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This thesis explores the links between film cultures and film distribution.What happens to film culture when a film is passed between friends on a USB, or downloaded from a cyberlocker, or purchased on a copied DVD at a local grocery store? Beyond the cinema and the major commercial players of the formal sector, film now lives in a multiplex of different access points, from iTunes downloads, legal BitTorrent releases, host-your-own community screenings and free YouTube streams. New forms of distribution beyond the dominant commercial players are not just restructuring the film industry, they are presenting theoretical challenges to film scholars. As disruptions and innovations in the industry, these trends speak to the research questions: How to conceptualise new forms of distribution not previously subjected to scholarly analysis? How do audiences in Australia access film today? How does the distribution of a film influence the terms of its use and reception by audiences?This thesis takes a multi-method path to interrogate the cultural-economic exchanges within the distribution screenscape and a diversity of distribution circuits. Case studies include Australia’s formal distribution sector, Sydney Film Festival analysed as a distributor and new and disruptive digital circuits such as the BitTorrent Now e-store.Combining industrial analysis, interviews with distributors and ethnographic observation, this thesis contributes to new knowledge in three major ways. First, throughout film studies, distribution has been primarily analysed as an industrial phenomenon. I attune distribution research to the phenomenon of film culture, showing how distribution and exhibition play into the contingent life of film culture. Second, I expose emerging forms of distribution to scholarly examination, namely cinema-on-demand, crowdfunding and e-stores that legally use file-sharing technologies to the advantage of film producers. Third, the thesis develops a new conceptualisation of di

From 1990, North American children’s television animation was revolutionised due to the regulation of children’s television under the 1990 Children’s Television Act, the rise of cable channels and the dissemination of third-wave feminism into the mass media. Consequently, children’s television animation saw greater representation of girl characters, both in terms of the number of characters and their roles in narratives. Lyn Mikel Brown proposes that despite these developments, girlhood subjectivity in media remains dependent on attaining the approval of boys and men. My research on the representation of girls in children’s television animation aired in North America between 1990 and 2010 builds on Brown’s concept of “girl typing,” a discourse that categorises girls as superficially opposed archetypes. I use textual, discourse and narrative analysis to examine children’s television animation through a feminist poststructuralist framework. The series I explore in detail are Nickelodeon’s As Told By Ginger, Disney’s Recess and MTV’s Daria, which feature girl characters of varying ages and gendered subjectivities. In each of these series, I examine how girls are represented within discourses of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age and class, how different girl types interact and how opportunities for transitioning into a different subjectivity are portrayed. Each of these series feature subverted transformation narratives, in which a girl is called upon, or forced, to perform a different form of girlhood. Within these narratives, girls must disavow their new subjectivity after a moment of sameness panic, wherein they realise that they risk losing their own identity. I argue that while the form of girlhood represented as correct changes according to variables such as the target audience and brand identity of the series in question, the girl typing discourse is ultimately structured around the belief that girls’ identities are mutable, performative, and interdependent

Many media scholars agree that television can be used as an informal site of teaching and learning. However, little is known about how television teaches. This thesis explores the pedagogy of television by investigating the processes by which television teaches and viewers learn. It addresses the following questions: how does television teach through production techniques and textual features? How do viewers learn from television? To investigate televisual pedagogy as a communicative process, this study links producers’ discourses, audiovisual textuality and audience responses. By connecting production, text and reception, it shows how teaching and learning interact in the context of televisual communication. Taking into account the distinction between public service and commercial television and the traditional demarcation between programmes that are explicitly produced to educate and those that are produced primarily to entertain, it examines the production, textual features, and reception of two Australian programmes: Who Do You Think You Are?, a documentary series broadcast on the public service channel SBS, and Home and Away, a soap opera broadcast on the commercial Seven Network. These two case studies reveal that regardless of conventional labels and categorisations, entertainment plays a crucial role in televisual education. In addition, they highlight the role of authenticity and realism in televisual teaching and learning. Although different programmes use different techniques and generic conventions to achieve this goal, it is argued that television must signify the real and invite referential involvement in order to educate, and that viewers must trust that the programme is authentic, realistic or accurate in order to learn from it. This thesis contributes new knowledge in two ways. Firstly, it demonstrates that entertainment is not only compatible with education, but that it can serve televisual pedagogy. Secondly, it makes an original contribution to a

Mounting ecological health concerns—for example climate change, pollution, and loss of biodiversity—occasion the need for innovative methods and interdisciplinary knowledge politics. Through empirical research and artistic mediations I demonstrate that practices of care are vital for reimagining ecological health. I contend that care, when materialised and performed through artworks, can engage with the complex question of how to bring about change. Within this exegesis, I adopt a case study approach to investigate three different artists’ practices, including Natalie Jeremijenko’s, Britta Riley’s and my own. Jeremijenko’s The Environmental Health Clinic stages public art experiments that reframe environmental concerns through a clinical health lens. Riley’s Windowfarms is an indoor garden art project that connects online communities who share sustainable designs. In the third case study, Black-Noise and Carbon Valley, I discuss artwork developed in response to the ecological health impacts of open cut coal mining in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia.*From an analysis of the three case studies I make a distinctive contribution by developing an ethos of “careful prospecting”. Careful prospecting, I argue, can be thought of as a means of learning how to care: it is a cosmopolitical practice that is about carefully tending to, tuning into, or becoming curious about ways in which healthy ecologies are produced. I offer careful prospecting as both a methodological and theoretical device for understanding and embodying practices of care in relation to ecological health concerns. Three modalities of careful prospecting were identified: experimenting, curating and listening. Each of these modalities, contributes to a sense of curiosity and obligation. Careful prospecting is about learning to be affected and mobilsing art as a means of engaging with ecological health crises. * The artwork is presented alongside this exegesis in the form of documentation of an ins

This thesis argues that the Hollywood romantic comedies released between 2005 and 2011 constitute a new cycle in the genre, the postfeminist cycle, in which feminism is “‘taken into account’ but only to be shown to be no longer necessary” (McRobbie 2004, p. 255). Drawing on accounts and analyses of postfeminism by McRobbie (2004, 2009) and Gill (2007), and on applications of these analyses to popular culture by Negra (2004, 2008, 2009) and Tasker and Negra (2007), I argue that the romantic comedies released during this period represent gender, sex, and power in a manner consistent with – and informed by – postfeminist approaches to these themes. I do this by conducting close readings (case studies) of three films, selected from a representative sample of thirty, and examining how these three films screen postfeminist ideas about gender (Forgetting Sarah Marshall [Stoller 2008]), sex (Friends With Benefits [Gluck 2011]), and power (The Ugly Truth [Luketic 2009]). Following analyses of the Hollywood romantic comedy by Jeffers McDonald (2007) and Grindon (2011), I demonstrate how these movies form a new and heretofore minimally examined cycle which is shaped not only by what Gill (2007) terms the “postfeminist sensibility” in the United States, but by the history of the genre, that is, in response to previous cycles. In each of the three case studies in this thesis, I place the films in question in generic context, and in extra-cinematic context, demonstrating how the films are informed by – and in turn contribute to – larger cultural discourses about: the effect of feminism on masculinity (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), “hook up culture” (Friends With Benefits), and women’s professional authority and economic independence (The Ugly Truth). Taken together, I conclude, these three films demonstrate that the Hollywood romantic comedy has become yet another popular culture site in which postfeminist ideas are represented, and I consider the political and cultural ramificatio

This thesis addresses a gap in current scholarship on Australian cinema by highlighting the role of the soundtrack in what I call an Australian transcultural cinema. I argue that the iconic sounds belonging to the national cinema from the 1970s and 1980s are variously repositioned, silenced and manipulated in the more recent transcultural cinema in ways that critically re-sound Australia’s history. I develop three concepts – the sonic fetish, sonic artefact and sonic spectre – that codify and help explain why sounds hold certain meaning and are stored in bodily ways and in memory. Providing a method for listening to the soundtracks of transcultural cinema, I argue that soundtracks need to be broken down and listened to as sound events and that silence should be recognised for the powerful role it plays in a film soundtrack.By examining the development of the film sound industry in Australia, I highlight the reasons why the soundtrack is an integral element in recent Australian films. My argument is supported by interview material from interviews I conducted with some of Australia’s most respected filmmakers, sound professionals, educators and industry personnel for this project. To support my findings I provide a series of close listenings of films that include: 'Walkabout' (Roeg 1971), 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' (Weir 1975), 'The Sound of One Hand Clapping' (Flanagan 1998), 'Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy' (Moffatt 1989), and 'Samson and Delilah' (Thornton 2009b).I conceptualise Australian transcultural cinema as a genre that draws from global and cultural influences, where boundaries are blurred and meanings take on new shapes and forms. I highlight how this cinema makes use of the sonic semantic markers and syntactic elements of the road movie, melodrama and Gothic genres to tell stories that cut across the Australian landscape and challenge ideals and representations of Australian society, home and family. I argue that the Gothic, operating as a mode and generated b