This study re-examines the European experimental film canon by investigating its original contexts of presentation. It seeks to unearth the un-recognised places of experimental film projection, its relationship to mainstream cinema in the 1920s, its significance in the amateur and underground scene and its connection to video art and 'institutional critique' in the 1960s, and finally its canonisation in the modern art museum of the 1970s and 1990s. This analysis will show that there is a constant dialogue between institutional context, mode of presentation and film text, in brief, between projection, space and form. It seeks to question the classical avant-garde film canon, which confines experimental film to the rigid parameters of Greenbergian Modernism, formalism and medium specificity. Quite literally, this study looks at where and how experimental film projection was presented. It aims to disclose the relationship between technology and the body in order to subsequently locate experimental film within its wider cultural frame. Hence, it re-interprets the artwork as a product of its contextual circumstances, rather than the autonomous 'brainchild' of an individual filmmaker. In the light an everexpanding art system and a profound re-reading of Western Modernism in favour of dispersed and global Modernisms, a re-writing of experimental film history is overdue. Film's flexible format and its cultural origin, not in the fine arts, but in popular entertainment, calls for a questioning of its definition as an autonomous modernist art form. This study thus seeks to challenge the modernist paradigm and offers are-reading of experimental film as a symptom of cultural transformations.

A popular urban song, fado has been the subject of highly contested debates in Portuguese politics and culture. This dissertation examines the representation of fado in the Portuguese cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, concentrating primarily on the popular comedies, dramas and rural-folkloric films. These decades witnessed the establishment of the Estado Novo (New State) (1932-1974) government of António Salazar, the promotion of fado as the national song, and the song’s prominence in the theatre, radio, and in film. It is generally accepted that this period in Portuguese cinema was complicit with the ideological values of the dictatorship. Critics of Portuguese cinema have identified fado as a prominent feature in the films, noting that the song’s position as the national song is reason enough for its presence, yet there has been no critical discussion examining fado's representation in these films. In this dissertation, I concentrate on Portuguese cinema’s negotiation with fado’s history and traditions, and the mise-en- scène of performance, place, and iconography. As this dissertation will show, in the 1930s and 1940s, fado and film were negotiating a position between the popular and the political, and that while the films have conservative elements, they nonetheless offer up contradictory representations that do not warrant the generally unfavourable critical view of a cinema in step with a dictatorship. This is due largely to the enduring legacy of fado’s transgressive history leading up to 1930.

This thesis focuses on the sudden proliferation of a highly popular genre in French cinema over the past two decades. While genre cinema, French and otherwise, and especially comedy have historically been under-examined in France, this study contributes to a gradual shift towards the application of more traditionally Anglophone cultural and gender studies approaches to the analysis of French cinema. It also looks at the question of generic evolution and the relationship between domestic practice and Hollywood paradigms, including the way in which the national cinema is being reconceptualised in the face of an increasingly transnationally conceived film market. Major lines of enquiry thus concern both the rom-com’s French specificity, including the extent to which the genre is ‘naturalised’ and/or exported, and its representational politics, particularly with regard to gender. Is it appropriate to see the rom-com as a feminised genre in France and, if so, in what sense? How does the genre negotiate major contemporary social shifts, particularly those linked to gender? Notable here are the extension of singlehood and the increased acceptability of female autonomy; the concomitant decline of marriage; and the increased range of ‘acceptable’ gender roles today - especially the rise of the professional woman, which in turn has implications for masculinity and for the family unit. Do films broadly reflect and embrace such shifts or do they resist, critique or downplay them? Finally, how are these questions inflected by considering production and reception contexts, as well as the issue of gendered authorship? In seeking to answer such questions, the thesis encompasses analysis of both formal aspects of the genre and specific narrative details. In so doing it hopes to pinpoint some of the ways in which the French rom-com has been mediating perceptions of key social trends over the past two decades, both at home and ultimately globally.

This thesis investigates the ways In which Horror metaphorically appeals to the viewers sense of identity by presenting a moment of crisis and deconstructing normative auto-boundaries. I employ various films and novels to illustrate the philosophical complexities of selfhood, especially centring upon the supposed "norm" subject. These moments of trauma are evinced in the contradictory pulls of ideology, and are symbolically rendered through the deconstruction of the body (the signifier of selfhood) onscreen. I employ a rereading of psychoanalysis and post-structuralism,a s well as grounding these more abstract theoretical thrusts in the socio-political reality of AIDS discourses. I begin by positioning my work in the critical field, especially in relation to the philosophy of consciousness and feminism. My second chapter utilises case studies that investigate Otherness within a locus of ideological "normality" - America. Here, I demonstrate the fragmentation of selfhood that occurs when self and Other interact, as well as the multiplicity and instability of identity. My third chapter opens with a re-evaluation of the slasher cycle. From this explicitly gender-based angle, I go on to explore the relationship between sex and death through the rape-revenge film, then pornography. Here, as in the slasher film, bodies interact, and can be read as problematising the interrelationships between selves. Pornography's desire to be read as "authentic" also implicates the viewer as one of the selves that are problematised during this interaction by transgressing the line between fiction and reality. My final chapter continues along this line of enquiry, probing narratives in which the character selves do not adhere to singular body-spaces, thus figuratively manifesting the crises of subjectivity, as the self Is paradoxically both abstract/intangible and embodied/physical.

The term 'New Queer Cinema' was coined by critic B. Ruby Rich in 1992, in an attempt to mark a flourishing of independent lesbian and gay film and video work that she observed occurring at the time. Key films of the (rather short-lived) movement included My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant, 1991), Poison (Haynes, 1991), Swoon (Kalin, 1992), and The Living End (Araki, 1992). To date, very little has been written about New Queer Cinema. This thesis is an attempt to fill this gap in scholarship. Chapter One offers an overview of three main perspectives on New Queer Cinema that have been taken to date, and their implications: Rich's claim that the movies share a similar aesthetic, which she terms 'Homo Pomo'; Jose Arroyo's assessment of the films as affiliated to, and intimately connected with, queer activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s; and John Pierson's positioning of New Queer Cinema within a history of independent filmmaking in North America. These three viewpoints are useful and valid, but do not begin to account for the complex content and political significance of New Queer Cinema texts. In Chapters Two, Three and Four, I examine in depth three alternative approaches to these films. In Chapter Two, I argue that New Queer Cinema (and queer culture more broadly) provoked a re-examination of the 'positive images' debate: one of the main ways it did this was through its representations of queer killers. Chapter Three assesses the role of space and place in New Queer Cinema, as many of the key films of the movement are set either in Los Angeles or on the 'open road'. Finally, Chapter Four investigates the persistence of campness in queer culture of the 1990s, offering a comparison of New Queer Cinema and mainstream American movies' uses of camp. The exploration of this trio of topics enables a nuanced appreciation of the significance of New Queer Cinema texts, and their relation to broader topics of cultural and political debate.

Representations of masculinity in the ‘new’ Hollywood (1967-1978) were defined by an impulse to authenticity, one articulated in terms of struggle. Filmmakers were preoccupied with the process of men attempting to break free from the popular fictions disseminated by the mass media. Seventies protagonists are usefully conceived as physical matter, specifically, as waste. But if the men are rejected by the mainstream, then the banal, automatist nature of their ‘performances’ points to inherent vice – to the paradox whereby their capacity for decay marks the men as products of the system from which they are ostensibly excluded. The transition from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ Hollywood is investigated with reference to <i>The Swimmer </i>(Frank Perry, 1968). The uncertainty as to whether its protagonist is intended to be viewed as camp suggests the limitations of arguments for subversion which reify past traditions. The chapter on <i>Alice’s Restaurant</i> (Arthur Penn, 1969), examines the ways in which Hollywood strove for a greater objectivity in its depiction of men, as it pondered countercultural and national failures. <i>Two-Lane Blacktop</i> (Monte Hellman, 1971) dramatises the seventies struggle for authenticity. If it seeks truth in the improvisatory confusion of Warren Oates’ charismatic loser, then the car freak played by James Taylor is conceived in terms of assembly-line automatism, enhanced by the star’s emptied-out, minimalist performance style. The fourth chapter investigates what happens to questions of authenticity when the protagonist is not heterosexual. When examining the homosexual protagonists of <i>Dog Day Afternoon </i>(Sidney Lumet, 1975), and the ‘Andy Warhol’ films, authenticity must be sought, perhaps surprisingly, in the arena of the freak and the televisual. The final chapter traces the decline of the conception of masculinity under consideration. The trucker movie <i>Convoy</i> (Sam Pekinpah, 1978), is emblematic of the ways in which Hollywood authentication changed in the late 1970s.

This thesis is multi-sited. Its first site of exploration is the world’s largest film industry, the commercial cinema world of Bombay, India. Through ethnography, it studies the processes by which commercial Hindi-Urdu films are made. It explores the history of this cinema industry along with an analysis of film professionals’ views on Bombay cinema, its roles within the Indian nation and the unique public sphere formed by it, its hegemonic and subversive practices, factors that influence its content and the ways both the Indian State and processes of globalisation have impacted the Bombay film industry. At another site, a Punjabi village in northern India, the thesis explores how popular Bombay cinema impacts viewers’ notions of identity, self, community and others. The thesis discusses how commercial Bombay cinema is influenced both by the cultural and historical backdrop to its functioning as well as by contemporary socio-political and economic occurrences. The thesis specifically examines how through the 1990s, India’s economic liberalisation, experience of militant Hindu nationalism and political movements around caste identity have affected popular Bombay cinema. The thesis discusses the predominance of ‘Punjabi culture’ in popular Bombay cinema of the 1990s onwards. It explores the main symbols of such cinematic culture, namely prosperity, vigour, manliness, joy, conspicuous consumption, Hindu ritualism and co-existence between tradition and modernity. It studies the history of such symbols and explores the impact of such cinematic symbolism upon Punjabi viewers. Specifically, this thesis discusses ethnography in a Sikh Punjabi village in India, examining how Jat, Backward and Scheduled Caste Sikhs negotiate cinematic <i>Punjabiyat</i>. The thesis thus delves into complex notions of purity, pollution and power, economic status, national belonging, cultural identity and diverse role-playing, as well as the significant intersections these make with ‘entertaining’ Bombay cinema.

This thesis argues that, in the years since 1968, the road film has played a significant part in French cinematic culture. Against much criticism which has tended to view the road film merely as an imported American genre, I argue for its specificity and pertinence to this modern French context. Central to this reading is a conception of the road film as expressing what I describe as <i>autopia</i>. Acknowledging Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, the autopia of the road film represents the perfected but unrealisable no-place of the utopia, and at the same time, the often dystopian movement of individual rebellion and social fragmentation. The thesis situates the road film as a particular tendency within French cinematic production; and in turn, one through which broader cultural and political concerns may be read. 1968, and more particularly its contested historical legacy, forms the core for this thesis. I argue that the autopia of the French road film is in part determined by the perceived utopian ‘failure’ of May ’68, yet a failure that we see constantly revived and re-explored in these films. My introduction locates the road film in its immediate pre- and post-’68 context, with a focus on new forms of cinematic space and identity. Chapters one and two address the place of the individual within the community, and the attendant, problematic questions of liberty and identification as filmic properties. Chapter three considers a body of road films relating to men and work, focusing on the condition of masculinity within modern capitalism; while chapter four, in response, considers the viability of a ‘feminine’ road film, looking at a new kind of road film pertinent to contemporary concerns. Chapter five takes up the concerns of chapter four to think about the role of the modern travel film, considering the situation of modern France within a transnational world.

This thesis sets out to theorize a genre of ‘mourning film’, or ‘cinéma du deuil’ which came into its own from the early 1990s, an era during which the cinema reached its centenary, saw fresh technological innovation and renewed investment in representing masculinity-in-peril, all of which helped shape the type. From the British and Continental arthouse, the Hollywood studies and the American independent sector come works which broached the effects of bereavement in sophisticated ways, often informed by recent trauma theory and grief therapy. The roots of this preoccupation originate in cinema’s evolution alongside nineteenth century spiritualism. Both were forms of image-conjuring combined with strong emotional content, and made separate though similar appeals to women, key protagonists in modern mourning cinema. Proposing an archaeology of mourning, this thesis proffers classical horror’s inherent concern with passage, melodrama’s emotionality and aesthetic ‘excess’, and European modernism’s investment in subjectivity as providing a rich impetus to modern mourning cinema. While drawing on Freud, trauma and grief theory, feminist film theory, and particularly mobilizing Deleuze’s and Daniel Frampton’s theorisation of post-classical cinema, this research positions the representation of mourning, with its play of presence and absence, its modernist manipulations of image and sound, its lachrymal gestures, at the heart of an attempt to understand cinema’s appeal. Privileging genre, theme and gender over authorship, this theorisation of a new genre proposes case studies of post-classical precedents and modern mourning films, while drawing a ‘bottom-up’ account of genre from post-classical initiatives of arthouse exhibition and a contemporary context of domestic spectatorship.

This dissertation concerns a group of young Chinese filmmakers, some of whom are referred to as the “Sixth Generation”, who have made films outside the state-run filmmaking system since the 1990s. Their strikingly innovative works have increasingly attracted attention both inside and outside China. In fact, this film practice, arising from new film aesthetics, has formed a new film genre: docu-realism, a term I coin to refer to the new genre in contemporary Chinese fiction film. This is a type of fiction film that for the most part employs documentary mechanisms and adopts documentary aesthetics.  The main task of this dissertation is to define “docu-realism” as a new film genre. This dissertation consists of five chapters and a conclusion. Chapter one, the introduction to the dissertation, sets up the theoretical foundation and critical strategies for the definition of docu-realism. Chapter Two, which is the core of the whole dissertation, accomplishes the most essential task of the thesis – unfolding the definition of docu-realism. Firstly, docu-realism is the product of the social-economic-cultural reality in China since the 1990s, and in some senses this makes it a counterpart to Italian neo-realism. Secondly, the philosophical foundation of docu-realism is to emphasize and value the redemption of physical reality, in ways consistent with the theories of Bazin and Kracauer. Thirdly, nostalgia, featuring a popular perspective and a narrative with documentary style form, is the fundamental characteristic of docu-realism. I further exemplify my definition of docu-realism with a range of films examined from various perspectives in the following three chapters, which are focused respectively on Zhang Yuan, Jia Zhangke and a group of filmmakers including Wang Xiaoshuai, Lu Xuechang, Wang Chao and Zhang Ming. The conclusion argues that docu-realism is a significant step in the Sinification of realism in Chinese film.