This thesis aims to study gender representations in Thai queer cinema. It is organized into an Introduction followed by four chapters and a conclusion. The Introduction charts the development of the film industry and representations on queer cultures in the country, arguing that the development of Thai queer cinema is P8rt of the advance of the Thai film industry. The representations of queer characters in these films are influenced by specific socio-cultural contexts regarding gender perceptions in Thai society. Chapter One discusses The Last Song (1986), Tortured Love (1987) and I Am a Man (1987) in terms of their representations of history and queer culture in Thailand. Chapter Two analyses The Iron Ladies (2000) and The Iron Ladies II: Before and After (2003) as to how these films use comedy to represent their queer characters in positive ways. The examination of different perceptions of the films by audiences from different sociocultural contexts shows that perceptions of queerness vary according to the context. Chapter Three explores Beautiful Boxer (2003), using Jay Prosser's work on transsexual gender embodiment and Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. Chapter Four examines the avant-garde film elements in Tropical Malady (2004), using Victor Turner's concept of liminality. Tropical Malady demonstrates that when social norms are not constructed, individuals are not yet divided into any particular group: they are neither majority nor minority. The conclusion demonstrates that Thai mainstream queer films are not made for political or aesthetic reasons but for marketing purposes and for mainstream audiences. These films ask for understanding from society rather than promoting any political agenda. The film characters mainly represent their gender identity through gender performance rather than physical essences. Throughout, the actual text and surrounding contexts of these films show that gender representations are not stable but changeable over time, place and subjective positioning.

Slasher sequels, such as those in the Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street series, are often criticised for their derivative processes of narrative construction, which are widely perceived to sacrifice development and complexity for the sake of repetition and formula. Thus, although scholars such as Carol Clover, Ian Conrich, and Tony Williams have examined these films from a range of psychoanalytical and sociocultural perspectives, academics have generally avoided engaging in processes of close formal analysis. Where such analyses do exist, in Vera Dika’s structural study of the slasher film, for example, the research tends to be geared toward interrogating the generic properties of the films, rather than the properties associated with their status as film sequels. As a result, there is a general lack of understanding about the narrative construction of the slasher sequel, leaving the dominant critical assumptions to proliferate largely unchallenged. However, for theorists such as David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, working within the domain of ‘historical poetics,’ even the most conventionalised systems of narrative operate according to complex constructive processes, often perceptible only to those willing to engage in close scrutiny. The reluctance to engage with slasher sequels as sequels is indicative of a wider tendency within film studies, where the practice of cinematic sequelisation has traditionally remained beyond the purview of academic analysis. In recent years, however, writers including Stuart Henderson have begun to re-examine the sequel from new critical perspectives, drawing on both historical poetics and Gerard Genette’s concept of hypertextuality to offer fresh insights into the processes involved in constructing a system of narrative continuity over multiple films. With hypertextuality and historical poetics demonstrating the potential to provide new perspectives on the film sequel, this study draws on both approaches to create a combined framework of analysis capable of answering the question: is there any evidence to suggest that the processes of narrative construction in slasher sequels are more complex than previously acknowledged? Using this framework to engage in a formal analysis of the Halloween films reveals a network of dynamic narrative processes operating beneath the conventionalised surface of the series. By subjecting the original story to extension, expansion, elaboration, and modification, each Halloween sequel serves to enhance, complicate, or compromise the coherence of the narrative system as a whole, and, in doing so, prompts the continual reconceptualisation and recontextualisation of previously-established information. In this way, the processes of narrative construction within the Halloween series can be seen to demonstrate complexity at both a formal and cognitive level. These findings suggest that there is evidence to challenge not only the existing critical assumptions about the Halloween sequels, but also the critical assumptions pertaining to other sequels in the slasher sub-genre. With the sequels in the Halloween series generally representative of those in other slasher series, sharing many narrative properties and drawing similar criticisms for many of the same perceived deficiencies, the study concludes that the array of dynamic narrative processes shown to operate in the Halloween sequels is also likely to be present in other slasher sequels. In drawing this conclusion, the study ultimately establishes that there is evidence to suggest that the processes of narrative construction in slasher sequels are more complex than previously acknowledged. By expanding the existing understanding of slasher sequels in this way, this study succeeds in making an original contribution to knowledge, serving to advance both the established field of research surrounding the slasher sub-genre and the emergent field of research surrounding the film sequel.

The project investigates the 1950s Quatermass films (The Quatermass Experiment [1955], Quatermass II [1957]) produced by Hammer, within their production contexts. Despite the assertion that Hammer horror productions were ‘initiated by the enormous commercial success’ (Hutchings, 1993: 25) of the Quatermass films, they have not been afforded the critical recognition they merit. Reassessment of the cultural importance of the Quatermass phenomenon is needed. This study addresses critical discourses on British film and the fantastic. As part of addressing the neglect within current scholarship of the Quatermass films, the privileging of the realist aesthetic within film criticism is discussed as part of the context for this neglect. While there has been increased interest in horror and science fiction in more recent writings and hitherto neglected films have been re-discovered, the Quatermass films have not enjoyed comparable critical space. My study goes on to illustrate this gap in the literature on Quatermass, which this study redresses. An underlying theme throughout the thesis is hybridity. Moving from discussion of how the hybrid text might cause difficulties for critical discourse that seeks finite definitions of film categories and an emphasis on realism within the film text, I address the hybrid within the production contexts and thematic content of the Quatermass films. How does the British/American co-production inform the films and contemporaneous responses to them? How is the hybrid configured within the text; as something troubling, to be feared, or is the response more complex with the potential for more positive readings?Discussion of the hybrid is combined with the fantastic and the uncanny, the emphasis being on the subversive potential of these modes and how they have potential to de-stabilise the “real”, and, by extension, dominant ideologies. How might hybridity, the fantastic and the uncanny problematise concepts of identity and “nation”? Concepts of “nation” and “national identity” will be emphasised as contested categories, contingent and inherently hybrid. How are these questions of identity mapped out within and through the Quatermass films and beyond?

This thesis focuses on the work of Dario Argento, a filmmaker whose cinematic style and use of technology have helped popularise Italian Horror both domestically and internationally. Specifically, this analysis engages with Argento’s use of an art-historical repertoire within his cinema, namely the appropriation of architectural, pictorial, and sculptural references, and argues for their importance in terms of reading the main films that constitute my primary corpus. Existing research has only sporadically and superficially treated this area and no systematic survey has been undertaken. The purpose of my analysis is twofold. Firstly, I discuss how art-historical references are integrated into Argento’s oeuvre via copying and quotation, and how they function in the film texts in terms of colour, framing, and lighting. Secondly, I explore whether the iconographic and symbolic processes through which this art-historical repertoire is enacted form a strict bond with the film’s narrative texture. In doing so, my research delivers a broad range of analysis, from narrative to stylistic detail, through an intra-artistic methodological approach. My corpus comprises four different films spanning across Argento’s career: Profondo rosso (1975), Suspiria (1977), La sindrome di Stendhal (1996), and Il fantasma dell’Opera (1998). These films have been selected for two specific reasons. On the one hand, they are the ones containing the greatest number of artistic references. On the other hand, they take into consideration a variety of aesthetic qualities and narrative solutions that, combined together, provide an exhaustive overview of the director’s artistic imagination. Other films from Argento’s forty-year-long career are cited in relation to the aesthetic and thematic affinities with the primary corpus. Because of my intra-artistic approach, which takes in both Argento’s attention to aesthetic detail and to the synergy of the aesthetic and the narrative within a film through the art historical repertoire, I highlight a new aspect of the semantic, stylistic, and technical complexity of the director’s cinema in terms of influence, referentiality, and intertextuality.

This study focuses on the silent female characters in the new cinema of Turkey. Its main objective is to explore these characters in order to reveal the functions and formations of this newly emergent and frequently used female representational form after the mid-1990s. This study sought to investigate two central questions: what are the functions and operations of these silent characters, and why did this silent representational form emerge specifically in this time frame? My analyses demonstrate that the silent female characters always bear a function of instrumentality and expose, one way or another, a close association between point of view and discursive authority in the films studied. Furthermore, I suggested that the silence of female characters is a cinematic symptom of the on-going struggle over the disrupted orders of gender, nation and national memory due to an increase in thus-far silenced or marginalised voices in Turkey. I argued that the silent form also functions as an instrument to reveal crises in hegemonic power positions and becomes a battleground within a struggle for (re)obtaining a position of discursive authority in the realms of gender, nation and past. The silent form in itself becomes an instrument on the discursive level which enables a response to these crises in these three interconnected realms.

The work presented herein seeks to bring together two convergent strands of research in regards to audio-visual perception and sound in social space. It is through the study of cinematic reception, and in particular, the art of Foley that the text below constructs a framework within which to critically examine different, and sometimes connecting strands of thinking around perception, listening practice, audio-visual theory, sound-art and music. Through this analysis the text and projects described below seek to both critique and offer an extension of some of the dominant theories in relation to audio-vision. Notation is used as a concept in order to contextualise and problematise Matt’s own work and that of other artists in an attempt to offer a legitimate way with which to approach different strategies of working with sound and music. The accepted dominance of the visual in both film and in society more generally is not a purely cultural phenomenon, but a perceptual one too. The contention promoted below is that an exploration of the ways in which this perceptual phenomenon is mirrored in how we approach urban listening environments and the markets and mechanisms behind consumption can lead us to a broader understanding of the nexus between perceptual auditory space and sound in social space. Despite the importance of a problematising of a prioritising of the visual, the intention of this work is not to propose a counter-attack of aural cultures against the hegemony of an ocular-centric society, or any other modality. Rather, an exploration of how post-print culture affords artists working with sound and music new sets of possibilities, and to offer new models of interpretation for the experience of sound art, audio-visual installation and experimental music.

This thesis attempts to understand Chinese film director Jia Zhangke with the concept of “paradox.” Challenging the existing discussions on Jia Zhangke, which have been mainly centered around an international filmmaker to represent Chinese national cinema or an auteur to construct realism in post-socialist China, I focus on how he deals with the individual and the crowd to read through his oeuvre as “paradox.” Based on film text analysis, my discussion develops in two parts: First, the emergence of the individual subject from his debut feature film Xiao Wu to The World; and second, the discovery of the crowd from Still Life to his later documentary works such as Dong and Useless. The first part examines how the individual is differentiated from the crowd in Jia’s earlier films under the Chinese social transformation during the 1990s and 2000s. For his predecessors, the collective was central not only in so-called “leitmotif” (zhuxuanlü or propaganda) films to enhance socialist ideology, but also in Fifth Generation films as “national allegory.” However, what Jia pays attention to is “I” rather than “We.” He focuses on the individual, marginal characters, and the local rather than the collective, heroes, and the national. As Deleuze points out that “paradox is opposed to doxa” (good sense or common sense), the individual in Jia’s earlier films constructs a paradox against the collective doxa in Chinese film history. In the second part, the paradox is considered as a way for Jia’s filmmaking to address the crowd. Since his cinematic experiments in Still Life and Dong, he has developed his cinematic problematics around fiction/documentary, reality/fantasy, and diegesis/non-diegesis by making a series of documentaries. In doing so, Jia discovers that there are people who live outside his films. Challenging traditional filmic conventions, he reflects on his own filmmaking and strives to film the people for whom he might not be able to speak. In this way, Jia questions how the film medium can represent the unrepresentable and where the filmmaker should be positioned between the camera and the subjects to be filmed.

This thesis considers TV documentaries that feature transgender subjects and which have been broadcast in the UK between 1979 and 2010. Despite the growing popularity of such documentaries, very little critical attention has been given to them. This thesis offers an original investigation of these mainstream cultural items within the multi- and inter-disciplinarity of Transgender Studies. The thesis also contributes to other disciplines, particularly Popular Culture, Visual Culture and TV Studies. My thesis investigates specifically how the visual narratives and the knowledge produced by them contribute to the ways in which trans subjects form themselves between knowledge products. Such TV documentaries form a notably ‘popular’ route to obtaining trans knowledge – what it means to be trans or what trans is. I also consider how they utilise the visual as part of their performance as well as foreground the productivity or achievement of such knowledge and make explicit its ‘uses’. In this thesis I ask: What happens when we see trans? What trans do we see? And what does seeing trans do? I consider the relationship between ‘serious’, scientific documentary making and notions of respectability, legitimacy and normativity. I show how such a relationship has been compromised through the emergence of the infotainment documentary. I frame my thinking autoethnographically in order to gauge the receivership of trans knowledge by trans viewers. I offer my own textual and historical analysis of the knowledge products and have also carried out TV screenings of the documentaries, in order to draw on recorded discussions with small groups of trans viewers for my research. I consider how popular documentaries that feature trans subjects play their part in producing a trans public that circulates discourse, forms sociability and effects change and pursues productive exchanges out of, from and through trans knowledge.

This thesis explores first person films as platforms for producing alternative subjectivities within contemporary Turkey. Its central question is: “Considering its history and power structures, how do first person films address the limitations and potentials of forming diverse subjectivities within contemporary Turkey?” This question is addressed through a video diary practice and coupled with a theoretical inquiry. The video installation Of Dice and Men negotiates hegemonic identity politics in Turkey through moments of rupture and constant migration within my daily routines in London and Istanbul — both shaped by political violence. Migratory subjectivities are thought through Félix Guattari’s proposal of molecular subjectivities, which was fruitful for enacting such subjectivities in a geography where identity is largely monolithic. The video installation Of Dice and Men is thus born of negotiating hegemonic identity politics in Turkey as well as a conformist filmmaking industry. In terms theory, one persistent question was: “How can a filmmaking method with a strong history, theorized foremost for US and European contexts, be a platform for alternative (in Guattari’s words, molecular) forms of subjectivity reflective of the specificities of Turkey?” The thesis thus proposes an expansion of the history and theorizations of first person film, through Guattari’s notions of the molar and the molecular. To elaborate and probe the above problematic I discuss recent first person films and how they address subjectivisation through normative ideologies in Turkey, pertaining to two separate but intertwined spheres of identity formation. M.M. Arslan explores Kurdish-Turkish conflicts in I Flew You Stayed (2012), while Aykan Safoğlu’s Off-White Tulips (2013) explores queer subjectivity and migration. Within this focus are multiple aims: 1) mapping the limits, if not dangers, of imposing a single identity on the body politic of an entire geographical region; 2) outlining issues of subjectivity in contemporary Turkey; and 3) examining filmmakers who use first person narrators to challenge the hegemonic perspectives linked to the formation of modernity. I conclude with reflections on the construction of an author persona through my own filmmaking method in Of Dice and Men. Furthermore, presenting my work as an installation led to thinking through fluid subjectivities and reflecting on active modes of spectatorship. The installation thereby stands in a mutual questioning and expanding relationship to the written component of the thesis.

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