This thesis examines what intermedia meant for artists and critics in 1960s-70s Japan in order to investigate the intermediality of Japanese expanded cinema. While demonstrating the ability for mediums to interact, intermedia highlights the particularities of a medium through the process of juxtaposition. The historical theorisation of medium interactions are outlined in Part I, which addresses the distinctiveness of intermedia from others and provides an overview on the ways Japanese artists and critics responded to intermedia in the 1960s. While proposing a discourse on medium interactions pre-existed intermedia's arrival as a term in Japan in the form of synthesis arts (sōgō geijutsu), I will delineate the meaning of intermedia in 1960s Japan using three events that incorporated the word in its titles: Intermedia at Runami Gallery; Intermedia Art Festival; and Cross Talk Intermedia. Performances with projections, projections onto bodies and projections onto balloons are analysed in Part II as recurring tendencies in Japanese expanded cinema to demonstrate the ways the potential for performative action inherent in the apparatus of film projection was accentuated through staging an interaction with performance. Seeking alternative surfaces for projection, the works revealed the amorphous qualities of light projection usually concealed in the experience of film. Part III discusses relations between film, audience and space that are established in the spatial projections of Japanese expanded cinema. I will analyse film emancipated from the prescribed codes of the cinema space in the pavilions of Expo '70, psychedelic shows in underground discotheques and early film installations, to discuss how film projection participated in the critical turn to environment (kankyō) in Japanese contemporary art. Through its historical overview, the thesis will show the intermediality of Japanese expanded cinema was demonstrated by its performative and spatial approaches to film projection that staged an opportunity to compare film with other mediums.

This thesis examines Walter Benjamin’s film aesthetics within the framework of his ‘anthropological-materialist’ project. His writings on film are dispersed among essays, notes and letters and may appear at first sight to be an incoherent collection of thoughts on film. However, I will try to argue that they form part of the same philosophical and political project as his ‘anthropological materialism.’ Thus, these writings sought, first, to analyse the transformation of the human senses brought about by the appearance of film technology; and secondly, to envisage the possibility of undoing the alienation of the senses in modernity through that very same technology in order to, eventually, create a collective body (Kollectivleib) out of the audience. This project dates back to Benjamin’s anthropological texts from the early 1920s and was central to texts such as One-Way Street, the Surrealism essay and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.’ The reconfiguration of aesthetics as aisthēsis that takes place in the latter text is analysed as forming part of this project, in which Benjamin is concerned with the transformation of the human body according to its interaction with technology. From this anthropological-materialist perspective, I address from the second chapter onwards the film figures—directors, actors, characters—and films that most concerned Benjamin. Thus, I analyse his writings on Soviet film with regard to the use and conception of technology in the country; the impact of the bungled reception of technology in Germany upon films from the Weimar Republic and National Socialism, especially in their representation of mass movements; the rehabilitation of allegory in the twentieth century with Charlie Chaplin and the possibility of undoing the numbing of the senses through his gestic and allegorical performance; and, finally, Mickey Mouse as a representative of the new barbarism that Benjamin advocated within his critique of bourgeois humanism.

This thesis examines how the term ‘video-essay’ or ‘film essay’ has gained particular momentum in contemporary art practice and theoretical debates throughout the past twenty years. Speficially, I examine the work of Ursula Biemann and María Ruido. The thesis plots how the ‘genre’ is considered to have emerged through a post-structuralist framework. Feminist and post-colonial praxis initiated an important critique of the documentary project from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Much of this criticism sought to re-ignite the active qualities latent in the technologies of lens-based mediums: qualities considered to be hidden, or dealt with uncritically in the documentary paradigm. A focus on construction, and a distrust of the ‘reflective’ capacities of the camera to record the real gave way to the mode of the ‘fictive’ and an interest in ‘discursive formations’. Fictive devices were implemented in order to give attention to maligned, purposefully obscured, or not-yet written histories, operating in place of absent ‘official’ documentation. This thesis argues that the term video or film essay is better conceptualised through a broader, yet nuanced enquiry of the documentary as it has unfolded throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The case studies in this thesis are part of a wider array of works that privilege, once more, the recording capacity of the camera (both analogue and digital), its social purpose and thus potential strategy to enforce change. I explore how these practices straddle, and re-kindle the familiar debates around utility and formal reflexivity in the ‘documentary turn’ of critical art production in the twenty-first century. The chosen themes of the works under analysis speak to the tension ever-present between form and content, text and context. Here the camera is used to render visible the concealed heterogeneous strands of labour. I evaluate how this practice is specifically apt for exploring the dialectic of waged/un-waged labour, undertaken historically by women. The works consider how female ‘migrant’ labourers are most ‘useful’ and ‘profitable’ to neoliberal capitalism. The manner in which bodies interact with the abstract flows of deregulated capital and electronic communication, has contributed to a need for re-cognition of the social world. Artists aiming to understand the power of the visual under these reordered circumstances have had to negotiate the vicissitudes of truth once more. I argue that the capacity of the document to provide knowledge and to track lived realities, has made it a dependable and useful form once more. Its contentious past is and must be acknowledged, as such debates have re-written our understandings of what the document is, should, and might be.

This thesis investigates the articulation between filmmaking using the cameras of personal mobile phones, and the distribution and exhibition of filmmaking at film festivals devised to support and promote its development. Covering a research period between 2010 and 2013, I analyse an emergent phenomenon using a mixed methodology over five major chapters. Following a discussion of the ontology of phone filmmaking and its historical situatedness, I establish terminology for each major element of cell cinema. Bridging features of contemporary digital filmmaking with the entertainment spectacles of early cinema history, the phone film privileges visual immediacy, urging genred and experimental presentations of limited narrative complexity. Notably, the thesis indicates that phone films incorporate technologically innovative aspects of autobiography by filmmakers. What are characterised as the ambulatory and movie selfie categories evidence contemporary representations of movement within phone filmmaking. By updating Walter Benjamin’s (1936) ideas of the flâneur, and Michel de Certeau’s (1984) writing about the physicality of walking, the thesis draws on the socio-cultural use of mobile technologies and physical, participatory engagement with the filmmaking process. Incorporating an ethnographic study of international cell cinema film festivals, the thesis interrogates phenomenological aspects of interrelated phenomena. I discuss how phone filmmakers, spectators and others experience their participation in the construction and dissemination of intercultural, shared discourse. Cell cinema’s cultural signifiers cross or subvert perceived geographical and economic boundaries, urging a reassessment of Western or Euro-centric philosophical traditions. The thesis investigates how cell cinema enables expressions of the self, delineates notions of identity, and communicates various aspects of socially determined meaning. Therefore, cell cinema engagement incorporates the sharing of gifts of phone films that foreground bodily movement and the ‘everyday aesthetic’ of the cell cinema gaze, involving the engagement with ‘knowledge communities’, and ‘culturalising events’ within festival environments.

German unification caused a seismic shock within Berlin and this has been reflected in the studies on the city which have been released over the last two decades. In particular, Berlin has become synonymous with chaotic urban renewal, with academic discourse casting the city as a location in transition. Yet, as society moves on from the 25th Anniversary of the fall of the Wall, contemporary Berlin bears little resemblance to this image of a work-in-progress city. Therefore, my aim in this thesis is to transcend recent academic debates and explore the ‘new’ city which has begun to emerge. To achieve this, I investigate the relationship which exists between Berlin and cinema. Indeed, throughout my analysis I offer an original discussion of Berlin’s contemporary cinematic image by focussing on the manner in which branding is being used to promote the city’s transformed urban space and societal structures. I start by demonstrating how the activities and marketing efforts of the city’s film professionals avoid the stereotypes of the past to promote a wholly-positive image of Berlin as a hedonistic and well-equipped global media city. This view then informs my subsequent analysis of contemporary Berlin-set films. Significantly, although these films also show Berlin to be a pleasure-seeking hub for young creatives, they project a more critical vision of the city. Above all, these films highlight the problematic dark-side which many of the city’s inhabitants have discovered to be part of Berlin’s new found global media city status. As a result, my in-depth discussion of the city’s cinematic brand demonstrates that, whilst Berlin may no longer be cast as a location in flux on screen, the city’s transformation into a creative hotspot for international pleasure-seekers has created a complex and challenging reality for many of Berlin’s inhabitants.

This thesis examines the portrayal of gender in a selection of feature films by the German filmmaker Alexander Kluge. These films are Abschied von Gestern, released in 1966, Der starke Ferdinand, released in 1976 and Die Macht der Gefühle, released in 1983. It is argued throughout this work that despite previous critical reception which has seen Kluge's attitude to gender in his films as patriarchal, they can in fact be shown as progressive in gender terms, and even to fit with some feminist aims. In the Introduction to this thesis, the critical reception to Kluge's films is historicised by discussing and re-evaluating the feminist credentials of his 1973 film Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin, before the evidence of a somewhat feminist viewpoint in Kluge's theory is re-examined. The first chapter then analyses how Kluge uses words and language, as well as discourse in Abschied von Gestern to both show the construction of patriarchal power and how this power can be subverted and challenged by women in this film. The second chapter goes on to discuss how Kluge's presentation of gendered bodies in Der starke Ferdinand undermines patriarchal norms, gender stereotypes, and the ability of men who represent patriarchy to be taken seriously. The third chapter examines what impact Kluge's theory concerning emotions has on his portrayal of gender relations in Die Macht der Gefühle, arguing that he appears to give his optimum approach to emotions to women and those characters who are in non-conventional relationships. Throughout all of these chapters it is argued that Kluge consistently challenges institutions of conventional gender norms, and supports female victims of patriarchy, showing that his films have the potential to be read as more progressive in terms of gender than previous commentators have argued them to be.

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The research started by asking the question: "How is the meaning and memory of home communicated through the films of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky?" The meaning this question was seeking entailed elements such as architectural experience, perception, memories and dreams, and the research thus enquired film's mechanisms for rendering legible such ineffable concepts, with a focus on the two particular case studies of Tarkovsky and Bergman. Building upon claims that film has the ability to communicate direct experiences of lived space, the thesis peruses theoretical intersecting findings that encircle the research quest: architecture and film, phenomenology, as well as other adjacent fields. The aim is to draw creative splices that outline an original view on the architectural experience of home, as read throughout the work and life of these two artists. Therefore, among the main outputs of the thesis was to rewrite the biographies of Bergman and Tarkovsky based on their spatial element, a recreated life-writing in which place gains a central role of life journeys and choices. From these reconsidered biographies, new understandings about home, dwelling and place attachment are drawn. The methodological aim of the study is to propose an architectural phenomenography (literally a writing of phenomena), a redefined view on architectural phenomenology that uses autobiographical film as a research tool to allow explorations on the concept of home. The established routes of phenomenological inquiry make use of linguistic material in order to read and write descriptions and in such a manner to reach the essence of phenomena. By replacing the majority of the linguistic research data with audiovisual material provided by the films, the novelty of the present approach lies in considering moving images as portent of inscribed phenomenological descriptions, legible through film viewing. The essential factors for selecting Bergman and Tarkovsky as the case-study filmmakers was the strength of their works to communicate the space of home in its lived form. Due to this peculiar quality, the present study looked at these works attempting to trace a method of writing spatial experience on the imponderable surface of film. Throughout the thesis, this method was termed as architectural phenomenography, and it was defined as a communicative medium through which, once spatial experiences have been written on film, they silently await a proper deciphering. This study therefore strives to answer the silent call of these experiential moving images and to disclose them as categories of architectural experiences.

This thesis explores contemporary fantasy horror films from Mexico and Spain in relation to the politics of historicity, trauma and national identity. Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's international success offers a renovated approach to this genre. A critical evaluation of his films reveals an interest in employing supernatural creatures and events to address cultural and historical issues, such as the impact of globalisation in Mex~co or the effects of the Civil War in Spain. Whether a vampire, a ghost or a faun, the presence of monsters in del Toro's films does not aim to present a fiction that escapes from reality, but rather to assess critically the ideological and discursive frameworks that constitute such reality in both countries. My research considers the psychoanalytical definition of fantasy to be ideal for this analysis. As a setting of desire, fantasy possesses a clear narrative structure that determines subjectivity. The projection of desire can be established in film terms, where the presence of the supernatural reinforces fantasy's ambivalent feature. On the one hand, it reveals discursive inconsistencies that determine the subject and its reality, and exposes a void of horror and lack of signification. On the other hand, fantasy re-structures national and historical significations around a desire for trauma. By analysing del Toro's Mexican and Spanish productions and a selection of more recent films, this thesis establishes how the psychical structure of fantasy determines a propelling narrative of desire in the fantasy film genre. The incorporation of Gothic and horror elements in these films also provides evidence of the uncanniness of the discourse of identity. The function of fantasy, then, ideologically sutures the constitution of an historical traumatic past by means of the supernatural and the monstrous, which work as mediating devices for the discourse of national identity.