The aim of this thesis is to reappraise the effects of the Cold War on Japanese cinema from the immediate postwar period until the start of Japan's economic boom in the 1960s. Studies of Japanese films from this period have typically analysed the 'textual' effects of the Cold War realignment with America, patiicularly in regard to Japanese cinema's assimilation of 'humanist' values during the Occupation period. Whilst an attention to 'representational politics' remains important, my argument is that in the context of the Cold War, an analysis of the discourses and practices peliaining to 'film trade' is an equally essential framework with which to examine how co-productions, international film distribution and the Japanese film quota and remission system were all framed by power relations between Japan and America. On the one hand, despite the rhetoric of Cold War friendship offered by the MP AAlMPEA (Motion Picture Association of America/Motion Picture Export Association) it was evident that the Hollywood majors were able to exploit the relation to Japan for their own ends. This was apparent both in their handling of Japanese films overseas and in the increasing success of Hollywood films imported into Japan. Rather than this simply being an issue for the commercial sector, however, the inequality ofthis trade relationship also raises critical questions about government attitudes to film. Here the ferocity with which the MP AA attempted to circumvent Japan's film quota and remission system, often adopting threatening tactics, may seem surprising in the context of America's wider trade policies with Japan. Here Japan received 'free trade' access to American markets whilst Washington still permitted Tokyo to maintain many of its trade barriers as a means to secure Japan's Cold War allegiance. The different attitude towards' film trade is particulat)y revealing given the support for the MP AA offered by. Washington, most notably in connection with chairman Eric Johnston's argument that Hollywood cinema was an important form of what today would be called American 'soft power

The thesis explores how documentary film makers and viewers use moving imagery and narrative as tools to imagine virtual futures. The author uses the term "virtual futures" to describe latent personal, environmental or social processes that are underway in the present (Adam 2004). The aim of this thesis is to explore the potential for creative and beneficial transformation that occurs when humans enter into an imaginative dialogue with these virtual futures. Underlying the study is an interest in the sustainable growth of the person in relation to wider environmental, global and future realities. How then, as documentary film makers and viewers, can we mediate relations between visual and virtual realities The thesis argues, using Sterling's theory of "sustainable education" (2001), that the challenge is neither to simply make invisible futures visible (filming about sustainable development), nor to produce alternative visions for futures (film making for sustainable development), but to help individuals engage with the future as a process (film making as sustainable development). Virtual Futures brings together knowledge across two key fields: social science and film studies. In addition, the thesis is informed by a third area: the author's practice as an artist and film maker. The text builds upon the works of Barbara Adam, Augusto Boal, Sergei Eisenstein, John Grierson, Charles S Pierce, Alfred Schutz, Stephen Sterling, Bronislaw Szerszynski and Dziga Vertov. Empirically, the author uses ethnographic methods and interviews to explore contemporary film makers' experiences. She also studies online audience forums, in which viewers discuss their experiences of the film Koyaanisqatsi (Reggio 1983). Theoretically, the thesis develops a "semiotic phenomenology" of futures and includes an exposition of instantaneous, immediate and durational aspects of film. The author proposes that certain formations in film can expand outwards to embrace futures and, subsequently, she searches for moving-images, narratives and ways of viewing that engage with the future as process. Ultimately, the thesis provides an overview and analysis of the intersubjective and inter-relational exchanges that occur between film makers, participants and viewers and with the hidden, future relationships that connect them.

This thesis investigates the existing film workflow processes in Malaysia and aims to explore, review and reflect on the expectations, experiences and preferences and problems experienced by practitioners in the Malaysian film industry. Part of that exploration is an in-depth examination of real practices of colour film workflow, investigating the common myth amongst Malaysian filmmakers that environmental colour temperature affects the image quality of Malaysian films. Analysis of this myth may help to establish why many Malaysian films have been processed through foreign laboratory facilities using foreign expertise. The argument and analysis are based on background analysis and interviewing using video documentation of Malaysian film workflow practices, which provides valuable data for the benefit of the Malaysian film industry. All the processes and evidence from the Malaysian film industry were recorded through qualitative video documentation, alongside quantitative data from filmstrip testing. This mixed action research method forms the main approach together with the use of participatory action research as a tool to narrate the development of the research. In justifying the use of all the data, an explanatory mixed method design has been applied. Indeed, the cooperation with expert witnesses in finding a solution to the research problem brought to the circle of practice-based research processes that validated the research. This validation becoming a central of investigation about the Malaysian film workflow complication. The initial technique (pursing the myth of colour temperature variation) proved inadequate, and, consequently, a broader action research methodology was adopted. As such, the filmstrip test data were used more as a tool to enhance the contributions of the expert witnesses, thereby shifting the direction and strengthening the research findings. It is hoped that the methods used could be transferred to solve other film industry problems This research also proves that the method applied has created new evidence of knowledge transfer in historical and film development context, which benefits the film industry in Malaysia. This development of new knowledge could provide a significant opportunity for future potential research, which will strengthen the colour workflow processes and lead to the development of film practices in Malaysia and the surrounding areas. It is the aim of this research to suggest solutions to the current problems of workflow practices among educators, government agencies and filmmakers in the Malaysian film industry.

This thesis offers a revaluation of the British biopic, which has often been subsumed into the broader ‘historical film’ category, identifying a critical neglect despite its successful presence throughout the history of the British film industry. It argues that the biopic is a necessary category because producers, reviewers and cinemagoers have significant investments in biographical subjects, and because biopics construct a ‘public history’ for a broad audience. This thesis provides a timeline of British biopics released from 1900 to 2014, constructing an historical overview of the continuities and shifts the genre has undergone. It also constructs an assessment of the representation of masculinity in the biopic, including detailed textual readings of representations of masculinity in biopics released between 2005 and 2014. This rectifies the critical neglect of masculinity in the biopic, despite the majority of biopics being about men. Following a critique of existing critical approaches to the biopic, including the viability of applying American paradigms to the biopic as a whole, subsequent chapters analyse the major aspects of the British biopic: a history of the production and reception of biopics and a survey of the biopic’s conventions. An inter-chapter introduces the nature of representations of masculinity in the British biopic using specific paradigmatic examples and the final two chapters focus on a detailed analysis of the representation of masculinity in particular films from the contemporary period which are mapped onto contemporaneous understandings of masculinity. One chapter considers the diversity of homosocial representations and those depicting ‘wounded’ men; the other discusses the ways in which selected films depict wounded men rehabilitated through supportive homosocial bonds. The thesis makes a contribution to knowledge in three ways: 1) an understanding and analysis of the biopic, a genre that has attracted few studies; 2) an historical overview of the British biopic which has not yet been attempted; 3) a detailed analysis of the representation of masculinity in the British biopic which, the thesis argues, is a distinctive and largely neglected aspect. The thesis argues that the British biopic has specifically national characteristics and that these patterns offer evidence of a profound difference between British and American paradigms.

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This thesis proposes a return to the issue of fidelity criticism in adaptation studies through a detailed consideration of the adaptations of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925). Within adaptation studies the issue of fidelity and the role of the source novel have been relegated to the sidelines in response to a logophilic prejudice which dominated early studies, and as a consequence intertextuality and genre have become more pronounced. I redress this negation of the source text, theorising new ways of conceiving of the source-adaptation relationship. I explicitly focus upon source-associated intertextualities to illustrate how a return to fidelity can open up a plethora of readings rather than close them down. In doing so the importance of the source text is foregrounded, as it is through the source that these intertexts are introduced, whilst demonstrating that two seemingly exclusive approaches to adaptation can be married in what I term a "web of intertextuality".I develop Gerard Genette's theory of stylistic imitation in order to theorise how an adaptation may develop a relationship with its source based on rhetoric, or style. I consider how Marleen Gorris'Mrs Dalloway (1997) adapts Woolfs literary impressionism through the use of the visual (editing and framing) as well as the aural, including the verbal (voice-over) and the non-verbal (the scored soundtrack). My analysis of The Hours, both Michael Cunningham's novel (1998) and Stephen Daldry's film (2002), examines how both texts develop a stylistic relationship with Woolfs novel through the presence of other Woolf intertexts such as her fiction (The Waves), her literary criticism ("Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown"), as well as her autobiographical writings. I address the diverse nature of intertextuality as I analyse alternative intertexts such as the cultural iconicity of Virginia Woolf and the figure of the hysteric. I consider how the merging of fiction, biography and cultural iconicity influences adaptation and its critical reception, promoting an on-going dialogue across the multiple texts present. The thesis found that a reclamation of the source novel and a return to fidelity produced a new means of conceiving of adaptation that incorporated both the source text and intertextuality which, through the web of intertextuality, presented an open, non-linear and potentially limitless way of reading adaptation.

This thesis draws on Film Adaptation Studies and Irish Diaspora Studies, two interdisciplinary fields that are fundamentally concerned with the concept of 'origin'. It focuses specifically on the notion of the 'unacknowledged adaptation', namely films that do not declare formally their status as adaptations. In terms of Irish Diaspora Studies, my interest lies in the phenomenon of the 'hidden' Irish diaspora in England. This thesis will offer a new perspective on the significance of the 'unacknowledged adaptation' by creating a parallel between a film's ambiguous enunciation of its sources and the ambivalent national identity of its characters. Drawing on critical methodologies from film adaptation studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, I seek to create a rigorous analytical framework for exploring the notion of the 'hidden' Irish diaspora in the 'unacknowledged adaptation'. This framework specifically combines the theories of postcolonial and diasporic theorist, Homi Bhabha (1994) and film adaptation theorist, Kamilla Elliott (2003), each of whom respectively undermines claims of pure cultural identities and aesthetic forms in order to foreground the notion of 'hybridity'. Combining the theories of Elliott and Bhabha not only enhances discussions on hybridity, but it also enables the recognition of a process of adaptation and of diasporic identities that would otherwise be left unacknowledged. Focusing on three case studies, Mary Reilly (dir. Stephen Frears, 1996), Liam (dir. Stephen Frears, 2001), and Breakfast on Pluto (dir. Neil Jordan, 2005), this thesis argues that the obscuring of origins in these films not only paradoxically draws attention to the act of adaptation, but it also serves to highlight themes of diaspora. I argue that the cultural hybridity evoked in the film adaptations is specifically signalled through word/image hybridity: the syntactical relationship between the word and the image enables the emergence of a liminal space 'in-between' the designations of identity, thus creating a hybrid dialectic that functions to draw attention to the act of concealing origins.

This practice-based research project uses a study of the key technological, political and social triggers that have brought about the normalisation of surveillance to identify the ways in which cinema has, over the last two decades, reflected the transformation of top/down institutional monitoring into a complex, criss-crossing dynamic that allows citizens to look up and challenge authority figures as well as peer across at each other both off- and online. The research illustrates that the domestication and demystification of monitoring has resulted in citizens playing an active part in the surveillance game while also making them more accepting of an institutional gaze that whistleblowers like NSA contractor Edward Snowden have demonstrated is being used to a greater extent than ever before. At the same time, the vast majority of contemporary films utilise the aesthetics and practices of surveillance primarily for the purpose of spectacle rather than presenting narratives and characters that help to investigate how the new monitoring dynamic is changing the way in which we watch and interact with each other, the media and our popular culture. While recognising the many positive aspects of ‘new’ surveillance this thesis argues that cinema must return to its historical position as a scrutiniser of institutional and domestic-based monitoring and my creative practice is a direct response to the shortcomings of current big screen depictions. The feature screenplay, Function Creep, contemporises the characters and tropes of classic surveillance narratives like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) while the short film, Groucho, uses satire and stylistic experimentation to investigate counter surveillance by citizens in a domestic setting and the way in which Internet content can reach and engage a global audience.

In recent years the Digital Film Production process has seen a huge increase in the amount of data captured, resulting in the need for automated tools within the pipeline. In particular, it typically involves the capture of multi-modal data such as 3D Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) scans, 2D images and videos, whose alignment and registration provide valuable information within the production process. There are significant challenges posed in this particular multi-modal registration problem that are not faced in the majority of feature-based registration pipelines. In particular, many existing feature detectors make modality-specific assumptions about the attributes a good, repeatable feature should possess, and as a result cannot be applied in a general, multi-modal manner. To combat this we take a saliency-based approach to feature detection that may be more meaningfully applied across modalities than other feature detectors. Furthermore, by extracting only the most salient features of a scene, significantly fewer features are obtained, resulting in a lower computational cost for the registration process. The first contribution of this thesis is a generalisation of the Kadir-Brady salient point detector. The generalisation allows for both a more robust alternative for 2D images, and a 3D extension, where in particular it may operate on both the geometry and texture of the scene. As a result, it allows for more meaningful multi-modal feature detection, and higher repeatability results are observed when compared to existing 2D-3D point feature detectors. The second contribution is the proposal of a novel salient line segment detector. By explicitly accounting for the surroundings of a line, the approach naturally avoids repetitive parts of a scene while detecting the strong, discriminative lines present. Its general, histogram-based framework allows for a natural extension to depth imagery and 3D, where lines are detected based jointly on both texture and geometry. The final contribution is centred around the registration phase, where a globally optimal solution to 2D-3D registration from points or lines based on a Branch-and-Bound (BnB) approach is proposed. Novel search procedures are proposed to speed up the algorithm, taking advantage of the special nested BnB structure used. The optimality properties of the proposed approach allow 2D-3D registration to be achieved for significantly higher rates of outliers compared to existing approaches.

This thesis examines post-apocalyptic films in American cinema in the period 1968-2013. These films will be analysed in relation to their status as a genre, their underpinning narrative structures, the influence of religious myths, and their relationship to American national identity. Three representative films will be analysed as case studies: The Ultimate Warrior (1975), Steel Dawn (1987), and I Am Legend (2007). A combined methodological approach will be used to study the post-apocalyptic genre. This approach utilises a ‘bottom-up’ thematic content analysis followed by close textual analysis of the case study films. This analysis is interpreted through a structuralist critical framework within a historical context. The analysis chapters in this thesis will focus on three main stages within the overall time period: 1968-1976, 1982-1989, and 2007-2013. In each of these stages elements in the post-apocalyptic genre shifted because of cultural and social developments. However, this thesis also examines the patterns and themes that have remained consistent and stable in the genre across time. One of the main aims of the thesis is to analyse how the post-apocalyptic genre overlaps, repeats, and is disrupted over time. This thesis demonstrates that the post-apocalyptic genre functions as a unified group of films. The chapters explore how the genre blends with others (e.g. the western), but also retains a coherent narrative. Additionally, the project establishes how the post-apocalyptic genre articulates aspects of American national identity. Primarily, this is through expressing a discomfort with modernity and depicting a pastoral utopia. The values that are conveyed in post-apocalyptic films are connected with conservatism and Evangelical religious doctrines in American popular culture. These broader themes are intertwined in the development of the genre with dominant historical influences, such as the Women’s Rights Movement, Reagan’s Presidency and nuclear anxiety, and the legacy of 9/11.