling of Catalan directors Jose Luis Guerin and Marc Recha as foreign or de-territorialised. Investigating the interstitial, liminal and marginal spaces that they occupy, it examines Guerin's Tren de somhras ('Train of Shadows', 1997) and En construccion ('Work in Progress', 2001) alongside Recha's Pau i el seu germa ('Pau and his Brother', 2001) and Les mans buides ('Where is Madame Catherine?', 2003). In light of the emergence of an 'accented voice within Catalan literature in the form of female author Najat el Hachmi, this work is timely because it addresses the alternative and hybrid cinematic language established by two native filmakers who are simultaneously local and foreign.

This thesis develops an approach to analysing sound-to-picture and audio-visual semiosis in non-fiction film.

This thesis examines the importance of a psychological conception of modernity for the filmic project of Surrealism. It posits two motivations behind this theorisation, the first as the surrealists' interest in the developments of psychology and the seconds as contemporaneous emphasis on the film as inherently connected to the machinations of the mind. Additionally, it explores the surrealist use of tropes from early filmmaking to suggest they recognised the filmic form as open and fluid, unconstrained by the boundaries of medium specificity. Chapter One examines surrealist film through the analogous trope of automatism and concludes that for the surrealists, filmmaking was understood as a solution to the problems of this method of production. Chapter Two extrapolates from this argument to suggest that the film scenarios are implicated in the desagregation of the self that has been identified as an integral facet of automatism. Chapter Three proposes an aesthetics of attention and distraction, whereby the lack of a stable subjectivity is played out in the attentive strategies of the film. Chapter Four explores the representation of memory and temporality as filmic paradigm and demonstrates that Surrealism appropriated this dimension of visual representation into their attempts to disrupt filmic diegesis and produce an embodied spectator.

This thesis discusses the scope for philosophy in and about film. It applies philosophical analysis to both the form and the content of Antonioni's films, and is thus both a philosophical approach to Antonioni's cinema as well as an exploration of his philosophical thought. The first part of the thesis reviews worthwhile discussions that are relevant to the complex relationship between film and philosophy. It also assesses the way in which the trend of philosophical thought known as existentialism fits into this relationship. General notions about existentialism are thus reviewed, as well as those that bear more particularly on art and cinema, and especially on the world as it is represented by Antonioni. Parallel to this, the thesis explores the role of time and space in film, and the philosophical implications of the way they are used by Antonioni. The second part of the thesis is devoted to the analysis of specific themes in Antonioni's films that relate them to an existentialist interpretation of reality. Chapter six is devoted to the early Antonioni, from his documentary shorts up to I1 grido, a period in which the phenomenological quality of his exploration of reality is already clearly noticeable. Chapter seven deals with Antonioni's peculiar narrative style and the way in which this style reflects his philosophical stances. The final chapters of the thesis are devoted to Antonioni's second important core of films and discuss the shift in Antonioni's central concerns. In films such as Deserto rosso, Blow Up, The Passenger, or Zabriskie Point, the connection with existentialism is related both to specific themes, such as anxiety and alienation, as well as to the more abstract philosophical stances that are implied by an existentialist worldview. In these films Antonioni questions reality itself, and discusses the limits of both our perception and representation of it.