The main aim of the thesis is to develop a definition of film restoration, both in its intrinsic properties and in relation to the restoration of traditional, non-reproducible works of art. Concentrating on films made between 1914 and 1931, it takes as its theoretical starting point Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and moves towards a framework incorporating Hans- Georg Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics and Umberto Eco’s reflections on forgery. It includes four case studies of restoration of Italian colour films as well as a systematic comparison between approaches to the restoration of works of art (Cesare Brandi, Michele Cordaro and others) and those to the restoration of films (Mark-Paul Meyer, João de Oliveira, GAMMA group and others). Different types of source are used to address practical issues in film restoration: technical documents (acquired in NFTALondon and CN-Rome), published, visual and oral sources. The latter consist of interviews with the main restorers involved in the case study projects (de Oliveira, Mario Musumeci, Johan Prijs) and other important scholars and restorers (Paolo Cherchi Usai, Martin Koerber, Nicola Mazzanti, Meyer). The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first introduces theoretical reflections on restoration applied to films and clarifies a number of terminological issues as well as providing a brief historical overview of the causes of dispersal and destruction of films. The second presents the four case studies and concentrates on specific aspects of film restoration: identification, colour, editorial restoration. The third addresses two key issues in restoration practices – patina and lacuna – and compares the differences in treatment between traditional arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) and cinema. The last, theoretical chapter defines a restored film from a semiotic viewpoint and offers a definition of film restoration as a hermeneutic discipline.

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In this study, I explore the representation of death, memory, mourning, and oneirism in specific transnational cinematic works from 1907 to 1958. Looking beyond psychoanalytic theories, I revise current theorisations of the Gothic through a formal-aesthetic methodological lens and propose new, cross-cultural avenues that have been heretofore neglected. I suggest that Romanticism and the Gothic have become catch-all terms whose usage may seem convenient to speak and write about film, but that nonetheless overlook the unique way the Gothic and Romantic doctrines meet and meld on the screen. I work towards an assessment of this singular relationship in cinema—which I describe as the Romantic-Gothic mode—by providing analyses of both US and European works. In so doing, I propose an interpretive strategy that highlights and investigates the implications of moving the afterlife out of the graveyard and into the space of the cinema. I endeavour to map the geographic, temporal, and psychological dislocations of the characters, which, I argue, are structured upon the contact between the sensing human body and the circumambient life. I examine the mediation of pastness by certain places and objects that insistently actualise gone-by events and thus question the notion of the past as an unequivocal cause for the present and future. I suggest that the encounter of the dwellers with what I call memory-objects in their lonely walks through the foreignness of private and outdoor spaces re/creates identity. A nodal point in the project concerns the idea that the Romantic-Gothic mode is a map of sensory memories where mourning, forgetfulness, and the annihilation of the self in time, space, and mind germinate. Finally, in broad outline, my work offers a starting point for a critical reappraisal of Romantic and Gothic art in film.

Taking a comparative approach, my PhD thesis investigates the relationship between recent cinematic representations of the Holocaust in Israel, Germany, and Hollywood, and formations of national identity. Focusing on the ways in which specific political and cultural factors shape dominant discourses surrounding the Nazis’ attempt to destroy the European Jewry, I argue that the Holocaust is central to a crisis in national identity in all three countries. Whereas Holocaust films have traditionally reinforced the socio-political ideals informing the context of their production, however, the analysis of my central corpus demonstrates that this cinema can also be seen to challenge dominant discourses expressing the values that maintain established notions of national identity. Central to this challenge is the positioning of the nation as either a victim or perpetrator with regards to the Holocaust. The presentation of opposing narratives in my central corpus of films suggests a heterogeneity that undermines the tendency in dominant discourses to present victim and perpetrator positions as mutually exclusive. The trajectory from one position to its opposite is itself informed by generational shifts. As a consequence, I also discuss the perspectives offered by members of the second and third generations whose focus on particular aspects of the Holocaust challenge the discourses established by the previous one. By way of conclusion, I focus on the transnational aspect of Holocaust film. In highlighting a number of commonalities across the three cinemas discussed in my thesis, I argue that in addition to expressing themes that relate to the issue of national identity, these films also suggest the construction of ‘identity communities’ that exist beyond state borders.

The study of film exhibition has become increasingly important in researching and interpreting the silent film period. In this context, it is crucial to understand how the British film-going experience emerged, laying the foundations for one of the key leisure pursuits of the twentieth century and beyond. This thesis examines a fascinating and distinct moment in the history of silent film. The resilience of films as an occasional form of entertainment during the first two years of commercial exhibition was due, in part, to the sensational aspects of the new medium, and to the activities of a range of travelling showmen and lanternists. The role of such individuals in suburban areas has been largely overlooked, while the role of the music hall and the frequency of film shows in this period have been overstated. I seek to redress this by showing that films arrived outside of large urban areas in a variety of settings, with lanternists occupying a crucial role. By employing an empirical and systematic methodological framework, I offer a new perspective by means of detailed case studies chronicling the exhibition of films in the suburban towns of Croydon, Ealing and Woolwich between 1896 and 1897. Focusing so precisely on the first two years of commercial exhibition enables a comprehensive study of the initial impact of the cinematograph and how film exhibition was working in that period. By means of a fourth case study, I re-appraise and re-position the role of lanternists and show the importance of these entrepreneurs in terms of film exhibition and their impact on the suburban London landscape. I also consider the broader theme of Sensation and how it relates to the film-going experience in this period.

The commentary addresses the works in the Research Portfolio (2010-2016) which consists of three films and one multi-media installation. These films are experimental but look very different from my previous work. This reflects my decision to address figuration and realist representation in order to expand and develop my experimental film language. The works are collective and individual portraits of women in monastic life, and one is a portrait of a young girl in a Catholic iconography. In these new works I find out what happens when you insert direct works about religion into an art space that is not expecting them and has no context ready for them. My aim is to see how that changes and tests the binaries of religion/art, traditional/experimental. The commentary investigates the works through a Catholic framing/perspective; close reading as a method of viewing the work, and a feminist analysis that provides gendered readings of the works. These three come together to open a space of reflection and a critical perspective on the films. The commentary shows how the works open a space for a religious subject to emerge: one not hitherto represented in the context of experimental film.

This thesis examines the figure of the wandering adolescent, prominently visible in Japanese television anime and videogames produced from 1995 to the present. Japan in the 1990s and at the millennium experienced intense economic and social change, as the collapse of the 'bubble' economy of the 1980s resulted in a financial recession from which the country has yet to recover. At the close of the decade, the national experience was characterised in media descriptions of malaise and disenfranchisement, and the loss of perceived core traditional cultural values. Arguably in this period the figure of the adolescent changed qualitatively in Japanese culture, rising to prominence within youth panic discourses circulated by the Japanese news media. These concerned the perceived rise in antisocial and problematic teenage behaviour, including the otaku, the hikikomori shut-in, classroom disobedience, bullying, and prostitution, while multiple cases of brutal murder perpetrated by teenagers became the focus of extensive media coverage. Public discourse expressed alarm at the perceived breakdown of the traditional family and the growing commodification of childhood in Japanese culture. This thesis develops understanding of the shifting attitude in Japan towards adolescence within the context of these cultural anxieties, and through the analysis of anime and videogames suggests strategies that are at work within popular cultural texts that are the product of, contribute to and reorient debates about the position of the suddenly and inescapably visible teenager in Japanese society. Through analysis of discourses relating to the shifting representation of the wandering adolescent as it moves across cultural texts and media forms, the thesis forms an original contribution to knowledge and understanding of Japanese anime and videogames through illumination of a prominent motif that to date remains unexamined.

In this thesis I explore reasons for the widespread and enduring popularity of Disney’s first feature-length films (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942)). While acknowledging the historical, industrial and aesthetic features that have contributed to their success, my argument is that the continuing fascination of these films is in large part attributable to the manner in which they engage the spectator and evoke unconscious concerns about family cohesion, interpersonal conflicts and the death of parents. My investigation begins with an analysis of the films’ prefilmic provenance and narrative characteristics, placing an emphasis on the role of their narrative and extra-narrative components as embodying social, pedagogical and psychological meanings. In order to explore how the films engage with the spectator’s unconscious mind, I employ a number of Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic concepts. The post-Freudian models include that of Jacques Lacan and those based on object-relations theory, particularly as developed by Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. These conceptual models are used to explore the content of the films, while that of Winnicott is also used to explore the visual fascination of the form Disney gave them. Although these films were designed for family viewing, and many of the more distressing aspects of their original stories were toned down in Disney’s adaptations, the films portray a remarkably dystopic version of family life, of childhood and of growing up. Moreover, psychoanalytic investigation suggests that concealed within the films’ attractive animation, music and humour, there lie recurrent ruminations on anxieties about death caused by germs (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and old age (Pinocchio) and about culpability for injury (Dumbo) and death of mothers (Bambi). I conclude that the films reward the spectator by offering her/him the opportunity to engage with, fantasise about and work through the problems encountered by the films’ protagonists.

A study of the nature and history of the comedy genre in British cinema over the decade 1929-1939. The account begins by considering the critical marginalisation of comedy in constructions of ’British cinema’ since the 1920s, before proceeding to a consideration of the problems of theorising comedy as a genre. British screen comedy is considered as part of a wider, cross-media ’popular aesthetic’, with reference to Bakhtin’s ideas of the ’novelistic’,and its roots in pre-cinematic entertainment forms are explored. On this basis a model of 1930s comedy as a non-classical, ’attraction’ based cinema is put forward, accounting for its seemingly aberrant and heterogeneous qualities, qualified by considerations of generic verisimilitude and institutional constraints. The pre-history of the genre is discussed, and the impact of non-cinematic forms and modes of performance stressed. A consideration of the impact of sound technology and government legislation on 1930s British cinema helps to define both the type of comedies made and the prevalence of comic modes in the British cinema of the time. A case is made for comedy as both the most widely produced and most consistently successful British genre of the 1930s. The films themselves are then examined in a series of studio histories which examine the stars, directors and writers involved in their production. A detailed look at a representative body of films reveals the extremely wide range covered by the genre, and the differences of emphasis and style created by diverse performers. The ways in which comedy is able to articulate central discourse of British cinema, such as those pertaining to class, gender and sexuality. in uniquely contradictory ways is linked to its particular formal qualities, its relationship to other genres and media, and its subaltern status within the paradigms of both British and ’classical’ cinemas.

This thesis explores the reception and fandom of Asian Extreme films in the UK over the last twelve years. It draws on the findings of a research project undertaken in collaboration with the British Board of Film classification (BBFC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The twenty-first century has seen an explosion in the popularity of Asian cult cinema in the West; it is within this evolving landscape that, for a number of years, the BBFC encountered difficulties when classifying many Asian Extreme films. This research draws on Annette Kuhn’s model of censorship as an on-going and provisional process that arises out of the interaction between a number of institutions, discourses and practices; in this case, the competing discourses generated by Tartan’s controversial marketing strategies, the regulatory activity of the BBFC, the response of the British ‘mainstream’ press and the practices and cultures generated by fan communities have all contributed to the discursive frameworks influencing the reception of these films in the UK. As a mixed-method, multi-stage research project this thesis combines archival research, a small-scale reception study, a survey of online fan activity, twelve semi-structured interviews and an online quali-quantitative questionnaire. Using these research tools, it sets out to capture a portrait of the pleasures, enjoyments and meanings that British audiences derive from Asian Extreme films. As a contested category, the Asian Extreme genre acts as important site for investigating a range of academic debates that have evolved in the overlapping fields of film censorship, fan studies, cult cinema, genre studies and East Asian cinema. In these ways, this study contributes to a number of academic debates and, in particular, offers new insights into the practices of film regulation in contemporary British culture.