My Ph.D thesis entitled 'Re-thinking Queer: A film-philosophy project' aims at articulating a discourse on sexual/difference by taking two critical steps: the first is signalled by a critical moving away from Queer Theory and its linguistic/cultural apparatus, on the basis of its failure to break away from a 'normative' (molar) notion of subjectivity; the second is related to an experimental coming together of philosophy and cinema - a coming together which actualises a thinking philosophically with film through the practice of writing as art. The thesis overall suggests a rethinking of 'queer' through the becoming-woman-lesbian concept; a concept that is explored in relation to desire, ethics and time within particular cinematic events. The thesis employs two different discourses: an analytical/critical discourse on desire, ethics and time that draws on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson, Nietzsche and the so-called neo-materialist feminism (Grosz, Braidotti), and a more creative, poetic writing that thinks with the filmmind.

This thesis challenges assumptions about the democratization of amateur film-making in the United Kingdom. By identifying a body of serious amateur film-makers, the thesis broadens our understanding of amateur film-making in the interwar era. It demonstrates by way of a case study of one south London cine-club in the inter-war era, Ace Movies, that the history of the first generation of cine-clubs in the United Kingdom is more complex than is currently appreciated. Derided in British inter-war intellectual film journals for being little more than social clubs trying but failing to emulate commercial film production, the thesis identifies a creative response to British inter-war film culture that not only challenges perceptions about the quality of cine-club films but also the extent of intellectual engagement with that culture. The thesis engages with recent work on alternative film culture, more established works about the development of film culture and production in Britain in the inter-war period as well as studies of class and gender engagements with leisure. Drawing on a range of primary sources, including intellectual film journals, amateur film magazines and Ace Movies' surviving films, the thesis explores the social context in which the first cine-clubs in the United Kingdom emerged; identifies the relationship between the first generation of cine-clubs and alternative and mainstream film cultures; identifies in the studios developed by cine-clubs like Ace Movies a mode of film-making that is distinct from the home mode; and demonstrates that the distribution and exhibition practices of the first generation of cine-clubs were more ambitious than is currently appreciated.

After conceding defeat to the Allies in World War 11, Japan was occupied by an American-led force which aimed to reconstruct the nation's political, social and legal ideologies. One of their biggest aims was to promote gender equality, and to this end a raft of reforms were enacted which enhanced the position of women in the early postwar years. This thesis aims to re-examine Japanese film of the late 1940s and 1950s by looking at the representation of female characters in mainstream narrative film. This will be achieved through analysis of three canonical filmmakers from the period: Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi. By exploring the history of women in Japan and making close textual analysis of nine films, I assess how the reforms which were put in place during the early postwar period in relation to women were reflected in the female characters of the nation's cinema. The cinema of Japan in the early postwar period has often been recognised as representing the Classical era of the nation's cinema. For various reasons, Classical Japanese Cinema was often characterised by a focus on both female protagonists and the sociopolitical issues relevant to women during of the period. While there is a rich body of scholarly work by Anglophone writers on Classical Japanese Cinema, the amount of scholarship that has looked specifically at women does not correspond with the importance of her position to the narratives of the nation's early postwar cinema. A space therefore exists for an extended study of the filmic representation of Japanese women in what was a crucial moment in history for her gender. Able t6 participate politically for the first time and entrusted with a wider range of personal freedoms and opportunities than ever before, the female subject in early postwar Japanese cinema was a dynamic agent of sociopolitical change.

The aim of this thesis is to re-examine the use of film on British television, 1955-78, in order to demonstrate that the production of drama on British television was more complex than in the existing supposition, that television drama was either shot ‘live’ or co-existed with the recording medium of film. Instead, the types of interaction will raise questions about the process of production and how the recording of programmes on film addressed the audience watching a domestic medium. The thesis attempts to answer these questions by examining a form and mode of popular entertainment on British television that existed on film. The shot-on-film television series was a form that had been imported from the United States in the 1950s, but had been modified in Britain. The type of modification is shown to reveal how notions of value and quality were assigned to a television programme when a public service ethos determined the cultural discourse set by British television. The development of an export market and the internationalisation of British television will raise questions about the exact appeal of these programmes. At the same time, indigenous modes of film production designed for the domestic consumption of television existed side-by-side with the professional ideologies associated with commercial film-making. These professional ideologies allowed for the development of television as an international commodity. However, they created a tension between separate modes of fictional television production. The thesis concludes that the creation of separate modalities in the British adventure series at various times interacted in the 1960s and 1970s, and led to it becoming a less stable object of analysis, which requires an exploration of the often contradictory ways in which a number of key programmes functioned.

Combining analyses of primary documents housed at American, Russian and Czech archives, and employing industrial analysis, market analysis, and analytical tools developed in reception studies, this thesis examines Hollywood's post-war operations in Eastern Europe, the strategies that were employed to advance them, and the responses of the indigenous film industries of Eastern Europe to them. While scholars examining Hollywood's post-war international activities have focused on western European markets, arguing that they were of supreme importance to Hollywood, this thesis shows that Eastern Europe was also central to Hollywood's post-war economic agenda. The major Hollywood studios, I argue, were, as early as 1944, drawing up highly ambitious plans to become the dominant player on Eastern European markets, including the Soviet market, and were working to prevent the Soviet film industry from expanding into Western Europe. Sitting at the border of East and West, the small country of Czechoslovakia played a key role in what this thesis calls Hollywood's Soviet Sphere Project. By revealing the extent to which expansion into Eastern Europe was central to Hollywood's short-, medium- and long-term economic objectives, this thesis offers new insight into Hollywood's domestic and international conduct during the early stages of the Cold War and reorients understandings of the relationships between Hollywood and communism. To date, scholars have focused considerable attention on the lengths to which Hollywood went to position itself as an anti-communist institution by distancing itself from, and demonizing, Communists and communism across the late 1940s and 1950s. However, this thesis shows that Hollywood's relationships to communism and Communists were more pragmatic, opportunistic, and ambivalent than previously thought. And, by revealing how Hollywood's Soviet Sphere Project clashed with global agenda of the Soviet government and film industry, this thesis complicates notions of Hollywood's worldwide dominance, and contributes to our understanding of mid-twentieth-century globalization.

My thesis examines the expanded cinema of Gill Eatherley, Annabel Nicolson and Lis Rhodes. My intent has been to locate them within their historical context, addressing in particular their relationship to the cohesive, 'Structural' film culture then emerging from the London Filmmakers' Co-operative, and the distinct expanded film form with which it was associated in the early part of the 1970s. The main focus of my methodology, however, is interpretative rather than empirical. Through close textural readings of key works I have attempted to open up fresh critical frameworks for understanding their work, referring to discourses of phenomenology and the haptic, for example, as a means of exploring their subjective and embodied relationship to the materials and apparatus of film. My thesis proposes a multi-interpretative analysis of Eatherley, Nicolson and Rhodes' rich and complex film works. The aim of my research is to create a dialogue of ongoing questions between the different theoretical, political and subjective positions their films engender, from which, it is hoped, productive juxtapositions and convergences can emerge.

The main subject of this thesis is film adaptation and film remakes with a specific focus on the study of emerging modes of adaptation from older media to new. This includes computer generated reconstructions of the iconography and characters of popular literary texts and early films, and media convergence forms (websites), which transfer and transform familiar media content from either TV shows or films to and for the Internet. I argue that the comparative analysis of processes such as the above and the rethinking of new media in general enable us to furt~er unseat the issue of fidelity and examine film adaptations within a framework of intertextual dialogism. I attempt to develop Robert Starn's embryonic concept of post-celluloid adaptation to cover the new technological developments involved in such processes. This leads to a working definition of this concept which essentially broadens the field of adaptation theory and regards as viable case studies the adaptations of popular visual narratives from analogue media to digital media. This definition intends to challenge the traditional perception of film adaptation, that is from a literary text to filmlTV, and to investigate how the aesthetics of digital forms require a different kind of critical analysis when these digital forms are created out of already familiar cultural productions. Furthermore, this thesis· examines the interconnectedness of the aesthetic and economic dimensions of post-celluloid adaptation and illustrates how the intertextual commodity form of popular texts redefines the relationship between the screen and the media literate viewer/user through the channels ofconvergence culture, which expand the mode ofexistence of a popular narrative.

This thesis investigates the reconstruction of femininity in Britain in the post-war period (1945-1958). This is carried out through an examination of the socioeconomic and cultural formation of the period, contemporaneous cultural commentaries, contemporary critical writing about the cinema audience, and selected British films from the period, including a detailed study of Yield to the Night (1956). The thesis utilises a range oftheoretical approaches to these issues - film theory, feminist theory and epistemology, social and oral history, discourse theory and textual analysis. The methodological framework of the thesis reflects its feminist concerns and, in tum, engages with debates within feminist theory concerning questions of methodology and epistemology. Accordingly, the first chapter outlines the methodological framework of the thesis as well as situating it in relation to published work in similar areas. In addition, this chapter introduces the themes of the subsequent chapters and clarifies certain key terms used throughout. The second chapter concentrates on the socio-economic and cultural formation of the period 1945-1958 and argues that this period is marked by particular discursive formations - 'Austerity', 'Affluence' and' Americanisation'. These are then discussed in relation to the ways that they are gendered and thus promote prescribed forms of femininity and womanliness. Chapter three focuses on the presentation of the period in terms of women's experiences of the time. This is achieved through an analysis of the tensions between domesticity, women's entry into the labour market and the discursive pressures on women at this time. Chapter four extends the arguments presented in the previous chapters with reference to selected films from the period - Dance Hall (1950), Turn the Key Softly (1953) and Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), which is discussed with reference to Brief Encounter (1945). Chapter five analyses two film publications from the period - Penguin Film Review (1946-1949) and The Picturegoer (1931-1960) - in order to establish the discursive construction of the female cinema audience. Finally, Chapter six is an in-depth analysis of Yield to the Night (1956) with respect to critical and audience reception of the film and the issue of the construction of 'Affluent femininity.'

The present thesis consists of a discussion of contemporary Western science fiction cinema from a cultural studies perspective. In particular, this work is focused on the analysis of political ideology and its discourses as they are conveyed in the visual, aural, and narrative dimensions of a selected corpus of films from three different countries: Argentina, Britain and the United States. The selection of this range of cinema industries is informed by the intention of widening the spectrum of science fiction criticism, which is mostly focused on American cinema, and also on the cross comparative purpose of examining three central forms in which Western films are produced and distributed: the hegemonic American blockbuster, the independent peripheral cinema of Latin America, and the mid-level position exemplified by a European film industry such as Britain's. The analysis of the selected corpus is approached from an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on several theoretical frameworks from cultural studies and social philosophy, such as Lacanian psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, post-structuralism, and critical theory. The underlying premise of this thesis is that, through the representation of imaginary, dystopian worlds and societies, science fiction films are in fact engaging with the critique of contemporary reality and articulating collective concerns and anxieties about the present. In consequence, films are examined here in a hermeneutic manner, with the objective of identifying and revealing the complex set of critiques of contemporary institutions, practices and discourses that are conveyed in the texts. The discussion is organised in three chapters, each covering three case studies that are representative of the selected cinema industries. Films studied in detail include the Star Wars prequels (1999-2005), La Sonämbula (1998), Adios Querida Luna (2005), La Antena (2007), Code 46 (2004), Children of Men (2006), and 28 Weeks Later (2007). Each chapter is organised according to certain theoretical parameters that allow for a critical reading of the texts, establishing connections between the films' subtexts and the social contexts in which they were produced. This work aims to demonstrate that the analysis of popular culture is essential for the understanding of how political concerns, anxieties and traumas can be expressed and articulated, whether in avowed or disavowed forms, not only in hegemonic texts but across the entire field of Western cultural production. Additionally, this thesis argues for the need to approach the study of cinema from the point of view of critical theory, as an appropriate way to uncover the ideological dimensions, represented in the films, that are critical of dominant discourses and institutions.

There is no study of the scope of the British film femme fatale: her nature and heritage have not been documented. That's what this thesis does. How does British society and history modify this figure? Does she reflect the social fortunes of British women, or is she such a fantasy that there is no correlation? I reject the psychoanalytic model that customarily interprets this subject and this field, so I borrow some Jungian magical thinking and follow an interdisciplinary trail of associations to test her merit as an archetype. And since archetypes are supposed to be unchanging, I am on a collision course with a Cultural studies model that ordinarily expects social adaptation. She is conspicuously absent from the British new wave and realism, but this reflects an ideological disparity between a left-wing aesthetic and the sovereign, dictatorial demeanour of the femme fatale. There are transcending archetypal consistencies: they relate to her embodiment of man's ambivalence about Mother Nature, acting out inevitable death from a cellular to a macrocosmic scale, inherited from mythological predecessors in media such as literature, painting and music. Not a figure to be trifled with, then. It turns out she does change with the times, progressively more physical in sexuality, aggression and mobility. Only Britain's war genre was closed to her, as her specialism moved from melodrama and crime to spy and horror films. She goes where the money is (box office), but her motivation ranges from materialism to vengeance to power to sadism. She is now sometimes construed as an assertive feminist role-model, but this contrivance applies only to the degree that might apply to the first British woman Prime Minister. Her masculine adaptation now demonstrates the devaluing of femininity, in both genders, in a ruthless, martial, capitalist culture, so that the term I find objectionable in my review is now objectionably valid: 'Phallic Woman' enjoys equal opportunity as anti-hero. You watch a film, take notes as you go looking for contrasting patterns with representations of the subject in this and other genres and other media. Notes loosely structured by headings categorise some observations at a stroke: costume; mobility; animalistic motifs; recurring characteristics that gradually coalesce into clusters to suggest sub-types offemmes fatales; mythological or psychological imagery. in turn resolved into sub-headings; same with themes. The categories make comparisons cogent. Other notes are freeform, open to any intuited observation, inviting dissociation, insuring against boxing yourself into presumptions. Then you can on a curator of special collections or a censor or a manager sitting on an archive at Pinewood Studios, and with a view to access all areas try to get them as enthused about this research as you are ... which requires an appreciation of storytelling that this chapter affirms as a research framework. To be transparent about it the moment you look for a beginning, middle or en~ or present a paper or otherwise share your work, you're into a storytelling narrative. That standard candid snapshot of one strategy extends to news footage and period television in my case, and organises my eclectic reading of art, mythology~ religion history, literature, music ... trawling for associations on the understanding that some conclusions in the humanities are found objects, so tangentially do they appear in the researcher's perceptual field. That's how W,J.T. Mitchell came to the fore from a supervisor's recommendation in art theory, and a Playboy interview came to qualify a psychoanalytic disquisition on 'the monstrous female.' This unconventional lateral research aims to show how transcendental themes and figures bind an unlikely grouping. An international comparison of films would do that, but the scope would rob the attention to British cinema that this thesis establishes as a unique radius for studying the femme fatale. I court creative accidents with a non-quantitative strategy of making an empty folder of 'Case Studies.' Pragmatic - but premeditated in the weighting on highly active, symbolic portrayals. My thematic approach gathers pertinence with incidences: themes define themselves by recurrence to make the case for the persistence of vision that any Jungian would associate with an archetype of the collective unconscious if there is one, and that anyone attuned to Aby Warburg would expect from a primal figure in art.