This thesis centres on four German actresses active from the year 2000: Nina Hoss, Sandra Hüller, Sibel Kekilli and Diane Kruger. These performers have embodied a range of multifaceted female characters, as well as offering insightful representations of ‛Germanness’ at home and abroad. Their films are emblematic of the revival of German cinema in the 2000s, which has seen the proliferation of commercially successful historical dramas and the emergence of the critically lauded Berlin School art film movement. This research seeks to contribute to German film studies by considering the role actresses have played in the context of the resurging German cinema of the new millennium. The four actresses are discussed both in terms of the female representations offered by their films, and as performers and stars. The films of Nina Hoss, Sandra Hüller and Sibel Kekilli explore the particular social, political and cultural circumstances of women in contemporary Germany, such as the ramifications of reunification and a changing economic order, the persistent female inequality in the workplace and the family, and the nationally specific conception of the mother role. Contributing to the study of film acting and performance, analyses of the four actresses’ performances are conducted to demonstrate how they enhance the films. Analysing and comparing the work of actresses from the 1920s until the present day, a German screen acting tradition is identified that is characterised by the actresses’ maintenance of a critical distance to the character they portray: female performers working across different decades share a stilted, non-naturalistic acting style, which imbues their characters with a sense of mastery and counteracts their frequent experience of oppression or objectification. The four performers studied also function as representations of national identity, with Diane Kruger, who acts in French and US films, contributing to the formulation and reflection of national identity both in Germany and abroad. Drawing on the findings of star studies, the media representations of the four actresses are analysed to illustrate how they reflect dominant social discourses about femininity, ethnicity and film stardom in Germany.

This thesis examines the oeuvre of the British filmmaker Terence Davies between 1976 and 2011. Overall, his work from this period can be separated into two distinct categories: autobiographical films and literary adaptations. Whereas previous critical works on this writer-director have often framed him as an auteur due to the considerable creative control that he exerts over his films, this thesis problematizes such a reading by situating his body of work within a larger intertextual field. Within this field, I include other films, literary texts and pieces of music, in order to explore how other cultural influences have been channelled into Davies’s filmmaking. I also explore the idea that his memories of growing up in Liverpool – particularly during the 1950s – constitute another intertext within his autobiographical films. Similarly, I demonstrate how considering the creative input of his key collaborators – including producers, cinematographers, editors and production designers – illuminates both Davies’s approach to filmmaking and the dense construction of his films as texts. Unlike other critical writings on Davies’s career, my thesis considers the audience’s engagement with his films and the readings they generate from them. This thesis adopts a multi-disciplinary approach to Davies’s films by engaging with various branches of study within the arts, including post-structuralist theory, autobiographical studies, adaptation studies, music theory, auteur theory and production studies. Furthermore, this thesis includes insights that have been gathered from eighteen original interviews with individuals involved in the making of Terence Davies’s films – including one with the filmmaker himself.

This thesis investigates how variational style is used in animated films, and whether this feature of language can withstand the process of translation. Variational style can explain instances of language varieties that appear in modern animated films, which implies a conscious design that confers various semiotic layers to the audiovisual text. We consider the case of four films that have been translated into Catalan and Spanish, and include instances of style with vernaculars in the source and target languages. Shrek 2 (2004), Shark Tale (2004), Madagascar (2005) and Cars (2006) present an opportunity to investigate how style supports the narrative in the original and dubbed versions. To this end, we apply a stylistic analysis to the four films in all three language versions to uncover how this dimension of language interacts. The corpus analysis addresses the local meanings of variation, which are established in relation to the space the variety plays in the narrative. Ultimately, we seek to determine whether the original style has been reproduced in the target texts. Furthermore, we seek to account for the acceptability of these translations by examining the current visibility of language variation in audiovisual media in English, Catalan and Spanish, and determining the extent to which speakers of each language are exposed to variation, and possibly style. Translation is also used to explore the possibilities that are available when transferring style between two languages by means of dubbing. In this context, we highlight the ethical perspective. To further address the acceptability of these translations, the final chapter consists of an empirical study into the perceptions that native audiences have of selected characters. Overall, we are able to conclude that the translation of style is a resource that has been exploited successfully for some of the characters of the corpus, and that it is a feature that can be further applied to similar fantasy films. We nevertheless acknowledge the importance of the genre, fantasy and animation, in creating a desirable situation where distance from reality allows for variation to create meanings that are distinct from their social context, which is the key to their translatability.

This thesis offers a close study of a wide range of films made between 1989 and 2005, which offer an insight into life in eastern Germany since unification. The principal focus is on the emergence of an east German identity, which, sixteen years since unification, continues to stimulate academic interest but which has seldom been explored in terms of contemporary film. East German identity is considered in its historical and cultural contexts, and with reference to three related issues - Heimat, memory and nostalgia. Having assessed the GDR's attempt to forge an identity and the debate surrounding a separate post-GDR identity, I move on to discuss the films, which are organised and analysed thematically. Drawing on social political studies, cultural theory and archival material, I consider the representation of provincial communities in the popular sentimental Heimat narratives of the early nineties and the period's sober social-critical films, which offer a corrective to the nostalgic impulses of the former. In the chapter that follows, I address the effects of unification on the urban population (principally that of Berlin), and turn to the east Germans' controversial celebration of the GDR past in the final chapter. The analysis of the films concludes that a new east German identity has emerged, one that involves an awkwardly articulated movement, whereby the east Germans face the future whilst simultaneously looking backwards. In some films, this leads to the resurgence of a localised community that celebrates the values of an imagined past, whether of a romanticised, a historical vision of German, or of an idealised GDR. In others, a yearning for the past hinders individuals' arrival in the present. The films, I conclude, ultimately demonstrate the continuation of an east German particularism that resists and problematises true integration between east and west.

This thesis examines the understanding of the contemporary Japanese horror film genre in the UK, taking into account the effects that the specificities of the UK cross-cultural context have upon audiences’ meaning-making. Analysis mainly revolves around six films selected based upon frequency of mention by participants: Ring (Nakata, 1998), Audition (Miike, 1999), Ju-on: The Grudge (Shimizu, 2004), Dark Water¬ (Nakata, 2002), Battle Royale (Fukusaku, 2000) and Ichi the Killer (Miike, 2001). Four focus groups and twenty individual interviews were conducted with individuals aged between eighteen and thirty years of age, all of whom self-identified as British. Responses were analysed in order to provide insight into three key areas: how UK audiences define the genre of contemporary Japanese horror film, the frameworks and processes they use in their definitions, and the meanings that they find in culturally-specific elements within these films. Both the Japanese and UK reception landscapes of contemporary Japanese horror film are outlined in order to provide necessary context. Ultimately, the research unearths a variety of interpretations of the contemporary Japanese horror film genre, which are reflective of a range of audience readings due in part to different levels of inter-cultural competence and personal preference. The study finds new channels of reception to be central in influencing transnational audience reception. Home viewing cultures and shifts from the original viewing context are further linked to the way in which audiences create experiences around the films, the influence of which lasts well beyond the point of reception. Alongside this, genre definition and film placements within those genres are shown to be an important factor in film reception, particularly in terms of influencing audience value judgments. Acknowledging the fragmented nature of the audience, hypotheses as to the development of an audience-led approach to transnational genre are outlined.

Sally Potter's film The Gold Diggers (1983) occupies an important place in the cultural politics of feminism. It poses the question of female subjectivity through a critical exploration of the structuring linearity of classic narrative film. Casting Julie Christie and Colette Laffont as co-stars, the film explores the relationship between the female spectator and two cinematic portraits: the over-exposed white female star and the under-represented black woman. Mobilised by their mutual desire for change, the white star escapes her pre-given status of screen goddess and the black woman adopts the role of investigative agent. Bringing together two women who have been divided by constructs of race, class and culture, Sally Potter is disrupting a prohibited story and making it possible within the parameters of feminist intervention in the cinema. Based on a detailed survey of the text, interviews and preproduction/production material located in hitherto unexamined archives, the thesis reconstructs for the first time an analytical script for The Gold Diggers. This enables the spectator to identify the film's episodic structure, montage system and camerawork and explore the innovative possibilities generated in response to the cinematic orchestration of voice, music, ambient sound and image. Although, at the level of content, The Gold Diggers draws on an Irigarayan critique of woman as commodity in patriarchal society, the film can be analysed using Julia Kristeva's models of revolutionary poetics and the analytic relation. With reference to Kristeva's theoretical precepts the thesis focuses on the new meanings generated by two women who are exploring the economic, political, psychic and cultural sources of their oppression. In Part I of the thesis, I examine the film's context within feminist cultural politics of the 1970s and address its strategic reworking of the conditions and conventions of twentieth century filmmaking; I give an introduction to and overview of the script; and I present an account of Kristeva's theories of subjectivity, signification and change. Part II consists of a succession of sharply focused segmental analyses of the text which demonstrate how the film contributes to and gives voice to the political revolution in female subjectivity and its representation through cultural practices.

The study investigates representations of masculinities in modern Mainland Chinese cinema from the early reform period to the year 2000. It argues that masculinities from this era are `on the run'; that is, male protagonists' ambiguous relationships with dominant discourses of nation, history and new formulations of subjectivity cause them either to flee from Maoist collective identity categories or more actively to move towards discourses of the sovereignty of the individual brought into China with the `opening up' policies enacted after the Chairman's death. The social and cultural upheavals represented in these films create an atmosphere of uncertainty in which little is solid or settled: for example, although filmmakers may represent their male protagonists rushing from ideas of Maoist manhood, these ambitions and identity figurations, active in the public imagination for so long, still structure male identity, and even male rebellion, acting as reins pulling at the individual agency male filmmakers may try so hard to trace on screen. The result is a recent history of representation in which male characters stand as symbols for their nation's central dilemma, as it wavers between a collective past and an unknown (both exciting and threatening) future. Whereas images of women have been analysed (especially those in the Fifth Generation cinema of the 1980s and 1990s), their male counterparts on the Chinese cinema screen have been largely ignored. This study redresses this imbalance and interprets the representation of men on screen through gender theory, cultural studies, and sources on Chinese society. The main chapters of the study concentrate on versions or expressions of masculinities, reflecting a society that has expressed its revolutionary aims through human models. The introduction to each chapter provides a contextualisation of the manner in which masculinities have been configured in other contemporary representational fields and will explain the relevance of the discussed ideas of masculinity in China's recent past. This study contributes both to conceptions of film and gender in China, and will widen the scope of cross-cultural theorisations of masculinities.

Despite receiving little academic attention throughout most of their history, film festivals have become the ‘natural’ background were most world cinema films are assessed both in terms of their artistic value and their potential for international consumption. Based on their cultural prestige, their crowd-gathering ability and hierarchical dynamics festivals create a multilayered filtering system that determines the varying artistic reputations of films and filmmakers as they travel from one event to another. However, the economic interests and geopolitical biases embedded in the Euro-American dominated system raise challenging questions about festivals’ criteria of artistic quality and supposedly objective ability to map world cinema. While festivals have become strategic regulators of world cinema traffic they affect both the commercial possibilities of individual Latin American films in global markets and the interpretive frameworks through which world cinema is assessed and understood. Using a theoretical framework drawn from the discipline of sociology of art, this research uses the concept of the ‘film festival world’ to analyse the international reception of Latin American cinemas as part of a cultural and industrial process of selection of the ‘best’ films from the region. First, it examines the film festival phenomenon in terms of its interaction with the global film industry and the marketing of film products for foreign audiences. Second, it analyses the international historical reception of key Latin American films from the expansion of the film festival circuit in the 1940s. Thirdly, it studies how contemporary films from the region continue to be assessed and interpreted across the film festival world in accordance with contingent notions of quality and well-established auteurist models. Thus, this thesis argues that the ‘Latin American cinema’ brand has been defined in close connection with the contingent ideas and practices of the film festival world, becoming an interpretive framework that enables the international positioning of cinemas from the region both as cultural artefacts and commercial products.

This thesis proposes to examine the production of sensory realism in world cinema by using as case studies the cinemas of Carlos Reygadas (Mexico), Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan) and Gus Van Sant (US). These cinemas are bound together through the hyperbolic application of the long take, which promotes a sensory viewing experience anchored in duration and the pure phenomenological presence of animate and inanimate matter. The theoretical underpinnings of the project are laid out in the Introduction, which addresses the alleged demise of realism in light of the emergence of digital technology and provides an overview of the ways the realist style has been historically theorised as connected to the sensory character of the cinematic experience. It further investigates the main aesthetic principles governing contemporary realist cinema and proposes a theorisation of its distinctive sensory mode of address. The thesis is divided into three different parts, which focus separately on each of the aforementioned filmmakers and their distinct realist projects, with emphasis given on their political impact and social significance. Part I is dedicated to Carlos Reygadas’s oeuvre, which, indebted to the transcendental cinemas of Tarkovsky, Bresson and Dreyer, complicates spirituality through a quasi-scientific take on materiality and carnality. Tsai Ming-liang is the subject of Part II, which examines his cinema’s auteurist, ultra-reflexive realist approach as recycling an aesthetics of the everyday in film through a focus on the sheer physicality of domestic spaces and the physiology of a grotesque body. Part III investigates Gus Van Sant’s recent incursion into an experimental-realist style as producing sensory explorations of mental processes of perception in line with the American avant-garde cinema ‘visionary’ tradition. The Conclusion contextualises and evaluates the aesthetic and political contribution of these cinemas as perpetuating, and reconfiguring, cinematic realism.

This thesis examines the understanding of the Middle Ages among the UK public and the impact that popular big-budget films which depict the period have on that understanding. Three films released between 2000 and 2009 are chosen for detailed study, their selection being determined by success at the UK box office as a measure of popularity: Lord of the Rings, Return of the King (Jackson, 2003), Kingdom of Heaven (Scott, 2005) and Beowulf (Zemeckis, 2007). Ten focus group interviews were conducted with nineteen participants, all between eighteen and twenty-six years of age, none of whom had studied the Middle Ages at GCSE level (age 14-16) or higher. In these groups, participants discussed their knowledge of the Middle Ages, were shown a film, and then discussed what they had seen. Participants were asked open-ended interview questions to encourage them to respond in their own terms and define what was important to them. As a result, topics ranged widely. In preliminary discussions, participants discussed how they understood the period, their academic, experiential and pop-culture sources of knowledge, their definitions of the similar terms ‘medieval’ and ‘Middle Ages’ and also their ideas about medieval culture, religion, warfare and crusade. After the films, participants discussed what they had seen usually in the context of what they already knew, sometimes constructing false memories of what they had seen which fit with their previous knowledge. Often they used the language of historical veracity to criticise the film for other related reasons (like poor filmmaking or inappropriate accents). They found support for many of their historical misconceptions in the films, but, rather than accepting all they saw as historical truth, they engaged in a complex critical discourse with what they were shown. The findings of this thesis have implications for medieval (and medievalism) studies, public history, and for the delivery of history in primary, secondary and higher education.