Since the 1980s the film and television industry in the United States has developed into a largely contract-based system characterised by career insecurity and precarity. Based upon 27 semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago during the summer of 2013, I analysed women’s reported career experiences in the contemporary US film and television industry. Using Banks’ (2009) concept of feminist production studies, which integrates political economy, cultural studies, and gendered perspectives I focused on several key areas of women’s careers as reported by my participants for analysis. I divided my analysis into three parts based upon data gathered through the interviews. First I explore how and why my participants chose to enter work in an industry characterised by precarious employment and then why, despite this insecurity, they chose to continue working in this field. Next, I analyse women’s networking practices in film and television work, how they conceptualised these relationships, and argue that my participants’ networking practices are embodied, genuine, selective, and managed contradicting some elements of Wittel’s (2001) concept of ‘network sociality.’ I conclude with an examination of women’s reported experiences of sexism and discrimination in the contemporary industry and strategies my participants used to avoid such encounters. Research concerning labour in the cultural industries has become more prevalent since the 1990s. However, most of this work has been conducted in reference to cultural work/ers in the UK and Europe. This thesis illuminates the career experiences of women of varied ages who work in diverse occupations in the contemporary US film and television industry.

This dissertation will explain how films utilise technological development to create special effects that portray the past, present and future and how time travel is conveyed to the audience. Several of the films to be discussed will show how the changes from old technology to the use of new special effects have affected the audience and that, as more advances are made, the audience then expects more. However, it will be noted that special effects can also take attention away from the story. When audiences watch a film, they link the meaning, story, narrative, and experience to other films that have similar styles. Genre critics recognise that films are watched within the context of other films ... (Newbold in Boyd-Barrett + Newbold (eds) 2007 p.442). Genre refers to a style or type of film and these are exemplified in the following examples within the context of time travel.

In this thesis I analyse visual traces of digital technologies in narrative cinema as a way of exploring broader questions about the medium and the cultural status of its technological constituents. In so doing, I not only identify a number of areas of filmmaking that are currently under-researched or overlooked, but move the focus away from the questions of what digitisation means for cinema’s ‘identity’, and towards a consideration of how the implications of digitisation are at once exaggerated in rhetoric and tempered in practice by aesthetic, ideological, and economic factors. To do this, I focus on recent narrative films (1998-2013) in which digital filmmaking technologies are themselves salient features of the cinematic image. I argue that initial appearances of these digital traces are presented and received as disruptive, in that they appear to symbolise both a break with the ontological assumptions of cinema, and the potential to re-imagine the very notion of the medium itself. However, I demonstrate how each of these disruptions are, to differing extents, soon absorbed into the conventional formal structures of narrative cinema, such that their ultimate effect on the medium is to broaden its stylistic palate rather than to radically transform its identity. In so doing, I make four main scholarly contributions. Firstly, I provide an account of digital cinema contextualised in relation to the broader use of digital image technologies over this time period. Secondly, I use the technological trace as a locus for exploring intersections of aesthetic, ideological, and industrial factors in the production of these films. Thirdly, I temper hyperbolic reactions to digitisation by stressing continuities with, and echoes of, the history of analogue narrative cinema. Finally, I demonstrate how digital ontologies are shaped by popular discourses, and how these reinforce, qualify, and in some instances, contest, existing scholarly debate.

This study attempts to formulate and test an original idea in adaptation theory, one that exploits the productive aspects of the two main tendencies in adaptation studies, fidelity and intertextuality. The question that is addressed here is how the prioritization of a novel's poetics as the focal point for the transposition of the literary text can inform the study and practice of literature to film adaptation. It will be argued in this thesis that an abstract description of the literary and filmic work can be used as a blueprint for the transposition between the two media. In the context of this study, adaptation is defined as a mode of engagement with the source text, while the adapter is defined as the agency responsible for the transposition. Poetics, in the context of this study, is a system of aims and methods, that represent the work of art as a system of creative decisions. Michail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, as well as his view of the author, have informed the theoretical structure of this thesis to a significant degree. The proposition has been tested in the context of adaptation criticism, through an examination of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The application of the rationale of this thesis on the specific case has revealed a complex system of interaction between two works that are superficially very different. In the context of adaptation practice, a form of practice based research has been employed in the discussion of the filmic possibilities of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. The system that derives from the conceptual framework of this thesis has created a discussion of alternatives, through a joint consideration of source poetics and medium demands. The conclusion of this research is that the focus on the poetics of a work can potentially provide fertile ground for the examination of adaptation as product, and for the practice of adaptation as a re-contextualisation of literary works in the filmic medium.

In India animation practice is almost completely dominated by commercial production. Much of this is outsourced to India by foreign companies, but even the animation that is produced for national broadcast shows characteristics of animation design of Western origination with regard to content, presentation and art style. Consequently, modes of commercially driven animation are dictating the expectations of the medium in India, and have become widely regarded as the normative standard. The forces of global expansion have accelerated the arrival of commercial media entertainment into the various peripheral regions of India. The indigenous communities there have been represented by outsiders since colonial times and have no representation of their own in the medium of animation. As a consequence, young indigenous people are growing up with media entertainment that has no cultural relevance to them. It is challenging their identities and through this process, they are losing touch with their own cultural heritage. In this research I set out to investigate whether animation is a medium that can be used to retell indigenous folktales and reconnect young indigenous audiences to their traditional narratives. The development and production of a sample collection of short animation films, Tales of the Tribes through participatory film-making practice presents case studies of the process of collaborating with indigenous artists and cultural practitioners from selected communities to examine these issues of representation and to investigate how adaptation can be negotiated from oral to audio visual forms of cultural expression. The contribution to knowledge that has emerged from this research shows how the medium of animation can have a significant role for communication within and between cultures. Young indigenous collaborators are receptive to adapting their traditional narratives to the animation medium and participatory practice based on local content engages their contribution. The practice has demonstrated that the possibilities for experimentation with local content and art forms can work to reconnect the young generation with existing cultural forms and practices. In addition, the research shows that young animators in India also appreciate opportunities to experiment with little known Indian content and folk art forms. My research delivers a practical model for animation practitioners to collaborate ethically with local communities and organisations within the context of media representation. For indigenous artists to work alongside animation practitioners to re-imagine their narratives through animation film-making empowers the voices of indigenous young people in India to tell their own story.

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This thesis explores the idea of Surrealism in relation to British films. Films often classified as Realism, Gothic, Satire or Artists’ Film and Video are revealed to contain substantial collective themes and techniques when looked at through the lens of Surrealism, while films that have not previously been associated with Surrealism are found to be significant. Detailed case studies of Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984) and Mona Lisa (1986) reveal that these two films embody these themes and techniques and straddle the perceived polarity of realism and fantasy in British film. Central to the discussion is Viktor Schlovsky’s idea of de-familiarization whereby that which is so familiar as to go unquestioned is made shockingly unfamiliar or strange. The thesis challenges the idea of mutually exclusive genres in British cinema, particularly Realism and its perceived opposites, ideas that have long-defined British Cinema studies. Conversely, Surrealism’s ultimate aim is the convergence of reality and fantasy or the imagination, and this thesis demonstrates that convergence within British Cinema. The thesis also builds bridges between British Cinema studies and disciplines such as Literature and Art History, as well as other European Cinemas. A major finding is that Surrealism’s roots in Romanticism are often played out in British films, and subversive narrational techniques are traced from eighteenth and nineteenth century Gothic novels to Lewis Carroll and the films of Luis Buñuel and British Cinema. There is however an important difference between Romanticism and Surrealism: the first is characterised by self-expression, which can often be controversial, without concern for consequences. Surrealism on the other hand is very much concerned with consequences, as in its hands self-expression becomes a means of protest, aimed squarely at shattering oppressive socio-political circumstances.