Although the position of mothers has changed considerably since the beginning of the twentieth century, an idealised notion of motherhood persists. The cinema provides a source of information about attitudes towards mothering in Australian society which is not diminished by the fact that mothers are often marginal to the narrative. While the study recognises that cinematic images are not unconditionally authoritative, it rests on the belief that films have some capacity to reflect and influence society. The films are placed in an historical context with regard to social change in Australian society, so that the images can be understood within the context of the time of the making and viewing of the films. The depictions of the mother are scrutinised with regard to her appearance, her attitude, her relationship with others and the expectations, whether explicit or implicit, of her role. Of particular significance is what happens to her during the film and whether she is punished or rewarded for her behaviour. The conclusions reached after analysis are used to challenge those ideas which assume that portrayals of motherhood are unchangeable and timeless. The study examines Australian feature films from 1900 to 1988. To augment its historical focus, it uses sociological, psychoanalytical and feminist theoretical writing with special relevance for motherhood and mothering practice. Looking at areas of importance to mothers, it comprises an exploration of what makes a mother good or bad; the significance of the birth of female and male children; the relationship of mothers to daughters; the mother's sexuality and the metaphor of the missing mother. It shows that images of motherhood on screen are organised according to political, social and economic requirements in the community. Further, films frequently show mothers in traditional roles which are useful for maintaining notions of patriarchal privilege in society. The analysis exposes stereotypical depictions of motherhood which are often inaccurate, unfair and oppressive to women.

Beyond the Pink: (Post) Youth Iconography in Cinema is a project in cultural time travel. It cuts up linear cinematic narratives to develop a hop-scotched history of youth, Generation X and (post) youth culture. I focus upon the pleasures, pedagogies and (un)popular politics of a filmic genre that continues to be dismissed as unworthy of intellectual debate. Accelerated culture and the discourse of celebrity have blurred the crisp divisions between fine art and crude commodity, the meaningful and meaningless, and real and fictive, unsettling the binary logic that assigns importance to certain texts and not others. This research project prises open that awkward space between representation and experience. Analysts require methods and structures through which to manage historical change and textual movement. Through cinema, macro-politics of identity emerge from the micro-politics of the narrative. Prom politics and mallrat musings become imbued with social significance that speak in the literacies available to youth. It grants the ephemerality and liminality of an experience a tactile trace. I select moments of experience for Generation X youth and specific icons – Happy Harry Hardon, Molly Ringwald, the Spice Girls, the Bitch, the invisible raver, teen time travellers Marty McFly and Donnie Darko, and the slacker – to reveal the archetypes and ideologies that punctuate the cinematic landscape. The tracked figures do not configure a smooth historical arc. It is in the rifts and conflicts of diverse narratives and subjectivities where attention is focused. This research imperative necessitates the presentation of a series of essays arranged in a tripartite framework. The first section proposes theoretical paradigms for a tethered analysis of filmic texts and Generation X. The second segment explores sites of struggle in public spaces and time. The final section leaves the landscape of post-Generation X to forge the relationship between history, power and youth identity. I particularly focus on the iconography, ideologies and imaginings of young women to lead the discussion of the shifts in the experience and representations of youth. By reinserting women into studies of film, it is imperative to stress that this is not a dissertation in, and of, women’s cinema. Rather, it serves as an historical corrective to the filmic database. The existing literature on youth cinema is disappointing and narrow in its trajectories. Timothy Shary’s Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema and Jon Lewis’ The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture exemplify the difficulties of capturing the complexities of individual films when they are collated in artificial and stifling categories. At one end of the analytical spectrum is the critique that comes with the caveat of ‘it’s just another teen movie’. Jonathon Bernstein’s monograph Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies is one such example which derails into acerbic diatribes and intellectual dismissal. The Cinema of Generation X: A Critical Study by Peter Hanson is a more successful project that is interested in the influences that inform a community of filmmakers than arriving at a catalogue of generic themes and narratives. There is an emphasis on the synergy between text, producer and readership. I continue this relationship explored by Hanson, but further accent the politics of film. The original contribution to knowledge offered by this doctoral thesis is a detailed study of (post) youth popular culture, building into a model for Generation X cinema, activating the interdisciplinary perspectives from film and cultural studies. With its adaptability into diverse media forms, cultural studies paradigms allow navigation through the expansive landscape of popular culture. It traverses beyond simple textual analyses to consider a text’s cultural currency. As an important carrier of meaning and sensory memories, cinema allows for alternative accounts that are denied in authorised history. As a unique form with its own visual literacy, screen theory is needed to refine observations. This unique melding of screen and cultural studies underscores the convergent relationship between text, readership, production and politics. This doctoral thesis activates concepts and methods of generationalism, nationalism, social history and cultural practice. There is a dialogue between the chapters that crosses over text and time. The 1980s of Molly Ringwald shadows the dystopia of Donnie Darko. The celebrity status of the Spice Girls clashes with the frustrated invisibility of the female raver. Douglas Coupland’s vision of Generation X in 1991 has evolved into Richard Linklater’s documentation of post-youth in the new millenium. Leaping between decades through time travel in cinema, I argue that the nostalgic past and projections for the future evoke the preoccupations and anxieties of the present.

This dissertation is an attempt to understand how early twenty-first century French films (2000-2002) position themselves in relation to late twentieth century feminist public discourse in France. More specifically, this study will examine how cinematic narratives are modifiers of feminist debate. Four selected films are analyzed for this research: Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl (2002), Patrice Leconte's Girl on the Bridge (2000), Pascale Bailly's God is Great and I am not (2002), and Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I (2001). The study focuses on how these four films illustrate the historical moment of the changing role of French women in society, as they move from a more private sphere to a larger public sphere. Following a renewed feminist debate in the 1990s, both male and female film directors express their ideas on this public discourse, that of the future role of women in French society. These films depict, through the narrative medium of cinema, proposals for a revised role of women, with its assets and its difficulties. Often, there is a merging of the private and public realms of the woman protagonist's life. A critical reading of each of the four chosen films for study traces the methods used by directors to depict a public debate, focusing on those techniques unique to film. This study shows the power of cinema to construct, propose, question and/or resolve potential real-life situations in relation to a historical public discourse.

My honors capstone project deals with the issues of reproductive rights and onscreen representations of women. I created a performance-based documentary style piece entitled Talk Over Me. It focuses on men’s opinions and stories surrounding abortion and conveys the disconnect between a woman’s face on screen and her opinions, thoughts and personal identity.

At roughly the same historical conjuncture when it began to be articulated as a concept marking a return of the repressed within the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank, the doppelganger motif became the subject of a veritable explosion of literary attention in 1920s Japan. Several authors – including Akutagawa Ryûnosuke, Edogawa Rampo, Tanizaki Jun’ichirô, and others – repeatedly deployed the doppelganger motif in their fictions against the backdrop of rapid urbanization, imperial expansion, and the restructuring of all aspects of everyday life by a burgeoning commodity culture. Interestingly, as if enacting the very compulsion to repeat embodied by the doppelganger on a historical register as well, a repetition of this proliferation of doppelganger images is apparent in the contemporary conjuncture, in the works of authors like Abe Kôbô, Murakami Haruki, or Shimada Masahiko, as well as in the films of Tsukamoto Shinya or Kurosawa Kiyoshi. To date, much of the previous scholarship on the figure of the doppelganger tends to be preoccupied with the attempt to locate its origins, whether in mythic or psychical terms. In contrast to this concern with fixing the figure to an imagined essence, in my dissertation, I instead place emphasis on the doppelganger’s enactment of repetition itself through an examination at the figure through the prism of the problem of genre, in terms of how it has come to be discursively constituted as a genre itself, as well as its embodiment of the very logic of genre in its play on the positions of identity and difference. By historicizing its formation as a genre, it becomes possible to productively situate not only the proliferation of images of the doppelganger in 1920s Japan but also its repetitions, resignifications, and critical articulations in the present within the the shifting constellation of relations among various discourses and practices that organize colonial and global modernity – language and visuality, the space of empire and the construction of ethno-racial identities, libidinal and material economies – that structure (yet are nevertheless exceeded by) its constitution as a concept.

This thesis offers an in-depth analysis of five films (Pane e cioccolata, Queen of Hearts, L’Emmerdeur, Mediterraneo sempre, Raging Bull) which deal with the Italian reality outside of Italy. The segment-by-segment study of these works reveals overlapping themes that define parameters that can be used to define a deterritorialized culture which the author of this study names the Italic culture. The analytical system produced can help scholars and students to understand what constitutes the filmic narrative of ethnic films. The title of the thesis derives from a monologue spoken by Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull by Martin Scorsese, which is a paraphrase of another monologue said by Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront by Elia Kazan. Though the words of the speeches are similar, their meaning is different. What for Malloy was a need for success becomes for LaMotta a criticism of this success. Presented at once as a study of forms and a survey of cultural connotations, this investigation proposes a journey into the representative world created by immigrants and children of immigrants who, by refusing to disappear into sameness, question what it means to be Italian in the world today.

Independent documentary films have made floating population– such as the migrants and people who flow from place to place– a prominent screen scene against China’s social and cultural landscapes since the 1990s. This study investigates how a “floating generation” of Chinese filmmakers has been formed and represented as an imagined community in China’s post-socialist context through Chinese independent documentaries. An attempt to excavate and examine the problems behind the instable but also flexible status of Chinese independent filmmaking within the state censorship, my study focuses on the implications of the keyword “floating” as they unfold along the development of Chinese independent documentary films. In a case study of Jia Zhangke’s three documentaries, In Public, Dong and Useless, my study analyzes the relationship between independent documentaries and China’s campaign of “constructing a harmonious society”.

This thesis offers an in-depth analysis of five films (Pane e cioccolata, Queen of Hearts, L’Emmerdeur, Mediterraneo sempre, Raging Bull) which deal with the Italian reality outside of Italy. The segment-by-segment study of these works reveals overlapping themes that define parameters that can be used to define a deterritorialized culture which the author of this study names the Italic culture. The analytical system produced can help scholars and students to understand what constitutes the filmic narrative of ethnic films. The title of the thesis derives from a monologue spoken by Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull by Martin Scorsese, which is a paraphrase of another monologue said by Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront by Elia Kazan. Though the words of the speeches are similar, their meaning is different. What for Malloy was a need for success becomes for LaMotta a criticism of this success. Presented at once as a study of forms and a survey of cultural connotations, this investigation proposes a journey into the representative world created by immigrants and children of immigrants who, by refusing to disappear into sameness, question what it means to be Italian in the world today.

Independent documentary films have made floating population– such as the migrants and people who flow from place to place– a prominent screen scene against China’s social and cultural landscapes since the 1990s. This study investigates how a “floating generation” of Chinese filmmakers has been formed and represented as an imagined community in China’s post-socialist context through Chinese independent documentaries. An attempt to excavate and examine the problems behind the instable but also flexible status of Chinese independent filmmaking within the state censorship, my study focuses on the implications of the keyword “floating” as they unfold along the development of Chinese independent documentary films. In a case study of Jia Zhangke’s three documentaries, In Public, Dong and Useless, my study analyzes the relationship between independent documentaries and China’s campaign of “constructing a harmonious society”.

At roughly the same historical conjuncture when it began to be articulated as a concept marking a return of the repressed within the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank, the doppelganger motif became the subject of a veritable explosion of literary attention in 1920s Japan. Several authors – including Akutagawa Ryûnosuke, Edogawa Rampo, Tanizaki Jun’ichirô, and others – repeatedly deployed the doppelganger motif in their fictions against the backdrop of rapid urbanization, imperial expansion, and the restructuring of all aspects of everyday life by a burgeoning commodity culture. Interestingly, as if enacting the very compulsion to repeat embodied by the doppelganger on a historical register as well, a repetition of this proliferation of doppelganger images is apparent in the contemporary conjuncture, in the works of authors like Abe Kôbô, Murakami Haruki, or Shimada Masahiko, as well as in the films of Tsukamoto Shinya or Kurosawa Kiyoshi. To date, much of the previous scholarship on the figure of the doppelganger tends to be preoccupied with the attempt to locate its origins, whether in mythic or psychical terms. In contrast to this concern with fixing the figure to an imagined essence, in my dissertation, I instead place emphasis on the doppelganger’s enactment of repetition itself through an examination at the figure through the prism of the problem of genre, in terms of how it has come to be discursively constituted as a genre itself, as well as its embodiment of the very logic of genre in its play on the positions of identity and difference. By historicizing its formation as a genre, it becomes possible to productively situate not only the proliferation of images of the doppelganger in 1920s Japan but also its repetitions, resignifications, and critical articulations in the present within the the shifting constellation of relations among various discourses and practices that organize colonial and global modernity – language and visuality, the space of empire and the construction of ethno-racial identities, libidinal and material economies – that structure (yet are nevertheless exceeded by) its constitution as a concept.