Psychoanalysis has been used extensively in film studies from the late 1960s and 1970s onwards. Inspired by Jacques Lacan, the work of Metz and Baudry in France and Mulvey and McCabe in the United Kingdom laid the foundations for film theory that explored the relationship between cinematic systems such as the apparatus and the screen on the one hand and the spectator on the other. The objects of these examinations were exclusively fictional texts. I use psychoanalysis differently through an interrogation of a largely untheorised embodied relationship between the documentary filmmaker and the subject of her or his film from a psychoanalytical perspective. There are many types of documentary film. I focus in this work on films in which a testimony, sometimes dealing with trauma, or an autobiographical account of the other, is gathered by the filmmaker. To this end I work with a number of documentary texts, including my own practice. I look at the potential tensions that these encounters might create between the need to gain as full a disclosure as possible, often fuelled by the filmmaker’s unconscious desire (which may or may not coincide with the consciously stated aim), and the ethical responsibility for the subject of the film. I suggest that a variety of unconscious mechanisms known from clinical psychoanalytical practice might be operating in the process of documentary filmmaking. These unconscious ‘hidden’ factors, notably transference, have a major influence on the decisions made in the creation of the final texts and therefore also have an impact on the future audiences of these films, which is why it is important to bring them to light. The thesis deals also with ethics of the documentary encounter. Apart from mainly Lacanian psychoanalytical thought, I draw on post-Second World War philosophy dealing with the relationship of the ‘I’ to the Other, led by Emmanuel Lévinas, but including Althusser, Badiou, Butler, Derrida and others.

Focusing on Taiwan New Cinema from its inception in 1982 to the present, this thesis examines the key features of historical representation, dramatic genre and postcolonial discourse. Taiwan New Cinema configures the different political formations of Taiwanese culture, and deals with the historical, social and cultural relations between Taiwanese culture and other cultures such as Mainland Chinese, American and Japanese. I argue that Taiwan New Cinema has become a vital cultural space wherein questions of national borders and identities are being renegotiated. This thesis will investigate Taiwan New Cinema and its historical and cultural phenomena from three directions. First, it aims to develop an understanding of constructed national identities by examining how Taiwanese history has been written within the Taiwan New Cinema movement and by considering Taiwan cinema in the light of the concept of national cinema. Part 1 proposes that Taiwan New Cinema is the site of a dynamic contestation in the representation of Chinese exile, shifting from a monumental style aimed at encouraging a sense of collective identity to a more self-reflexive and critical approach. Second, this dissertation attempts to reevaluate domestic genres by mapping the spaces culturally occupied by selected new wave film texts produced to challenge, in various ways, the dominant realist aesthetics. Part 2 argues that Taiwan New Cinema tackles the issue of American neocolonialism by exploring the significance of popular genre in Taiwan, especially the effects of the Cold War on Taiwan society. Third, this dissertation is concerned with the way in which postcolonial discourse is inscribed in Taiwan New Cinema. Since the 1990s, there have been transnational trends in deploying Taiwan New Cinema as a site of cultural translation for addressing postcolonial subjects or responses to Japanese contemporary culture. Part 3 reveals a diverse landscape in film narrative, subject matter and cinematic style in relation to an attempt to reimagine the colonial past.

This is a major in-depth qualitative study of congregational use of film. The use of film by the young people of St. Quaratus' Episcopal Church, New Martinton, Pennsylvania, signals a convergence of the practice of religion and the practice of cultural consumption. What this thesis shows is that these religious young people are avid film viewers and that film functions in religion-like ways in their lives. Film operates primarily as implicit ordinary religion offering a means by which they orient themselves in the world and in a limited way as extraordinary religion, in that much of the film-watching documented herein, took place in the context of their traditional religious community. For these young people, film is a significant resource for implicit theological themes, role models and vernacular by which they orient themselves in the world and express religious meanings and values. However, although much of their film viewing takes place in the context of their traditional religious community, when assessedin the light of the Chicago Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1888, which has been affirmed repeatedly as a core doctrine of the Episcopal Church USA for more than 120 years, their traditional religious practice is not explicitly traditional Christianity in its theological underpinnings. Furthermore the data suggests that the leadership of the parish and in particular those working amongst the youth, offered the young people little help for making explicit connections between their implicit theologies found in popular culture and the explicit theologies in traditional Anglican/Episcopal Christianity. As a result, amongst the many potential implications that can be drawn from this study, the research calls for greater intentionality on the part of those who engage in religious work with young people, to educate and equip youth to think critically about the power of popular culture and to dialogue with their religious tradition by cultivating a "critical reflexive spirituality".

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the portrayal of the Irish in American cinema. This thesis makes a significant original contribution to existing research by examining a range of American-made, Irish-themed films produced between 1910 and 1930 that are either underrepresented in current discourse, or missing entirely. It adds to current debates in Irish, and American, film studies and shows that the 1910s and 1920s were highly significant years in the on-going history of American cinematic representations of the Irish. This thesis explores how the Irish were depicted between 1910 and 1930, and how , these depictions compare to the dominant, and generally negative, representations of the earlier period (1896-1910). In addition to the study of a large number of Irish-themed films, this thesis draws on a wide range of primary material, including archived newspaper articles a~d production documents, to discuss the recurring themes and characters that dominated Irish-themed films in the 1910s and 1920s, characters like the hard working Irish migrant, the virtuous Colleen, the social arbitrating Irish cop and the ready-to-reform Irish criminal. The study explores in particular, the lrish-themed films of Sydney Olcott, including the often overlooked Little Old New York (1923), and argues that these films made a significant contribution to the improved depiction ofthe Irish in the early 191Os. John Ford's earliest Irish-themed films are also relatively unexplored in current studies and this thesis considers them in detail, examining how his Irish lineage had an impact on the films in question. Additionally, the study examines a number of infamous Irish-themed films that caused controversy and offence, including MGM's ill-fated The Callahans and the Murphys (produced in 1927, and directed by George W. Hill). These controversies also demonstrate the impact that the American Catholic Church and Irish fraternities, including the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, had on the film industry at the time. This thesis finds that the period examined was undoubtedly one of the most important and transitional in the history of the on screen Irish. This study offers a detailed analysis of the remarkable development of the Irish character over such a relatively short period of time, demonstrating that the depiction between 1910 and 1930 was unquestionably better than that found in the foundational period of American cinema.

Jazz has been associated with crime and immorality since early forms of the music were heard in. the brothels of New Orleans and the gangster-owned clubs of the "Jazz Age. " This association encouraged the use of jazz in film noir: tales of anxiety and urban decay that flourished in American cinema during the 1940s and 1950s. Yet, the extent to which jazz was used in film noir is the source of some confusion. The collaboration between the two idioms has often been alluded to but seldom explored in detail. Contemporary noirs, such as Body Heat (1981) and the series Fallen Angels (1993), have used jazz to evoke the classic period of film noir thus contributing to a "retrospective illusion" of the relationship between these idioms. Literature which refers to this relationship tends to discuss jazz and film noir in general rather than distinguishing between widely differing styles and periods of production. This lack of specificity, particularly regarding jazz, has resulted in considerable misunderstanding. This thesis seeks to determine the true extent of the involvement of jazz with film noir and why it has often been "taken for granted. " The thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates film theory, specifically work concerned with racial and gender discourses, sociology and music history. Beginning with a discussion of the relevant literature, the thesis suggests that the association of jazz with the noir themes of sex, crime and immorality stems from an understanding of black culture as being expressive of primitivism and irrationality that was prevalent in white imperialist ideologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although contemporary writing and film noirs often refer to the modernist jazz style of bebop, which emerged in the mid-1940s at the same time as film noir, as the sound of the classic noir period, the thesis suggests that prevailing racial attitudes and conventions of 1940s film meant that the fundamentally black and intellectual nature of bebop could not be represented in noir of this time. The thesis places the films discussed in their historical context and makes considerable use of archival sources and documentation for extended studies of Phantom Lady (1944), Young Man with a Horn (1950) and I Want To Live! (1958). The tensions created by the involvement of jazz in these productions become more evident as a result of this archival material. The emergence of the jazz or jazz inflected score in films of the 1950s is examined as is the proliferation of jazz scores in television noir of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The penultimate chapter considers the use of jazz in neo-noirs of the last twenty-five years, particularly Taxi Driver (1976) and The Last Seduction (1994), before offering thoughts for further work and a summary of the thesis in the conclusion

Comparatively little has been written about British animated public information film and this gap in knowledge led to research, which positioned my practice as an animator in the historical and theoretical contexts of British filmmaking. My research investigates how animation creates distinctive approaches to information narratives and contributes to persuasive information communication. The animated public information film is one of several categories of information film, which are identified in my Glossary of Terms. Volume 1 of the thesis contains theoretical and historical discussion and argument. Chapter 1 is an overview of my research which generated the first comprehensive filmography of animated British public information shorts, chronologically recorded and defined from 1939 2009. Chapter 2 uses my filmography to determine the core characteristics, role and function of animated information film in the interdisciplinary contemporary era. This in turn informs my own approach to making a contemporary information film, and I also draw on some informal primary research and my critique of the historical sources identified in Chapter 1. Chapter 3, on my practice (evidenced in Volume 2), identifies how a contemporary animation responds to my research questions: How is the art of persuasion manifested in British animated information films? and How can animation practice contribute to contemporary information films made for public distribution? I focus on the history of British animation information films to assess patterns and forms affiliated with information delivery. I examine media technology and methods of communications as they evolve in a cross-media era, consider how they facilitate the production of a contemporary information film, and evaluate how I developed Tell Someone to provide information on how children, aged seven to eleven, can remain safe while on the Internet. My research establishes that British animation has been instrumental in contributing to social awareness by delivering important information to British society for over seventy years. My practice reveals that animation can make a contemporary contribution to information films. It proves to be adaptable to rapidly changing technology and capable of updating knowledge to meet new social challenges posed both by online access to technology and the new multiple platforms available for the delivery of information in the digital era.

This thesis attempts to theorize how precarious work—poorly paid, flexible, on call, even part-time employment—is pronounced in the global cinema of filmmakers Jia Zhangke, Park Chan-wook, Neill Blomkamp and Sebastian Silva. The images of the urban worker envisaged by these global directors show Chinese, Korean, Chilean and South African working classes as less attuned to the predatory nature of neoliberalism and the uncertainty they face: overwork, downward mobility, beckoning consumerism often out of reach, physical exhaustion, strains on family ties and worst of all, the lingering threat of destitution. These hardships point, at least since the late 1990s, to the insertion of a precarious worker in global cinema. With this in mind, much cinematic precarity is demonstrable to flaws in our current network society, wherein nomadic dispersal and managerial hegemony are part of a neoliberal agenda to dismantle any type of collective bargaining and shared prosperity. But these cinematized conditions must be read “against the grain,” where to conceive of workplace precarity we must go beyond The Maid and The World as compelling “foreign melodramas,” District 9 as video game inspired “science fiction” and, finally, Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance as depoliticized “neo-noir.” To see them as labor films advances our understanding of the transformation of labor practices in advanced capitalist systems (Neilson and Rossiter 2005). It also, in a double move, exposes the inadequacy of the phrase and category of “world cinema” and its institutionally homogenous and problematic orientation to comprise new cultural capital—itself, another form of work. Thus by rephrasing world cinema to global cinema acknowledges its own material production as well as its artistic and social value, in that we understand any particular instance or text to be globally orientated. More specifically, individual chapters will be based on the relational phenomena that show political and economic forces at work, or—allegories of dispossession—which mark and differentiate spaces within these urban centers for its proletarians: neoliberalism, particularly in its geo-cultural manifestations. To date, two monographs and two anthologies in film studies deal with labor and its revivification in a contemporary (but also Western) context: Broe, 2009; Nystrom, 2009; James & Berg, 2001; and Zaniello, 2003. In light of this gap in research, this project examines how cinematic formations of the proletarian can lead to new articulations about national identity, race relations, urban citizenship, unstable labor networks and their social interactions under neoliberal globalization.

The aim of my doctoral project is to study how the Holocaust has been represented in Soviet cinema from the 1930s to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The USSR was one of the central participants in WWII and lost over a million of its Jewish population in the Holocaust. While the suffering of the Soviet nation was vividly depicted in arts and history texts, forming a significant part of popular culture, the violence against Jews often appeared to be a (deliberately) forgotten chapter. In the multi-ethnic and multi-national state – whose pre-Revolutionary anti-Semitic history produced the very concept of pogrom – official Soviet ideology, propagating a sense of unity, emphasised the Soviet identity of the victims and refused to differentiate between the dead. Moreover, the devastating statistics of all the casualties of the Soviet-German war (1941-1945) occupied a central place in popular memory, overpowering the proportionally smaller number of Holocaust victims. Throughout the period studied in this thesis, history and memory of the Holocaust underwent a series of repressions and re-evaluations, constantly shifting between the margins and the forefront, between official and unofficial knowledge. This thesis is a chronological study of the role played by Soviet cinema in relation to the shifting discourses of memory, knowledge and history of the Holocaust. Comprised of four chapters, my work traces the trajectory of cinematic portrayals through four main historical periods, under the respective leaderships of Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev. Accounting for the interrelation between Soviet ideology, censorship, the Soviet film industry, cinematic genres and individual film texts, I tease out the complexity and versatility of Soviet cinema’s relationship with the subject of the Holocaust.

Over the past 20 years, Spanish cinema has embraced the fantastic genres in filmmaking. Films such as El día de la bestia/The Day of the Beast (Álex de la Iglesia, 1995), Los otros/The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) and Los cronocrímenes/Timecrimes (Nacho Vigalondo, 2007) have expressed the cultural outlook of the new generation of Spanish filmmakers, and have gained popularity as productions aimed at national and international audiences. While scholarly articles and essays have been written on some of these films and filmmakers, there has yet to be a comprehensive study of this current cycle. This is the first English-language scholarly study of contemporary Spanish fantastic film, addressing its origin, its manifestations, and how these manifestations are representative of the 21st century Spanish cinema identity. The variety of films, in genre, approach and content, makes this period unique in Spanish film history. Considering Spanish fantastic film’s continuing (and arguably increasing) popularity, both with filmmakers and audiences, my original contribution to this area is to investigate this period in both Spanish and genre film history and studies.

This thesis is the first history of Taiwanese independent documentary. It asks what independent documentary (dulijilupian) is in Taiwan and how it changes in different historical periods. To address the characteristics of Taiwanese independent documentary and pursue the connection between social and political circumstances and independent documentary production in Taiwan, the thesis relies on primary data collection and archival documents to write a chronological and analytical history. It argues that independent documentary in Taiwan should be periodised according to changes in the in the mode of production, which are related to changes in the social and political environment. Deploying this approach based on mode of production and socio-political environment, the thesis divides the history of independent documentary production in Taiwan into four periods. First, the independent documentary making originated primarily as a vehicle against government-controlled media and in order to reveal alternative points of view during the political movements of the 1980s. Thus, independent documentary is a form for participating in political movements in this period. Second, the period after the cessation of Taiwan’s martial law (1987) saw independent documentarians shift their focus from political and social movements and towards social issues. Here, the independent documentary revealed the problems of the socially marginalized, which had been ignored by mainstream media. It participated in the idea of Community Development, which was a major topic from the late 1980s to the mid- 1990s. Third, after the mid-1990s, the decline of the Taiwanese feature film industry drove filmmakers, especially members of the post-New Taiwan Cinema young generation, to turn to digital video and make low-budget documentaries independently. Their approach placed art as a higher priority than social and political engagement. Fourth, since the early 2000s, independent documentary making has also become a way for expressing identities. For instance, filmmakers who used to be the filmed subjects of documentaries, such as Taiwanese indigenous peoples, foreign spouses, or other marginalized groups in society, have used independent documentary to express their cultural and social identities from their own viewpoints, and to claim equal rights.