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The aim of the research has been to discover new ways in which documentary film might be developed as a performative academic research tool. In reviewing the literature I have acknowledged the well-established use of observational documentary film making in ethnography and visual anthropology underpinned by a positivist epistemology, but I suggest there are forms of reportage in literary and dramatic traditions as well as film that are more relevant to the possibility of an auto-ethnographic approach which applies documentary film in an evocative context. I have examined the newly emerging field of Performative Social Science and the "new subjectivity" evident in documentary film to investigate emerging opportunities to research and disseminate scholarly knowledge employing reflective documentary film methods in place of, or alongside, text. This inquiry has prompted me to consider the history of the creation and transmission of scholarship. The research methodology I have employed has been auto-ethnographic reflective film practice. Specifically, I have drawn on images from my previous documentary films and woven them together into a research film to explore the possibility of provocative, evocative filmmaking as a “creative academic research tool”, whilst noting the value of a relevant skill-set to deliver a quality threshold in applying such a method. In this particular instance of filmic scholarship, I have questioned the notion of the ‘B’ roll to illustrate and interrogate the performative application of auto-ethnographic film production. I became interested in the idea of the performative artefact as an expression of investigation when I spent a year documenting the construction of Sir Antony Gormley’s landmark sculptures Another Place and The Angel of the North. Gormley’s statement in the film that sculpture might be thought of as “a witness to life”, has informed my own practice as a filmmaker and informs the film that has become the data for this thesis. The following year when I made a film about a fishing community, Village By The Sea, I began to develop the idea that film or video artefacts might also be viewed like sculpture, as “an inert, benign object that stands somewhat outside time, somewhat outside the span of human life, but that acts as a witness to it” (Gormley, 1998). I have incorporated what Gormley terms this “impulse” into my research by creating a hybrid ‘para-documentary’ using ‘B’ roll footage: an experiment in a performative method that I am reporting on here, and an experiment which obliges the filmmaker to engage with the ethical questions which arise when grappling with the imaginative and the documented. The outcome of the research is described as the discovery of the research experience that while I have been walking around in the world, that world has been walking about in me. Three implications are identified from this outcome. Firstly, that the concept of the Creative Academic Research Tool might be a useful systematic matrix with which to frame the specific traces of a practice-based research and from which to draw more generic outcomes. Secondly, counter-intuitively to the conventions of other media documentary forms that prioritize character and dialogue, the application of the wider angle of the ‘B’ roll filmic technique might offer a particularly powerful evocative tool in Performative Social Science. Thirdly, the documentary sensibility identified in this research, when placed performatively in the hands of the audience, might place the imagination at the heart of the scholarly documentary project.

Film distribution has undoubtedly changed during this contemporary era of media convergence, with a range of innovative practices and methods being adopted across US film and the arrival of new organisations to the industry and distribution sector. This should not suggest that conventional distribution and marketing methods are extinct, or that the traditional gatekeepers of these fields are obsolete. Rather it should indicate a merging of old and new strategies, practices, methods, and organisations, and it is through this fusion of tradition and novelty that today’s complex distribution landscape has emerged. At the forefront of many of these changes has been American independent cinema and as such, the central question posed by this thesis is: how has media convergence impacted on the distribution and marketing of American independent cinema, and how can this impact be understood in terms of wider technological, industrial and sociocultural contexts relevant to the current media landscape? In answering this, this thesis provides a comprehensive re-mapping of the distribution sector of American independent cinema, in terms of the distributors involved and methods and strategies through which films are being released, within this contemporary era of media convergence. This thesis uses the concept of media convergence as a complex and multifaceted lens that has dimensions in the technological, industrial and sociocultural realms, through which recent innovations in film distribution and marketing can be examined. Underpinning this framework is the adoption of an approach informed by the emergent media industry studies agenda (Holt and Perren, 2009; Hilmes, 2013; and McDonald, 2013). The implementation of this converged method to understanding media industries has allowed for a fluid, diverse and multi-layered assessment of the area under examination. Specifically, the thesis uses Thomas Schatz’s (2009) macro and micro level framework to examining film industries in order to identify key trends and industrial practices within American independent cinema (and, to a degree, US film at large), exploring how they relate to specific films, filmmakers and companies, within a distribution context. From this a number of key findings have emerged, including: • The identification of a new industrial structure that has facilitated a form of re-conglomeration of parts of the American independent cinema that is similar to the co-option of American independent cinema in the late 1980s and early 1990s. • The identification of new, collaborative distribution and marketing strategies being used within American independent cinema that not only seek to connect films with consumers, but also involve them, to varying degrees, in related processes. • An outline and discussion on how changes within the distribution sector have impacted on film form and consumption practices evident in this era of convergence. The thesis provides original contributions to knowledge in the fields of American independent cinema and distribution studies at large by: reconceptualising what independent film is within this contemporary period of media convergence; reframing discussions on film distribution to be more inclusive and less elitist in their scope; providing new methodological approaches to understanding the wider workings of film distribution and marketing; and demonstrating how distribution studies can be utilised to understand innovations within the fields of film production and exhibition.

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This thesis examines the generic body of a vast group of commercial crime films produced in Italy during the anni di piombo or Leaden Years, a time peculiarly marked by widespread episodes of political violence and tragic facts of terrorism (1969-early 1980s). These films achieved resounding success at the national box-office by conjugating the aesthetic of foreign crime films and formulas with clear references to the grim and violent Italian reality. The aim of this thesis is to assess how, and to what extent, problems and concerns associated with contemporaneous historical events had effectively influenced their production and consumption as well as their generic identity. In contrast with traditional (and prevailing) critical accounts, this thesis contends that these films and their generic images are less concerned with terrorism and related political extremism than they are with other contemporaneous social events, such as the reigniting of culturally deep-seated regional tensions, and the crisis of a national benchmark such as the patriarchal family. In discussing this point, this thesis provides a thorough historical contextualization of the Leaden Years which does not rest exclusively on political-terrorist issues, but takes into account other topical social problems, as well as reconstructing the cultural and political-ideological complexity that marked this era. Arguments in support of this thesis have been crucially elaborated through referencing historiographical material and critical sources mostly from Italy, in an attempt to further provide the examination of these films and of their generic identity with an Italian critical and cultural perspective to date scarcely represented in the Anglo-American film studies upon which the theoretical body of the Italy crime film is prevalently built.

This thesis proposes a framework for the 'embodied presence' that emerges out of the transitional spaces created in the avatar-mediated virtual spaces of Machinima filmmaking practice. At its root, Machinima is a form of cinematic expression that documents life within virtual spaces and draws connections between virtuality and reality. Drawing upon the writings of Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this thesis examines how the contemporary notion of the virtual and its relationship to the imagination has changed our understanding of embodiment and presence. The analysis of the imaginative effects of my Machinima film, I Am My Mother's Son (which provides the practice-based study for this thesis), demonstrates a mode of artistic exploration of the particular combination of user-generated and avatar-mediated spaces. An analysis of a phenomenology of practice in avatar-mediated virtual spaces utilising a method of interpretive phenomenology analysis reveals that presence is experienced as embodied. Moreover, a materiality to space is identified through an imagination of the senses that responds to the presence of the (imagined) body of the avatar. This thesis argues that the conditions for the embodied presence in Machinima filmmaking practice are best generated in avatar-mediated virtual spaces, where the experience of space is heterogeneous and where the plasticity of mind-body-space relationships is articulated.

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This thesis considers the work of Atom Egoyan in order to address the relationship between film form and philosophical critique. I look at two of Egoyan's films which appropriate narrative and thematic conventions associated with the mainstream thriller. I argue that in these films Egoyan mobilizes these conventions only to suspend them, specifically through the narrative privileging of ambiguous experiences of mournful and traumatic responsibility. I read these films as strategically failing genre. My analysis of Egoyan's thrillers is informed by Derrida's critique of Freud's theory of the work of mourning, and Levinas's accounts of the ethics of responsibility. While Egoyan's cinema repeatedly examines the experience of mourning and the difficulty of responsibility, I argue that his experiments with mainstream genres in these two films can be understood in relation to ideas of fidelity and failure that feature in the thought of both Derrida and Levinas. The first two chapters introduce the theoretical contexts for the analyses of Egoyan's films that follow. Chapter One, 'The Work of Mourning and the Trauma of Responsibility,' addresses the theories of mourning and responsibility which inform my reading of Egoyan's cinema. This chapter seeks to emphasize analogies between Derrida's discussions of a mourning that paradoxically succeeds by failing and Levinas' s description of a responsibility that can never be fulfilled, that inevitably fails. Mourning and responsibility, in these accounts, cannot be understood in relation to conventional notions of success or resolution. In Chapter Two, 'Suspense Thrillers, Generic Identity and Strategic Infidelity,' I look at debates concerning genre and auteur cinema and theories of the suspense thriller in order to provide a context for Egoyan's experimental approach to the genre. Chapter Three looks at Felicia's Journey (1999), and Chapter Four looks at Where the Truth Lies (2005). These chapters examine the relationship between the films' strategic failing of generic conventions and their narrative privileging of traumatic mourning and responsibility.

[First paragraph of introduction:] This study explores the meaning of Britishness as it has been defined by its relations with other geo-cultural terrains. If on the one hand Britishness, as we shall discover, has powerfully insular and inward looking elements, it has on the other hand an identity forged within a triangulation of significant Others. Britain's 'special' relationship with America, its political and cultural position on the edge of mainland Europe and the legacy of its Imperial past mark the three points of that triangle in which I want to locate the formations of national identity. This triangulation is complex. There is a sense in which each relationship Britain has with one geocultural formation, e.g. America, is also imbricated with or superimposed onto Britain's relationships with the other two. This imbricated spatial model must also factor in how each of these relations are themselves prone to ambivalence, marked as they are by both fascination and fear with these various Others.

This thesis explores approximately two decades in the history of the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT). During the 1960s and 1970s not only did film appreciation metamorphose into media education, but what had been a marginal discipline operating at grass-roots level in schools became established in the Academy in a variety of forms. Film study provided the • basis from which continental theory and cultural politics might be explored. During this period also the term 'screen education' came to have a particular currency where each element of its designation was separately scrutinised. There were two organisations which oversaw the transition, the Society and the British Film Institute. In the later 1960s the BFI's Education Department operated increasingly like a university department. Such was the antipathy to this development among BFI governors that the franchise for developing theory was in effect handed to the Society and its journal Screen during the mid-1970s. But Screen's writers eschewed the role of academics. They were self-declared intellectuals seeking opportunities to try out theories acquired from European thinkers. While much interest has been evidenced about the journal Screen in the 1970s, the institutional framework of its operation and SEFT's other involvements with the development of media education have received little attention. SEFT had started as the Society of Film Teachers (SFT) and to demonstrate its continuity as a teachers' organisation a complementary journal Screen Education grew in size and prestige. It has been the function of this investigation to begin to explore these un-researched areas and to attempt to provide a framework on to which the fragmentary record may be attached. The investigation of these developments has been complicated by the absence of any consistent archiving of relevant materials. If only limited documentation has survived, the timing of this research has meant that many of the individuals from the period under review were still accessible. Therefore interviews with some fifty people have provided an important resource that has helped to supplement the interrupted written record.