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In this study, I examine the presence of Kenyan women in the film industry through the lens of postcolonial African feminism. Situating the study in this theoretical framework heightened the awareness that ideologies of womanhood and struggles against gender oppression intersect and cannot be analysed without considering the contextualisation of womanhood. Postcolonial African feminist theory reflects that issues that affect women in each place and time are different (former colonies and western regions). This study explores and uses the afro feminist lens to analyse the responses by Kenyan women filmmakers to comment on filmmaking in Kenya. The film industry offers an important arena where manifestations of African feminism can be explored, as espoused by the women filmmakers in this study: Matrid Nyagah, Jinna Mutune, Ng'endo Mukii, Wanuri Kahiu, Judy Kibinge, Dommie Yambo-Odotte, and Anne Mungai. By adopting a qualitative research design using face-to-face semi-structured interviews, I examined the filmmakers' career paths, motivations, perceptions, challenges, and barriers to getting into and remaining in a male-dominated industry. The thesis reveals that the level of Kenyan women's representation in the film industry on the global scene was proof that the women were empowered, competent, talented, and able to tell their stories through their lived experiences. The study also identifies barriers and challenges that impede their reach to a wider audience. Key among them were the lack of proper film schools in Kenya that teach the requisite content, the ongoing patriarchal system, the lack of defined film culture, a lack of a government policy on film, lack of government support, lack of funding, and poor marketing and distribution channels, among others that seem to truncate the full potential of women in the film industry. I argue that Kenyan women filmmakers have excelled, given an excellent account of the stories they tell from their lived experiences. These filmmakers' films not only deal with women's issues, Africa, war, famine, disease, and the girl child alone but also seem to focus on neo-feminism (as defined by Obioma Nnaemeka) and tackle subjects on sexuality, female emancipation, mother-daughter relationships, HIV/AIDS, drugs, science and technology, postelection violence and terrorism. Neo-feminism offers space for women filmmakers to work alongside men since it advocates for negotiating with them to achieve hard ideals. The study found that though women in the Kenyan film industry did not agree they were working within a feminist framework, they objected to the western attitude toward feminism. It is also found that whereas some of the women filmmakers trained locally, the training they received abroad contributed to their being better filmmakers. Indeed, the Kenyan film industry has offered mixed signals as regards supporting its women filmmakers. While the government has faltered, the women filmmaker's grit and sense of purpose have helped them stamp their presence in the film industry both locally and internationally. Also, the study revealed that despite the important role women filmmakers play in the film industry, there was a lack of support from the government. However, family members continued to provide both financial and emotional support to the women filmmakers to live up to their dream. In addition, the lack of a national film policy to regulate the film industry meant that gender was not mainstreamed in it. Women filmmakers continue to negotiate for space through their passion, supporting and mentoring each other, recognising other women's efforts in the industry through film awards and establishing funding opportunities specifically for women but also for men.

Following the coup that took place on September 11th, 1973, and until the beginning of the 21st century, the cinematic memory of the Chilean dictatorship rested in the hands of people who had directly experienced the Coup and the seventeen years of authoritarianism and who, for the most part, had fled into exile. Until the end of the dictatorship in 1990, theirs was a cinema of memory and resistance, focused on the victims and often silencing the executioners. However, the new century brought new filmmakers, people who grew up during the dictatorship and whose experience of it led them to film different stories from different points of view. The filmmakers in this thesis were all born after 1973, and all began producing after 1990: they are, in the end, children of the dictatorship and filmmakers of the democracy - a transitional generation of sorts. They produce a critical representation of both dictatorship and democracy, to the point where the limit between the two periods is no longer clear: this reveals a questioning of the concept of "democratic transition" in the Chilean context, as well as an attempt to represent the symptoms of trauma. Understood in this thesis as examples of post-traumatic filmmaking, the films of our corpus reflect upon the continuities of dictatorship in democracy. They also offer a meta-reflection on cinema's representation of atrocity and the traumatic past. This dissertation will explore a political and ethical reading of this generation's work. The adoption in the films of an aesthetics of trauma is the basis of an ethical discourse on both one's accountability in the present for the horrors of the past and on the social role of cinema and its (non)representation of trauma. Through this, the films invite the viewer to engage in critical spectatorship. The aesthetics of trauma thus leave abundant space for the viewer to participate in the film, and this active participation allows for self-reflection on the viewer's part. Offering an alternative reading to the apolitical interpretations of these filmmakers that have abounded, this thesis aims to present this generation's work as a different approach to political filmmaking.

This PhD by Publication focuses on the representation of motherhood on 'quality' American television and how that is intrinsically linked to women's political and economic oppression in society. Although this study focuses on contemporary television series, it is grounded in a history of how motherhood has been theorized, its cultural positioning and how this informs the representations of maternity, motherhood and mothering in quality American television drama. Arguing that, in order to understand how patriarchy subjugates women, we need to expose the way patriarchal norms related to motherhood work as, while 'we know that difference exists, ... we don't understand it as constituted relationally',1 I propose that cultural attitudes expressed through televisual representations betray a deep-rooted misogyny that ties women to their reproductive potential thus impacting their positioning in society, their employment prospects and a lifetime's wage prospects. With so many meshes of ideological carriers at work, I conclude that it is urgent to bring them into consciousness and wield that knowledge politically.2 My work brings what is invisible into discourse, what is unconscious into consciousness and teaches us much about the ingrained attitudes of a neoliberal western patriarchal society, how it views motherhood and the impact that has on women in society more broadly. My original contribution to this field acknowledges 'quality' television's soap opera roots, and, by analysing series from a feminist perspective, shows that much can be revealed about the patriarchal unconscious, how it views its mothers and how women are inevitably linked to their reproductive potential.

This practice-based PhD explores the writing process for an original screenplay titled Lucy Drives a Car, a 65 page script written within the style and sensibilities of art cinema combined with dramedy, a genre that blends both drama and comedy. The thesis carries out a detailed analysis of selected screenplay fragments from the film Ratcatcher (1999), and the television series Atlanta (2016-18). Both of these objects of study illustrate how the narrative modes of art cinema and dramedy function at a creative, formal and practical level. This allowed me to determine how I could incorporate these film narrative modes into my screenplay. The introduction of the essay examines the predominant features of art cinema and dramedy, and presents an overview of Ratcatcher and Atlanta that outlines how these narrative trends are used. The key research question, separated into four key aims, is introduced and the methodology implemented to achieve each of them is explained.  Chapter One investigates Ratcatcher's narrative structure, and carries out a deeper analysis of its 'James and Margaret Anne' storyline. It distinguishes the plot's narrative elements and how they are used to imbue emotional significance to unimportant events. Specific sections from the screenplay are studied to resolve how they convey the film's melancholic mood, and how the script communicates the character's feelings with minimal use of dialogue. Other strategies, such as the handling of open and unresolved narratives, the implementation of ellipsis, the use of close ups, and how it conveys an ambiguous sense of time are also analysed.  Atlanta is examined in Chapter Two with the analysis of the series' comedy and drama elements. It discusses how the show comments upon social themes within relatable, everyday situations, and how it handles surrealist elements in hyper realistic settings. A scene by scene analysis of the Streets On Lock episode examines the series' blend of societal observations with comedic moments, and how this combination may be both copious and nuanced. Chapter Three looks into the writing process of the Lucy Drives a Car screenplay which deals with the emotional repercussions of a family trying to continue with their daily lives after the disappearance of a loved one. It examines the development of the early story ideas from a plot-driven narrative to an art cinema style, and the use of a free writing approach that highlights character development. It also discusses narrative qualities, including the use of commonplace situations, surrealist elements and how the screenplay attempts to present social commentaries without infringing on the audience. The fundamental ideas framed in this research are the detailed analysis of selected screenplay texts. This analysis, performed at a granular level, aids the comprehension of the narrative strategies found within specific scenes, yet it is an uncommon method in screenplay studies. The thesis also delves into seemingly uneventful story situations to develop deeper meaning within the mundane. Furthermore, it explores how humour can expound on a film's themes and accentuate a story's dramatic elements. The findings within this thesis may be useful for screenwriters that develop scripts in the art cinema or dramedy style.

Politics and aesthetics in the cinema of Luchino Visconti 1943-1963 This thesis provides an innovative approach to the cinematic work of Luchino Visconti, from Ossessione in 1943 to Il gattopardo 1963. Visconti is known as a canonical figure in Italian cinema but it has been difficult to see the relevance of his work to current concerns in the field of film studies. The conventional view has been that Visconti's work should be understood through the frame of either neorealism or auteur cinema. Most scholars have focused on his themes of major political significance, or have argued that his visual language is best understood as an expression of high-culture references. But this thesis argues that these films from the earlier period in Visconti's career can be successfully used as a site for discussing contemporary issues: questions on the relationship between cinema, politics and national identity, on taste and gender, on the popular aspects of cinema, and on methods that focus more on cinema as an industry. A consistent focus of this research project is to scrutinise and disentangle the complex relationship between Visconti's attention to the aesthetics and politics of his films. The first two chapters of this thesis explore the details of the political and critical context in which Visconti worked and in which his work was received. In chapters three, four and five, I apply contemporary theories - theories of modernity and consumer culture, of decorative aesthetics and of actor performances - to challenge some of the most historically entrenched views on Visconti. Using archive material, interviews, and biographies, the first chapter explores how Visconti's relationship with the Italian Communist Party was based on a network of personal connections with Communist collaborators and senior party officials and shows how Visconti's films played an active role in the development of the cultural policies of the PCI. In chapter two I examine the debates that the films provoked, placing them within the Italian culture and society of the time, focusing primarily on their reception by the PCI and Marxist film critics. In chapter three I tackle the anti-decorative bias that has tended to categorise Visconti's aesthetics as regressive, and offer a new reading of Visconti's use of decoration and mise-en-scene. In chapter four I examine several examples in which Visconti's films engage with consumer culture and modernity, and show how these introduce complexities into the political messages of the films. In chapter five, I bring together a range of sources to draw conclusions about how Visconti chose and worked with actors - an area that has been almost entirely left out of the literature on Visconti.

This thesis considers the role of the male body in the construction of a Northern English place-myth in fictional film and television. As scholarship of the region's representation acknowledges, masculinity is dominant within the production of a Northern imaginary. However, critical discussion of this masculine coding frequently overlooks the male body itself. Consequently, this body has been produced as a taken-for-granted formation; an obvious figure carrying a limited set of meanings. In contrast, this thesis argues that representations of male embodiment are complex sites of meaning which must be read, textually, to be understood, culturally and historically. In its methodology, the thesis combines textual analysis with an examination of aesthetic, social and political contexts. By treating text and context as reciprocal, I chart how fictional representations of the male body both respond to and actively produce our sense of the North's meanings and values at specific points in time. The first part of the thesis establishes an intellectual and cultural history, by asking what precedent exists for describing representations of male embodiment as specifically Northern. In Chapter One's literature review, I demonstrate how the Northern male body has pervaded scholarship on the region as a concept with an implicit but influential presence. Chapter Two examines the relationship between male bodies and the production of historical narratives of the North according to a canon of film and television texts. This is a critically complex task which requires, firstly, reproducing a canonical screen history in order to map how male bodies have mediated changing notions of Northern identity, and, secondly, critically querying the representational politics of a 'Northern' canon. The second part of the thesis involves an investigation of contemporary representations of the male body. The primary field of investigation is the representation of male embodiment in texts produced between 2008 and 2020. This period has seen the re-emergence of the North as culturally significant in the mediation of a post-recession structure of feeling, in part through the popularity and controversy of releases such as I, Daniel Blake (2016), Happy Valley (2014 -), and God's Own Country (2017). Across three chapters, I examine three modalities of male bodily representation in this period, which I term, respectively: the deteriorated body, the youthful body, and the racialised body. By treating deterioration, youthfulness, and racialisation to be specific, if overlapping, processes in the representation of Northern masculinity, these chapters emphasise the rhetorical nature of these bodies and locate social and ideological meaning in the contradictions that result from this rhetorical specificity.

Women's cinema has been the focus of much of the scholarly discussion that has developed feminist film criticism. However, theorists have not treated the concept of 'feminist film' in much detail, and previous studies of feminist cinema have not dealt with the possibility of male filmmakers doing feminist filmmaking. This thesis argues that the gender identity of directors who can make feminist films is not fixed and addresses the neglected aspect of male directors presenting feminist perspectives through cinema. Along with the focus on cinematic representations of gender, this thesis also analyses the roles played by sociocultural context, history, ethnicity and sexual orientation in capturing feminist representations on film. Adopting an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach, combining feminist film theory with cultural studies, gender studies and film theory and philosophy, this study conducts a close reading of All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999), Centre Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1991), Summer Snow (Ann Hui, 1995) and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) - Westernised and Hong Kong films made by directors with different genders (male and female) between 1990-2000. By situating these films and directors in a transregional, transcultural or intertextual context, this thesis indicates that feminist film in contemporary times is not only about the on-screen representations of female identities or experiences, women's oppression and strength but also revelations about how hegemonies regarding gender, race, class and culture impact on the social identities and lives of individuals. The films discussed here show that film feminism or feminist filmmaking is not merely a one-dimensional discussion of gender but a dynamic process - in theoretical and practical manners - that intersects with different sociocultural issues in a diverse environment.

A Diamond Geeza is a Girl's Best Friend is a collection of short stories and vignettes that demonstrates predominantly working-class men, trapped within a toxic, patriarchal sphere and explores themes such as power, reclamation of honour and the changing cultural landscape of Great Britain. The main story from the creative folder, 'Author of His Own Doom' chronicles, through the first-person narrative, how the protagonist attempts to rise above his surroundings and baser instincts and works towards discovering his identity and self-respect. The accompanying critical study contributes to the knowledge of metafictional writing. The creative process contributes by acknowledging the existence of a limiting and often degrading space for working class men and the ways in which they may seek a redress. This study refutes the assumption that metafiction is elitist or passé and is instead a powerful social tool to understand both cultural perimeters and the self, demonstrating the value of building a narrative for men who may feel that they have little or no voice. The sources that support this research include creative and critical texts, as follows: Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, Martin Amis's Money, and Davis Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men; David Lodge's The Art of Metafiction, Robert Scholes' Fabulation and Metafiction, Patricia Waugh's Metafiction The Theory and Practice of Self- Conscious Fiction, William H. Gass's Fiction and the Figures of Life, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Dan Ariely 's Predictably Irrational, Mary K. Holland's A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies and Jonathon Greenberg's Was Anyone Hurt: The End of Satire in A Handful of Dust.

Film sequels have usually been looked down upon by fans and film critics alike, as well as overlooked by most film theorists. However, sequels provide a rich layering of intertextuality that create all kinds of new meanings worth looking into more closely. This dissertation investigates the type of sequels in which the passing of time, both inside and outside of the story, becomes a key feature of the films themselves. I focus on sequels that acknowledge, incorporate, and specifically reflect on the duration between one film and the other often with ten, twenty or even over thirty years passing between instalments. My research focuses on their use of temporality, developing the vocabulary to speak about them and how they convey the passage of time. I primarily analyse the character development and the longterm gaps, which, even if inconspicuous and until now ignored, play an essential part in the intertextuality of the films. When we look at these sequels in depth, we discover they provide a new way to look at narrative time closely related to real-life time. This intersection of the two allows for a new way to think about time and its effects in the long term, both regarding character development and the social contexts around them. This study provides a new perspective to look at sequels and the temporal intertextuality between them. My purpose is to define this type of sequel as a 'time-critical sequel' and show how they operate by enhancing an old story while telling a new one.

In this thesis I bring the nonhuman animal character into the discourse of Film Studies, from which they have by and large been excluded. Including the nonhuman animal character helps to expand film theoretical discussions that have normally been restricted to human characters. In order to address this omission, I introduce and conceptualise two notions: the nonhuman animal call and the cinematic call on behalf of the nonhuman animal. The nonhuman animal call is an umbrella term for a variety of nonhuman animal expressions. Some of such expressions are based on five basic senses on which humans rely, but the nonhuman animal call also includes senses not present in humans. The division of calls is non-hierarchical. The aim of introducing the nonhuman animal call is to emphasise nonhuman animal performance and expression as intentional, meaningful, and important for the film in which the nonhuman animal appears, and thereby opening up new interpretative possibilities which take the nonhuman animal perspective into consideration. The cinematic call on behalf of the nonhuman animal denotes film techniques, which, under certain conditions, can provide space for nonhuman animal calls to manifest themselves in the film, or help clarify nonhuman animal calls which the spectator might find unintelligible, or strengthen the nonhuman animal call's affective impact on the spectator. Cinematic calls on behalf of the nonhuman animal character are versatile, that is, they are not limited to a particular genre or tradition of filmmaking. Therefore, the reflection on the conditions which such film techniques must fulfil to be considered as cinematic calls invites a productive dialogue across genres and aesthetic traditions. As a result of such a reflection, this thesis offers some guidelines for film production and film analysis that are, on the one hand, more mindful of the nonhuman animal characters, and on the other hand, take into account diverse types of spectators, and the ways in which to appeal to them to invite a reflection on the nonhuman animal condition. The nonhuman animal call and the cinematic call on behalf of the nonhuman animal character are, therefore, practical, didactic, and analytic tools that can be applied in order to render the Film Studies discourse as well as film production and reception more animal-oriented.

'Cinema' still stands as Romania's longest-lasting film periodical. Between 1963 and 1989, it was the only Romanian film magazine published during the communist regime. After the fall of Communism in 1989, the magazine changed its title to Noul Cinema and continued to be published until 1998. Because of its singularity during Communism, Cinema has had a central role in the development of Romanian film criticism and culture. The periodical holds an important position in Romanian film history, yet there is no detailed academic research on the magazine. The present thesis addresses this gap in research by approaching Cinema as autonomous material of study, and analyses how Hollywood film was presented to readers and audiences in the context of Romania's totalitarian communist regime, and then in the post-communist context. The PhD. project focuses on coverage of the Hollywood film scene as that which was most affected by the political backdrop. During Communism, Cinema was State-owned, censored and obliged to fulfil the ideological requirements of the Romanian Communist Party and its leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu. These demands specifically shaped the coverage of Hollywood films and stars, depending on Romania's political relationship with the West. The national cinema dominated the pages of the magazine, while Hollywood film was dismissed as entertainment, and used to illustrate the superficiality of America's capitalist society. However, at times Cinema magazine was also a window to the outside world, sneaking in coverage of Hollywood films and stars when the oppression of the communist regime was at its peak. During the violent context of Romania's 1989 revolution, Cinema became Noul Cinema. Censorship and political pressures were lifted, and coverage of Hollywood cinema came to dominate its pages. Cinema magazine survived Romania's communist dictatorship, and as Noul Cinema witnessed the 1989 revolution, the most important event in contemporary Romanian history. The analysis of the magazine provided by this thesis adds primary evidence to existing scholarship on Romanian national cinema, further revealing the reception of the globally popular Hollywood film in a once isolated country that continues to struggle with the trauma of its communist past.

This thesis explores the development of the film industry in Saudi Arabia from 2005 to 2020. It divides the industry's development in Saudi Arabia into two periods: from 2005 to 2015 and from 2015 to 2020. In the first period, the industry was supported and led by two key industry figures, the Rotana Group and the Saudi Film Festival (SFF). The second period was characterised by the government and non-profit organisations leading the industry's development through the Saudi Film Council (SFC), General Commission for Audiovisual Media (GCAM) and King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra). This thesis includes personal interviews with industry decision-makers and leaders such as the CEO of SFC, founder and CEO of the SFF and the Head of the Cinema Department at Ithra Centre. This thesis contributes to the knowledge of the Saudi Arabian film industry through a comprehensive analysis of the industry structures that can support the industry's growth, enabling government agencies, non-profit organisations and cultural institutions to better support its further development. The findings reveal that religious opposition to cinema led to its decline after 1979, and in the first time period, this opposition limited Rotana's ability to produce more films and closed its theatres. Events in the second time period demonstrate the government's seriousness about supporting the industry and its growth, and the government has established a massive financing policy for local and foreign films produced inside Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, the challenges of censorship still trouble film producers, especially for domestic films, whereas foreign films have greater freedom although the executive regulations for censorship do not differentiate between foreign and domestic films. Overall, this thesis aims to answer the question: What is meaningful about the Saudi film industry's development in the twenty-first century?

The Artist and the Regime explores the works of Czech filmmaker Karel Kachyňa during four decades of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Despite being a prolific filmmaker who made over forty feature films across five decades, Kachyňa's works outside the 1960s and the Czechoslovak New Wave have gone largely unnoticed in scholarship. This work challenges the uncertainty surrounding the reception of Kachyňa's works in the context of a totalitarian regime and a nationalised film industry and offers the thesis that Kachyňa's works provide a unique perspective on the communist era in Czechoslovakia. As such, this thesis engages with Kachyňa's film poetics from the historical and analytical perspectives, as well as providing an examination of spectatorial theorising which comprises another aspect of film poetics and therefore contributes to knowledge in this field. This work presents Kachyňa's unusual treatment of socialist realism from the outset of the communist era in Czechoslovakia in 1948, his approach to Army Film, his invocation of issues surrounding the concept of borders, his depiction of child narratives, his dealing with taboo subjects, his influence on and contribution to the New Wave movement, and his engagement with Holocaust narratives as evidence of an artist whose humanist poetics were at odds with his environment, despite working as an agent for the regime within a nationalised film industry. This paradoxical position offers an appreciation for individuals who experienced the trappings of the regime in Czechoslovakia during four decades of communist rule. By analysing a wide range of films in how they reflect and diverge from one another, this thesis ultimately argues that Kachyňa's humanist poetics challenge a system that attempted to reduce the individual's ability to express themselves freely. This thesis demonstrates how Kachyňa showed that it was possible to provide this challenge from within the staterun film industry without having works banned by the authorities. By examining his works throughout the communist regime in detail, a study of Kachyňa's poetics reveals a filmmaker whose works continued to provide criticism of the regime and the filmmaking culture in an implicit manner and challenges the critical response to his works that currently exists. From this position, the thesis presented here argues that Kachyňa is an important filmmaker of the twentieth century whose works require greater attention in scholarship.

This project follows the ghost of Gothic British masculinity across the ocean in the period of classical cinema. It examines the ways in which British stars were offered as an alternative to the American ideal of muscular, anti-intellectual, tough male identity. British men on film allowed Hollywood a glimpse in a mirror, a dark, haunted mirror, where identity might be fractured, damaged, liberated, queered or feminised. In a period dominated by two world wars and a Great Depression, identities of all types were being challenged and filmmakers used Britishness to allow this tension to seep into cinema. This project uses the lens of the Gothic as a method of uncovering the hidden history that is embedded in many films. The uncanny and the sublime, shadows and mirrors, portraits, decadent iconography and dark doubles all dominate in these cinematic texts. At a time when the Production Code made it necessary for subversive content to be well hidden, films contained embedded secret codes and invited possible alternative readings. Bringing together film scholarship with literary theorists this thesis offers fresh perspectives on historical cinematic meanings. This study presents a detailed analysis of British male stardom as it emerged in the period of early talkies. It details the ways in which the male stars, Ronald Colman, Basil Rathbone and George Sanders were presented in fan publications. It presents the contradictions inherent in their fan discourse and allows for consideration of the queerness that American culture seemed to accept was part of British - and European - male identity.

As the first and longest-running queer film festival in East Asia, the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (HKLGFF) was established in 1989. Since 2000, the HKLGFF has gradually commercialised, transforming into a self-sustained, market-driven queer film festival. Examining the operation of the HKLGFF offers insights into the queer film festivals that have undergone commercialisation around the world. Meanwhile, the examination of HKLGFF can reveal how small-scale queer film festivals interact with other (queer) film festivals regionally and globally. Focusing on the festival's operations from 2016 to 2020, I argue that under the neoliberal trend in the global queer film festival circuit, by privileging middle-class gay identity and commercial interests, the HKLGFF reproduces homonormativity, which characterises the consumption-oriented queer culture in Hong Kong. The thesis adopts a combined methodology, including semi-structured interviews, content analysis and secondary data analysis. The thesis contextualises the HKLGFF in terms of the historical development of the festival itself, in terms of the relationship with the global queer film festival circuit, and in terms of the territory of Hong Kong. This thesis also investigates how the festival operation reproduces homonormativity through its programming and its targeting of and affordances for audiences. Overall, this thesis expands the concept of homonormativity and interrogates it to all aspects of festival organisation and provides a framework to explore the specificity of a queer film festival through an analysis of the dual relationship between the festival and its local context as well as the global queer film festival circuit. This thesis also extends the discussion of the film festival circuit by mapping the broader picture of the global landscape of queer film festivals as well as investigating how the global queer film festival circuit influences the operation of small-scale queer film festivals in the Global South.

This practice-based research project comprises two related components: A web documentary to be found at https://kboswall.wixsite.com/speakmysister, and this written thesis. The web documentary is a multi-modal response to the revolutionary Mozambican film Sing My Brother - Help Me to Sing (José Cardoso, 1981). It is a curated collection of twenty short films made collaboratively with young Mozambican students of film and cultural studies in response to the 2018 National Festival of Culture theme: 'Culture, promoting women, identity and sustainable development'. The multi-modal, musical, interactive and non-linear format of the web documentary is a creative and critical response to the calls for intersectional decolonisation and inclusion in Mozambican film production, audio-visual research and knowledge construction. During the production, post-production, and multi-modal exhibition of the films both physical and on-line, this practice-led research engaged with questions of polyphony, dialogue, inclusivity and diversity in film production. The written component of this multi-modal thesis also embraces decolonial principles of multi-modality and non-linearity in its exploration of the research themes of the role of women's song, dance and film in knowledge construction in Mozambique. The seven chapters combine critical reflective analysis of the Speak My Sister research project and the resulting web documentary from historical, local, global and personal perspectives. Seven musical portraits from Cardoso's revolutionary film Sing My Brother - Help Me to Sing serve as conceptual and thematic springboards through which to explore three core themes: collaboration and authorship in audio-visual production, the role of music and dance in knowledge construction and exchange and the place of African feminism, decolonisation and cultural activism in Mozambique's audiovisual research and production in the future. The portraits are reimagined as written scripts, illustrated with screenshots taken from the original film to form cinematic pauses, or 'interludes', between each of the chapters. The text below is divided into three parts that follow the Aristotelian progression of narrative and logical argument: introduction, development and conclusion. The first three chapters that make up Part 1 introduce the theoretical principles and personal and historical context behind the research (Diawara 1992, Convents, 2011, Gray 2020). Part 2 is made up of three chapters each of which uses the practice as a starting point to explore theories around collaboration and authorship in Chapter 4 (Rangan 2017, Bishop 2012, MacDougall 1998, 2006, 2020, Rose 2017), local musicking and nego-feminism in Chapter 5 (Reiley and Brucker 2020, Nnaemeka, 2004) and body knowledge, gender and power in Chapter 6 (Cowan 1990, Conquergood 2002, Jackson 2012, Meintjes 2017, Impey 2020). In Part 3, the concluding seventh chapter takes these ideas to assess the contribution of this research towards constructing more inclusive representation in Mozambique in the future and the role of polyphonic and dialogic thinking in collaborative and authored audio-visual content (Aston and Odorico 2018). At a time where national and international governments are being asked to redress historic and institutional racial, geographical and gender inequalities, this critical creative practice combines lessons from visual anthropology, ethnomusicology, African film studies and media practice to approach the theme of decolonisation from a creative, personal, national, and international perspective, and so to explore the relationship between personal, local and global change.

This thesis examines the portrayal and significance of science fiction in contemporary British theatre. Analysing twenty-two texts and productions in their original performance contexts, I make critical comparisons between their science-fictional narratives and the anxieties of the present moment, including social instability, accelerating technological innovation, institutional violence, neoliberal exploitation, and climate collapse. By exploring how theatre practitioners are increasingly intervening on matters of national and international urgency via the lens of a speculative tomorrow, this thesis ultimately argues that science fiction constitutes a new method of political engagement within twenty-first century British theatre. This thesis is structured as a series of case studies built around science-fictional subgenres, each of which is mapped across an interdisciplinary scholarly framework. My introduction lays out the broad theoretical concerns and organisational choices that underpin these case studies, before examining the (limited) existing publications in the field and and locating my approach within scholarship allied to the interests of science fiction, such as robots in performance, digital technologies, and the staging of political theory. Opening with an examination of post-apocalyptic plays, chapter one examines how these productions communicate intense social, political and economic anxieties by making links to the familiar yet alien landscape of the modern post-industrial ruin. Chapter two focuses attention on Anne Washburn's Mr Burns (2014) and draws on cultural memory to explore how the play's post-electric narrative intervenes on notions of remembrance, national identity and belonging. Chapter three considers the depiction of the android in contemporary theatre, framing this figure as a posthuman agent that troubles ontological binaries including human/nonhuman, biological/artificial and object/subject. Concentrating its gaze on RashDash and Unlimited's dance-theatre piece Future Bodies (2018), chapter four considers how this production utilised a range of embodied performance choices - including song, dance and movement - to interrogate and resist the technological erasure of the human body. Finally, chapter five examines the staging of dystopia in numerous recent productions by drawing on scholarship concerning precarity and systemic violence. Combining science fiction, theatre studies and wider academic discourse, this thesis both documents an expanding performance practice and pioneers a new interpretation of political representation within contemporary British theatre-making.

This thesis argues that with the beginning of the 21st century new notions of the vilified woman who possesses supernatural powers have emerged in American horror and dark fantasy cinema. These notions of a fantastical film antagonist conceptualised as the Evil Woman are concerned with depictions of female power that oppose normality in American culture and patriarchal hegemony, by investigating the context of American socio-cultural and political attitudes, feminist psychoanalysis and female power as a threat to traditional American values. In addition, this concept brings the factor of the 'voice' of the Evil Woman into the investigation and explores the development of contemporary female antagonistic characters who are bearers of independence, communicate female issues and criticise a flawed patriarchal system including capitalism, as well as contemporary notions of feminism. This voice delivers female-centred messages and is intended to reach a female audience rather than to please the male gaze. This is the written defence of a practice-based study that aims to investigate creative alternatives to feminist-informed film criticism. The performative research methods used aim to interrogate the boundaries of theoretical feminist film criticism by tearing down the general invisibility of the researcher.

The aim of this project is to consider the ways in which the cinema of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) represents notions of 'Jewishness', tracking continuities and discontinuities with images of 'the Jew' that were conveyed in the Weimar Republic and beyond. The enquiry therefore includes films produced across the entirety of the Republic's existence, incorporating comparisons with Nazi cinema to highlight how tensions in Weimar society could be manipulated to suit the Nazi purpose. This is an atypical approach within Weimar Film Studies which has tended to consider 1933 as a caesura in German cinematic history. Examination of Weimar cinema in this way reveals that there was fear of an 'internal invasion', as a wide range of marginalised groups increased in visibility both on and off-screen. This fear of 'internal invasion' would eventually be presented as 'Jewish', with the films selected for this enquiry indicating that tropes applied to these 'othered' groupings would eventually become synonymous with 'Jewishness'. This enables reference to films that are not traditionally associated with ideas of 'Jewishness', for characters that are not explicitly identified as Jewish can step into a similar role as enemy of mainstream German society. As the Weimar period develops, so too do the representations of 'the Jew' on-screen, with representations of 'Jewishness' becoming much more codified as 1933 and Hitler's rise to power approaches. This research thus explores the notion of antisemitism as a socially generated projection formulated in response to the social experience of modernity, projected onto 'the Jew' as the ultimate enemy of the national community.

This dissertation fills research gaps in general historiography, film historiography and exile historiography alike by presenting the first ever monography on the German plurilingual multiple artist Walter Rilla (1894-1980) whose filmography of 200+ titles developed parallel to his similarly huge German-British stage, radio, literature and television work. My study period 1921-1957, politically highly charged, covers decisive decades of Rilla's professional career 1913-1978 during which he was likewise a musician, intellectual, publisher and political theorist. While primarily analysing Rilla's European and anglophone films - including their actant roles in contemporary ideological discourses - I equally outline Rilla's network and specify both his star rank and brand on the backgrounds of his press, audience and advertising reception. My original contribution to knowledge redresses the hitherto chronic research marginalisation of this NS-exiled artist via my transnational and transcultural theory approach which finally puts Rilla, consistently the equal of top star colleagues from both sides of the Atlantic, back on the map of top film artists of European, transcontinental and global fame, where this star actor, producer, director and musician belongs. My film exile and exile film definitions enable an exemplary litmus-test interpretation of Rilla's multifaceted transnational and transcultural work that challenges both nation-based culture models and exile research binaries. Not least due to his transnational European film network acteur position as unearthed by me, he retained his transcultural Weimar Cinema career level during and beyond his 23-year British exile. Most of his 110-112 films made in 1921-1957 alone, hitherto largely overlooked by research, were, as I have proven, aesthetic and commercial European to global successes, including transcultural adaptations I have identified amongst 30+ British export versions. As I have demonstrated, Rilla's hitherto largely dismissed wartime BBC German and Home Service radio propaganda work constitutes an outstanding contribution of global impact to Britain's war effort.

Images of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are the site of an acute crisis in photographic representation. The purportedly "authentic" UFO photographs that proliferated in the mid twentieth century are alleged to depict some unknown aerial activity operating just beyond the perimeter of scientific knowledge, yet courtesy of the visual ambiguities that maintain the UFO's essential unidentifiability, they typically reveal almost nothing of its actual nature. Despite these visual ambiguities, UFOs also quickly established themselves as an iconographical staple of popular entertainment cinema. Between their appearances in these two very different kinds of photographic image, photographic UFOs emblematise many of the key issues at stake in debates concerning the epistemology of photographic imaging. What is it we actually see in photographic images, and what can we hope to reliably learn from them? Why do some photographs seem innately comprehensible, perhaps even overburdened with association, while others seem to resist attempts towards their interpretation? Juxtaposing a range of competing approaches to photographic semiology from film and photography theory (including the modernist realism of Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film, and C. S. Peirce's conceptualisation of "symbolic," "iconic," and "indexical" signs), this thesis performs a theoretical examination of the unique aesthetic character of the photographic UFO, and what it is capable of revealing about the nature of the photographic image. Using close textual analysis of both still and moving, fictional and non-fictional UFO images, it is a consideration of how the UFO's self-reflexive semiotic unruliness functions variously favourably and unfavourably in the context of both art and evidence. Culminating with the formulation of a speculative theory of the photographic UFO's visual disruption, this thesis presents the UFO as an image that gestures to a range of representational possibilities beyond what are conventionally considered the limits of photographic representation and interpretation.

This thesis explores the ways in which the Italian illustrated press created and disseminated a visual cinematic knowledge in the period between 1950 and 1965. Through explorations of production sites and processes, and related editorial practices, it offers an in-depth analysis of the role played by major publishers like Arnoldo Mondadori and Angelo Rizzoli. The study focusses mainly on three weeklies that serve as case studies of the modern news magazine in the post-war period: L'Europeo, Oggi and Epoca (in the first years of its existence, 1950-1951). Rizzoli will also be considered in relation to its impact on film production. After addressing the broad context of the international press (chapter 1), the thesis examines the creation and function of new editorial environments within the expanding publishing industry of the 1950s-1960s. Analysis of photographic prints and illustrated pages of magazines reveals the various forms of storytelling related to cinema that ran through the different spaces of illustrated magazine and which shaped editorial work (chapter 3 and 5). The study is complemented by examinations of specialised units within publishing houses, such as documentation centres and marketing offices (chapter 4 and 5), which had a decisive impact on the circulation of filmic imagery. Drawing on the publishers' documentation centres, among other sources, this thesis delves into the complex institutional and inter-personal relationships that shaped the formation and perpetuation of a cinematic imaginary in the Italian press. Combining tradition and innovation, the magazines used cinema to extend the range of visual content that their readers were familiar with. By examining strategies for promoting directorial 'brands' that were considered to be consistent with journalistic values, the study highlights the fluid relations that obtained between journalism, advertising and visual documentation.

This thesis investigates the ways in which 'liveness' has been mobilised by the US film industry during the exhibition of film trailers on broadcast television and online. It offers a lens to understand how Hollywood is not only responding to viewers' increased ability to evade television advertising, but also to an online landscape where users' attention is becoming increasingly difficult to attract and retain. In this emerging 'new screen ecology', we are witnessing how the established media organisations and practices of the twentieth-century are being challenged and reconfigured by a variety of digital technologies and online platforms. To examine this, two key research questions are asked: 1) in what ways has liveness been mobilised by the US film industry; and 2) why was liveness mobilised in these ways? Drawing together case studies that explore live moments of trailer exhibition during broadcast television ad-breaks and live-streamed online broadcasts, this thesis interrogates each case study through its 'constellation of liveness'. This framework approaches each live moment as mutually-constructed by an interrelated array of textual, technological, institutional, and audience-related domains. Critically, this thesis contributes to two key areas of film and media studies research. The first is 'trailer studies', which has charted how trailers and their exhibition have moved extensively beyond the spatio-temporal boundaries of the cinema screen. The second is around 'live and event cinema', which has considered how liveness has been increasingly employed during film exhibition. Where the former has considered trailers but not their liveness, and the latter has considered liveness but not in relation to trailers, this research project intersects the two by situating itself in this lacuna. Ultimately, this thesis first argues that liveness represents one strategy through which Hollywood is 'eventising' trailer exhibition within converging, competitive, and highly-saturated exhibitory spaces it does not own. Secondly, it argues that the mobilisation of liveness during film trailer exhibition represents a broader move towards liveness being witnessed beyond the exhibition of film. Finally, it argues that these mobilisations of liveness represent neither standardised nor even emerging promotional practices. Instead, in light of a contemporary entertainment culture heavily invested in live events, these promotional mobilisations of liveness represent exploratory manoeuvres deployed by Hollywood as it attempts to navigate, and situate itself - and its content - within an increasingly complex, interconnected, and interactive media ecosystem.

Nation building is the process in question. This process is, as a rule, complicated in diverse countries, such as Kazakhstan. As a post-Soviet nation, it is still not sure how to define itself in the country and in the outside world. The crisis of the Kazakh identity is compromised by the manifold ethnic groups and cultures, juxtaposed by the clashes of Kazakh and Russian languages and different identities. In this regard, the role of cinema in the need for cultural certainty and the systematisation of national identity cannot be underestimated. Film is one way of offering knowledge of the nation to itself. Through cinema it is possible to imagine the history of the nation and construct modernity and to rebuild the nation. The current study investigates Kazakh cinema in transition. This thesis, for the first-time, provides an assessment of Kazakh cinema production after the adoption of the new Cinema Law (2019) and the Eurasia International Film Festival (EurIFF) within a nation-building context. Also, little work using a theoretical framework has been done on the relationship between Kazakh film and nation building within the wider discussion of nationalism. This thesis adds to this small body of work by addressing Kazakh cinema's role in nation building. Through the analysis of Kazakh films framed through Anthony Smith's ethno-symbolism concept, this thesis will look at how Kazakhstan is trying to define itself through cinema, how Kazakh films aid the country to reconstruct itself. In order to critically analyse the current Kazakh cinema landscape, this thesis has adopted a qualitative approach, utilising semi-structured interviews with 30 participants residing in the Kazakhstani cities of Almaty and Nur-Sultan. After carrying out my research in relation to the literature on nationalism and film studies, the analysis of the data establishes four primary themes. Firstly, I investigate Kazakh film policy, focusing on the way the Cinema Law may reshape the film industry in the country. Secondly, I consider the significance of the Eurasia International Film Festival (EurIFF) as well as the unusual challenges that this state-run festival had to face in order to organise itself effectively. The third theme explores the curation and programming of the festival, examining the festival's approach to its audience and palette of films. Finally, in the fourth theme I demonstrate the influence of the film industry on both Kazakh cinema and the EurIFF with respect to image building. Today, not many countries have successful cases of nation building through films. Kazakhstan is no exception. I conclude that Kazakh cinema and film policy is situated in between the discords of the old system (Kazakhfilm) and the new (the State Centre for Support of National Cinema). This thesis shows that the impact of Kazakh cinema on nation building is limited. Ultimately, I argue that if Kazakhstan had a stronger business-oriented approach to film policy, both domestic and international markets would be more reachable. As a result, cinematic nation building in Kazakhstan would be more successful.

Often adapted from long standing hegemonies of masculine bravery and strength, and visible in a wide range of Scottish popular art, literature, and film, not to mention certain Hollywood adaptations, the Scottish hard-man character has infiltrated many aspects of the country's history and culture1. Most recently, a particular form of this character - a stubborn, strong-willed version, wary of official health intervention and reckless with his own health behaviours - has emerged within both popular and academic attempts to explain some of Scotland's public health problems and their often-disproportionate effects on Scottish men2. But who is the Scottish hard man, what does he look like, what does he say, how does he behave and what is his relationship to the country's public health problems? In order to answer some of these questions, this thesis turns to the texts in which the visual images of the hard-man are most closely linked to his health behaviours - public health film. Three years of archive research has uncovered a wealth of film and accompanying public health materials that variously attempt to challenge or control men's public health behaviours. From state sponsored public health films to locally organised campaigns, these texts are filled with visual representations of Scottish masculinity as well as the bodies, the medicines, the tools, the doctors, the patients and the spaces of 20th century public health language. Tracing the steps of the Sottish hard-man character through these texts, I aim to discover how this figure has been constructed and utilised in public health film and what this can tell us about the cultural connections between gender, the media and health in the 20th century and beyond.

This thesis explores the ways in which Saudi women entrepreneurs are socially constructed in Saudi Arabian media by deploying a social constructionist epistemology. Drawing upon Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis, this thesis examines the discursive apparatuses through which the phenomenon of female entrepreneurship in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is forged. It also explores the contextual factors, such as the political, socio-economic and socio-cultural milieu, in addition to endogenous ones, affecting the representation and entrepreneurial practices of Saudi women entrepreneurs through qualitative in-depth interviews. Building on the extant literature, I challenge the ubiquitous entrepreneurship conceptualisations and discourses, and especially the Western, white, male entrepreneur, by shedding light onto Saudi women's entrepreneurial experiences in Saudi Arabia. The findings unveil the ideological paradoxes and shifting power relations that are embedded within, and underpin, the representation and experiences of Saudi female entrepreneurs. These paradoxes, arguably, are a manifestation of the current socioeconomic reforms in KSA amalgamating conventional, religious and nationalist values with a neo-liberalist and (state) capitalist structure. Such juxtapositions produce conformist narratives and counternarratives to the Western entrepreneur, as seen through this study's analysis. The findings reveal that there are Saudi discourses that chime with Western constructions of the entrepreneur such that of the individualistic, heroic and successful entrepreneur. However, there are other Saudi discourses on entrepreneurship that counter the Western entrepreneur as a rags-to-riches iconoclast and rather, offer elitist ascriptions instead. Another presumption that underpins the Saudi discourses is that although the Saudi women entrepreneurs are celebrated for their achievements, they are, in some instances, immanently essentialised to their new roles. Such complexities encapsulating the discourses of entrepreneurship are not merely a manifestation of the changing milieu and gender relations in Saudi Arabia, but also the malleable and fluid conceptualisation of entrepreneurship theories and practices. From a pragmatic stance, the thesis is concerned with advancing the knowledge on the entrepreneurial practices of Saudi females by understanding the contextual and institutional factors at play that affect their business endeavours. From a conceptual stance, it is concerned with widening the participants of the field to expand our understanding of entrepreneurship theory and practice.

This PhD thesis demonstrates how post-'9/11' US security discourses are co-constituted through Hollywood's superhero genre, specifically the productions of Marvel and DC. In doing so it contributes to important debates within International Relations and Critical Security Studies that address the connections between popular culture and world politics. My interdisciplinary and inter-textual film analysis reveals that artefacts of popular culture have to be seen beyond their merely representational potential; on the contrary, popular culture becomes an important site to make sense of political issues as part of the mundane and the everyday, increasingly blurring the line between reality and fiction. Looking at American history and the development of the American Monomyth shows how superheroes were not created on a blank slate but were already born out of a specific narrative of the American nation in the 1930s. For those past 90 years, superheroes have been constant co-producers of crisis and conflict, making sense of foreign policy to domestic and global audiences. Their reinvigoration since 2001, leading into large-scale productions of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, corresponds with the crisis of '9/11' and the 'War on Terror'. Throughout the presidencies of Bush, Obama, and Trump they have been shaping the discursive elements of US security and foreign policy. The thesis argues that by engaging with superhero films, not as trivial pieces of entertainment but as important cultural artefacts that co-constitute political reality, scholars might find new ways to make sense of violence and conflict and seek new paths to a more peaceful world.

Mexican screen melodrama, often located in the margins of Film and Television Studies, is frequently dismissed as lacking cultural value. This genre, however, should not be overlooked as it offers a unique opportunity to understand the social representations and dynamics of the country. This thesis by publication historicises and contextualises the evolution, production and development of key Mexican screen melodramas over seventy years to understand and mediate Mexico's ambivalence around socioeconomic background, race and religion, gender and worth, family and duty. Crucial titles outlined in this research include María Candelaria (dir. Emilio Fernández, 1943), Quinceañera (dir. Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1960), Quinceañera (prod. Carla Estrada, 1987-1988), Nada personal (Nothing Personal, prods. Carlos Payan, Epigmenio Ibarra, and Hernan Vera. 1996-1997), Mi pequeña traviesa (My Little Mischief-Maker, prod. Pedro Damián, 1997-1998), Primer amor ... a mil por hora (First Love ... at 1000 Miles Per Hour, prod. Pedro Damián, 2000-2001), Rebelde (Rebel, prod. Pedro Damián, 2004-2006), El estudiante (The Student, dir. Roberto Girault, 2009), and Miss XV (Miss 15, prod. Pedro Damián, 2012). The six publications that constitute this thesis demonstrate the importance of localised scholarly inquiry into Mexican audiovisual media that considers not only narrative discourses, content and textual analyses, but also industrial records and practices, marketing campaigns and press releases, archival research and interviews, multimedia synergy, and comparative analysis. For some time, research on Mexican melodrama has had a strong social focus, with several writings about audience engagement, but it is imperative to have more close readings of the texts themselves to understand their cultural context and industrial histories. The relevance of this research has been highlighted across three different journals - the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, Critical Arts and Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies - and will be published as a book chapter in the forthcoming Children, Youth, and International Television and within a special dossier for the Journal of Popular Television. This research exposes societal changes within Mexico by utilising one of its most omnipresent forms of popular culture and provides a deeper understanding of Mexico's primary media productions through the use of genre and remake theory. This research is an invaluable contribution to international scholarship on melodrama, Mexican screen media, telenovela remakes, genre studies, gender studies, quality television and streaming services.

This thesis examines the concurrent arrival of a burgeoning queer televisual culture during the post-2000 boom in Chinese TV format adaptation and innovation. It focuses on contemporary Chinese provincial station-produced variety shows that are originally based on global TV formats. Drawing on global TV studies, global queering theory, Chinese feminist theories and media and cultural globalisation research, I develop a 'queer-glocalisation' framework to doubly debunk the static polarity prevalent in global queer and TV studies. My theoretical approach works to explore the complex ways in which multiple forces and factors associated with the ideologies and power struggles of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality and class, at both global and local levels, are intertwined and co-constitutive in this process. I present a critical analysis of the Chinese glocalisation of TV formats in three often queerly connotated variety genres: talk shows, reality TV and impersonation shows. Using specific case studies from each genre, I ask why and how certain formatted programmes have become a queer female 'runway', so to speak, yet sometimes also a worrying and ambivalent one. In addition, the paradoxes and promises of contemporary Chinese lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) culture in its conversations and contestations with local normative ideologies and global flows of TV and queer knowledge are also interrogated. By so doing, I construct a comprehensive thesis for understanding the ways in which queer meanings emerge, reside in, contribute to and flow through predominantly heteronormative, patriarchal public culture and mainstream spaces. Ultimately, my research in this thesis reveals a dual process of contemporary Chinese queer-glocalist TV culture that has been enacted by and is continually negotiating with both the dominant industrial, technological and social-political forces of mainstream Chinese society and the nonnormatively gendered and sexualised desires and tactics of TV producers, performers, celebrities and audiences.

This thesis critically engages with the literary response to environmental degradation during late capitalism that entrenches further racial and class inequalities. The rampant exploitation of natural resources by neoliberal and neo-colonial systems has been registered in a number of fiction and non-fiction works. This project focuses on the treatment of the theme of environmental injustice by writers from ethnic minority backgrounds in the US and traces the connection between race and classbased inequalities and environmental dispossession. Environmental justice has been widely studied across disciplines in the last three decades. The scholarly interest in the topic has been piqued due to drastic environmental degradation, uneven distribution of natural resources and pollution, and the highly uneven impact of climate change. Although literary scholarship has shown keen interest in environmental justice, little attention has been dedicated to studying environmental justice with emphasis on ethnic minority writers and the strategies of resistance they offer through their works in a comparative fashion. Drawing on Jason W. Moore's world-ecological paradigm of capitalism and new approaches to environmental justice, I investigate the ways in which ethnic minority writers are structurally better placed to explore the damaging effects of environmental degradation. This thesis finds that, as in the civil rights movement, ethnic minority writers and artists are today at the forefront of the struggle against environmental injustice through their creative work and activism. Therefore, this project not only studies the creative response to conditions of environmental degradation, but also investigates the complex affiliation of "writer-activists" vis-a-vis the ethnic communities from which they originate, as well as the global literary market in which they must operate. The writers and artists under study engage in a form of truth-telling that allows them to function as nodes in a global struggle against environmental injustice, even as they secure often privileged positions within the circuits of the global culture industry. The thesis concludes that the complex positions writer-activists hold in return shape the aesthetic forms they deploy in their response to environmental inequality.

Low fertility rates, advances in medicine and improved living standards have dramatically altered the worldwide demographic landscape of age and ageing. The world's population is growing older, and as a result of this demographic trend, scholarly research in a variety of academic disciplines in the West have turned their focus towards socio-cultural understandings of old age. Research-based in cultural gerontology suggests that within the context of western neoliberal societies perceptions of older age mainly unfold within two hegemonic narratives, namely ageing as related to decline, frailty and dependency and successful ageing characterised by youthfulness, productivity and continued personal autonomy. Since recent multi-disciplinary approaches to age presume that western views of ageing are shaped by the socio-cultural environment and its hegemonic narratives, the role media play in the dissemination and preservation of these hegemonic narratives has been an important site of investigation, particularly in relation to the portrayal of older women. However, the media depiction of older males and related cultural narratives and how older men experience these narratives within a cultural environment other than the U.S. have received less academic attention. Paradoxically, whilst the representation of older male ageing is strikingly less in the focus of scholarly debate than female ageing, the action film genre has recently brought older male characters into focus through the revival of tough-guy action films featuring older male protagonists. This thesis analyses three 'geri-action films', The Expendables, The Expendables 2 and The Expendables 3, in order to explore current representational contextualisations of masculine ageing within the hegemonic socio-cultural constructions of successful ageing and ageing as decline. In so doing, it furthers an understanding of the dominant socio-cultural frames of reference which influence older men's constructions of older male identities. Subsequently, this thesis explores the ways that ageing impacts on the later lives of men who would have been judged during their working lives to fulfil the criteria of hegemonic masculinity in that they are heterosexual, white and were, before retirement, in white-collar, affluent, middle- and upper-managerial positions. The in-depth semi-structured interviews with four retired German men offered genuine and novel views of older German men's inner worlds in relation to the specificities of their life-course narratives and self-perceptions within the socio-cultural and theoretical contexts of ageing and masculinity. Through qualitative research underpinned by theoretical and conceptual understandings of media, ageing and representation, cultural gerontology and masculinity studies, this thesis offers a critical analysis of previously unheard narratives about ageing and masculinity.

Dream ballets were a regular feature of Hollywood film musicals in the 1940s and 1950s, especially at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, but they have received limited academic study. An understanding and exploration of these dream ballets in the context of meaning created through dance and choreography is largely missing. There has been some critical debate about the nature of dream ballets within integrated film musicals but with limited understanding of dance as an abstract art form and its intention to communicate emotions. Mostly the existing scholarship offers psychoanalytic interpretation adapting ideas from Freud's dream theory. Focusing on dream ballets, this thesis will explore through primary research in American film archives and textual analysis, the creation of a new style of 'American' choreography and musical performance as core syntax within the integrated narrative musical. This research will examine how this new style and creative process impacted on the representation of male and female genders in dance, how it determined the internal dream protagonist's perspective, and how the complex layering of codes was employed to avoid the Production Code Administration regulations. The first dream ballet identified within the corpus is a ballet featured in the Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935) choreographed by Albertina Rasch. The final dream ballet identified within the corpus is 'The Small House of Uncle Thomas' ballet choreographed by Jerome Robbins for The King and I (1956). The corpus includes over twenty musical films that include dream ballets.

Interactive films have been around for almost a century, yet they have suffered repeatedly from critical, commercial and interactional failings. We propose that brain-computer interfaces can offer interactions with narratives and encourage cinematic engagement by minimising active control. We ask what are the problems inherent to interactive cinema? Can real-time interactions via a brain-computer interface (BCI) construct cinematic content? And how do groups of individuals experience brain-controlled cinema designed for individual, shared or distributed control? Our review of related work motivates the interactional choice of using Passive BCI with real-time cinematic construction to synchronise rhythms of the viewers blinking, Attention and Meditation to the rhythms of cinema. We use the Performance Led Research in-the-Wild methodology to probe public deployments of our films, and we describe user interactions in-the-Wild during screenings of multiple designs of two interactive films: three single user, three multi user, and a live score performance. Our descriptions of BCI mappings to cinematic techniques and production strategies to produce interactive content efficiently contributes to the understanding of practical interactive cinema production. In our results we define 1) different stages of control; discovery, conscious and unconscious, 2) awareness of the affective loop, 3) a shifting prominence of engagement between the narrative, the visual qualities and the agency of users' interactions. We offer a dynamic view of control; people's experiences are shifting from awareness of their self, the film, and their control. Our hyper-scanning multi-user study introduces the concept of effects moving across groups, working together to produce engaging experiences, and instances of group members disrupting other's experience by deciding to unilaterally take control of the film. Our discussion contributes to our understanding of passive interactions with narrative systems. Our research contributions include our insights into seven designs of two brain-controlled films. We define two taxonomies, of control and group control, and produce insights into value to audiences of brain-controlled films. We show the development of affective loops of physiological response and cinematic content, and provide new design directions and practical implications for interactive filmmakers.

Disney princess films and marketing have captured the hearts of children and adults all over the world. However, they may also contain gendered messages that reinforce traditional societal expectations of men and women. This thesis examines the Disney princesses, a worldwide commercial and cultural phenomenon that made $1.686bn just in 2018 (The Licensing Letter 2019). The Disney princesses are 16 royal women featured within animated Disney and Pixar films that are loved by young girls across the globe. This research will explore the Disney princess phenomenon, aiming to answer the following research question: 'How is femininity depicted within the Disney princess phenomenon?' through facet methodology. I examine the role of femininity through three facets. Firstly, by examining the models of femininity depicted in Disney princess films using textual analysis. Secondly, the identified models are used as a framework to examine which models of femininity are dominant in Disney princess merchandising and marketing experiences. Content analysis and interviews supplement this research. Thirdly, I build on this framework once more by examining which models of femininity are dominant within princess park experiences through autoethnography. I identified five 'waves' of femininity within the princess films: passive dreamers, lost dreamers, active leaders, sacrificing dreamers and innovative leaders. Each wave demonstrated characteristics that adhered to psychological understandings of femininity and masculinity. It was found that as more masculine attributes were introduced, the princess' behaviour would be policed by the introduction of a romantic relationship. The most dominant model of femininity within princess merchandising was the innovative leaders due to the heavy marketing of Anna and Elsa (Frozen 2013). Without the sisters, it was the passive and lost dreamers who dominated. Within princess park experiences, the singular character trait of female support was most central, being depicted by active and innovative leaders. Overall, the most dominant model of femininity within the princess consumer experiences was the innovative leaders due to the heavy marketing of the Frozen sisters. Without them, it was the passive dreamers who were most dominant. This thesis has provided an exploratory and holistic examination of the Disney princess phenomenon in its key representations: films, merchandising and marketing, and princess park experiences. It also has provided an up to date analysis of non-franchised and franchised princesses, including the recently released Frozen II (2019), adding further depth to the phenomenon. The film analysis framework created for this research is a transferable and adaptable structure that can be used by future researchers to analyse a phenomenon of their choice. This research is a lens in which to view and understand how a global phenomenon such as the Disney princesses can contribute to the depiction of femininity within popular culture. I have identified micro changes within the phenomenon due to the in-depth nature of my analysis. It has provided a deeper insight to the 16 heroines in order to highlight how the phenomenon has changed and developed over time.

Since the 1993 market-oriented reform, the Chinese government has strengthened its role in the domestic film industry’s commercialisation. Feng Xiaogang’s New Year Celebration Films (hesui pian, NYCFs), by virtue of their impressive box-office performance, are a valuable indicator of how commercial imperatives work in tandem with ideological prescriptions and state censorship to shape contemporary Chinese commercial filmmaking. This thesis selects, as case studies, Feng’s eight NYCFs of modern urban life across the period from the late 1990s, when he began making films in this mode with governmental support, to the 2000s, when his NYCFs address genre shift in the context of China’s entry to the WTO: Party A, Party B (Jiafang yifang, 1997), Be There or Be Square (Bujian busan, 1998), Sorry Baby (Meiwan meiliao, 1999), Sigh (Yisheng tanxi, 2000), Big Shot’s Funeral (Dawan, 2001), Cell Phone (Shouji, 2003), A World Without Thieves (Tianxia wuzei, 2004) and If You Are The One (Feicheng wurao, 2008). It investigates how the political economy of the Chinese film industry — comprising three interactive aspects in this context, industry commercialisation, government regulation and popular culture — produced Feng’s NYCFs as a popular commercial genre. To facilitate this investigation, this thesis merges textual, industrial and cultural-policy analysis, combining film texts with attention to the government’s cultural and industrial policies, film regulations and censoring rules, the Party’s political philosophies and relevant campaigns in the film sphere, the trend in popular culture of humour from the late 1980s to the 2000s, and interview materials involving Feng and his close collaborators. It argues that Feng’s filmmaking, along with the three categories’ mutual construction, appropriates popular humorous expression to integrate political promotion and commercial return. This market-approved integration, in turn, promotes the film industry’s state-led commercialisation, with regulatory authorities using economic and administrative means to infuse state propaganda into domestic filmmaking and thus, consolidate the Party’s cultural hegemony. This thesis contributes to a nuanced understanding of the relationship between state, film industry, and filmmakers. Taking a political economy perspective, it uses Feng’s NYCF production as a lens through which to illuminate Chinese cinema’s production culture, in the context of state-led commercialisation. In addition, the thesis offers a new model that acknowledges the intersection of popular culture and ideology in constructing cultural hegemony, and further, highlights the role of the popular culture of humour in coordinating state propaganda and social critique in contemporary Chinese commercial cinema.

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 thesis explores representations of young people in four youth films which thematize the coming of age of young adults in 1960s and early 1970s Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is based on the analysis of Čudna devojka/Strange Girl (Jovan Živanović, 1962), Tri sata za ljubav/Three Hours for Love (Fadil Hadžić, 1968) Bubašinter/The Bug Killer (Milan Jelić, 1971), and Kužiš stari moj/Get it, Man (Vanča Kljaković, 1973) that have been made during the so-called utopian phase in Yugoslavia. Cinema is here understood as a privileged domain of youth construction, and a projection of (un)desirable images related to processes of maturing in Yugoslavia. By placing the concept of coming of age at the centre of the analysis, this thesis examines the contradictory relationship between film representations of young people, and the youth ideal promoted by official discourses in Yugoslavia. Close analysis of four films within their specific social, political and cinematographic contexts demonstrates how selected representations subvert society’s main ideological tendencies concerning questions of female emancipation and class liberation. This pioneering analysis of Yugoslav youth cinema and its coming-of-age representations presents a theoretical and cultural intervention into the cinematographic, social and cultural history of Yugoslavia. The findings show that due to their ambivalent status inside the Yugoslav film industry, selected youth films subvert the binary opposition of auteur cinema and the producer’s cinema, which functions as a dominant organizing principle in histories of Yugoslav cinematography. By analysing different patterns of the youth’s behaviour that are represented in the films, this research offers insights on gender and class regimes that were hierarchically structuring social relations in Yugoslavia at the time. The thesis therefore introduces youth films as valuable objects of study in the social and cultural history of Yugoslavia.

This thesis explores contemporary science fiction cinema through the concept of the Anthropocene. The literature review suggests that science fiction film studies doesn’t engage with ecological concerns as much as it could, that ecocinema studies tends to ignore the genre, and that the broader field of the environmental humanities similarly overlooks the genre’s uses. By bringing science fiction cinema into conversation with emergent Anthropocene debates, it makes useful contributions to science fiction film studies, ecocinematic understanding and the wider environmental humanities field. This thesis is split in two. Part one suggests a trend within a number of science fiction films of the 21st century, which are shown to respond to the ecological concerns of this era marked by rapid environmental change. Chapters two and three in particular are concerned with showcasing how legacy forms of representation in the genre undergo Anthropocene-inflected alterations. These chapters showcase a movement from technological to ecological concern in a selection of contemporary science fiction films. Beyond demarcating this shift towards the ecological that’s being borne out in the genre, this thesis also suggests science fiction cinema as a uniquely placed framework for mediating and experiencing certain aspects of this era. In part two, comprising chapters four and five, this thesis argues for the importance of science fiction films in lending aesthetic and experiential consideration to the dwarfing nonhuman timescales and objects that pervade human experience in the Anthropocene. Through an analysis of the representation of time and planets across a range of films, this thesis argues for the uses and importance of the genre in wider ecocritical discourse and understanding.

Through various far-reaching measures of modernisation the recently independent Malaysian state endeavoured to construct a capitalist infrastructure while demanding Malay men to embrace a new ethos of hard work, conquest and productivity. This thesis analyses Malay films to explore the extent to which the clash of differing temporalities in the aforesaid process problematized Malay masculine power. To explore this I shall turn to a local trend of films about Malay men in transit where they are often shown journeying in search of home and work. Here I point out two things: Firstly, we frequently a see a struggle for men to adapt to modernisation shown against women's relatively more adjusted and advanced position in it. Secondly, this often raises the structural question of which gender ultimately commands the meaning of 'home' and belonging, a question that reveals a tension between a modernity dictated in Malay masculine terms and a longer-standing history of Malay women's cultural influence. Ultimately, I argue that Malaysian modernity is underlined by a cultural battle over the gender of history, as the question of who Malay modernity is for, that is to say if it will be won by its men or women, remains unresolved. This amounts to an uneven gender regime where Malay women's historically established cultural authority actively contends with an expanding patriarchy.

When they began to flourish in the 1970s, women’s film festivals offered pivotal opportunities for the exhibition of films by women filmmakers beyond the mainstream. Since then, these festivals have grown into significant platforms for the dissemination of and research into women’s films and are actively shaping the global film festival landscape. Yet, despite this proliferation and the advance of the burgeoning field of Film Festival Studies, little research has been undertaken into the organisation and development of women’s film festivals. This thesis presents the first lengthy study that explores women’s film festivals in depth. The key concern of this research project is to fill a conceptual gap in scholarship by mapping the field of Women’s Film Festival Studies. It is situated at the intersection of Film Festival Studies, feminist theory and feminist film theory and draws on a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework. The enquiry is based on Patricia White’s understanding of cinefeminism, which is concerned with the exhibition and distribution of women’s films as an activist practice. Departing from this theoretical starting point, this thesis examines women’s film festivals from four perspectives: their history, their position on the film festival circuit, their relationship with feminist theories and their archiving practices. At the heart of this analysis are case studies of four festivals: a study of the Dortmund | Cologne International Women’s Film Festival, a comparative study of the London Feminist Film Festival and Underwire Festival in London, and a reconstructive study of the Women’s Event at the 1972 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Drawing on findings about these festivals, this thesis proposes a conceptual framework for the study of women’s film festivals that is informed by their history, impact, activism and documentation. The thesis also focusses on an underexplored aspect of the feminist film movement: exhibition. It lifts women’s film festivals out of the generic framework of niche film festivals, and draws connections between Film Festival Studies, history and archive studies. Thus, the conceptual originality of the work is found in its contribution of new knowledge to the fields of feminist film theory and Film Festival Studies. The research design is based on feminist research methodologies and is rooted in Standpoint Theory and a feminist epistemological understanding of knowledge production. As such, another key contribution of the thesis is a methodological intervention, which is not only valuable within the academic context of the field, but can also be applied by festival organisers and practitioners. This thesis attempts to reconstruct a comprehensive history of women’s film festivals and embeds their development in the context of the general history of film festivals and the political progress of women’s movements. Moreover, it draws parallels and highlights differences between the cultural and political contexts of individual festivals, and provides a survey of contemporary women’s film festivals. With regard to women’s film festivals on the global festival circuits, the thesis suggests how different purposes of these festivals inform how they are positioned in relation to one another. In terms of feminisms at women’s film festivals, it analyses the way different feminist theories become manifest at these festivals and proposes that contrasting theoretical perspectives can be present simultaneously at the same festival. Finally, considering the state of archiving women’s film festivals, it argues that renewed encounters with historical festivals through the archive can produce new knowledge about these events, which can inform contemporary and future practitioners. The thesis takes the view that the future of women’s film festivals lies in their past. Every aspect negotiated in this thesis draws a connection between contemporary and historical women’s film festivals and considers how the past informs the present and the future. As such, the research serves as a practical application of what Kate Eichorn describes as the archival turn. It proposes an open dialogue between the historical progress of women’s movements, which gave birth to the idea of women’s film festivals, and contemporary feminist activism at festivals and festival research, by looking backwards and forwards at the same time.

This practice-based research explains how non-human subjectivity can be suggested in documentary film and identifies film techniques that allow a spectator to empathise with an onscreen animal. It argues that a spectator cannot be told to feel empathy, and instead should be offered an experience that allows them to practise empathy whilst watching and listening. Henceforth, both theory and practice explore how audience and onscreen animal can be connected in cinema and what the requirements are for a human spectator to relate to and embody the onscreen animal and its film world. The argument starts with the proposition that humans are not capable of fully portraying non-human subjectivity in documentary film, because any depiction will be an anthropomorphic interpretation of what that might be. However, there are films that do give a sense of non-human subjectivity, including those made in this research. To resolve this apparent contradiction, this study examines how the illusion of onscreen animal subjectivity is formed in the audience’s minds, how the audience empathises with the animal, and how a filmmaker can construct a cinematic animal that invites empathy. The thesis firstly offers a theoretical framework that outlines how humans have conceptualised human and non-human animals and how this has transformed over time. In describing what sharing a gaze with a non-human animal entails as per “The Animal That Therefore I Am” (Derrida, 1997) it demonstrates how dialectics help to access animal otherness. Furthermore, it argues that anthropomorphism and dialectics can be part of practices that decentralise the human subject and can put thinking such as ‘becoming-animal’ into action. In order to evaluate theoretical ideas and concepts, such as animal otherness, animal subjectivity, decentralisation of the human subject, and to see how they work in practice this research includes textual analyses of three documentaries made by other directors that have non-human protagonists, as well as the production of three short films: The View From Here (2012, Kooij), The Breeder (2017, Kooij), and Wolves From Above (2018, Kooij); and the longer film Wolfpark (2019, Kooij) where techniques were repeated and this film demonstrates how liminality can be visualised on screen. These analyses demonstrate that the six techniques for suggesting animal subjectivity in documentary film and provoking empathy are: depicting animals as breaking the fourth wall; anthropomorphising animals; juxtaposing humans against non-humans; the inclusion of abstractions and defamiliarisations that render the image otherworldly or unheimlich; avoiding didactic voice-over to stimulate imagination; and to allow for poetic or artistic interventions, rather than attempting to suggest non-human subjectivity with strictly observational or scientific means. Ultimately, the thesis celebrates (re)imaginings of actuality on part of the authored filmmaker, as it argues that artful interventions are the most effective way to express subjectivities of human and non-human animals, and encourage feelings of connection and sharedness through cinema.

For the last decade, urban professional single women in China aged thirty-plus have been labelled sheng nü (translated as 'leftover' women in English), a term popularised by the media. This research analyses three recent Chinese films portraying 'leftover' women, together with online reviews of the films. I address how 'leftover' women are constructed in Chinese media, how these representations are read by the audience and how this links with wider changes in Chinese urban society. The latter include changes in gender relations, love, marriage, intimacy and family relations, as well as wider trends concerning choice, modernity, individualisation and consumerism. Using genre analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA) along with multimodal techniques, my thesis addresses the representations and readings of 'leftover women' through the following key themes: self-identity, choices in love, and intergenerational and social ties with families and friends. I argue that 'leftover' women are represented as having complex, mixed emotions; while proud of being independent professional women they also express anxieties about ageing and desires for a stable relationship. 'Leftover' women's search for love in the films is associated with several cultural components, such as concern with the remote consequences of one's decisions, cultural norms and consultation with family and friends. While marriage focused on men dang hu dui1 remains an acceptable and popular principle of a 'good match', the films also address individuals' personalities and socioeconomic status as important dimensions. Finally, tensions between life choices as an individual and life choices shaped by tradition emerge from the representations and their audience readings, with parental intervention simultaneously normalised and criticised, and friends' involvement emerging as a new form. Overall, I argue that the contemporary preoccupation with 'leftover' women reflects anxieties about the changing status of Chinese women and their quest for more agency and autonomy, as they navigate the tensions between choice and tradition.

This dissertation examines the cultural results of Italian decolonization in the process of national reconstruction which followed WWII (1945-60). It dialogues with recent scholarship investigating colonial legacies in modern Italy, although it presents some innovative insights concerning both the methodology adopted to dissect the formation of those legacies and the corpus of representations that will be considered. As far as the first element is concerned, this thesis will define a critical approach enabling the exploration of the ways in which film contents offered a renewed sense of national belonging - or Italianità. Not only does this work shed new light on the transition from Fascism to the Republic according to critical and postcolonial perspectives (chapter 1), but it will offer a systematic examination of a film corpus that has almost been neglected by previous scholarship, that is newsreels and documentaries about the Italian former colonies produced between the 1945 and the 1960. The political interferences which characterised the production of that footage will be dissected thanks to the study of original archival findings combined with the review of scholarship on the topic (chapter 2). The analytical chapters will tackle the extent to which the memory of the colonial past was either repressed or selectively recollected in order to redefine the discursive geography of national belongings (chapter 3) and the intrinsic benevolence of Italians working abroad (chapter 4). The following chapters will deal more specifically with the formation of an aphasic and a-grammatic form of postcolonial memory (chapter 5), and with the resilient ways through which uncomfortable recollections of that past were re-articulated in a new and positive presence of Italy in Africa (chapter 6). In so doing, this work suggests that the ambiguous connection between de-Fascistization and decolonization engendered unproblematized narratives and memories about the colonial period that reverberate in contemporary Italian society.

In this thesis I explore how women trafficked for sexual exploitation emerge as subjects of public pity in media discourse. I do this by analysing their depictions in three media genres: film, celebrity advocacy, and newspaper journalism. The broad goal of the study is to understand how proposals for emotional and moral obligation towards trafficked women are constructed in the mediated communication of human trafficking. More specifically, I explore the dichotomy between ideal and undeserving victimhood through an intersectional lens by analysing how the embodiment, agency, and vulnerability of trafficked women are constructed in the media. The analytics of mediation is employed as a methodological approach, combining multimodal and critical discourse analysis as tools for analysing data. My thesis reveals that representations of trafficked women are characterised by discursive ambivalence and that dominant trafficking discourses, which coalesce around depictions of naïve, innocent, young women exploited by evil traffickers carry the most visibility, which is reflected in laws, policies, and humanitarian and human rights appeals. But more importantly, rather than an absence of marginalised identities and narratives, this study shows that victim hierarchies legitimate only those voices which are already dominant in social and institutional discourse. In other words, victim hierarchies are problematic not only because they highlight some groups as particularly worthy of public pity, but because they create and perpetuate dominant discourses at the expense of contextualising and politicising marginalised subjectivities and experiences. Victim hierarchies, therefore, result in a discursive ambivalence within semiotic texts that do carry political potential but, as it is, fall short of giving full political agency to those trafficked women whose experiences and identities do not conform to notions of ideal victimhood.

This thesis explores the historical informal distribution of art cinema in Taiwan from 1986 to 2016. This historical analysis is conducted through different stages including various media formats and platforms. To examine this area in greater detail, I interviewed seven informal distributors directly linked to Taiwan's art cinema during this time period. Because there has been limited access to art cinema historically in Taiwan, informal distribution is one of channels for accessing art cinema. From the development of Solar MTV, cinephiles have been able to watch art cinema via advanced technology, including Laser Discs(LDs) and unauthorised Video Home System tapes. Concurrently, informal distributors strengthened access to secure their sales via film magazines. With the advent of unauthorised Digital Video Discs(DVDs) in 2001, informal distribution in Taiwan became transnational across Taiwan's border with China and operated in tandem with multiplex contradictions such as pricing and practice. Additionally, unauthorised DVDs brought stunning content to cinephiles, which can broaden their watching experience through DVD paratexts. Finally, the online activities of Chinese fansubbing groups present another dimension of informal distribution. In this study, I observed their activities from 2012 to 2015. This research revealed that these groups provide access to alternative art cinema, different from institutional art cinema, which contributes to a more abundant culture of art cinema. In summary, informal distribution plays a significant role historically in Taiwan's art cinema culture.

This thesis considers its material from both a historical-critical and a performative-creative standpoint. It brings together complementary approaches: historical research, knowledge of musical repertoires, performance studies and creative practice, and film-music studies. It addresses questions of silent cinema, of music and narrative, of music and image, of live musical performance and early fifteenth-century history in the context of a large-scale creative project, Voices Appeared. This project and the critical approach of the thesis are based on first-hand engagement with the 1928 Carl Theodor Dreyer silent film, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc and with the polyphonic music performed and composed during Jeanne d'Arc's lifetime (c. 1412-1431). It suggests new perspectives for the understanding and critical reception of the musical and cinematic aspects of the creative project, and of the film itself. It also examines the use of music in Dreyer's later sound films and various alternative soundtracks for La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, setting all this in a wider relation to Dreyer's practice and oeuvre.

This thesis explores how different forms of nostalgia have been constructed by various forms of screen media in China since the 1990s. Textual analysis of media languages and structures and discourse analysis of the Chinese government’s economic-politics are used to examine the relationship between screen nostalgia, the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), China’s neoliberalist capitalism, and China’s media internationalisation. In order to examine the complex relationship between socio-economic and political contexts and nostalgic screen cultures produced by various generations of producers and presented in different formats of screen media, this thesis will investigate diverse forms of screen media texts in film, Internet drama and TV documentary. The following screen media texts are chosen: five feature films, A Mongolian Tale (Xie Fei, 1995), Nuan (Huo Jianqi, 2003), Shower (Zhang Yang, 1999), 24 City (Jia Zhangke, 2008), and So Young (Zhao Wei, 2013); one Internet drama, With You (Liu Chang, 2016); and two television documentaries A Bite of China (Chen Xiaoqing, 2012) and Maritime Silk Road (Zhang Wei, 2016). This thesis identifies that a culture of nostalgia has emerged in China in the past three decades, and this is strongly manifested in different media forms and genres and across different generations. The nostalgic culture speaks to, or engages with, China’s postsocialist condition and social changes, including the urban-rural divide, urbanisation, commercialisation, and youth experience, as well as China’s domestic and international policies. Overall, through examining various forms of nostalgia constructed by different forms of screen media, this thesis argues that nostalgia culture has changed, from filmmakers’ intellectual and critical engagements with China’s postsocialist condition to its co-option by the Chinese government and screen media industry for political and commercial gains over the past few decades.

This thesis presents a multidisciplinary, mixed methods approach that combines Film Studies and Human Computer Interaction (HCI), aiming to elucidate the rapidly digitised cinema-going experience and its implications on the construction of cinema audiences’ digital identity. Existing literature in the field of Film Studies has looked into it from a social, economic and architectural perspective, without taking into consideration the emerging incorporation of digital practices and therefore, digital footprint within the cinema-going experience itself. HCI scholars have experimented with enriching the cinema-going experience using technological interventions but their research remains limited in the screening room space. Combining Film Studies and HCI, this research project suggests a new insight on audience research. The conducted fieldwork consists of focus groups, expert interviews, participatory design, diaries, prototyping and prototype evaluation workshops. The studies’ results reveal that cinema-going is a holistic experience, a trajectory that begins before reaching the cinema, during one’s presence in it and after walking away from it, consisting of multiple physical and digital interactions, activities, platforms and devices that leave behind digital traces. Mapping this journey led to the segmentation of cinemagoers in four different types according to their cinema-going related behaviours. The approach followed resulted in the development of a prototype of a multiplatform system that provides enhanced and personalised experiences, made by the users for the users, taking into account what they think as important, beneficial, and problematic. This PhD project contributes to the field of Film Studies using an HCI methodological approach to renew cinema history literature, adding an understanding of how audiences make use of digital platforms and data during the contemporary cinema going experience. Additionally, it adds a contextual contribution to the HCI community, extending user needs and data handling in the field of cinema by presenting cinema-going trajectories in the digital age. The exploration of digital identity construction within cinema-going extends the digital identity literature of both fields by examining the actual audiences’ practices and viewpoint but also by getting the cinema exhibition’s perspective on the matter. Finally, implications for design serve as a basis for expanding on the suggested prototypes and designing better cinematic experiences that address users’ needs –adding to the list a commercial contribution of the project.