This thesis explores the specific cross section of two fields of study: fan culture, and 'event film' adaptation (Mm'golis, 2009). Here, I put fonyard evidence of the shifting relationship between filmmakers and fans of a popular adapted wlork, and present new modes of engagement for the fans to the adaptation process facilitated by the Internet. This is an investigation of the pertinent research in the fields of adaptation studies (Naremore, 2000; Stam, 2005; Hutcheon 2006), and fan studies (Jenkins, 1992; Bacon-Smith, 1992; Jancovich, 2003; Booth, 2010) in the digital age. I also present my own practical, ethnographic research from film sets, working with a production company and a film funding body, The Film Agency of Wales, interviews, and fan events for analysis of practical application to provide evidence of the dialectical shift in the fan and filmmaker relationship due in large part to the Internet. I Fans now have unprecedented access to the filmmaking process due to digital media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and the various fan sites and discussion boards that provide immediate information dispersal. The information-sharing abilities and marketing power of fans as well as their immediacy in organizing events and movements can be harnessed and utilized in the adaptation process of the event film . This is affecting filmmaking processes, as many are beginning to incorporate new practices for fan management into their procedures. This thesis examines relevant research on participatory communities, fan culture, and fan management, to argue the new and developing modes of fan interaction and fan influence on event film adaptation. This thesis concludes that the dialectical relationship between the fan and the filmmaker has shifted, as evidenced in the production of the event film

This thesis is practice-led research in the field of commercial feature film development in the UK. It addresses the growing interest in practice as research in film, while proposing how traditional research methodologies can be broadened to allow for a more fluid use of practice as research in film for the future. In doing so, this thesis indicates that practice-led research is a critical tool for allowing a more functional understanding of the film industry generally because as a methodology it has the potential to encourage filmmakers and practitioners to engage with academic and research environments, and can ultimately expose more specific aspects of the filmmaking craft. Contextual analysis of this type does reveal the unfortunate presumption that often exists within film studies that there is a dichotomy between the theory of, and the practice of, making a film. Traditionally page-based film criticism has investigated film by seeking out associative theory and critiquing filmmaker’s work, while the filmmakers themselves often suggest that their artefacts ought to speak for themselves. As the development of making an industry film has rarely been subject to process specific theoretical critique by the filmmakers that created them, film practice has suffered a divorced relevance as a mode of research at doctoral level. The creative artefacts within this study, however, face a number of affects from film theory and this thesis confronts the traditional notion of a divide between page-based critical theory and production practices in film and builds towards an outcome that promotes a core relationship between the two. By presenting practical feature film development artefacts and providing a page-based critical insight, new knowledge can be revealed about how the UK film industry and critical theory both function as stimuli for creativity in film. The methodology here treats the filmmaker (myself) as a critical commodity in understanding the film industry and will show how the practicalities of making a film as a research artefact is influenced by a fusion of three core determinants: Critical Theory, Creative Process, and Market Forces. Structured around these three elements primarily, this study creates a working model for practice-led research, while giving an insight into the processes of feature film development in the UK.

The Middle East is at the heart of political debate today. This study analyzes the representation of Middle Eastern politics in contemporary American and Egyptian films produced between 1980 and 2000. The study aims at complicating theories on the East/West divide, namely Edward Said's discourse on Orientalism, by showing not only how the Orient is constructed and dominated by the Occident, but also how the Orient itself engages in representations of the self and Others and how it is consumed by internal as well as external power struggles. The study identifies four main themes: the representations of the Arab-Israeli conflict and Islamic fundamentalism, and the use of space (both physical and mental) and gender as tools utilized in strengthening the nationalist stance each cinema takes. The study argues that the two cinemas both converge and diverge in their portrayal of those issues. While Hollywood constructs the United States as a world policeman, positioning itself above the politics portrayed, Egyptian cinema constructs Egypt as an Arab leader, yet positions Egypt as a sympathizer to other Arab nations. Hollywood also imagines the American nation as a masterful male, while Egyptian cinema imagines Egypt in terms of subdued femininity. The study shows that the two cinemas converge in their outlooks on Islamic fundamentalism, which is constructed as a common enemy. However while Hollywood's portrayal of Islamic fundamentalism is one-dimensional and based on terrorism, Egyptian cinema's is more nuanced, focusing on other dimensions of fundamentalists' lives, from every-day social matters to psychological trauma. The study concludes that the Egyptian films constitute a factor of resistance to Hollywood's global narratives yet the study's highlighting of the non-innocence of the Egyptian films in this context complicates an East/West binary that either views the East as an essential victim or as an incarnation of goodness.

This thesis considers the representation of mental disorder in the contemporary American biopic from 1999 onwards, focussing upon how such representations of the biographical subject’s experience of mental illness can be read as interrogating many of the central features and ideologies of American national identity. Though long overlooked in academia, a recent surge in scholarly attention has repositioned and illuminated the biographical film (biopic) as a dynamic genre that warrants greater appreciation and investigation. This thesis contributes to current debates and understandings of the genre by critically interrogating the representational strategies and tropes present in depictions of mental disorder in the genre and contextualising these aspects in regards to wider cultural issues. Much like many critiques of the biopic genre, the portrayal of mental disorder in film and media has often been criticised for lacking authenticity or accuracy. Where critics and filmgoers bemoan the biopic’s over-celebratory nature and malleable relationship with history, so too psychiatric professionals and members of the public lament derogatory stereotypes and images of mental disorder that contribute to the perpetuation of stigma. However, this project realises a conscious move away from subjective debates concerning accuracy whilst still engaging with psychiatric research as a means of demonstrating the valuable interdisciplinary overlaps between psychiatry and film studies. Where critical considerations of mental illness representation largely focus upon the impact of film and media on cultural attitudes, the analyses in this thesis instead consider the influence of American culture on film representation. Whilst engaging with key ideas associated with the construction of national identity (primarily gender, race and class) this thesis also includes critical considerations of the portrayal of mental disorder and its intersections with many other socio-culturally significant aspects of American character and identity, including capitalism, sexuality, celebrity, religion and regionality.

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No description available.

Scholarly reviews of the Trümmerfilm1 have hitherto concentrated on the its redemptive qualities. In these readings of the films, the defeated German soldiers, Landser, or émigrés return to Germany and into the arms of their beautiful and faithful wives. The wives provide the safe space that the returned men need in order to be restored, reconciled and re-integrated into the new Germany. In this role, Germany’s women are responsible for ‘setting their men on course’ to rebuild the new nation and bring it out of its defeat. Robert Shandley has suggested2 that it is possible to view the original Trümmerfilm, Wolfgang Staudte’s 1946 film Die Mörder sind unter uns, through a genre lens, namely that of the Western movie. He notes that the genre expectations of this film were “thwarted” (Sieglohr, 2000, 99) by the intervention of the film’s female lead, but he does not carry this idea on by examining the gender implications of this thwarting, nor does he conduct a Cross-German study of the Trümmerfilm in its western and eastern forms to explore whether this is a trend. This thesis will build on Shandley’s comments and will first attempt to show whether the Trümmerfilm can indeed be seen as constituting a “genre” and then explore the implications of Shandley’s comments across eight Trümmerfilme, four from the western zones and four eastern zone. These films will be examined through the lenses of the Western and Kriminalfilm genres. These are used at Shandley’s suggestion and are genres that have clear sets of codes, spaces, gender relations and trope outcomes. This use of a genre lens reveals that male dominance of space is slowly ceded to the films’ leading women and the standard trope outcomes are “thwarted”, thereby contradicting trope expectations. The transgression of the expected genre expectations and ceding of the control of male spaces expose the implicit criticism of German women inherent in these films. The interpretation of the films thus changes from redemptive to critical and this study thereby exposes the misogyny of the Trümmerfilm.

This thesis represents the first comprehensive study of how film was employed in the Canadian province of Québec to reflect upon the AIDS crisis prior to the introduction of combination therapy. Chapter One establishes how the unique threats posed by HIV to the physical and moral integrity of individuals and societies incites potentially divisive reactions that perpetuate harmful understandings of HIV and those it touches. In contrast, the creative medium of film offers a flexible framework for meditation in which the significations of HIV can be explored and confronted constructively and inclusively. Québec, owing to its historical situation, its distinctive and vibrant cinematic heritage and status as a hub for HIV/AIDS-related activity and solidarity, represents a rich microcosm of the different social, political and creative dynamics at play within the AIDS crisis. Chapter Two establishes how documentary can enact objective investigations of the AIDS crisis that methodically deconstruct prevalent misconceptions of HIV and People living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHAs). These intellectual studies are also juxtaposed with subjective material that evokes the emotional aspects of the crisis. Chapter Three illustrates how testimonial film can catalyse the interrogation by PLWHAs of their relationship with their HIV-positive status. Through the process of filmmaking, PLWHAs can better comprehend the trauma provoked by their status and form friendships and communities built on the discursive and cathartic act of sharing. Chapter Four explains how feature film, exploiting the popular mechanisms of storytelling and characterisation, can bring considerations of HIV to both niche and broader audiences, potentially provoking far-reaching contemplations of the virus. The thesis concludes by summarising how, thanks to its idiosyncratic filmic tradition, Québec’s cinematic representations of HIV/AIDS were varied and revealing, questioning and nuancing problematic understandings of HIV and PLWHAs and successfully investigating the AIDS crisis as a local and global phenomenon of human proportions.

This thesis offers an adjunct to recent theories of the haptic contingent upon proximity by considering how embodied engagement might take place at a distance. Developing a broad definition of gesture as a motion away from the (carnal or camera) body that is nonetheless always attached to it, the thesis seeks a state of in-betweenness unmediated by touch. Two chapters explore this gesture-as-bodily-extension as an analytical approach to art. Each focuses on an insistently individual artist, according each a different theoretical approach in order both to do justice to that individuality and to test fully the potential and limits of the gestural approach in question. The first chapter focuses on the writings and films of the écrivain-cinéaste, Chantal Akerman, whose gesturality, equal parts literary and cinematic, is explored through Giorgio Agamben’s similarly language-based thoughts on gesture, the moving image and repetition. Charting a three-stage gesture of (displaced) demonstration (proximal, medial and distal) that finds its linguistic correlate in a triad of slippery shifters (là, làbas and ça), it examines how, and why, the artist, in a relentless process of ressassement informed by atrocities always one step away from first-hand experience, translates these to page and screen as the story of ‘la petite chose à côté’. The second chapter centres on the photographs, films and installation work of the artiste-cinéaste, Agnès Varda, using an approach developed from selected writings by the German art historian, Aby Warburg, the majority translated into English for the first time. As with Akerman, Varda’s work insists upon a spectatorship premised on distance, but it also demands complicity. Defining the viewing experience not as the still contemplation of moving images but as the active contemplation of still ones, the chapter explores the relation between onlooker and image by harnessing Warburg’s vision of a gesture encoded in the artwork that may be triggered anew through mobile, engaged and bodily spectatorship from afar; a vision underpinned by his concepts of the animated accessory (bewegtes Beiwerk), the memory-image (Erinnerungsbild) and the inbetween space of artistic encounter (Zwischenraum). Ultimately, this thesis asks, and answers, two questions. What can theories of gesture contribute to a close analysis of artists whose work demands distance? And do these highly individual artists exceed the scope of theory – and in so doing, expand it?

Medium-bound features and translation strategies are two central issues in the study of subtitling. However, the translator, who reacts to the medium-bound features and opts for translation strategies, has remained outside the focus in research on subtitling. The scarcity of studies on the translator in the context of subtitling seems to suggest that the translator in this type of translation is simply viewed as a transparent vehicle. This study attempts to shed light on the translator’s discursive presence in subtitling by proposing the use of a new concept, the translator’s communicative assumptions. A bottom-up model, rooted in Descriptive Translation Studies, has been established to investigate the translator’s communicative assumptions. This model consists of a comparative phase followed by an analysis phase. The English subtitles of three Chinese feature films were examined using this model in order to reveal the translators’ communicative assumptions. In the comparative phase, the original dialogues and the subtitles are compared in order to identify and categorise micro-structural shifts in the subtitles. In the following analysis phase, Bordwell’s (1997) approach to filmic perception and cognition, Text World Theory and Relevance Theory are adapted and combined to provide a theoretical framework and analytical tools to further scrutinise patterns and tendencies observed at the comparative phase. The comparative-analysis model proves to be a useful tool to reveal translators’ communicative assumptions in subtitling. The findings show that although translation shifts take place at various levels, the translator makes linguistic adjustments to give priority to syuzhet (plot elements) related to his/her own established fabula (story). Consequently, syuzhet is made more explicit; film characters’ inner worlds and personality are enhanced; culture-specific and stylistic features of the original dialogue exchanges are generally diminished. Viewers seem to be regarded as cultural outsiders who have little knowledge of the Chinese culture in general and need additional assistance in the comprehension of certain syuzhet information.