This thesis analyses the concept of the “Vietnam Syndrome” and its continuing manifestation in fictional American films produced after the 1991 Gulf War, with reference to depictions of the Vietnam, Gulf and Iraq Wars. Based on contemporary press reports as source material and critical analysis, it identifies the “Vietnam Syndrome” as a flexible and altering national psychological issue characterised initially as a simple aversion to military engagement, but which grew to include collective feelings of shame, guilt and a desire to rewrite history. The thesis argues that the “Syndrome” was not quashed by the victory of the Gulf War in 1991, as had been speculated at the time. Rather, the thesis argues that it was only temporarily displaced and continues to be an ingrained feature of the collective American psyche in current times. The argument is based on theories of collective memory, according to which social attitudes are expressed in cultural products such as films. The relationships between memory and history, and between memory and national identity are explored as two highly relevant branches of collective memory research. The first of these combines the theories of Bodnar (1992), Sturken (1997), Winter and Sivan (1999) and Wertsch (2002), among others, to define memory’s relationship with history and position in the present. The discussion of the relationship between memory and national identity describes the process by which memory is adopted into the national collective, based on the research of Schudson (1992) and Hall (1999). Consideration is given to the alternative theories of Comolli and Narboni (1992 [1969]), Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) and Miller (2005) that propose a unified representation from a dominant ideology and of The Popular Memory Group (1982) who argue a counter-hegemonic popular memory. The thesis argues that both are insufficient to account for public memory, establishing a multi-sourced collective memory as the basis for its arguments, as described by Hynes (1999) and Wertsch (2002). Successive chapters provide a close analysis of films in relation to the “Vietnam Syndrome”. Each of the films shows the different approaches to the conflicts and ways the “Vietnam Syndrome” manifests itself. Chapter 3 provides a summary of Vietnam War films released prior to the main period focused upon in this thesis, in order to contextualise the post-Gulf War texts. Chapter 4 analyses Heaven and Earth (1993, Dir. Oliver Stone) as a revolutionary depiction of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese depiction. Chapter 5 discusses The War (1994, Dir. Jon Avnet) as a late revisionist text. The focus of Chapter 6 is Apocalypse Now Redux (2001, Dir. Francis Ford Coppola), a revision of a vision, in which the additional scenes are analysed for their contribution to this later, more reflective version of the 1970s text Apocalypse Now. The last Vietnam film analysed, We Were Soldiers (2002, Dir. Randall Wallace), is the subject of Chapter 7 and is discussed with reference to post-September 11 American society and the dormant period of the “Vietnam Syndrome.” Chapter 8 brings the previous Vietnam War film analysis chapters together to form intermediate conclusions prior to the progression to Gulf War films. Chapter 9 provides a break in the film analysis chapters to consider the press coverage of the Gulf War, compared to that of Vietnam, paving the way for the following discussion of Gulf War films. Press coverage of the Gulf War influences the visual depiction of the Gulf War in both Three Kings (1999, Dir. David O’Russell) in Chapter 10 and Jarhead (2005, Dir. Sam Mendes) in Chapter 11. The reading of Three Kings also analyses the narrative as a metaphor for American concerns over the American-led coalition’s conduct during the conflict, while Chapter 11 argues the use of Vietnam War films as media templates (Kitzinger, 2000) in Jarhead. Finally, Chapter 13 brings the film analysis to a close by discussing the early representations of the Iraq War that have emerged in recent years, including: American Soldiers: A Day in Iraq (2005, Dir. Sidney J. Furie), Home of The Brave (2006, Dir. Irwin Winkler), Stop-Loss (2008, Dir. Kimberley Peirce), Lions For Lambs (2007, Dir. Robert Redford) Redacted (2008, Dir. Brian de Palma) and The Hurt Locker (2008, Dir. Kathryn Bigelow). The main, but not exclusive, features typifying the “Vietnam Syndrome” expressed through the films include: a reluctance to engage in or support foreign military intervention; use of “good war” and “bad war” discourse; signs of a collective national trauma of defeat; expressions of guilt for the consequences of American actions and failings of policy; attempts to restore the national self-image. This thesis concludes that the “Vietnam Syndrome” is still relevant to American society and that it is expressed through films in a variety of ways. It argues that the Vietnam War and the “Vietnam Syndrome” have become frames of reference for the discussion and representation of conflict and that the American collective psyche suffers a mixture of syndromes, some mutually enforcing and some contradictory, that are triggered by a variety of circumstances. The “Vietnam Syndrome” is identified as the most prolific of these and through its construction and circulation in media products, including cinema, this thesis argues it has become an umbrella term for the remnants of angst over Vietnam and new concerns over other conflicts.

In this thesis I explore the idea that Samuel Beckett's 'Ping' is a text that 'performs' - acting on the reader to create an active response - through the act of translating the text into a different medium - one that fundamentally also 'performs'; sounds, shows, moves, that of moving-image.

This thesis outlines and discusses portrayals of Albanian and Ethnic Greek migrants from Albania in contemporary Greek cinema. The focus is on seven coproduced films made between 1993 and 2009 that set out to challenge endemic xenophobia and nationalism. The latter have served the most in the exclusion of Albanian immigrants in Greece. The exclusion of Albanian migrants in Greece can be linked to a history of opposition between both countries which has led to a collective predisposition towards Albanians as inherently criminal. This is not an isolated event, but a broad phenomenon that saw Southern European cinemas becoming increasingly preoccupied with the presence of migrants in a region that has not been conditioned to hosting but rather to sending émigrés. Such films therefore also challenge the cultural bedrock of Greece and Europe. It is argued in this thesis that the shift from a national cinema to a transnational mode of filmmaking and representation, that asserts difference and a decline in national sovereignty, is an entirely alien experience to the history of Greek cinema. By utilising a holistic and critically informed framework and methodology, the author unpacks the films' creative and cultural context and addresses them as one body in relation to the specific cultural and historical backdrop. Consequently the texts per se are addressed in order to measure the degree to which they achieve a radical representation of difference and an overall shift from the norm of an insular cinema and film discourse. It is argued that the proposed films plant the seeds for an inclusive discourse but not without reinforcing obvious essentialisms that underlie nationalism and Eurocentrism. Therefore, the author argues that nationalism and Eurocentrism inform the films and hinder their aspiration towards a radical discourse.

This thesis explores the ways in which those who have experienced psychosis engage with and respond to film texts which feature psychosis; it draws upon screen theory and cultural theory to combine analysis of film content with reception analysis. Adopting a Foucauldian critical discourse analysis approach, (Jäger and Maier 2009) I employ textual analysis to examine the construction of psychosis in three key areas. Firstly, the naming of clinical psychosis is explored through an examination of policy documents. Secondly, a broad range of texts from the inception of film to the present day are analysed to investigate film images and narratives of both named and inferred ‘psychosis’. Ethical guidelines were observed in recruiting and carrying out twentyfour semi-structured interviews with respondents who have experienced psychosis (Koivisto et al 2001, Davies 2005, Horsfall et al 2007, Keogh & Daly 2009). The transcripts of these interviews provide the basis for my third area of discourse analysis; they are explored to determine respondents’ attitudes towards psychosis and films that feature it. In this study I argue that different hierarchies of discourse and procedures of power operate in the three distinct areas through mechanisms of nomination and exclusion (Fairclough 2009). Audience analysis reveals that respondents use film texts in order to make sense of and associatively re-create their experiences of psychosis. Making an original contribution to the field, I have identified the ways in which respondents appropriate specific texts as ‘evocative’ readings. Here, films which do not denotatively feature images/narratives of psychosis are read as highly relevant to respondents’ experiences of psychosis. My thesis makes a valuable contribution to audience studies by bringing together three areas of study in a way that has not been done before. It explores the interaction between audience and text and gives voice to a respondent cohort which has historically been marginalised. The concept of ‘evocative’ reading also enables me to challenge prior emphases on the ‘accurate’ representation of psychosis in popular film (Ritterfeld & Jin 2006, Pirkis et al 2006).

At the turn of the millennium, some commentators hailed the advent of new digital video and computer technology as precipitating a ‘digital revolution’ in movie-making. However, this has been discussed and theorised primarily in terms of the image, with no consideration of sound. Adopting a sound-centric perspective, this thesis examines key feature-length works of digital movie-making over a ten-year timespan that share aesthetic and production characteristics, most of which have been critically positioned as a low-budget, digitally-enabled response to a perceived mainstream or precedent. Writing in 2002, Lev Manovich identified these works as a reaction to “the increasing reliance on special effects in Hollywood” (Manovich 2002: 213), and used the term DV realism to position the aesthetics of this cycle of features in opposition to the aesthetics of films heavily reliant upon digital special effects. These works tend to be characterised visually by the use of shaky, hand-held camera suggestive of unpredictable, documentary-like shooting conditions; moreover, they tend to eschew post-production special effects in favour of capturing the pro-filmic action as it spontaneously unfolds. I argue firstly that the lack of consideration of sound and its earlier digital turn in the late 1980s and early 1990s leads to over-emphasis of the ontological shift in image-making from celluloid to digital. Secondly, I demonstrate that the use of digital video to shoot features does not necessarily determine the aesthetics of sound in low-budget DV movies; in spite of this, the feature-length works analysed in this thesis share a stylistic approach to sound that I define as DV realist sound, after Manovich. Chapters 2 to 6 use textual analysis of sound-image relations in sets of sub-categories of DV realist digi-features. I argue that DV realist sound design uses the material qualities of location-recorded sound as a means of ‘authenticating’ the images accompanied, as well as sonic characteristics that intertextually reference other media. Now that shooting digitally is commonplace, this formal analysis represents a shift away from discussion of digital movie-making as ‘new’ and argues for millennial convergence cinema to be discussed quasi-historically, as a millennial trend within feature film-making reacting thematically and aesthetically to perceived shifts within media production.

This project argues for rethinking the western as a global genre, rather than one rooted in a particular construction of the American West. First, by considering the western's global origins through an examination of early cinema, I challenge the singular connection to an American origin. Through tracing an alternative history of the genre in early cinema, we can see that the assumed connections between America and the western can be challenged by way of examples from France, Argentina, and Australia. Moving to the post-war and contemporary periods, this project highlights the popular and political uses of the genre by way of examples from Germany, Latin America, Spain and Italy, and Australia. These case studies identify how considering the western as a global popular genre allows it to address local political concerns across a range of national and transnational contexts. To situate the different contexts, this thesis relies on the broad theoretical framework of transculturation, following Mary Louise Pratt, to consider how the western 'selects' and 'invents' from particular historical, cultural, and political moments, often as part of asymmetrical power relations. Each case study also seeks to provide a theoretical framework specific to the local context, such as the theories and practices of Third Cinema in Latin America, in order to suggest ways of addressing the western outside of Hollywood. By shifting the western away from a central origin point, this thesis shows how the genre becomes meaningful on a global scale in terms of key issues of identity, political critique, and representations of space.

This thesis seeks to determine how representations of dyadic teen homosocial bonds and relationships in film lend themselves to queer possibilities. Looking at teens in film across genre, certain types of dyadic homosocial relationships emerge: the best friendship, the antagonistic teen girl friendship, the boys friendship within a wider homosocial milieu, and friendships which fit these types but include gay and lesbian characters. I ground the research by establishing a record of the films released theatrically in the UK between 2000 and 2009 with teens as primary characters, and develop a qualitative and textual analysis of dyadic homosocial relationship types which illuminates their queer possibilities as well as the modes of denial and compensation which may accompany the threat those queer possibilities represent. As it investigates the policing of gender and heterosexual norms in teen homosocial relationships in key texts such as Aquamarine (Allen 2006), Superbad (Mottola 2007), Thirteen (Hardwicke 2003), The Covenant (Harlin 2006), Evil (Håfström 2003), and My Summer of Love (Pawlikowski 2004), the research here expands teen film studies, and applies queer reading practices to an often under-analysed segment of film. It also contributes to gender studies, as the findings here point to the ways that boys continue to be tied to physicality, violence, and athleticism, while girls continue to be tied to mirrors, masquerade, and manipulation. The move to include a variety of genres allows a consideration of how genre-specific tools of analysis, such as those developed in relation to the teen film genre or to dyadic homosocial relationship films such as the buddy film and female friendship film, can be productively mobilised across genres. Issues such as denial of homosocial desire through displacement, triangulated relationships, and passing heterosexual foils link these films to the history of films about homoerotic homosocial friendships. I argue here that queer possibilities are present in a wide variety of otherwise heteronormative films. My arguments centre on structures of desire and denial within homosocial friendships, as well as to the similarities between the heteronormative representations of homosocial desire and those present in specifically gay and lesbian narratives. The ways that these emerge are gender and age specific. By bringing out the denied and repressed homoerotic desires in these films, I demonstrate their existence in various forms. The thesis demonstrates that, in keeping with dyadic homosocial relationships between adult characters, in representations of dyadic homosocial bonds, the boundaries between homosocial/homosexual remains fluid in friendships between teen girls while it is much more rigidly separated in friendships between teen boys, primarily through homophobia, even in films containing gay and lesbian main characters.

This thesis contends that a number of popular Hollywood films from the 1990s present evidence of a transformation in the legitimate ways of acting for white heterosexual men in contemporary Western metropolitan society. I argue that the transformation is intimately tied to the rising dominance of what I call a neoliberal ‘narrative of legitimation’. What is significant about my intervention, and distinguishes it from previous studies of representations of masculinity in film, is the use of the theoretical lens of legitimation and my focus upon late capitalism as a normalising principle. Each of the four chapters is dedicated to a close reading of a single film, Falling Down, Se7en, American Psycho and Fight Club. Through an interrogation of the films, as well as an appraisal of the critical literature that has responded to them, I will argue that a fundamental change has taken place in the legitimate expectations, motivations and justifications that inform the representation of masculinity in late-twentieth-century Hollywood cinema. The necessity for such a change is framed in the films as a response to an urban environment represented as a cynical, indifferent and chaotic hell that has to be resigned to as the only ‘real’ reality. My analysis proposes that through the narrative trajectory of these films conflicting models of masculine conduct are put forward yet successively abandoned, leaving only a single model that is fully aligned to neoliberal ends. This model abandons any attachment to family, nation or community and affirms a resigned individualism that merely maintains itself, unable to attach to or affect the world around it. Such a conflict of narratives, however, also leaves open the possibility of attesting to alternative narratives incommensurable with the prevailing neoliberal narrative of legitimation.

This thesis explores the political implications of Gilles Deleuze's two-volume work on the cinema (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [2005a] and Cinema 2: The Time-Image [2005b]). I argue that counter to the common reading of these works as being primarily concerned with aesthetics and philosophy, Deleuze's cinema books should be understood as a political critique of the operations of cinema. I outline the main arguments set out by these works as a political formulation and argue that they should be directly related to Deleuze's more explicitly political writings. In particular, I argue that these books should be read alongside Deleuze's later 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' (1992), which re-addresses some of the most significant aspects of his earlier work on cinema following a transforation in media technologies and social organisation. I argue that Deleuze's time-image and his later conceptualisation of control should be understood as forming the two poles of his theorisation of cinema and visual culture. When addressed as connected concepts, a significant political dimension emerges in this area of Deleuze's thought, focusing on a time-image that opens a range of possibilities for the future ordering of the world and a system of control that will recurrently close and eliminate these possibilities. Through a series of studies of film texts I will develop the political implications of Deleuze's thinking on cinema and visual culture in order ot show how the forces of control and the time-image operate and how these concepts can be systematised and further integrated into Deleuze's wider political thought.

Urban actuality films are short, single shot views of street scenes, skyscrapers or construction sites, or views from moving vehicles. They are, typically, regarded as simple filmic snap-shots. Conversely, early cinema is conventionally thought to be a complex hybrid medium, a crucible for the idea and representation of the modern. Through close, contextualised analysis of a series of New York films, this study addresses the discrepancy between the putative insubstantiality of actuality films and the evident complexity of early cinema. A hitherto overlooked historical coincidence of actuality cinema, the modernisation of New York and its intermedial culture is shown to provide both a subject and setting for filmmakers. Actuality cinema is a technology of the present; accordingly, temporality is pivotal for this study. Tom Gunning's 'cinema of attractions' thesis and a neurological conception of modernity posit a familiar shocks-and-jolts axis of the relations between cinema and modernity. In contrast, I argue for an alternative axis, founded in periods, rather than moments, of time and seek to demonstrate cinema's role as a technology of an expanded present time. Fifteen films of transport systems, skyscraper building sites and ways of seeing New York's streets, make up the primary source material. In these films, time provides a space for the representation and negotiation of the modern. An expanded present fosters a thickened visuality. Within New York's intermedial culture, the adoption of stereoscopic visual practices was key to constructing a coherent filmic present, and a place for the spectator within a cinematic world. As a functioning space and time machine, a cinema of simultaneity, the complexity of actuality filmmaking practices increasingly moved actualities towards, and enabled their interrelation with, an emerging narrative cinema. Rather than a failed experiment, New York actuality cinema is here demonstrated to be an example of cinema working.