In this thesis I propose a new methodology for constructing national cinemas, using reception studies, which aims to better convey the plurality of identities present within a national context. Existing national cinemas overwhelmingly rely upon homogenous national identities dictated by scholars who opaquely play judge and jury over inclusion. Each national cinema ostensibly provides a superior representation of a particular nationhood than its predecessors. I argue that filmic nationhood is less absolute and the role of the national cinema scholar should be in communicating the significance of various existing interpretations within a national context. National audiences do not watch films as blank canvasses but rather are conditioned by the context in which they consume them. This necessitates these audiences’ disaggregation according to their various collective identities which enact ingroup favouritism and outgroup discrimination. These identities’ filmic reception is accessed through press materials such as magazines and newspapers which address their particular readership appropriately. Analysis of this reception over an extended period of time constructs a national cinema network and reveals both the complexity and contradictions of filmic nationhood. Croatian film culture from 1980 to 2009 serves as the medium through which I implement my preferred methodology in this thesis. Analysing the varied receptions of six films, I construct a Croatian national cinema which is significantly more nuanced than those which have preceded it. Nationhood is shown to be the most significant collective identity in Croatian film culture, often conditioning the depiction and reception of other national and non-national identities. Nevertheless, this was neither a static nor an exclusive nationhood. What it meant to be Croatian in film culture was concurrently understood in different ways and Croatian imaginings were always supplemented by Yugoslav alternatives.

My thesis investigates issues of sustainability and belonging surrounding the Bulgarian feature film industry. There is a limited body of scholarship on Bulgarian cinema, most of which focuses on film aesthetics and fails to account for the socio-historical and industrial context of local film creation, dissemination and consumption. My work is a continuation of Dina Iordanova’s New Bulgarian Cinema (2008) which promoted the idea of cross-Balkan creative collaborations. In contrast, I see pan-Balkan alliances as simply one part of the transnational co-operation and appropriation practices that have shaped Bulgarian film culture. I reveal that early productions like The Bulgarian Is Gallant (Vassil Gendov, 1915) and Cairn (Alexander Vazov, 1936) sought to reaffirm Bulgaria’s place in European culture and act as a business bridge between the East and the West. During Communism (1944-1989) the Bulgarian Poetic Realist movement and the detective cycle appropriated narrative and aesthetic ideas from, respectively, the Italian Neorealism and British/American spy movies, achieving sustainability not necessarily reliant on state funding. With the shift to an open market economy, I show how the notion of national cinema changed under different legislation as did the balance between state subsidy and private funding. The tension between the art-house canon and contemporary domestic audiences’ idea of Bulgarian cinema is evident in my case-studies of The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner (Stephan Komandarev, 2008), Mission London (Dimitar Mitovski, 2010) and Love.net (Ilian Djevelekov, 2011). The emergence of the Sofia International Film Festival, digital distribution and piracy further redefined the cinema experience in Bulgaria. The case of Bulgaria illustrates the complexities of describing a small national cinema in an environment of legislative and economic inconsistency. It exposes the need for overcoming stereotypes when examining Eastern Europe and questions the existence of singular definitions when it comes to European film culture.

Employing textual and contextual analysis, this thesis analyses hysterical masculinity in popular Korean cinema. I argue that in a significant number of contemporary Korean films men are depicted as experiencing trauma due to the impact of the Korean economic crisis after 1997. My focus will be mainly on films made in the first five years after the onset of the financial crisis. In Chapter One, I discuss the ways in which Korean cinema prior to this period explored masculinity, providing contrast and comparison to subsequent forms of representations. In particular, I explore the trajectory of masculine identities in Korean cinema since the 1960s. I also address the textual and theoretical methodologies which inform my case studies. Chapter Two asks to what extent Confucianism and militarism had an influence on Korean masculinity. I suggest that the 1997 Korean financial crisis revealed not only economic complexities but also structural problems in Korean society. Furthermore, the chapter briefly maps a history of Korean cinema from 1980s to 1990s, in particular the emergence of the Korean New Wave and New Korean Cinema. In sum, I examine the historical contexts of Korean masculinity and cinema focusing firstly on patterns of male dominance, secondly on pre and post-1997 Korean cinema, and thirdly on the formal conventions of melodrama and the gangster genre as essential aspects in comprehending the background of how masculinity figures in contemporary Korean cinema. In Chapter Three, I introduce the notion of ‘hysterical excess’ in the expression of masculinity, looking in particular at the case-study of Jung Jiwoo’s Happy End (1999). Through textual analysis, I detail how a hysterical excess of masculinity eventually results in femicide and female victimisation. Chapter Four employs the concept of ‘distorted pleasure’ to examine Kim Kiduk’s films, in particular The Isle (2000) and Bad Guy (2001). The chapter notes their tendency to represent a vision of ‘twisted pleasure’, which includes rape fantasies, sadism and masochism. Once again, a weakness of masculinity expresses itself through violence toward women. In Chapter Five, I discuss two films by Lee Changdong; Peppermint Candy (2000) and Oasis (2002), exploring themes of nostalgia, fantasy, and Christianity, as well as the meaning of particular aesthetic devices such as flashback and social realism.

My thesis consists of two interrelated projects. The first analyzes legal and aesthetic testimony in Atom Egoyan’s film The Sweet Hereafter. “But From My Lie This Did Come True” is an extended meditation on falling: literal accident, communal loss, ethical lapse, and imagistic and linguistic vertigo. Falling is this film’s instigating event, but falling is also a figure for trauma, and its capacity to make reference itself fall. By definition, a trauma exceeds our ability to contain and communicate what we have witnessed or survived. How then can it be possible to testify to a traumatic event and its effects? In dialogue with Paul de Man, Jean Luc Nancy, Sigmund Freud, and Cathy Caruth, I argue that The Sweet Hereafter reveals how one fall can powerfully reference another. My aim is not simply to apply theory to a film, but also to explore how the film reconfigures the theory. Just as Egoyan’s work adapts a novel to the cinema, my project adapts film to the essay form. The second part of my thesis excerpts Hook Tender, a novel inspired by archival research and oral history, including travels to BC logging camps and Canada’s Arctic. Hook Tender explores falling through the actual labour and visceral experience of felling trees. Set in an immigrant logging camp on Canada’s West Coast, the narrative also dramatizes falling in the ethical and psychological dimensions addressed in my essay. An accidental fall causes Eva to lose a child through still birth, and this loss instigates an emotional crisis and moral lapse as she begins an adulterous involvement with Charlie, an Inuit logger who communicates injustices survived by Indigenous communities. So both sections of my thesis offer a sustained reflection on falling: its broken narratives, questionable bearing of testimony, and the incalculable power of its emotional charge.

Amid the often complex and paradoxical relationship between Hollywood and American Christianity lies the dichotomy between the archaic and the futuristic, and the way in which biblical beliefs have been intertwined into the seemingly discordant realm of science fiction. Hollywood, as an institution that has often been regarded as pronouncedly secular, was once deemed at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum to American evangelical belief – in much the same way that science and religion are often identified as conflicting arenas of ideological latitude. My study lays emphasis to the fact that biblical allegory and religious cabal are now adopted by Hollywood on a frequent basis, and cinematic visions of apocalypse, incorporating ideas of biblical ‘myth’ and prophecy, are often framed within the machinations of science fiction. What makes this development all the more intriguing is that, in effect, this represents an ideological inversion of what had not only been an expressly secular 20th century (sub)genre of science fiction cinema, but one which had often incorporated a denigration of religion as a whole. My key conceptual approach is based on close textual analyses of a body of contemporary apocalypse films that most effectively represents this ontological shift. As a cultural backdrop to post-9/11 America over the first decade of the 21st century, I examine the influence of ‘premillennial Dispensationalism’, or the form of evangelical belief that is intrinsically concerned with the biblical ‘endtime’, and thus with the future, and is ‘hermeneutically hungry’ for signs and prophecies that might signal the beginning of the end. Correspondingly, I draw on Hollywood’s own accordant fascination with prophetical signs and codes and premonitions of apocalypse, and consider the socio-cultural intersection between premillennialist belief and post-9/11 social structures of trauma, paranoia, and neoconservatism. This thesis ultimately contends that, since the turn of the century, perceptions of Premillennialist endtime belief has become an integral aspect of Hollywood’s apocalyptic vision, and this is something that informs a strong religious consciousness already at the heart of the American apocalyptic imagination.

The thesis provides an historical overview of the artist biopic that has emerged as a distinct sub-genre of the biopic as a whole, totalling some ninety films from Europe and America alone since the first talking artist biopic in 1934. Their making usually reflects a determination on the part of the director or star to see the artist as an alter-ego. Many of them were adaptations of successful literary works, which tempted financial backers by having a ready-made audience based on a pre-established reputation. The sub-genre’s development is explored via the grouping of films with associated themes and the use of case studies. These examples can then be used as models for exploring similar sets of data from other countries and time periods. The specific topics chosen for discussion include the representation of a single painter, for example, Vincent Van Gogh, to see how the treatment of an artist varies across several countries and over seventy years. British artist biopics are analysed as a case study in relation to the idea of them posing as a national stereotype. Topics within sex and gender studies are highlighted in analysis of the representation of the female artist and the queer artist as well as artists who have lived together as couples. A number of well-known gallery artists have become directors of artist biopics and their films are considered to see what particular insights a professional working artist can bring to the portrayal of artistic genius and creation. In the concluding part of the thesis it is argued that the artist biopic overall has survived the bad press which some individual productions have received and can even be said to have matured under the influence of directors producing a quality product for the art house, festival and avant-garde distribution circuits. As a genre it has proved extremely adaptable and has reflected the changing attitudes towards art and artists within the wider community. It has both encouraged renewed interest in the work of established national artists and also raised the profile of those relatively obscure such as Séraphine de Senlis and Pirosmani.

This thesis is an enquiry into avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s stated impetus for aesthetic practice, in that his approach is characterised by a desire to elicit a ‘transformative’ response from the spectator: “I chose cinema as the mode of personal expression for its potential and capacity for disruption: it is the surest means to incite change.” This central animating principle of Anger’s practice has been fundamentally neglected in what little critical writing that already exists on his work. Whilst this intent is framed within an esoteric religious paradigm – the occult – my contention is that it must also be understood as part of a much wider socio-­historical political process. I argue that as a personal friend of many within the Beat and psychedelic movements, Anger’s practice should be understood as part of the US countercultural drive to ‘revolutionise consciousness’. This aspiration was prompted by the widespread belief within the Sixties US counterculture that ‘normality’ was a state of implicit alienation, and that the undermining of standardised forms of subjectivity was necessary in order that a more authentic mode of existence be found; either as a prerequisite for wider structural change, or, as in the romantic psychedelic movement in which Anger was associated, as a qualifier for change in itself. This particular ‘politics of consciousness’ of the Sixties as propagated by a spiritually inflected, romantic anarchist strain in post-­war US society was based upon the utopian belief that the transformation of individual consciousness was a method of facilitating widespread revolution. I see this aspiration as a utopian expression of the refrain ‘the personal is political’ that came to popular fruition in the Sixties, in which the consideration of one’s own life was a political concern in itself. In this politics of consciousness, the Sixties countercultural paradigm saw the idealised forms of subjectivity produced by post-war US capitalism as serial, standardised, and crucially, ‘inauthentic’; as something to be overcome, with aesthetic production playing a fundamental role in this process. I argue that Anger’s Sixties work must be read in much wider relation to the socio-­political discourses of its time than has been previously afforded in what little critical writing on Anger’s work that exists to date.

This practice-based research presents an analysis of the representation of embodied experience in the travelogue film genre. It reflects upon the embodied and synaesthesic nature of the cinematic experience by tracing a shift in travelogue filmmaking from the ocular realism characteristic of early travelogue films to the emergence and proliferation of subjective approaches. Moreover, it analyses experimental travelogue films and the capacity of non-linear and non-narrative structures to express sensuous, embodied perception. 9 Meditations is the practice component of this thesis. It is an experimental travelogue film. Through its production this research explores the translation of embodied experience as a multi-sensory process into filmmaking practice. In the field of film studies, the travelogue has not been widely discussed outside historical approaches, and it has certainly never been discussed in relation to phenomenology and embodied sensation. This research articulates a new conceptual framework for both the production and theorisation of the travelogue film, as a form that is intrinsically related to performance, subjectivity and embodied perception. Moreover, this research concerns both the production process in filmmaking practice and the cinematic experience as grounded in synaesthesic, embodied perception. This approach brings to the forefront the capacity of audiovisual practice to both encode and produce sensuous knowledge.

The writing-up of this PhD has examined experimental films I made between 2004 and 2010, in all five 16mm films: Stages Of Mourning, (17min, 2004), Taking My Skin, (35min, 2006), Blind Light (21min, 2007), Fall In Frame (19min, 2009), Phantom Rhapsody (19min, 2010). As I have been making films that have been exhibited and funded in the public field since 1990, the films included here constitute just less than half of my total films to date. The commentary is divided into three sections, each of which analyses the films from a particular perspective. In each section the five films are considered in turn, in chronological order. The rationale for having three different perspectives to analyse each film is that this provides a means of acknowledging and preserving a sense of the alterity of artists’ film, where readings are understood more as interpretations than as explanations. The choice of focus in each section summarises key considerations that have been relevant to my filmmaking practice over this time period, if not since the start of my filmmaking in 1990. In addition to providing contextual international film artists from both avantgarde and feminist film, I also reference theorists from philosophy to film and feminist studies who have been instrumental in the rationale for the films. The first section explores the films from the point of view of cinematic space, examining factors such as camera frame, angle, lens and edit as well as qualities of lighting, and durational qualities where for example a slowing of time might expand an idea of the space. Cinematic space is as much expressed through sound, so where relevant this is also discussed. The second section focuses on qualities of texture through both image and sound. In particular, as all the films were shot and printed onto 16mm, the question of the haptic in relation to the films is discussed, as is the low-budget hand-made texture of image and sound that is the materiality of the unpolished. Vivian Sobchack (The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, 1992), Sobchack (Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation and Documentary, 1984) Laura U. Marks (The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 2000) and Tom Gunning (The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde, 2006) are key texts I refer to. The third section focuses on issues of gender, in particular the female body, the female and lesbian gaze, and queer sexuality. Where the first two sections focus more on the structure and language or form of the films, this section focuses on social and philosophical questions of gender difference as points of critique or protest in the films. Luce Irigaray (Speculum Of The Other Woman, 1985 and This Sex Which Is not One, 1985) and Laura Mulvey (‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, 1975) are key texts that inform the writing.

This thesis explores the portrayal of Italian Catholicism in five feature films: E venne un uomo (A Man Named John, dir. Ermanno Olmi, 1965), Galileo (1968, dir. Liliana Cavani), Teorema (Theorem, 1968, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini), Nel nome del padre (In the Name of the Father, 1972, dir. Marco Bellocchio) and Fratello sole, sorella luna (Brother Sun, Sister Moon, 1972, dir. Franco Zeffirelli). Challenging the notion of Italian Catholicism as a monolithic and unified system of thought, this investigation brings out its fragmented quality, thereby validating Antonio Gramsci’s claim of the coexistence of a plurality of religious tendencies in the country. The study focuses on a twenty-year period between 1958 and 1978, as it is during this period—referred to as “the new secularisation”—that the fragmentation underlying Italian Catholicism emerged with clarity. Within this context, the five chosen films offer ideal case studies to assess the plurality of attitudes towards Catholicism in that period: not only do they employ a large repertoire of narratives, persons, symbols, iconography, quotes, rituals and places of Catholic tradition, but they also reimagine this repertoire in either orthodox or provocative ways, effectively upholding or critiquing Catholicism as a belief system, Catholicism as practiced by the faithful and the Catholic Church as an institution. Analysis of the films is organised across the four areas suggested by Melanie J. Wright, namely narrative, style, cultural and religious context, and reception, with a focus on reception amongst Catholics. Analysis of these elements uncovers the five directors’ personal and unique approaches to religion, ultimately attesting not only to the immense cultural and social legacy of Catholicism in the country, but also to the existence of a multiplicity of religious sensitivities.