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The figure of the private eye is among the most recognisable of fictional archetypes. From the early-1930s to the mid-1950s, private eye films were a staple of American cinema, yet they were often adapted from novels infamous in both Britain and America for their violence, seediness and moral ambivalence. These stories, written by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, were usually altered significantly during their transition from page to screen. How and why these changes took place are questions often considered, but rarely answered in a satisfactory way. Literature which refers to screen adaptations such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) tends to privilege the author of the source novel or the director of the film. Consequently, the most important aspects of adaptation are overlooked or marginalised. This thesis seeks to understand the screen adaptation of the private eye novel during the Hollywood Studio Era. In so doing, it places particular emphasis on Hollywood's factory-like system of film production, and evaluates the contributions of producers, screenwriters, directors and the industry censor. The thesis maintains that the various tensions between these seemingly opposing elements provided an equilibrium that was crucial to the aesthetic definition of the private eye film. Adopting a paradigmatic approach to illustrate this point, the thesis presents and evaluates contemporaneous opinion. The thesis has an historical emphasis, and begins with an examination of how the private eye literary genre emerged and evolved. It then explores the studio system and introduces the complex role of the producer in adaptation. Although producers are often seen as obstacles to artistry and originality, the thesis suggests that the opposite is true, and that their input was both essential and decisive. This thesis makes use of archival sources to demystify hitherto misunderstood screen adaptations such as Satan Met a Lady (1936). Studio memoranda and documentation are used to introduce new perspectives on films such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946) and Lady in the Lake (1947), while the creative ideas and values of production executive Darryl Zanuck are explored through his involvement with The Brasher Doubloon (1947). The penultimate chapter examines the important authorial presence of the censor, and the thesis concludes with a summary of the findings and thoughts for further work.

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Postcolonial intercommunal violence on Cyprus and its after-effects have been studied extensively in the social sciences and humanities over the past five decades. However, the cinematic representations of the postcolonial condition in Cyprus have not yet received significant critical recognition. This dissertation is a response to the scarcity of scholarship on cinematic representations of the postcolonial history of the island. By analysing cinematically recreated and visualised ghostly matters of interethnic strife and post-conflict situation in Cyprus, I want to contribute to the current debates on the politics of postcolonial memory in Cyprus. My discussion focuses specifically on a film trilogy by the Turkish-Cypriot art house film director Dervis Zaim, ‘The Cyprus Trilogy’: Mud (Çamur, 2003), Parallel Trips (Paralel Yolculuklar/ Ta parállila monopátia [Τα παράλληλα μονοπάτια], codirected with Panicos Chrysanthou, 2004), and Shadows and Faces (Gölgeler ve Suretler, 2011). This trilogy is the most remarkable set of critical films about the partition of the island that have been produced in post-Yesilçam Turkish film history. My analysis of Zaim’s film trilogy departs from the assumption of the primacy of the phenomenological experiences of the postcolonial Cypriots over geopolitical and macro-historical explanations. The reading of Dervis Zaim’s works about the intercommunal civil wars in postcolonial Cyprus raises the question of the haunting/hauntedness. Therefore, this Ph.D. thesis addresses hauntological themes such as disjointed time, memory, historical justice, haunting, visor effect, voice, silence, ghost story, haunted house, haunted body, and the absent other that appear persistently in the films. Throughout this thesis, the spatial/temporal, vocal/narrative, and embodied/disembodied aspects of Zaim’s film trilogy are discussed, drawing primarily upon a Derridean hauntology. Building a theoretical bridge between hauntology and postcolonial cinema, the relationship between postcolonial memory, film, and haunting is examined in the context of Cyprus. This thesis concludes by discussing the extent to which Dervis Zaim and his spectral realist films have achieved the deconstruction of postcolonial memory through challenging both the imperialist and nationalist structures imposed by dominant discourses.

Demystifying Japanese Uniqueness. Representations of Life and Death in Contemporary Japanese Fiction Cinema strives to create a thorough analysis of selected contemporary Japanese films with a specific focus on the fictional drama genre produced in the period from the mid-1990s to present day in relation to specific social and political circumstances and critical of essentialisation. By investigating visual and narrative film patterns as well as its scholarly and critical readings, which contributed to interpretations of Japanese cinema through terminologies such as ‘obscurity’, ‘mysticism’ and most importantly the elusive concept of national ‘uniqueness’, this thesis works towards de- mystification. Chapter one – History, Monumental Style and Aesthetics of Shadows will give a historical background by investigating events within political, social and cultural developments, which influenced film production and contributed to the mystification discourse of Japanese cinematic patterns during its early phases. Chapter two – The Instruments of Mystification. Japanese Cinema in the Period of the 1990s–2000s consists of a detailed analysis of the instruments of ‘mystification’ such as the influence of pre-contemporary cinematic aesthetics, a non-linear concept of time, and the deliberate export and promotion of films that fulfil the criteria of being quintessentially Japanese. The analysis is created through a close reading of drama fiction film examples. Finally, the last chapter of the thesis – Japanese Cinema and the Significance of the Disasters argues the shift in cinematic consciousness and strives to uncover any significant changes in post-3.11 cinema production and how the incident has influenced the approached towards the representations of life and death in Japanese cinema as well as their ‘mystification’ over the last five years.

This critical appraisal is based on an overview of my published research on the subject of the screenplay between 2007 and 2014 when my most recent monograph, The Screenplay in British Cinema (BFI, 2014) was produced. The aim of my research has been twofold: to bring to academic attention the depth and breadth of screenplay writing as a written form, particularly within British Cinema, and to argue that the screenplay can be studied as a literary text.

Historians currently engage with film either as a form of evidence or as a medium for representation. This doctoral thesis aims to move beyond this binary by examining how historians can use film-making as a research method for generating new insights into certain areas of historical research, such as public history and cultural memory. Focusing on the Second World War re-enactment group UK Homefront as a case study, my investigation uses film-making to analyse how members of the group 'make' history, use re-enacting as a pedagogical tool, and contribute to the cultural memory of the war through their representations of aspects of the homefront experience. This thesis also considers how historians who use film-making as a research tool can disseminate their insights through the mediums of film and prose. Over three chapters and a fifty-minute research film, I explore how historians can use film-making as a research method and I reflect on the results that this approach can produce. The thesis begins by building on scholarship in visual anthropology and oral history to discuss how historians can employ film-making as a research tool. Then it moves onto demonstrate how historians can use film-making to research re-enacting as a form of public history, charting how and why members of UK Homefront re-enact. Finally, I engage with the group's re-enacting as a form of cultural memory and use film-making to uncover the fluid, dynamic, and contested nature of cultural memory as it is manifested at re-enactment events. Through an examination of both film-making as a method and the insights that it can generate, my thesis demonstrates how film-making offers historians a method for research which can provide new insights into the sensory and the embodied aspects of public history and cultural memory.

This thesis explores the appearance, function, and meaning of pre-existing music in the films of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), with an emphasis on works from the Western classical canon. Active as a director, producer, and writer for sixty-one years, Bergman used his love of music to fuel his films in both form and content, largely eschewing traditional soundtrack scores in favour of pre-existing music used sparingly but precisely, incorporating music into the lives of his characters, and finding artistic inspiration in the works and lives of the composers. This study’s primary focus is to trace patterns of musical usage in Bergman’s oeuvre through a series of case studies that link film-specific events to broader cultural traditions. Chapter One focuses on Bergman’s relationship with music, sketching his musical life from childhood to his early years as a director and examining how he used the history and language of music to enhance his own biographical legend, interpret his cinematic techniques, and justify his artistic choices. Using The Silence (1963) as a case study, Chapter Two considers the onscreen representation of listening to music (music as sound) and explores how the act of listening can create for Bergman’s characters a channel of communication between listeners and with a larger cultural history, mediated through technology. Chapter Three traces the dynamics of onscreen musical performance (music as act) back to a broader tradition of ritual humiliation, using Music in Darkness (1948) and Autumn Sonata (1978) as case studies. Focusing on In the Presence of a Clown (1997) as a case study, Chapter Four draws upon theories of the Gothic and the uncanny to illuminate how music becomes a haunting presence, enabling Bergman’s characters to transgress the boundaries of fantasy and reality, past and present. The conclusion looks at Bergman’s last film, Saraband (2003), which weaves music through its structure, soundscape, and narrative and offers a glimpse of music at its most transcendent, a gateway to the beyond.

This thesis explores the complex relationship between the concepts of Heimat and Fremde in a number of contemporary Austrian films. Firstly, by revisiting and re-examining a variety of Heimatfilme, from the genre’s inception in the 1920s up until the present day, I aim to draw on the ideas posed by scholars including Johannes von Moltke which challenge the common assumption that Heimat exists in direct opposition to Fremde, and argue that the two seemingly contradictory concepts are in fact mutually contingent on one another. Then, focussing on key works by the New Austrian Filmmakers, Houchang Allahyari (I Love Vienna, 1991), Florian Flicker (Suzie Washington, 1998) and Barbara Albert (Nordrand, 1999), I demonstrate the manner in which these filmmakers continue to draw on the semantics and syntax of the Heimatfilm genre in order to re-evaluate the complex relationship between Heimat and Fremde within the context of post-1990 Europe. These filmmakers, as this thesis demonstrates, return to the Heimatfilm genre as a means to probe issues of space, place, identity and belonging, which, I maintain, also undergo a series of renegotiations and redefinitions within their films. By drawing on contemporary globalisation and migrant and diasporic film studies, and by critically engaging with contemporary Heimat discourse, this thesis seeks to investigate the manner in which these New Austrian Filmmakers attempt to renegotiate and deterritorialise the concept of Heimat in response to the changing needs of an increasingly globalised and multicultural society.