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Over five case studies, this thesis brings together six 'telefantasy' programmes, television dramas that have been understood as 'cult' texts because of their fan audiences and that are centrally concerned with representing the fantastic. By situating the Quatermass serials, The Prisoner, Star Trek, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) within their contexts of production, this thesis challenges the characterisation of such programmes as 'unique' cultural phenomena. Through this analysis, this thesis argues that the fantastic suggests itself as a particularly rich area for re-examining the central assumptions about the aesthetics of television. Challenging the notion of television as an intimate medium of 'talk' that addresses a distracted viewer through a small screen in the living room, this thesis argues that the display of the image in these programmes functions as an aesthetic and economic strategy to address an attentive viewer with distinctive programmes. However, this tendency towards spectacle and distinctiveness is not opposed to the 'intimate' model of television, but is used to negotiate a position for these programmes in which they are both spectacular and intimate, distinctive and familiar, addressing an attentive and a distracted viewer. By analysing the different ways in which the representation of the fantastic is negotiated within each case study, this thesis reassesses the industrial and aesthetic history of 1950s/1960s television, and engages with the debates about the impact of the rise of satellite, cable and digital television services. Through an analysis of the different status of telefantasy on contemporary US network and JfK terrestrial television, this thesis explores the different ways in which these two industries have responded to the fragmentation of the industry over the 1980s and 1990s. By retheorising the aesthetics of television, this thesis argues that we need to have a clearer understanding of the complexity of television history if we are to assess fully the impact of the current changes on the future of the medium.

Over the last two centuries, a succession of childhood pursuits has been blamed for deterioration in children's health, morality, education and literacy, as well as increases in juvenile delinquency, yet there has also been a constant voice in opposition to these charges. In Britain this debate reached something of a climax in the 1930s, due to the massive growth of cinema and its huge popularity with young people. This thesis aims to explore all aspects of the controversy surrounding children's cinemagoing in the thirties, with a particular focus on the mechanisms used to try and control or contain children's viewing, together with an assessment of the extent to which these mechanisms were successful. Its main arguments are that while concerns about child viewers motivated the development of film censorship practices in Britain and elsewhere, the debate is too complex and varied to be seen as a straightforward moral panic. In addition, it argues that, despite the attempts of the BBFC and others, children were essentially the regulators of their own viewing, as they frequently subverted or circumvented the largely ineffectual mechanisms of official cinema regulation. Moreover it suggests that, in a period when school, home and even leisure tended to be strong on discipline, the cinema was colonised by children as an alternative site of recreation. Matinees in particular were the birthplace of a new and somewhat subversive children's culture, which only started to be `tamed' with the introduction of more formal children's cinema clubs towards the end of the decade. Finally, the productive nature of the debate surrounding children, cinema and censorship is explored in a cases tudy of the 1930s MGM Tarzan films, which assesses the extent to which issues relating to the child audience may have helped to shape a genre.

This thesis examines constructions of Chicano (or Mexican American) identity in literature and film. I explore how writers and filmmakers negotiate the dominance of Hollywood models over the culture. In Chapter One, I argue that literature gives way to film in articulations of Chicano identity; Gonzales and Anzald6a use cinematic imagery and Castillo's short story adopts the characteristics of film. Chicano documentaries were made to correct Hollywood's negative images of the culture. In Chapter Two I study Luis Valdez's Zoo! Suit (1981), a film that celebrates the Chicano icon of the pachuco by subverting the Hollywood musical genre. Chapter Three considers two films by Lourdes Portillo in which Chicano culture is scrutinised through the frames of ethnography and film noir. In Chapter Four I examine John Sayles' revisionist Western, Lone Star and the extent to which history dominates the present in Texas. Robert Rodriguez's Mexican action heroes and his ethnic humour are the subject of Chapter Five. Chapter Six examines two films by Allison Anders in the light of her self-confessed obsession with Chicano culture. In conclusion I argue that Anders' autobiographical character in Gas, Food, Lodgi»g (1991), articulates Anglo anxieties about identity, bringing the trajectory around full circle.

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This thesis examines four films made during two key phases in East German film history in the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s which have earned critical acclaim for their challenge to cultural-political orthodoxy and which I read as national narratives offering political, social, cultural and historical constructions of GDR identity. I argue that narrative representations of gender and sexuality serve in the films as a means towards negotiating between affirmation and critique. My analyses are informed by a wide range of other DEFA films. Chapter One sketches broader political and film-historical contexts. Chapter Two examines the role that gender discourse plays in differentiating East from West in the depiction of the frontier city of Berlin in Gerhard Klein's Berlin-Ecke Schonhauser. Chapter Three focuses on Konrad Wolf’s adaptation of Christa Wolfs novel Der geteilte Himmel. It shows how the film articulates competing views of the GDR, but instrumentalizes the female character ultimately to endorse socialist society in a divided Germany, and expresses her attachment to this new society in terms of a family-type relationship. Chapter Four examines how Frank Vogel's Denk bloss nicht, ich heule seeks to mediate between the 'national' past and present, using a triangular family plot. In Chapter Five, the analysis of Frank Beyer's Spur der Steine centres upon the role of a lone female in the film's reforming exploration of the overwhelmingly male collective, but shows how it leaves the status of sexuality - whether for pleasure or for reproductive ends - unresolved. There has been little in-depth study of the way gender representation relates to constructions of the GDR in films of this period. This study remedies this omission, showing how the film-makers frequently rely upon conservative gender paradigms to manage the contradictions implicit in their project and how the endings of the films increasingly come under strain.

My thesis is an examination of the formal and textual aspects of the long take, principally as used in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles), Ugetsil (1954, Kenji Mizoguchi), and Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky). The thesis begins by defining the long take as a shot of 25 seconds or longer that usually contains one of the following qualities: a sense of completeness or wholeness, 'durational complexity, ' and a 'soft' formal/thematic determinism. This working definition is used as part of a 'philosophical' formal-textual methodological approach to the long take informed by a 'common sense' philosophical understanding of time. An important element of this formal-textual methodology is 'contextual statistical analysis' (CSA) and close, accurate shot description. This 'common sense' philosophical understanding sees time as being expressible by properties that are both outside the self (external time) and by properties that are within the self (internal time). External time becomes the 'measurable' aspects of the long take (duration), which condition and are conditioned by the 'less quantifiable' aspects of a long take's internal time (pertinent formal and textual properties within the shot). Internal and external time combine to express the 'emotional quality' of time in a long take, which I call temporal tonality. By employing this formal-textual methodology to my three case study films, I demonstrate how a dominant use of the long take is an important (though not exclusive) formal component of each film's particular thematic and/or philosophical treatment of time. The long take is also analysed in two other case studies with more general designs: a taxonomy of the long take time and narrative time (Chapter 4), and an analysis of the long take as an expressive narrative agent in popular cinema (Chapter 5). Lastly, the statistical differences concerning long take usage gives rise to an articulation of three long take practices: Dialectical, Synthetic, and Radical. This original observation will lay down a general groundwork for further exploration of long take practice, style, theory, and analysis.