The Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematogräficos (ICAIC) was the first cultural institution to be created by the new Cuban revolutionary government in 1959. One of its aims was to create a revolutionary cinema to suit the needs of the Revolution in a climate of transformation and renewal. At the same time, issues of gender equality and gender relations became extremely important in a revolution attempting to eradicate some of the negative social tendencies of the past. This thesis brings together these two extremely significant aspects of the Cuban revolutionary process by examining issues of gender and gender relations in six Cuban films produced by ICAIC from 1974-1990; a period of dramatic change and development in both Cuban cinema production and in Cuban civil society. The films are: De cierta manera, Retrato de Teresa, Lejania, Hasta cierto punto, ¡Plaf! (o demaiado miedo a la vida), and Mujer transparente. The thesis argues that the portrayal of aspects of gender relations in Cuban cinema developed along a progressive path from expressions of the modern to expressions of the postmodern, closely following a cultural transition in the nation as a whole. This does not mean that there occurred an absolute rejection of all the principles of what it meant to be `modern', but that, in the latter half of the 1980s, expressions of the postmodern can be seen through the prism of gender relations in the films produced during the latter part of the period concerned. One of the goals of this thesis is to illustrate how, through the prism of the gender debate presented on film, analysed using a number of theoretical approaches, Cuban cinema both reflected and produced some of the central ideological concerns on the island during this period. It will be possible to see how the gender debate both helps to create and, at the same time, makes reference to, more general cultural debates on the island. As such, the issues around gender explored through Cuban cinema can be seen as one of the most important cultural topics of this period.

This thesis examines the complex role played by film in the maintenance of an American “self” in opposition to a series of politically and culturally defined pathological “Others” in the 1950s. I reveal how popular imagery and political rhetoric combined to link domestic “deviants” such as juvenile delinquents, homosexuals, domineering or passive mothers and drug addicts with the Communist “Other,” portraying each as essentially pathological, an insidious and sickly threat to the health of the American home and family. By analysing case-studies within a wide-reaching and inter-connected cold-war media relay, underpinned by archival research that takes in newspaper and magazine journalism, television shows, government documents and medical journals, I uncover the ways in which film helped to maintain the visibility of the disenfranchised, as well contributing to their cultural surveillance and the discursive currency of the “pathological” Other. My study exposes the politics involved in medically attaching the term “diseased” to pre-existing domestic groups, and demonstrates how a culture maintains its guard against an invisible enemy. My thesis demonstrates that, across genres, American cinema embraced socio-medical tropes and disease metaphors in narratives that aimed to delineate friend from enemy and “self” from “Other” and in this way exposed fears and tensions that simmered beneath the supposedly placid surface of the 1950s.

This thesis is an analysis of the development of regional film policy and practice in England. From the late 1960s regional film production sectors have gradually emerged from small-scale, under-resourced cottage industries to become significant areas of British film practice. By the mid-2000s the English regions were incorporated into a national film policy strategy based on a network of nine Regional Screen Agencies and centrally coordinated by the UK Film Council. Along with similar developments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, for many commentators the devolution of film production has questioned the traditional way that British cinema can be understood as a national cinema. This thesis aims to understand how regional film production sectors have developed, what filmmaking practices have characterised them and what these mean for British cinema. It is argued that the development of regional film policy and practice can be understood in terms of two distinct models: the regional workshop model and the regional “creative industries” model. Each was based on different systemic processes and ideological frameworks, and is best represented in institutions. The development of an institutional framework for regional film production is placed within the wider context of the trajectory of public policy in Britain in the post-War period; specifically the shifting boundaries between cultural policy and economic policy. The thesis employs a critical political economy approach to analyse the development of these policy frameworks and the filmmaking practices that have emerged from them, including detailed case studies of regional film practices, specifically regional documentary, regional short film and regionally-produced feature films.

This research addresses the ways in which film might be used to investigate senses of place and representations of place and ritual. It focuses on two seasonal performative folk traditions in rural England, Haxey Hood in North Lincolnshire and Mayday in Padstow. By considering the experiential qualities of these annual rituals and their significance for local communities as seen in their wider socio-economic contexts, this research raises broader questions regarding place and belonging in contemporary society, and how film as a medium capable of directly conveying phenomenological experience, might transmit the sensual qualities of lived experience, place, and landscape to an audience. Drawing on Sobchack's conception of the film as a body in itself, the role of embodied experience is central in this study in exploring interconnections between the bodies of the filmmaker, the film itself, subjects and audience and their empirical possibilities. The research at the same time is wary of realist approaches to representation, instead seeking to consider the ways in which this “wild meaning” is then manipulated, fragmented and transformed in the process of filmmaking, both ‘in the field’ and in the editing process. Through the use of experimental ethnographic methods, key conceptual aspects of this thesis such as performance, the embodied camera and auto-ethnography are used to investigate the complex ways that place and ritual might not only be known and understood, but are also performed and imagined anew through film. Place and belonging are themes of great contemporary relevance in current academic and art practice, and the outcome of this study has been the creation of my film Folk in Her Machine (2013). By exploring both the sensual qualities of lived experience, and other forms of meaning through experimental ethnographic methods, it is argued that fruitful insights have been gained into both the embodied nature of filmic representation and its performative possibilities, or in MacDougall’s words, film’s interplay “between meaning and being”.

Through an engagement with Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the cinema, this thesis explores how the notion of labyrinthine time is represented differently in movement- and time-images. Part I contrasts the different types of subject that are created in the narratives of the two types of image. This begins with an exploration of the philosophical conceptions of time behind the two images and the subjects they create. Chapter two focuses on the role of memory in the creation of these subjects, drawing on the works of Henri Bergson, and using films by Hitchcock and Fellini. The third chapter delves into the recent re-emergence of the debate over spectator positioning, and questions what Deleuze can offer this field. Here the thesis most comprehensively negotiates its place within the field of film studies, through its interaction with psychoanalytical theories of the subject, and the debate over what exactly constitutes suture. Part II focuses on the movement-image. In particular it explores characters' attempts to perform their present identities differently, by falsifying their past and taking a new direction through the labyrinth of time. Chapters four and five analyse the way in which this performativity is represented in, Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run, The Talented Mr Ripley and Memento. These recent films are seen to draw a broad distinction between female performativity, which is sanctioned, but only for a brief while, and male performativity, which is represented as getting away with murder. Movement-images are thus found to uphold a very traditional gender binary, by reterritorializing the labyrinth's subversive potential into a legitimizing straight line and its marginalized, labyrinthine other. This is a conclusion that had already been suggested in chapter three.

The Doppelganger is a celebrated motif of German silent cinema that has been seen by art and literary historians as a filmic descendant of German Romanticism, and by psychoanalysts as a concretisation of human beings' fears regarding their own potentially fragmentary nature and mortality. This research builds on such interpretations by suggesting that - in the case of German cinema before World War One, at least - the Doppelganger can be read as a signifier of modernity as it was experienced by members of various social groupings. Returning to primary sources, some 203 films are identified that featured a Doppelganger and were released in Germany between 1895 and 1914. This corpus is broken down both by genre (into detective films, comedies and art films), and in terms of the polarities of identity about which the figure of the Doppelganger is constructed (high yersus low class, female versus male, and black versus white). From here, individual chapters address the Doppelganger as a fantastic representation of shifting class, gender, sexual and ethnic identities in Wilhelmine society. Each chapter draws in particular on contemporary sources relating to the various frames of identity under discussion, and suggests possible readings available to Wilhelmine spectators of the Doppelganger in individual films and genres. In this way, meaning is located at the intersection of the filmic text and contemporary discourse, and the 'Doppelganger film' can be regarded as a conduit for exploring issues of shifting identity within modernity, with particular regard to perceived new identities constructed 'between' supposedly stable binary oppositions of class, gender, and so on. These include the 'new woman' (perceived as a female incursion into the male sphere), the nouveau riche (moving between low and high class identity), the 'sexual intermediate' (constructed between male and female sexuality), and so forth.

This thesis focuses on the 1920s Parisian avant-garde films and their artistic potential as revealed in the contemporary art of video installations. Starting with an overview of the moving image arts in the early 20th century Paris,the project deals with both the theoretical and the practical aspects of the artistic experiment. Tracing the formation of the cinematic language from contemporary static visual arts, on the one hand, and the verbal art of literature on the other, the first chapter reviews the aesthetical content of the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde (cubism, Dada and surrealism) in general and as applied to 'moving image' in particular. In addition, the artistic and critical context of 'mechanical arts', i.e. photography and cinema is analyzed, involving such issues as the categories of time and space, the visual nature of film and photography and the use of movement and the machine. The nature of video is reflected upon in close parallel with the above argument, being compared with and contrasted to that of film and photography. The second and largest chapter of the thesis is devoted to a detailed textual analysis of the 1920s Parisian experimental films. Within it, parallels are drawn between the films and a number of contemporary video installations to show the early cinematic era heritage in the 'post-cinematic' visual culture. In the last chapter the emergence and nature of new media and video installation art are considered. Multimedia installations are seen as an interactive montage in three dimensions: their 'textuality' is analyzed via the concepts of narrativity versus database, while the screen is treated as a border between the artistic space of the work and the immediate space of the viewer. furthermore, the complex nature of image in multimedia installations, including its materiality and plasticity, is considered. Such issues as the role of medium in experimental art and the importance of self-filming/documentary are reflected upon. A textual analysis of some video installations with references to the 1920s Parisian experimental films analyzed above concludes the study. An attempt to classify the installations is mader, as well as to reveal some of their typical patterns and structures. Some terminology is suggested, along with a wider perspective for future research in the field of video installation art.

The thesis explored the theoretical implications of the African Revolution through an examination of its radical cinematic inventions. My research investigated points where the cinema screen became a site of radical gathering and ambitions of cinema emerged that expressed a revolutionary desire. The thesis mapped out a relational geography between different late liberation struggles of the 1970s and 1980s produced by cinema in the networks of connections lived out and constructed through radical drives. The exploration of aesthetics of liberation is the point of departure to investigate how screens, as urban surfaces of projection and reflection, appearance and masking, emerge from the world and have material and psychical effects in the world.

Setting out to provide a definitive history of the European Film Fund (EFF), the purpose of this thesis is as follows: first, to draw attention to the many exile and refugee organisations by examining one of them, the EFF. As a study of a refugee organisation founded as a result of Nazism, my examination of the EFF not only fills an existing gap in film history as far as the EFF itself is concerned. Refugee organisations in general have received scant attention by exile scholars. By making one refugee organisation the focus of my inquiry, I am also highlighting the presence of women in the topic of exile as two women, Liesl Frank, wife of the writer Bruno Frank, and Charlotte Dieterle, wife of the director William Dieterle, were at the centre of the EFF. My investigation of this organisation demonstrates that women played a much larger role in exile and exile communities than history and literature have thus far accorded them. Additionally, I show how the political situation after 1933, including apathy by the international community, led to the founding of the EFF. Lastly, by shifting the focus away from figureheads of the émigré community to below-the-line film artists, technicians, theatre artists and so on, I foreground those refugees whose lives have hitherto been obscured by their more famous fellow émigrés.

This thesis provides a commentary on three films that I have made on the subjects of childbirth and death; Born (Lawrence 2008); The Lover and the Beloved: A Journey into Tantra (Lawrence 2012); The One and the Many (Lawrence 2013). I discuss these films as practice-based research within the discipline areas of anthropology, media and performance in order to suggest an innovative way in which intersubjectivity may be explored and evoked through a method of ethnographic filmmaking. After a brief summary of the content of each film, I present my research methodology and associated techniques of filmmaking for fieldwork. I identify these as being different to those employed by Robert Gardner in his much discussed film about death, Forest of Bliss (1985). I elaborate on the methodological importance of intersubjectivity in filmed fieldwork by using two words, ‘confusion’ and ‘catharsis’, borrowed from reviewers of my film, Born. I argue that these words help to explain how the dual processes of perception and expression operate for all parties involved in the filmic encounter, including here the filmmakers, the subjects and the audiences. Drawing on ideas about how subjective experience is narrated by Turner (1986); intersubjectivity in ethnographic story telling by Jackson (2002; 2012); the conditions under which a film might provoke a cathartic response from a viewer by Scheff (2001); I consider how a filmmaking method can focus on the confusion in human experience, to become a new but related experience for the audience of a film. The objective of this methodology is to understand how subjective confusion becomes narrative coherence through the empirical lenses of childbirth and death. These ideas provide a basis to explain four areas of filmmaking technique that I use to produce anthropological films. The first relates to proximity: here I describe how I become a participant as well as an observer in action as it is unfolding and thus also a part of the story myself. The second looks at ways in which camera and microphone movement produce an “expression of experience by experience” (Sobchack 1995, p. 37). Thirdly, I outline a technique for the close examination of field experiences as they unfold and before they are fully comprehended that can also facilitate the production of high quality recorded material from which to craft a film. Lastly, I look at how reflexivity enhances the role of all the film’s subjects, including myself, to develop a useful context by which viewers of a film can engage with the protagonists of a story. In conclusion, I evaluate the success of these techniques in realising the methodological objectives of the work.