This thesis explores the phenomenon through which numerous directors, from emerging and established film industries from East Asia, have been collectively recognised as auteurs in the West in the last two decades. The thesis proposes a multi-dimensional approach that investigates contexts, discourses, and agencies closely associated with three representative directors that shaped their auteur reputations, as revealed in different forms of archival materials which are treated as auteur paratexts. These paratexts are archival materials associated with the Rotterdam International Film Festival in relation to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, home video promotional materials in relation to Kim Ki-duk, and YouTube user-generated content in relation to Wong Kar-wai. Drawing on and expanding from the method of Foucauldian critical discourse analysis, the findings reveal persistent discourses on geo-politics in relation to national and regional cinema, and an expanded discourse on art cinema in relation to transnational multimedia art forms and diverse taste cultures. Further multi-modal textual analysis of sample materials, which take into account multiple individuals involved, illustrates how directors and associated agents negotiate discursive framings and assert their own pleasure and personal politics through language, voice and performance. Each case study also discusses wider networks of relationship, drawing on and expanding from Pierre Bourdieu's frameworks, which facilitate or undermine the process of auteur reputation-making associated with the three case study directors. In the context of the film festival, Apichatpong has been promoted as a modernist auteur as part of festival branding. Emerging through the commercial context of film distribution, Kim Ki-duk and associated distributors have drawn on and moved away from Kim's restricted cult reputation generated by influential distributors over time. The case study of Wong Kar-wai points to the importance of individual users on YouTube, who are not represented by film-related institutions but exhibit shared taste cultures through maintaining and expanding the director's reputation. As a whole, the thesis offers a multifaceted perspective on the East Asian auteur phenomenon and highlights collective cultures that sustain fascination with the auteur figure.

Japanese anime is 'one of the most explosive forms of visual culture to emerge at the crossroads of transnational cultural production' (Brown, 2006:1). This study proposes that anime is framed in a different wayfrom orthodox Hollywood cel animation (Wells,1998), influenced by Japanese aesthetics, iconography, social norms and a well developed role for individual anime directors. The significance of anime as a novel form of animation is specifically linked to a broader alignment within Japanese cultural identity. The study benefits from previous research by Thomas Lamarre (2009) who proposed the concept of the 'animetic process' and Hiroki Azuma's (2009) post-modernist discourse on 'otaku' (anime fans). Close reading analyses of selected feature films in the anime canon directed by Hayao Miyazaki (1941-), Satoshi Kon (1963-2010) and Mamoru Oshii (1951-) were conducted, to determine the significance (defined as sharing a common meaning and value) of anime within contemporary discourses on animation. The study concludes that anime represents a continuation of Japanese film tradition which has frequently borrowed from other film cultures, notably Hollywood, but then subverted this influence through a specifically Japanese gaze. Evidence for anime being regarded as novel in terms of the development of film tradition was found in relation to its adoption of digital trans-modality and interactivity to become a mediated cinematic form which breaks new ground. The dialogue between the anime director as the creative force and the viewer as the active consumer has wider implication for this hypothesis that modern anime is emerging as an interesting and important filmic form in digital environments.

This thesis offers an analysis of the British marketing and reviewing of three films from the 1970s which have been seen as controversial, through to their most recent DVD releases, as well as their more recent remakes, in relation to the changing public construction of cultural taste. The films are Straw Dogs (Peckinpah, 1971/Lurie, 2011), Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972/Iliadis, 2009) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)/The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Nispel, 2003). The methodological design of the thesis is based firmly in traditions of historical reception studies, following Barbara Klinger (1994), Janet Staiger (1992, 2000) and Kate Egan (2007), and employs methods of analysis primarily drawn from Lisa Kernan (2004) and Martin Barker and Kate Brooks (1998). By employing a historical reception studies approach to the material, the thesis resists the tendency to treat film remakes as inherently 'inferior' to authentic originals. The public construction of taste in relation to these films is figured in relation to Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital, cultural distinction, and developments of these, such as Sarah Thornton's notion of subcultural capital (1995). Through such an analysis a discrepancy emerges between the two sorts of material under scrutiny, whereby a sense of 'the generic' is figured as either positive in marketing or negative in reviewing, suggesting difference conceptions of an imagined audience. Overwhelmingly, the remakes are positioned negatively by critics in relation to the original films and these negative appraisals are often asserted through the discourses which have rehabilitated the original films from their own negative reception during the 1970s and 1980s.

This thesis is submitted alongside the film Forecast (2015) to be a submission for the PhD project Cantre?r Gwaelod and Tales of Inundation. The project aims in its entirety to propose film as a mode of enquiry regarding ways in which the dangers of climate change, specifically anthropogenic climate change, can be addressed in a documentary film. Using the possible allegorical power of the Welsh flood myth of Cantre?r Gwaelod, the original aim of the project was to create a documentary film which used this myth as a way to illustrate the effects of a changing climate. During the research, however, it became apparent that myth as a concept presented several points of interest which overall problematised its use in this way. Myth itself could be seen to be present in mass communication because some simplification of complex issues needs to take place in order to make this type of communication possible. Furthermore, it also became clear that the issue of climate change had to some extent been mythologised through a similar process of simplification. This project looks closely at the ways in which this tendency towards mythology in communication, especially regarding complex issues such as climate change, might, in fact hinder the communication of themes and ideas and damage the efficacy as a result. It therefore became obvious that the purpose of this project was to develop a methodology which attempted to communicate through a documentary film in a way that eschewed mythology as much as 2 possible. This written thesis looks at the ways in which this was achieved, both theoretically and practically and details extant work that serves to illustrate this.

This study will focus on the analysis of eight films representing migrants in Spain. The films are documentaries and fiction films made by Spanish and non-Spanish filmmakers from 1999 till 2010. The main focus of this analysis is to explore the ways in which migrant and non-migrant filmmakers reframe the urban and rural space to create opportunities for a free, although contested, exchange between marginal voices and mainstream Spanish society. I will analyse to what extent the films challenge forms of exclusion, exploring how they represent ethnicity in a space that includes some and excludes others. It is my main aim to describe how and to what extent the films open the space for political argumentation. My main theoretical framework will derive from the work of French philosopher Jacques Rancière to demonstrate to what extent the films create scenes of dissensus. I will also draw upon Hamid Naficy’s characterisation of ‘accented cinema’, as well as upon theorists like Doreen Massey, Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, since their arguments will help the analysis of how the films represent space, time, power and movement. Apart from this, I will make use of Laura Marks’s theories on intercultural cinema made by the diasporic filmmaker and its capacity to create new kinds of sense knowledges through haptic perception. Other political theories from Giorgio Agamben, Fredric Jameson and Thomas Elsaesser, among others, will contribute to exploring how migrant characters are portrayed and to what extent this representation contributes to the creation of scenes of dissensus.

This research proposes an approach to understanding the systems and modes of story that sets knowledge gaps as a common denominator. It uses a constructivist approach and content analysis to capture a comprehensive range of knowledge gap data from different genres and eras of popular Hollywood film stories. The data is used to demonstrate the significance of knowledge gaps in a narration and to establish a taxonomy. The research thereby reveals both the operation of knowledge gaps in a story and the operation of story through knowledge gaps. The study categorises knowledge gaps firstly by those which privilege the audience and those which withhold knowledge from the audience. It further classifies them according to whether they are simple, compound or complex in their makeup and situates them in the audience context: gaps are either paratextual, diegetic, mimetic or delivered through specified forms of narrated signification. The analysis also defines and identifies knowledge gaps by type, such as gaps through the star or character image, marketing material and foreshadowing media; lights, music and mise-en-scène; ellipsis gaps; questions, subterfuge and plans; action and dialogue, promise, subplot, suggestion, misdirection, suspense and comedy; character growth, vicarious learning, metaphor and allegory, recognition and allusion. The study concludes that information disparity is a fundamental substance of all stories. Knowledge gaps provide a singular foundation that can be used to codify a comprehensive narratology, uniting the story, the writer, the narration, the hermeneutic process and the reception of a story. The thesis demonstrates how this unity of definition can integrate applications of the term ‘narrative’ by other disciplines, including cognitive psychology, education, narrative and identity, and narration in, for example, political, religious, medical or legal discourse. The thesis formalises knowledge gaps not only as a component of narratology, but also as a material, measurable component of all stories, which can be developed as a tool of story analysis and the story development process for the commercial benefit of industries which must invest in stories, such as film production companies and publishers.

A documentary and 20,000 word thesis on filming the unperformed testimony of Holocaust survivors.

This thesis draws on a reflexive account of embodied female spectatorship in order to re-frame dominant accounts of the cinematic experience. In particular the project shows how distraction, defined as a series of puncta which expand the spectator’s cinematic experience, is integral to embodied experience of film spectatorship and fandom. Drawing on theoretical grounding from film theory, classical cultural studies and fan studies, the study sheds light on how inhabiting the position of distracted spectator involves maintaining several identities simultaneously. The thesis used an in-depth contemporary case study, the Hollywood blockbuster franchise The Hunger Games (Gary Ross and Francis Lawrence, 2012-2015), to examine how these identities are made visible through distracted spectatorship and its impact on the cinematic experience. By making specific reference to the individual spectator’s cinematic experience the thesis re-evaluates how the spectator is presented within theories of fandom and spectatorship. The resultant reading makes visible the ways in which female fans already see. In turn this argument complicates current fandom and spectatorship theory as it calls into question the certain positions that these theories hold. This thesis challenges the more commonly theorised arguments by stating that the inhabiting of multiple identities creates a level of uncertainty within film analysis.

On first consideration, documentary film and psychoanalysis seem incompatible. Historically, documentary film has privileged the visual in exploring the social world, whilst psychoanalysis has privileged the aural in apprehending the internal world. Despite this apparent incompatibility, documentary film was productively employed in psychoanalytic research in the 1950s and 1960s by a handful of ocularcentric psychoanalysts. In an attempt to address the gap between looking from the outside while seeing on the inside, this investigation examines the synthesis of both fields by evaluating the genre’s capacity to document interiority. It asks: how can documentary film function as a visual methodology in the psychoanalytic production of knowledge of interiority? Through an innovative methodological approach, this is addressed from the filmmaker’s perspective, in which psychoanalytic epistemological debates are transposed onto three documentary film forms. These include the polemical discussions between clinical and observational research in psychoanalysis, explored through the essay film; the use of linear temporality, examined in observational film; and the notion of après coup, or afterwardsness, that attends to memory and meaning through the compilation film. From this theoretical and practice-based enquiry, this research develops the notion of the temporalised gaze that may produce psychoanalytically informed constructions of subjectivities in documentary film. In making this gaze visible, it argues that documentary filmmakers and psychoanalytic visual researchers require greater reflexivity of how temporal ways of looking construct interiority. Therefore, this investigation establishes a psychoanalytic methodological base on which a plurality of visual subjectivities may be developed. It calls for the revival of the ethical and reflexive use of documentary film in psychoanalytic research.

This thesis proposes an articulation between the history of Portuguese contemporary cinema and broader political and social variables. Thus, the main purpose of the present thesis is to follow and understand the evolution of Portuguese cinema in the period between 1960 (the beginning of the decade of the New Cinema movement) and 2010 (the year of the height of the economic crisis that suddenly left the country in a difficult position), from a socio-cultural and economic perspective. Paying especial attention to post-1974 decades, this project provides an overview of the last 40–60 years and looks in depth at the identity of Portuguese cinema and the reality(ies) in which it has been inserted. This is a work on the development of this cinema, within and outside its national borders, in which the object of study is not a corpus of films (when understood as aesthetic objects), but rather its market context, as well as a political and social situation. It falls within the scope of this thesis to look further into the reasons for the real and the symbolic absence of Portuguese cinema from the national and European contexts, along with its commercial problems. Three vectors of analysis will guide this research: relation with audiences; circulation and problems with distribution; and financial struggles. The driving force of this research project is fueled by the interest in addressing the historical difficulties that Portuguese filmmakers faced during this period in order to understand the origin and characteristics of those obstacles. Indeed, this work aims to identify, debate and clarify the reasons that influenced the evolution of aesthetics and determined the precarious situation in which Portuguese cinema found itself during the past decades. This thesis also analyses cases of success, in order to understand the broader frame from a holistic perspective.