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Digital preservation is posing major challenges to audiovisual institutions. However, debates surrounding infrastructural sustainability and stewardship in relation to film heritage (FH) are still underdeveloped. In light of this, the thesis examines changes in external relationships and the internal processes of film heritage institutions (FHIs). The methods used are document analysis and elite interviews. The former allows investigation of the broad institutional climate in which FHIs operate. The latter allows analysis of the insights and values of established professionals who are key figures in policy formation. The findings of the thesis are structured in three blocks. Firstly, the institutional context. FHIs have been influenced by neoliberal cultural policies, in three main ways: (1) they are de facto asked to prioritise digital access over other activities; (2) they have been pushed towards collaborative provision to pursue economies of scale; (3) they have been pushed towards a more frequent use of public/private partnerships. Meanwhile, the relationships with other important institutional players (universities and the film industry), seem to remain substantially intact. Secondly, organisation. The rapid increase in preservation costs is not being met by public subsidy or other forms of income. Indeed, new economic resources are provided mainly to support digital access so that preservation solutions are, in most cases, temporary and fragmented initiatives. As far as the analogue collections are concerned, the readjustment of some archival practices does not correspond to substantial changes in archival principles. Thirdly, dissemination. Due to the configuration of the institutional context, online access, for the time being, is only offering limited opportunities. More opportunities, in the long run, might be offered by theatrical presentations due to lowering distribution costs. The thesis offers three main proposals for action in relation to each of the previous blocks: (1) systematic lobbying and development of stronger relationships with academia to gain legitimacy and to encourage regulations for the IT sector; (2) setting up publicly-owned digital preservation infrastructures and, when possible, safeguarding analogue processing capacity to avoid mass digitisation; (3) elaboration of a richer articulation of the cultural and social value of film heritage.

This thesis is an examination of the reception of selected films from the United States concerning the Great War during the interwar period. Despite the influential nature of these films at the time of their release, relatively few studies have been conducted on the response of contemporary audiences to these texts. Given the significance of the Great War as a critical event in modern history and culture, it is important to study the responses of audiences to works concerning the war during this period. Taking the war as a cinematic subject as opposed to a genre, I analyse both the content and reception of significant war-related films, using the movies themselves and contemporary newspaper and magazine articles and reviews, advertising and internal studio memoranda. I use this method in reference to the following films: The Heart of Humanity (1918), The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (1921), The Big Parade (1925), What Price Glory (1926), Wings (1927), Hell’s Angels (1930), Journey’s End (1930), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Men Must Fight (1933), The Road Back (1937) and Three Comrades (1938). I argue that audiences often interpreted what they perceived to be honest portrayals of war trauma as ‘realistic’, there was no uniform definition as to what constituted an ‘anti-war’ film, Great War films from this period tended to blame Germany or humanity in general for the war, sometimes both, and that most war films performed a memorial function for audiences.

This practice-based research project explores modes of thinking and writing that are generated during and after my encounter with one film, Christopher Petit’s Unrequited Love: On Stalking And Being Stalked (2006). As opposed to a frame by frame analysis of film, this project explores how the anomalous affects and after-effects engendered by film, for example, the disorientations in time and memory produced by camera movement, might generate forms of ‘cinematic writing’. This project approaches these affects as an integral part of the film viewing experience, and asks how they alter the way we think, feel, see, remember, and write. What connections in thought and memory can be provoked and engendered by them? How can our experience of being captivated, disoriented, and absorbed by these filmic affects be enveloped by, rather then represented in, writing? With the aim of developing a practice-based written response to these questions, this project investigates the visual and text-based cinematic techniques used by three writers: William S. Burroughs, Don DeLillo, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. It establishes how cinema has impacted on and been used as a resource to alter and transform their writing practice. The central claim of my project is that the visual and text-based cinematic techniques used by these writers make a valuable contribution to the development of a practice-based mode of writing that is engaged with, but that is not representative of film. I call this mode of writing cinematic writing. This research project claims that a theoretical and practice-based investigation into the anomalous affects and after-effects generated by film could contribute to our knowledge of how film can alter and transform the way we think, see, feel, and write. It explores what cinematic writing does in being read/seen by a reader, and asks how cinematic techniques in writing could impact on and alter our conventional literary reading habits.

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This thesis is an empirical analysis of Jane Fonda’s films, stardom, and political activism during the most commercially successful period of her career. At the outset, Fonda’s early stardom is situated in relation to contemporaneous moral and political ideologies in the United States and how she functioned as both an agent and symbol of these ideologies. Her anti-war activism in the early-1970s constituted the apex of Fonda’s radicalisation and the nadir of her popular appeal; a central question of this thesis, therefore, is how her stardom was rehabilitated for the American mainstream to the point of becoming Hollywood’s most bankable actress. As the star and producer of IPC Films, Fonda developed political projects using commercial formats, namely Coming Home (1978), The China Syndrome (1979), Nine to Five (1980), and Rollover (1981). The final IPC film, On Golden Pond (1981), signalled an ideological breach in this political strategy by favouring a familial spectacle, and duly outperformed its predecessors significantly. The first and last chapters of this work provide historical parameters for IPC in Fonda’s career, while the remaining chapters are structured by the conceptual and political aspects of each IPC project. Julia (1977) is discussed as an IPC prototype through its dramatisation of political consciousness. Coming Home, The China Syndrome, Nine to Five, and Rollover all exhibit this motif whereas On Golden Pond employs melodramatic nostalgia. Often discussed reductively as a star symbolising change, this thesis instead uses archival and published sources to analyse Fonda’s individual agency in historical context, as well as the cultural and political impact of her stardom. The IPC enterprise provided cinematic apparatus for Fonda’s political recuperation within the American mainstream, which, more broadly, harboured significance for the nation’s conservative resurgence at the end of the 1970s.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the garden as a cinematic space. It centres upon the idea that cinematic spaces accommodate and advance the medium’s peculiar relationship with movement. Previous study of cinema’s spatial specificity, the deployment of geographically identifiable places on film, and the role of space in constructing cinematic meaning has led me to identify an academic bias that considers other spaces, such as the city or the road, as fundamentally cinematic but curiously neglects the garden. My thesis will correct this critical blind spot and, moreover, promote the garden as the most complex of such spaces. It draws on the work of geographers, philosophers, and film scholars engaged with questions of space including, but not limited to, Doreen Massey, Michel Foucault and Giuliana Bruno. I especially build on their assertions that all space is mobile, political and sensorial and apply these insights to the overlooked space of the garden. I frame this research within the context of British film culture, arguing that this national cinema offers exemplary representations of the types of movements that I have chosen to explore, for example, colonialism. A secondary research question thus involves the garden’s role in articulating Britain’s somewhat fragmented national identity. The project takes a range of films as case studies, from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) to Richard Laxton’s Grow Your Own (2007).