This thesis analyses the cinematic representation of the so-called migrant Other in contemporary French and German cinema from the period 1989-2011, in the context of the theoretical discussion of European identity. It argues that cinema’s examination of Europe’s changing societies needs to be seen as an important element of the discussion of European identity. More specifically, it examines the ways in which the chosen works portray the impact the presence of the European Other has on the concepts and comprehension of the notions of nation, national and post-national identities, and Eastern-Western European divisions. It argues that the cinematic works under discussion can be interpreted as an inspiration for a new understanding of Europeanness as a hybridised and multidimensional notion inclusive of Europe’s various Others and their diverse socio-cultural heritage. Chapter One considers the ways in which Claire Denis’s 1994 feature J’ai pas sommeil (I Can’t Sleep) depicts the problem of social otherness and foreignness as intertwined with Europe’s rapid socio-political changes post-1989 and France’s postcolonial struggles. Chapter Two examines Kutluğ Ataman’s 1999 Lola und Bilidikid (Lola and Billy the Kid). It considers the film’s exploration of the Others’ multiple identities in the context of socio-cultural changes within the Western European urban spaces. Chapter Three investigates to what extent Michael Haneke’s 2000 Code inconnu (Code Unknown) politicises Europe’s prevalent social divisions and their sociocultural consequences. Chapter Four moves on to Fatih Akin’s 2007 Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven). It looks at the film’s examination of pan-European political identities and communities. The final chapter considers Denis’s 2008 film, 35 Rhums (35 Shots of Rum), as an example of a work which elaborates on the positive vision of the European by exploring the possibility of its recomposition through what could be defined as a form of Euro-creolisation.

Cinema into the Real is the practice of creating an affect based encounter between film and the lived world where their thresholds shift. It is an inquiry into the possibility for navigating what Gilles Deleuze calls the 'not-yet-thoughf brought into existence by an irrational form of cinema comprised of crystalline time-images. How does the schema of normative cinema fiction and documentary stand in for the lived world, and how might the statements, maps and spaces of this cinema be made fluid to form a more radical moving image, one that is further implicated in, and may open up insightful gaps for, our experience There are three facets to this inquiry: first, the emergent and imaginative situation of filmmaking itself, where the very intention to make moving images produces a new frame through which to practise everyday life, a cinema of action and alteration secondly, the invention of my conceptual persona as filmmaker, an uncommon self that I have cultivated in order to approach filmmaking as in part alien to its methods of production thirdly, the exploration of a limit in thought (which is the state of affect, commonly experienced as panic) by way of a mental gap brought into being by aberrant moving images. Twelve films (and cinema interventions) were made, and these are thinking spaces in themselves. Between the theoretical text written, and the films produced, I have extended the flight line projected in Deleuze's two cinema books, in an attempt to do film as an art practice of experimental philosophy, and to navigate a space between cinema and the lived world. This minor cinema of which I speak, and which I practise, is acquired by destratification and drifting, courts affect, and can, I will argue, enable new aspects of (non-habitual) thought.

Different Shadows: Gay Representation in Israeli Cinema studies the role of cinema in the rise of Israeli gay consciousness over the past three decades. One aim of this research is to map Israeli gay cinema by situating it in relation to other Israeli and non-Israeli films, the hegemonic values of dominant Israeli culture and the idea/1 of a unified Israeli gay community. Another aim is to explore the ways in which cinema, as a primary source of gay cultural production in Israel, has defined gay identity and community since the late 1970s. The thesis brings together two objects of study. One is Israeli society, including the gay movement. This branch of the research studies the history of the gay movement and the incorporation of gay men and lesbians into the Israeli public sphere. The other is Israeli cinema, including production and distribution apparatuses as well as the film texts themselves. This branch examines representations of gay life on the screen along the axes of ethnicity, gender, nation and religion, the reception of films both in Israel and abroad, and matters of censorship. The thesis focuses on the mutual influences these two objects of study have on one another, namely the way in which cinema has contributed to the promotion of gay causes in Israel, and the way in which gay concerns have enriched Israeli films both visually and thematically. The project crosses and links various disciplines and encompasses different approaches to the films. Combining film theory, institutional and textual analysis, employing the tools of post-colonialism and queer theory as well as theories of race, nation and feminist criticism, I attend to the complexities of the representation of gay culture and identity and its organization and legibility through culture.

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It is widely argued that in contemporary Western societies, masculinity is in crisis. Whether or not this alleged `crisis' represents a shift towards more positive and reflexive masculinities has been the focus of much debate. Such debate provides the context for this thesis. The thesis offers new insights into the psychic and cultural shaping of masculinities by examining the possibilities for `good-enough' masculinities within the shifting conditions of Western postmodern culture. It uses psychoanalytic, cultural and social theories to explore contemporary masculinities through a study of male jealousies and their representation in popular cinema. Jealousy provides a useful case study to explore the alleged crisis of contemporary masculinities because it indicates a capacity to tolerate the complex emotions of wounded narcissism and feelings of loss that are said to characterise this crisis. The thesis argues that jealousy occupies a central place in the psychosocial shaping of Western masculinities. Historically, it has played a key role in guarding and defining men's social and emotional boundaries. However, the cultural rules of entitlement and possession are in flux, and the cultural codes surrounding male jealousies are becoming less clear. The thesis discussion develops through the analysis of representations of male jealousies in recent popular films, where the possessive gaze of the hero and the emotional and moral outcomes of jealous triangles are often ambiguous. Such ambiguity resonates with the popular cultural trope of masculinity in crisis and the alleged feminisation of masculinity within popular culture more generally. These themes are explored in depth through case studies of four films, released in the 1990s, which examine their cultural reception in the press and the possibilities for reflexive, `good-enough' formations of masculinity in popular cinema. The thesis aims to contribute to the study of cinema and the emotions by developing an interdisciplinary mode of analysis, which captures the psychic, social and emotional nuances of the film text, and the cultural context of its reception.

The work of Straub/Huillet questions received notions of the essence of cinema. Against the background of the dominant stylistic paradigm of classical film style, their films challenge both the viewing and listening skills of their audience. In seeking to grasp the nature of this challenge, this thesis focuses on a feature which is common to all of Straub/Huillet's works. Taking recourse to a broad variety of representational forms, the filmmakers always engage with the specific properties and representational forms of existing works of art and documents. On the basis of four films, the formative impact of a variety of art forms and source materials is analysed. The selection includes <i>Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach </i>in which the music of J.S. Bach provides the dominant aesthetic material; <i>Einleitung zu Arnold Schoenberg's Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene, </i>a work whose origins lie in a piece of film music for which no film had ever been made; <i>Klassenverhältnisse, </i>an adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel fragment <i>Der Verschollene; </i>and <i>Paul Cézanne im Gespräch mit Joachim Gasquet</i>. a film in which Cezanne's paintings are presented both as physical objects and theme. In combination with a number of other materials which feature in the films, the polyphonic music of Bach, a serial composition by Schoenberg, the prose style of Kafka and the pictorial style of Cézanne, provide the aesthetic material for the interplay between film and other art forms, which is formative of Straub/Huillet's oeuvre. A common feature emerges from the analysis of this formal and material diversity. Drawing on the distinctive features of their selected sources, the filmmakers evolve various strategies for the overt cinematic enactment of this material. A palpable split between the source material and its cinematic representation results. Stylistic operations are not merely vehicles for the transmission of meaning, but come to the fore, bringing time and space and the material features of the sounds and images to our attention. Highly unconventional forms of cinematic representation are generated in this process and classical stylistic devices are appropriated to serve new functions.

Since the emergence of audiovisual translation as an academic discipline in the 1990s, research in the field has evolved in a wide range of directions. Subtitling, however, has remained a largely prescriptive form of translation, and has been typically unaffected by the various ethical and creative turns that have emerged within the wider discipline of translation studies. And, while recent years have seen an increasing preference for interdisciplinary research, this interest has rarely questioned subtitles' capacity to convey meaning within the film text. Little has therefore been done to consider the aesthetics of subtitles outside of the constraints of subtitling norms. Similarly, in spite of the influence of subtitles on an audience's cinematic experience, few works in film studies have investigated the role of translation in the distribution, marketing and reception of foreign films. This thesis therefore aims to forge a creative subtitling practice that draws upon both film and translation studies. It asks three key research questions. What can an interdisciplinary approach bring to an aesthetic form of subtitling? How might this interdisciplinary approach manifest itself in a creative subtitling practice? And how is this creative approach received by a target audience? These research questions are answered through an examination of film and translation theory and graphic design principles, with a view to establishing a methodology for a creative subtitling practice. This methodology is then tria lied through the production of creative subtitles for an award-winning Spanish film. Finally, these subtitles are tested empirically through an eye tracking study, consecutive questionnaire and focus group discussions. These studies provide qualitative and quantitative data on the processing effort required to view creative subtitles and the participants' opinions regarding their filmic experience. Together, the answers to these research questions demonstrate the creative potential of film subtitles and highlight the complexity of audience reception.

This thesis offers a timely reappraisal of authorship in Shakespeare film adaptations. It analyses the films of nine auteur-directors, breaking new ground by using an interdisciplinary framework (drawn from literary, film and cultural studies) to resituate the auteur at the confluence of commerce. and cultural politics. Contesting still-normative paradigms that hold the auteur as either self-detelmining creativity or casualty of industry, I maintain that auteur Shakespeare is a plurally constituted, restlessly changing phenomenon whose every instance is constihlted by and through a unique meshing of material, social and intertextual processes. Chapter One surveys the histories of auteurist and Shakespeare on film criticism, drawing on each to argue for the necessity of an approach attentive to the auteur's roles both inside and outside cinema. Chapter Two demonstrates precisely the need for such a dual focus insofar as it assesses the persistent influence on the reception of Welles's Shakespeare films of a mythologised auteur persona. Chapter Three adopts a Bourdieu-inflected perspective on Laurence Olivier's and Kenneth Branagh's Shakespearean undertakings, uncovering in them aspirations towards legitimacy. Chapter Four conceptualises Franco Zeffirelli's work as middlebrow auteur cinema - ideologically safe and commercially orientated. Chapter Five, by contrast, suggests that Derek Jarman's films exemplify auteur Shakespeare's counter-hegemonic possibilities. Chapter Six also focuses on dissident articulations: it posits Julie Taymor's oeuvre as a feminist counter-point (though, finally, a problematic one) to auteur cinema's androcentrism. Chapter Seven uses close reading to delineate Akira Kurosawa's and Grigori Kozintsev's affiliations to art cinema. The final chapter examines Vishal Bhardwaj's adaptations in light of transnational theory, positing forms of exchange as a crucial interpretive concern. These analyses yield important evidence of Shakespeare's multidimensional significance to various filmic culhlres and subcultures. In tum, they newly illuminate the essential part that commercial and political formations have played in reauthoring past and present incarnations of auteur and Shakespeare.

This project proposes a new reading of the constitution of the critical category of film noir in terms of Lacan’s theorisation of the retroactive construction of meaning. The thesis contends that, despite a turn away from Lacan in Film Studies, psychoanalytic theory must not be abandoned and - rather than regressing to questions of film, language and psychoanalysis articulated in the 1970s (Metz, Screen) - aims to plot a new trajectory, alongside theorists such as McGowan and Zizek, for such inquiry into the cinema. The relationship between psychoanalysis and noir is itself well-trodden ground; however, the major interventions (Kaplan, Krutnik) have been oriented towards questions of gender, leaving unexplored the possibility of noir’s relation to Lacan’s theory of signification. Specifically, this thesis engages the historiography of film noir (Naremore, Vernet, Elsaesser) with Lacan’s theory of the point de capiton to work through the implications for a theory of discursive construction suggested by the registers of the Symbolic, Real and Imaginary. This thesis engages film and theory to discover not simply what Lacan can reveal about noir but crucially what noir can reveal about the structure of meaning. The project also explores various noir tropes as they raise theoretical questions: of particular interest are films such as Double Indemnity (1944) and D.O.A. (1950) that are concerned with the retroactive production of knowledge. In addition, the roles of contingency and necessity in such a relationship to the past are investigated, and both the ontology of noir as a category and the structures of film noir narratives - such as Gilda (1946) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) - are explored in terms of the Lacanian theory of sets and concepts such as lalangue and suture; an extended reading of The Maltese Falcon (1941) explores the Lacanian notion of fiction.

In 2001, four out of the five Academy Award nominations for best actress went to women who played the role of a lone mother, Juliette Binoche for Chocolat (Lasse Hallsttrom: 2000) Julia Roberts for Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh: 2000), Laura Linney for You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonnergan: 2000) and Ellen Burstyn for Requiem for A Dream (Darren Aronofsky: 2000). The fact that these four films each prioritized a narrative of lone motherhood became a point of interest for cultural observers who saw the popularization of lone mother narratives as indicative of mainstream cinema’s policy of inclusion and diversity and reflective of a broader political acceptance of lone motherhood. And yet, despite the phenomenal political and cultural significance of the lone mother figure, little academic attention has been paid to the cultural prioritization of this oftentimes demonized female figure. This thesis offers a critical account of the cultural investment in mainstream cinema’s lone mother figure to argue that she plays a crucial role in shoring up postfeminist, neoliberal and neo-conservative family values rhetoric in ways which highlight the exclusions on which postfeminism thrives.