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This research is concerned with the power imbalance between filmmakers and participants and with exploring filmic strategies to challenge gender stereotypes often found in war films. I adopt a practice-led methodology which consists of editing and screening the 60-minute documentary film We Were There, in collaboration with the Prisons Memory Archive and its participants, and of writing a critical reflection of this process. The findings show that sharing authorship and authority with participants offer them control over the creation and re-contextualisation of their stories and turn them into active agents in the meaning-making process. As a result, this collaborative framework can potentially minimise risks such as re-traumatisation or misrepresentation, offer a sense of validation and acknowledgment of people’s life experiences and present different learning opportunities for participants. For filmmakers, working collaboratively with participants enables the creation of an ethical, transparent research and that contains adequate representation of people’s life stories. This is paramount in places where people have been over-researched and misrepresented, such as Northern Ireland. However, collaborative frameworks also have limitations: they can be more time-consuming than firstly presumed, can blur roles because of the close relationships and may not necessarily guarantee an equal sharing of tasks. The findings also demonstrate that when women have the opportunity to frame their own stories through a collaborative media project and when this project has a sensitivity to gender, the gap between media representations and women’s plural lived experiences are more likely to be addressed on screen and in off-screen discussions. This research offers two original contributions: it proposes an ethical and sensitive model of filmmaking/research where all parties involved in it invest in and are rewarded by the process; and brings to the public a relatively unknown multi-faceted portrayal of the women’s experiences of the Maze and Long Kesh Prison.

This thesis provides a comparative textual, aesthetic, and thematic analysis of self-representation in a selection of films and installations produced in France by three film-makers whose backgrounds and approach to the subject varies: the installation artist, Sophie Calle, the experimental film-maker, Vincent Dieutre, and the documentary film-maker, Marianne Otero. It examines ways in which their films and installations are characterised by certain recurring themes and aesthetic strategies despite their apparent differences. The first chapter contrasts the traditions of literary and pictorial selfrepresentation (autobiography, diary, self-portrait, and essay) with the blurring of such distinct categories in cinema and the visual arts. In the following chapters, a comparative analysis between the three artists points to a recurring representation of a questioning, split, and scattered Self. As a result, a sense of constant in-between-ness emerges, and the protagonists’ systematic spatial dislocations are not merely geographic and physical but also temporal and mental. The aesthetic constructions aptly reflect their interrogation about their place in the world in that the cinematic balance between motion and stillness aptly underscores the fundamental paradox of simultaneous permanence and change, which characterises identity. The abstraction associated with figurations of loss and absence contrasts with a sense of nowness, which is reinforced by the prominence of the body on screen, which harks back to more concrete issues and calls for a reflection on theories of affect, the Figural, sensation. Most importantly, the bodies’ physicality draws attention to the plasticity of the medium, and the fact that the body on screen is also that of the artist is especially effective. Self-representation is a mise en abyme par excellence and cannot be envisaged outside the film-makers’ aesthetic reflection upon their practice for their modes of self-representation rely heavily on the specificity of the medium used. Finally, it draws on recurrent patterns, which simultaneously reflect the rituals of self-representation and the cinematic process: passage, repetition, and transformation, through figures of intermediality, re-enactment, or intertextuality. Yet, equally important are figurations of the place and limits of the Self in relation to the outer space of the Other; hence the significance of margins, thresholds, liminality, in which the question of gender is also central.

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This thesis examines how film contributes to the collection of visual images and narratives that enable a community to imagine itself as a nation. It· focuses on three such communities, the Armenians, the Kurds, and the Palestinians, who have been, or remain, stateless. It argues that, in the face of external threats, stateless nations and their diasporas require repeated re-imagining to ensure their continued existence. A starting point for the study is that cinema is an important site for this reimagining in the way that it continually highlights concerns with national identity. Using a diverse collection of film in each case, the analysis identifies national themes, key symbols, and formal structures employed by film-makers to depict these nations. The films are categorised by means of the concept of 'cinema regarding nations', that is they are specifically about the respective nations. Through this categorisation, the thesis contributes to national cinema studies by facilitating the critical examination of a body of work which otherwise is fragmented. The study is comparative and uses a combination of textual and contextual analysis that enables the films from each case to be related to their political and social circumstances. The cases represent nations with arguably widely different origins, from the 'historic' Armenians to the more 'modem' Palestinians. Thus, the thesis also contributes to the debate in studies of national identity and nationalism between those who argue the nation is a modem political invention and those who argue that cultural roots are essential for the formation and persistence of nations. It reveals the relationship of the historical processes of nation formation and the persistence of national identity over time to their representation in film.

My PhD thesis proposes to look at film adaptation through a concept derived from ekphrastic discourse in order to delineate a critical space, or ‘ekphrastic third space’, opened up by the process of adaptation. It raises questions about the semiotic dialogue between (moving) image and text, cinema and literature, and how that dialogue is enriched by reconfiguring traditional notions of ekphrasis as ‘reverse ekphrasis’. The chosen case studies - film adaptation of classical myths - reconnect with the origins of ekphrasis as a rhetorical figure, in an attempt to link it with cinema's 'mythical' dimension. The concept of reverse ekphrasis is mediated through a hermeneutic theory of translation which, 1 argue, offers a way of countering overly instrumentalist or transpositional, semiotic readings of film adaptations. The hermeneutic model allows the critic to see all texts as inherently unstable and dialectical; thus opening the way to seeing film adaptations of classical myths as a way of revealing and/or problematising the conditions of production. The ekphrastic third space is therefore not defined by its polarity but by the interlacing occurring in-between; its premise is founded on an unpredictable process’vyhich adjusts itself as a territory for creativity and critical thinking, not on a finality based on a logic of containment. The image-text relationship is thus envisaged not only as a relationship between the said and the seen but between the unsaid and the unseen. The outcome of such an approach is twofold: the process is both mechanical and organic, hermeneutic and poetical, which implies a constant concern for the ambivalence of signs. In that sense, the workings, or illogical ‘logic’, of reverse ekphrasis concur with a cinema of signs that opens up a discursive space on the transformative process from words into moving images and on its conditions of production.

This thesis examines the localised nature of cinemas and cinema-going between the end of the Second World War and the early 1960s. It provides a comparative analysis of Belfast and Sheffield, two similarly sized industrial cities in the United Kingdom. By following the principles of the ‘new cinema history’, it focuses on cinemas as social spaces and investigates the extent that residents of these two cities constituted distinct cinema-going communities. The thesis argues that place was as great a determinant of cinema-going practices as other factors such as age, class and gender. UK cinema attendance peaked in 1946 with 1.6 billion recorded admissions. In the 1950s, television ownership, population shifts, changes in leisure habits and greater affluence led cinema attendance to decline rapidly. Admissions fell to 395 million in 1962 and many cinemas closed down. While the cinema continued to play a key role in the social life of UK citizens, their engagement with it changed and the composition of the audience altered significantly. This thesis traces this period of decline and examines the social practices of cinema-going, audience preferences, exhibition practices, the impact of television ownership and the pattern of cinema closures. The use of a range of quantitative and qualitative sources, such as local newspapers, box-office statistics, tax records and oral history testimony, provides new evidence on the diversity of cinema-going experiences and the decline in admissions. The emphasis on local sources shows how changes in cinemas and cinema-going were experienced and perceived in local contexts. This thesis expands the geographical range of cinema-going studies and contrasts experiences of cinema attendance in different parts of the United Kingdom.

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This thesis explores the use and influence of painting in post-1960 European cinema as it relates to a host of reflexive practices which, through either their adoption or rejection, help to define “modernist” film. The formal and thematic presence of painting in the films of key European <i>auteurs </i>(Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Peter Greenaway, Raul Ruiz, Jacques Rivette and Werner Herzog, among others) is analysed with reference to a number of theoretical perspectives, including but not limited to, those provided by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of art and perception, André Bazin’s realist film theory, and Clement Greenberg’s neo-formalist art theory. Within a post-1960 context, a basic distinction is made between cinematically reflexive and <i>a</i>-reflexive/transparent films, as the products of what is defined as “<i>seeing-with cinema</i>” filmmaking and “<i>seeing-through cinema</i>” filmmaking, respectively. Among the films of each general type that substantially incorporate painting (in the form of the representation of individual works and/or as a subject matter), an analogy is drawn between their dominant reflexive or <i>a</i>-reflexive tendencies and, firstly, the choice of art works or styles cited, and secondly, the differing ways in which this art is presented on screen. This analogy is tested via an in-depth study of art in the prototypically reflexive films of Jean-Luc Godard (as well as the multi-faceted relations between Godard’s mid-to-late 1960’s cinema and American Pop art painting), followed by an analysis of the representation of painting in Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinema, as it’s <i>a</i>-reflexive stylistic counter-point.

The purpose of this thesis is to insert the character Ze do Caixao in the international horror film tradition. This will be done by investigating the characteristics of horror cinema in Brazil in the light consecrated examples of horror films taken from German Expressionism and classic horror from Universal Studios. This work will engage with six films produced by director Jose Mojica Marins in which the character Ze do Caixao appears: A Meia Noite Levarei sua Alma (1964), Esta Noite Encarnarei no teu Cadaver (1967) Ideo/ogia (1968), 0 Despertar da 8esta (1970), Delfrios de um Anormal (1978) and Encarna~ao do Demonto (2008). The work presented here examines the historical conditions that produced an icon like Ze do caixao. The films are read against different backgrounds with the aim of seeing how the character was created and developed within his original context. This thesis analyses the director's associations with circo mambembe and its influence on his artistic identity and film aesthetic, his alternative methods of production and marketing strategies, and the symbiotic relation between 'creator' and 'creature'. It also discusses the film-maker's metaphorical representation of Brazilian culture and reality which employed elements from the codified universe of early horror films and Gothic literature to respond to soclohistorical events taking place in Brazil from the mid-1960s. Close readings of Ze do Calxao's films demonstrate how the portrayal of violent scenes is linked to torture practices during the 1964 - 1978 period of military regime in Brazilian history. Moreover, it investigates Ze do Caixao's transposition into media such as comic books, television and literatura de cordel, emphasising how the character's transition into other media was crucial for the consolidation of his fame, but prevented the development of his saga. These chapters also discuss how the emergence of horror comics in Brazil during the 1950s may have contributed to the development of a character like Ze do Caixao. This case study provides an outline of possible characteristics of the horror film genre in Brazil and a framework of analysis for future research in the area. As film-maker and character enter the global market by means of subtitled releases of the 'Coffin Joe' films, these films become consumption items and the identification of certain specific cultural, national and historical features in the films become less discernible. This thesis addresses these cross-cultural matters by highlighting Brazilian socio-cultural elements.