This thesis focuses on some of Godard’s most complex, innovative and daring experiments in sound design in a selection of key films and videos made predominantly during the 1980s. It charts Godard’s evolving experiments with live, electronic and pre-existing music, as well as his manipulation of voice, texture, spatiality and speed alteration. It aims to advance a theory of ‘acoustic spectatorship’, a term I have coined to establish and convey the depth and significance of the spectator’s experience of film through sound and the sense of hearing. The thesis develops an approach to Godard’s films from the perspective of sonic art, arguing that an emphasis on the active process of listening enables the spectator to perceive more fully the multileveled and multifaceted experiences that the chosen films and videos provide. It foregrounds Godard’s extraordinary sensibility to sound and his persistent efforts, which often go unheeded, to challenge the ingrained assumption that film is primarily a visual medium. The thesis will explore the expressivity of acoustic phenomena in a range of commercial feature films, video scenarios, short films and videos, along with a CD soundtrack release, engaging with Godard’s approach to film history, his conception of projection and his theory of montage. The close analysis performed in each chapter will be supported by a plural and interdisciplinary methodology. It draws on different intellectual and artistic disciplines, including musicology, sound theory, film theory, as well as writings by composers, writers, philosophers and poets, underpinned by the crucial discoveries of sound engineer Pierre Schaeffer, especially his fundamental concept of the acousmatic condition. By prioritizing the acoustic experience of the film spectator, this thesis constructs a new means of perceiving Godard’s 1980s film work, which, in turn, calls for a reassessment and redefinition of the very notion of spectatorship itself.

Throughout its existence, East Germany’s ruling Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) never officially acknowledged any direct or inherited responsibility for the crimes committed on its territory between 1933 and 1945, instead choosing to recast itself as both victim and victor of fascist oppression through the foregrounding of political persecution. This interpretative framework undoubtedly resulted in the marginalisation of the fate of Jews under National Socialism in East German historiography and memories of the past. However, by focusing on East German cinematic engagements with National Socialist racial persecution, I seek to challenge the assertion that films depicting Jewish victimhood were unwelcome or even taboo in the German Democratic Republic. By combining close readings of five films – 'Ehe im Schatten' (Maetzig, 1947), 'Sterne' (Wolf, 1959), 'Lebende Ware' (Luderer, 1966), 'Jakob der Lügner' (Beyer, 1974) and 'Die Schauspielerin' (Kühn, 1988) – with an analysis of the films’ production files, I unravel the complex status of films dealing with Jewish persecution produced in a country which consistently privileged narratives of political persecution above racial victimhood.

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Inspired by recurring themes in the representation of the female body during the early postwar period of Japanese film production, this thesis investigates the affective impact of the female image during national crisis. Following scholars such as Miriam Hansen, Isolde Standish and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, who posit film as a reflexive medium which expresses and mediates popular anxieties, I suggest that the popularity of certain reoccurring female images on film can be understood in terms of their expressive and cathartic affect during the Allied occupation of Japan (1945-1952) and its aftermath. My art-historically informed iconographic analysis of popular film texts is contextualised by contemporary criticism and viewer responses published in major commercial film journals of the period, with reference to Japan's socio-political climate during the first decades of the postwar era. This study addresses the affect of film on the viewer as a means to understand the popularity of repetitive imagery. I suggest that recurrent trends within the presentation of the female image are coded to reflect viewer concerns and allay popular fears. In focusing on reoccurring themes in the female image on film, I engage with extant scholarship which identifies popular tropes in the representation of women in Japanese cinema, but which has yet to fully interrogate their impact or the reasons for their popularity, which engenders their repetition. The interdisciplinary approach of this thesis contributes to methodological questions within film studies as a discipline, while my use of affect theory is a new theoretical approach to postwar Japanese film. Analysis of the impact of affective imagery addresses concerns expressed in scholarship and in popular media throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first as to the impact of film imagery on the viewer.

This thesis examines Edgar Reitz’s internationally acclaimed films <i>Heimat </i>and <i>Die Zweite</i> <i>Heimat</i> in the context of the early avant-garde theories and films, which Reitz developed during his years at the Ulm Film Institute. The two films have been widely analysed in articles, essays, books and PhD theses within the context of the Heimat film genre of the 1950s and the anti-Heimat and critical Heimat film genres of the 1960s and 1970s. They have also been extensively debated for their controversial portrayal of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Astonishingly, in all the studies on the films, critics have assumed that, apart from an autobiographical relationship, there is no link between Reitz’s <i>Heimat-</i>films and his early avant-garde theories and films. Interpretations, therefore, largely overlook the cinematographic issues brought up by the films. This dissertation attempts to close this gap in the discussion of Reitz’s <i>Heimat-</i>films. Starting with a detailed study of Reitz’s early avant-garde theories and films, it investigates Reitz’s contributions of the New German Cinema, shedding light on his novel approach in exploring a new film language, as well as a new film venue. Critics have debated the question of the venue of Reitz’s <i>Heimat</i>-films, which were made for the cinema but gained success in television. Few, however, have related this debate to Reitz’s earlier attempts to challenge the conventional venue of film. The fact that critics have predominantly focused on the question of history and the meaning of Heimat in the two films has had the unfortunate consequence that references to Reitz’s earlier films have been restricted to those which likewise deal with the topic of National Socialism, namely <i>Die Reise nach Wien</i> and <i>Stunde Null</i>.

The work of the West German artist Rainer Werner Fassbinder is as versatile as it is extensive. During the 16 years of his artistic career Fassbinder produced more than forty cinema and television films and also staged 29 plays about half of which he had written himself. In doing so he not only drew an aesthetic traditions as diverse as the German folk play, the American gangster film, Hollywood melodrama, the Theatre of Cruelty, and the French Nouvelle Vague, but also worked in three media simultaneously: theatre, cinema, and television. It has repeatedly been pointed out that this versatility appears to forestall a conceptualisation of Fassbinder's work from the vantage point of its production. The present work aims at exactly such a conceptualisation by exploring the interplay between the director's work for the different media. Right from the beginning of his artistic career Fassbinder based his aesthetic approach on the transposition of aesthetic devices from one medium to the other. Whilst his theatre plays are characterised by a montage of short scenes reminiscent of film editing, his films are marked by a stark theatricality which concerns not only the acting and the entire mise-en-scene, but also the specific ways in which camera work and editing are implemented. In the course of his artistic development Fassbinder later also included the medium of television into this aesthetic exchange, first by turning towards a more balanced aesthetics in his cinema films, conveying a more 'positive' outlook on life as television would provide it, later by carrying many of the devices he had developed in the cinema into his work for television. Thus in each medium Fassbinder breaks with conventional forms of expression and creates new possibilities through media interplay. It is on this basis that Fassbinder achieved the astonishing versatility of his artistic output which is surprising in so far as all of Fassbinder's films are concerned with the same basic issue; the exploitation of feelings.

Historically, documentary films have always encountered very serious problems of distribution and have struggled immensely to find reliable audiences, even though, ironically, documentaries are accepted by many as significant tools for the promotion of important historical, social and cultural values. There is a very serious lack of proper tools and strategies to allow documentaries to reach their potential audience in a manner that is consistent with the importance of these films as enablers of important discussion and analysis inside a society. This is especially true in the case of most developing countries, where open discussion about social, economic or cultural issues that documentaries are perfectly suited to confront and explain is more than necessary. And among these countries, the case of Colombia will occupy this research as a remarkable case study, since it is a country that is producing a large number of documentaries about pressing matters but which unfortunately are not being seen, while at the same time it is a country whose ambivalent attitude towards film production and distribution embodies the contradictions between formal and informal economies as well as between legitimate and illegitimate ways to obtain access to films and other media. Considering this situation, the main concern of this research is to review and analyse the different mechanisms that have been used to distribute and promote documentary films (although in some cases, such as the informal markets, the focus will be placed on issues pertaining both fiction and nonfiction films), with the intention to understand how these mechanisms have failed or succeeded in allowing these films to meet their primary objective: reaching their audiences. To provide this analysis, this study will resort to several different resources such as economic studies, surveys, reports, interviews with filmmakers, producers and film distributors –both legal and illegal– from different countries, along with other different sources that will provide what is hopefully a well-rounded account on the complex situation of film distribution in developing countries in general, and Colombia in particular, XI and the challenges that result from such scenario. As a consequence of this analysis, this work also aims to propose new alternatives for the distribution of documentary films; alternatives that could ultimately be of use in improving the communication between documentary filmmakers, their work and their potential spectators.

This thesis explores the constructions of place in contemporary Japanese children’s cinema. Based on a wide survey of Japanese children’s media, I focus on an in-depth examination of three case-study films released in 2008 and 2009: 'Eiga Fresh Purikyua!: Omocha no Kuni wa Himitsu ga Ippai!?', 'Gake no Ue no Ponyo', and 'Eiga Doraemon: Nobita to Midori no Kyojinden'. The ‘media mix’ marketing strategy that characterises much of contemporary Japanese children’s media results in endlessly expansive works; their inherent multiplicity cannot be ignored when conducting textual analysis on such works. Consequently, I situate the films as single elements of the broader ‘media mixes’ of 'Purikyua' and 'Doraemon', and, in the case of 'Gake no Ue no Ponyo', the Studio Ghibli brand image. While numerous analyses of Japanese popular culture highlight a widespread embrace of ‘newness’, I argue that in the case of children’s media, such analyses overlook an equally strong focus on the past. Looking at the intersections of the portrayals of place, time and change in the case studies and other contemporary Japanese children’s works, I find a pervasive tendency to emphasise transformation positioned alongside a concurrent emphasis on changelessness. Frequently, the ambivalent portrayal of transformation is connected to simultaneous celebrations of what connotes the past and the future; in these past/future worlds, the present is conspicuously absent, or rejected outright. This tendency is echoed in the related media mixes, which often focus on creating a world set apart from contemporary urban Japan. Ultimately, I argue that by idealising places/times explicitly positioned in opposition to contemporary urban Japan, Japanese children’s media treats removal from contemporary urban Japan as a value. The merchandising and marketing of the texts merges with their narrative content to construct the possibility of (what is formulated as) removal from contemporary Japan.