No description available.

No description available.

This thesis is an inquiry into the emergence, development and eventual transmutation of the 'virtual reality' (VR) subgenre. I critically intervene in discourse on cinema, digital media, phenomenology and science fiction (SF) to explore how these films refract and enact Hollywood cinema‘s engagement with digital media and imaging technologies. Given that these films are about bodily immersive mediated experiences, I argue, their reflexive displays of special effects technologies are far from anti- or contra-narrative, as certain analyses imply. My emphasis on the imbrication of narrative and spectacle motivates a critical questioning of further, often interrelated and mutually sustaining dichotomies between body and mind, cognition and affect, cinema and digital media, real and virtual, reflection and immersion. Via close textual analysis with a phenomenological leaning, I explore how these films variously disrupt such binaries. As both old and new media produce and address differently mediated publics, they adopt, adapt and assimilate the narrative-aesthetic modalities of other (digital) media, negotiating their impacts upon our phenomenological relations to the world and to cinema. Through reflexive allusions to their increasingly mediated extradiegetic contexts, they function to uphold cinema‘s ability both to present innovative technological spectacle and to represent contemporary experiential realities. I explore how earlier VR films Tron and The Lawnmower Man aesthetically and conceptually 'map' VR, and how Strange Days and The Matrix ambivalently explore the implications of intensified and widespread virtual experience in radically different ways. I characterise Avatar and Source Code as 'Post-VR' cinema, in which formerly upheld dichotomies – particularly between 'real' and 'virtual' – prove untenably anachronistic. I ultimately maintain the value of an approach to popular cinema which apprehends genre, context and convergence, while advocating sustained and detailed close analysis as a means of grasping cinema‘s narrative-aesthetic functions in the digital age.

This thesis focuses on China’s Minjian film exhibition culture, which arose in the 1990s and has proliferated across China throughout the 2000s, to examine in detail two main issues - its sustainability and legitimisation. Minjian film exhibition is defined as including grassroots film festivals, organisations and cineclubs, which are dedicated to showcasing Chinese independent films. The thesis aims to examine conflicts between Minjian film exhibition and the state against a backdrop of the forced closure of a number of grassroots film festivals at the hands of local governments and state intervention in grassroots level exhibition activities since 2012. Empirical data obtained through a ten month ethnographic study evidences that the sustainability and legitimisation of Minjian film exhibition culture largely rely on its interaction and negotiation with the state, society and global networks of NGOs and cultural institutions. This finding challenges the assumption that Minjian film exhibition culture is a local film exhibition culture and exists in an antagonistic relationship with the state. The networking of China’s grassroots film festivals with global networks of NGOs and cultural institutions also challenges the neoliberal structure of the international film festival circuit. This thesis is critical of accounts of the static nature of this cultural movement. In analysing the dynamic nature of this exhibition culture, this thesis draws on the concept of reterritorialization connected to Actant Rhizome Ontology, which provides a non-dichotomous approach and insights into the relational ties of Minjian film exhibition culture, the state, society and global networks. It argues that no inherent qualities and static identities can be attached to Minjian film exhibition culture as it constantly gains meanings and qualities through contact with the state, society and global networks which ensure its sustainability and legitimisation.

This study examines the cinematic portrayal of the interrelationship between the concepts of home and cultural hybridity within contemporary processes of migration in Thomas Arslan’s Brothers and Sisters (1997), Dealer (1999), A Fine Day (2001) and Ferien (2007) as prime examples of Turkish-German cinema. It argues that cultural hybridity offers the potential to construct new spaces of home apart from demarcating, essentialist polarities. While integrating critical discourse analysis and literary analysis of post-colonial (Said, 1978; Bhabha, 1994), transcultural (Welsch, 1999, 2010; Antor, 2010, Werbner, 2015), sociological (Castells, 1997; Gellner, 2006), and film theories (Deleuze, 1986; Elsaesser, 1999; 2015; Hickethier, 2001), this study consists of two stages. Firstly, it explores concepts of culture, cultural hybridity, home, and collective memory in order to provide a theoretical and conceptual framework for the film analysis and, subsequently, it contextualises Arslan’s oeuvre through the analysis of Turkish-German cinema. Finally, it explores the cinematic techniques used in four consecutive films by Arslan in order to examine the interdependence between these apparent antipodes: home and cultural hybridity. My study demonstrates that the concept of home in a cultural hybrid context must be re-evaluated. The rigid understanding that the concept of home feeds on exclusionary polarities can no longer withstand in today’s society that is marked by ever-increasing boundary-crossings and cultural hybridity. At a time in which increased migratory streams to Europe coincide with the flourishing of nationalistic movements throughout Europe it is essential to recognise the processual and transformative qualities of culture and home that questions habitual constants, such as cultural identity and memory, and refutes primordial givens and cultural categorising in order to pave the way to new spaces of home.

In 1990, Timothy Corrigan identified a rising trend in Hollywood film marketing wherein the director, or auteur, had become commercially galvanised as a brand icon. This thesis updates Corrigan’s treatise on the ‘commerce of auteurism’ to a specific 2017 perspective in order to dismantle the discursive mechanisms by which commodified author-brands create meaning and value in Conglomerate Hollywood’s promotional superstructure. By adopting a tripartite theoretical/industrial/textual analytical framework distinct from the humanistic and subjectivist excesses of traditional auteurism, by which conceptions of film authorship have typically been circumscribed, this thesis seeks to answer the oft-neglected question how does authorship work as it relates to the contemporary blockbuster narrative. Naturally, this necessitates a corresponding understanding of how texts work, which leads to the construction of a spectator-centric cognitive narratorial heuristic that conceptualises ‘the author’ as a hermeneutic code which may be activated when presented with sufficient ‘authorial’ signals. Of course, authorial signals do not only emanate from films but also promotional paratexts such as posters, trailers, production diaries, and home-video special features like the commentary and behind-the-scenes documentary. These paratexts—by no means arbitrary or ancillary—are instrumental in constructing pre-textual expectations and, correspondingly, textual meaning and value. Through the exploitation of Romantic and auteurist maxims art demands an artist and the director is the film artist, the commercial projection of branded authorship sanctifies the product as unique and distinguished, rendering it irresistibly attractive to a consumer irrespective of its actual value; the bet-hedging branded author functions as an a priori guarantor of quality, which is especially important for a post-recession horizontally-integrated entertainment empire for which a film can still be a failure even if it makes dozens of millions of dollars. This thesis investigates the effect and affect of commercial brand-authorship with regards to J.J. Abrams’ authorship of Star Wars: The Force Awakens—how it manifested through a variety of media; how these media were tailored to pander to the fandom; and how online audiences responded to interviews, video-blogs, and SFX reels in order to construct their own utopian presumptive visions of the film. Yet the fetishised auteur-brand carries little interpretive weight and a sole focus on paratexts tells us even less about the textuality of contemporary authorship. Concordantly, this thesis concludes with an extensive authorial reading of Interstellar, The Hobbit trilogy, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe with an eye to how they each use their ‘authors’—and for what ends. This, in turn, leads to an expansion of Gérard Genette’s hypotheses on transtextuality and the discovery of auto-centric transtextual sub-categories: autotextuality (Interstellar), intratextuality (The Hobbit), and unitextuality (Marvel). Unlike an ahistorical auteurism that myopically valorises directorial style for its own sake, this thesis finds that there are numerous ‘types’ of authorship and that ‘Nolan’, ‘Jackson’, and Marvel’s authoriality cannot be understood without a corresponding appreciation of their industrial burdens and commercial imperatives. Constituting a dialectic on ‘authorship’ versus ‘auteurism’, Author Functions, Auteur Fictions engages with a commercialised auteurism that has evolved far beyond Corrigan’s model into a much more endemic and integral socio-economic system: the author-industrial complex.

Emerging at the intersection of feature-length animated cinema with computer-generated imagery (CGI), and preceded by a cycle of preparatory shorts released during the 1980s, the computer-animated film has become the dominant form of mainstream animation. But while the field of animation studies has expanded dramatically in the last twenty years, reflective of increased levels of academic interest in the subject, the computer-animated film as an example of feature-length narrative cinema remains rarely investigated. This research argues that computer-animated films, including their continued evolution and mutation, can be critically evaluated through the rubric of genre. An approach is developed which elaborates upon their unique visual currencies and formal attributes, reconceptualised and organised as a generic framework that supports the study of computer-animated films as a new genre of contemporary cinema. This thesis is therefore centred on locating where the features of this genre may reside, individuated across three chapters concerned with issues of fictional world creation, performance and animated acting, and comedy. These subjects have been identified for their significant, and often highly problematic, relationship to traditions of animated filmmaking. Each chapter sets out to situate the computer-animated film within these traditions, before pursuing fresh lines of enquiry that target directly it’s determining generic codes, narrative conventions and common aesthetic tropes. Informed throughout by focused textual analysis of individual computer-animated films, the genre is discussed and debated through its relevant connections to a variety of topics. These include cinephilia and intertextuality, anthropomorphism, junk art, puppetry and the Western tradition of performing objects, film sound theory, narrative literary theory, and seventeenth-century Mannerist art. Animatedness is a term that is developed across the thesis, invoked to promote the key specificities of this new digital cinema and the richness, energy and vigour of its film worlds. This thesis is framed by the question of the particular ‘animatedness’ of computer-animated films, and my research reveals the distinct terms and novel perspectives through which this otherwise undiscovered genre of contemporary film can be examined.

‘Battleaxes, Spinsters and Chars: the Ageing Woman in British Film Comedy of the Mid-Twentieth Century’ explores the prominence of the mature woman in British film comedies of the mid-twentieth century, spanning the period from the Second War World to the mid-1960s. This thesis is structured around case studies featuring a range of film comedies from across this era, selected for the performances of character actresses who were familiar faces to British cinema audiences. Organised chronologically, each chapter centres around films and actresses evoking specific typologies and themes relevant to female ageing: the ‘immobile’ woman in wartime, the spinster in the post-war era, retirement and old age in the 1950s, and the cockney matriarch in the early 1960s. The selection of case studies encompasses the overlooked and critically derided alongside the more celebrated and better known in order to represent the range of British film comedy of the time. The final chapter spans the time-frame of the whole thesis, exploring the later life stardom of Margaret Rutherford. The thesis is centred on close textual analysis of sequences from the case studies, applying research into a range of historical texts relevant to the films and actresses, including biographies, letters, correspondence, press, posters and publicity materials. Each chapter draws on diverse scholarly disciplines to interrogate representations of female ageing, encompassing age studies, feminist studies, star studies, sociological research, genre studies, political philosophy, anthropology and social history. I conclude that film comedy of the mid-twentieth century offered familiar and reassuring typologies of the ageing woman for audiences in a time of upheaval and social change. My analysis of the films demonstrates how the representations of female ageing provided by these character actresses and stars were inflected by the cultural and social context. In her various guises the character actress in British comedy offered a fantasy of continuity, stability and reassurance within a country which struggled to define its national identity, and a national cinema which was struggling to survive.

How can film and social research be used to interrogate the relationship between a marginalized place and its vacant spaces - what I refer to as Ghost Developments? This research project investigated aspects of the post-Celtic Tiger Ireland newly built environment through the production of an experimental ethnographic documentary film and an accompanying scholarly text. In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, the Republic of Ireland experienced one of the most dramatic property market collapses in recorded history, resulting large swathes of vacant and/or unfinished housing and commercial property throughout the country. My hometown and county Longford was one of the places that suffered disproportionally as a site of what became known as ‘ghost estates’ - unfinished housing estates, though it should be noted there remained a paucity of social or artistic research into vacant commercial property. In my research I have expanded on the popular term ‘ghost estate’ to arrive at ‘ghost developments’ as a new conceptualization within ruin studies that seeks to explore the aesthetic, artistic, historical, relational, material and experiential qualities of a range of ruined spaces in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, and furthermore what they can tell us about the social dynamics of place. I use the ‘ghost development’ conceptualization as a social and filmic device that not only questions how vacant space has been represented in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, but furthermore to propose the idea that through these spaces we can begin to think of the categories of urban/rural/suburban not solely as spatial delineations but as sets of social practices which are negotiated differently depending on social setting or location. My film A Place Where Ghosts Dwell employs a number of different styles, film modes and techniques to narratively tease out the spaces between ethnographic film and the essay-film to create an artistic film that is subjective and intersubjective, stylized and socially contextualized. As an experimental ethnography, this project (text and film) is both artistic and social research.

Since the 1990s, Chinese independent cinema has been at the forefront of documenting contemporary realities for marginalised citizens in Mainland China. This began with the New Chinese Documentary Movement and exploded in the mid-late 1990s with the rise of what is called the ‘Urban Generation’ of filmmakers who mix fiction with documentary to make sense of urban transformations at the street level. Now, with the continued expansion of more affordable and portable digital video production, independent filmmakers have moved beyond their local parameters and urban aesthetic styles to explore, represent and imagine new ways to document reality for the everyday citizen. In recent years, scholarship on Chinese independent cinema has acquired greater significance in film studies, insofar as it has devoted itself to the analysis of the historical significance and lasting influence of the New Chinese Documentary Movement and the ‘Urban Generation’. However, in the past decade, increasingly active digital video practices in China have proliferated on the independent film scene, including an increase in amateur and grassroots filmmaking which has embraced realism in multiple and innovative ways through documentary, fiction and experimental films. In this thesis, I will address the question of realism in contemporary Chinese independent cinema, which I argue, remains under-examined and both requires and warrants closer textual analysis. The cultural politics of China’s subaltern voices provides the common thread of this research which is articulated through the tropes of urban spaces, mobility and memory in this alternative filmmaking practice. These films imagine and represent realities through different and original modes of intervention that include performance, self-portraits, re-enactment and participatory filmmaking. In short, my research focuses on film productions from the past decade that challenge China’s official culture but also engage with it, placing it in relief with the ambiguity inherent in representation in film and history.