This thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach in order to explore the social and cultural history of black Britain in 1970s fictional film and television. It draws on rigorous archival research, original interview testimony with practitioners and audience members, and close textual analysis of visual sources, in order to examine relations between black film and television texts and the social, political and institutional contexts of their authorship. The key focus of my study is therefore on black creative agency. Whilst prior studies have addressed black expression and representation in film and television, few have attempted to trace the process of creativity itself. My study uniquely traces the black creative voice in an historical period of emergence and conflict, and endeavours to ‘map’ it in terms of networks of (white and black) practitioners, the spaces of industrial production and the metaphorical, geographical and diasporic spaces of community and socio-political action. The thesis is structured in two parts. In Part 2, my ‘mapping’ encompasses a broad landscape – I ‘map the field’ socio-politically and then provide a survey of the significant range of feature films and television programmes concerned with black Britain in the 1970s. I then present three case studies. These are chosen for their variety of genre and form, for the valuable insights they offer into production and reception histories, and because they demonstrate the usefulness of the imaginative interpretation of archival and interview material in reappraising film and television texts in their historical contexts. In Part 3, I then draw on this methodological approach in order to ‘map’ the creative journey of the poet and playwright Jamal Ali, who worked in radical black theatre, film and television in the 1970s. Ali’s story provides an exemplar for the exploration of black creative agency in this period. Furthermore, the Brixton of Ali’s life and work is explored both as a site of socio-political struggle and as a liminal space in which diasporic community and black identity are imaginatively located.

This thesis seeks to develop an aesthetics of spectacle in mainstream cinema. Whilst a significant amount of critical work has been undertaken on spectacle within the context of narrative theory, little attention has been paid to defining and analysing spectacle in itself and its place in the cinematic experience. Not only does this mean that a pervasive concept in film studies is left poorly defined and unconsidered, it also hampers an understanding of the nature of the cinematic experience itself. The central question addressed by the thesis is ‘What is the role of spectacle in the cinematic experience, with particular reference to mainstream cinema?’ This involves a consideration of the ways in which spectacle has been treated in theoretical terms to date. In particular, the contribution of cognitive approaches is critically assessed with a view to establishing a more inclusive framework that recognises the experiential nature of cinematic spectacle. In the light of this, the thesis proposes a new critical model for understanding spectacle, one based on a notion of transmission which presents narrative and spectacle as coexistent within the cinematic experience rather than as antithetical qualities. As another aspect of this, the thesis considers the historical development of spectacle in the context of spectatorship at the time of early cinema at the end of the nineteenth century. The latter part of the thesis applies its definition of spectacle to specific elements of the cinematic experience, namely the use of technology and miseen-scene. It thereby engages with the aesthetics of spectacle within particular contexts and conditions. This exercise makes it clear that far from being a marginalised element, as suggested by current narrative-centred film theory, spectacle is central to the cinematic experience.

People have become accustomed to living with - and inside of - the media screen. Not just in the cinema or living room, but more pervasively with mobile telephones, advertising hoardings, and computer interfaces. It has infiltrated the art gallery, its high definition, contrast ratio and immersive scale tending to blind the audience to its mediating presence. And what about the genre of landscape today, beyond the latest BBC wildlife spectacular, computer simulated Hollywood blockbuster, video game or Google Earth? As the screen populates the cultural landscape, and increasingly mediates between the actual landscape and humanity, where are the points of contemporary artistic reflection on - or resistance to - the screen's increasing ubiquity and transparency? The thesis comprises three components to be taken as a whole: Screen as landscape, an exhibition of seven paintings; Touch screen, documenting the development of practical research; and Screen as Landscape, a dissertation examining contemporary artworks across a diversity of media, including film, photography, printmaking, painting, and computer-generated imagery. Supplementing these, a Guide book offers an overview of the thesis: its origins in an established practice; its developing themes and research methods, emerging out of making and writing; its resolution into three interrelated parts; and its distinctiveness within a range of recent curatorial projects. Echoing the landscape theme, the thesis takes a journeying form rather than being fixed in a specific geographic, art-historical, or theoretical situation. Landscape is salvaged as a live genre for visual art, as a web of interrelated perceptual and symbolic forms that are insistently present. This is despite landscape's annexation as an art-historical anachronism after Post-Impressionism, ripe for nostalgia and parody; its default appearance as seamless photographed or simulated backdrop to fantasies of wilderness and escape; or as a cartographic plane for the projection of information and ideas of control, containment, or exploitation. Landscape is an idea born of familiarity and estrangement, with which artistic interventions with screen technology can actually offer insights. Through its apparatuses - its obstructive lenses and artificial surfaces - the screen can reveal forms of imaging analogous to - yet not identical with - the perceptual and cultural formation of landscape, between experiences of nearness and distance, presence and absence, discovery and loss. Screen as landscape proposes an inter-medial approach, describing a field of contemporary concerns with potent art-historical resonances, harbouring essential questions about human subjectivity in the face of the screen's replacement of landscape with depthless surfaces. For the screen interface threatens subjectivity through the fluid integration of perspectival viewpoints, textual or graphical information, and networked interconnectivity. Through the immediacy of spatial and temporal proximities, and the replacement of physical location by virtual access points, the dimension of depth is increasingly lost to perception. The screen must be landscaped to counter the screening of the landscape - the supplanting of atmospheric, ambiguous, and multisensory encounter. Against the backdrop of cyberspace, it fathomless depths and infinity of virtual frames, Screen as landscape performs a bold or foolhardy attempt on the sheer, inhuman edifice of the screen.

This thesis is the first sustained analysis of historical films made in the New Hollywood era (1967-80). It explores the mediation of the era’s social, cultural and ideological concerns in feature films that represent key periods in American history. The terms New Hollywood and the historical film are utilised with revisionist aims. As well as considering the new wave of ‘auteur’ cinema synonymous with the New Hollywood, the thesis demonstrates the diverse range of films produced in this era. Similarly, it rejects the boundary drawing practiced by many studies of history and film, and submits that any film set in the past can be used to explore the values, assumptions and ideological conflicts of the present. Furthermore, the thesis contends that analysis of historical films allows us to understand how audiences of a given period engage with the past in emotional, moral and aesthetic terms. The method and approach of this research is robust and wide reaching, providing evidence based analysis of each film’s production and reception, as well as close readings of individual texts. The primary sources utilised include production files, draft screenplays, film reviews, press interviews and other forms of publicity. The vast majority of new Hollywood historical films are set in the recent past, and the six case studies undertaken in this thesis include a broad section of the era’s significant historical films: The Day of the Locust (1975), a drama centred on 1930s Hollywood; Sounder (1972), a story of Depression-era African American sharecroppers in the deep South; The Dirty Dozen (1967), a Second World War combat drama; The Way We Were (1973), a romantic film bridging the radical 1930s and the McCarthy ‘witchhunts’ of the 1950s; and American Graffiti (1973) and Grease (1978), which look back on the early rock and roll era of the late 1950s and early 1960s with nostalgia.

The advancement of theoretical screenwriting has been limited to popularized “how-to” techniques to further investigate the field. These techniques were based on internalised rules-of-thumb drawn from inductive observations of existing screenplays. Such analyses failed to provide answers to two troubling fundamental questions: first, what makes stories emerge in the context of narrative, and second, what are the underlying dynamics that allow a screenplay to function as a unified whole? The contribution of Screenplectics lies in first, by explaining how a screenplay functions synergistically, and appropriating the necessary metaphors, systemically. And second, by explaining the mechanism that is employed between compositional interactions in various structural levels that allows the coherent accumulative derivative we call story to emerge. The transition from an empirical to a theoretical perspective is achieved by examining such dynamics under the prism of holism and through the introduction of characteristics of complex systems: a network of components arranged hierarchically that interact parallel to one another in non-linear ways. This hierarchy shapes the foundation of the different layers of structure in a screenplay: deep, intermediate and surface structure. This research consolidates the notion that for the comprehension of such complex dynamics a more comprehensive theory of narrative is required.

This thesis develops a theoretically-informed approach with which to analyse the aesthetics of the adaptation of superhero comic books into blockbuster films. Pervasive modes of thinking present superhero blockbusters as artistically degraded products that are not worthy of aesthetic analysis. I demonstrate that exploring the ways in which superhero blockbusters adapt comic book style and form reveals aesthetic sophistication and multiplicities of meaning. Engaging with comic book and film history also enables me to identify ways in which superhero blockbusters have contributed to the development of Hollywood’s blockbuster filmmaking paradigm. My approach combines models and concepts from studies of adaptation that employ poststructuralist theory. This theoretical framework explains transformations that content may undergo as it is adapted between the different forms available to comics and film, and enables examination of dialogues occurring in the vast networks of intertexts in which superhero blockbusters are situated. After my review of literature establishes the thesis’ theoretical underpinnings, my chapters undertake close textual analysis of three distinct case studies. The selection of case studies allows me to continue to develop my approach by examining different superhero archetypes, alongside significant contexts, trends and technologies that impact Hollywood blockbusters. Chapter one looks at the first superhero blockbuster, Superman: The Movie (1978). I begin by outlining, and exploring relations between, the range of Superman texts released prior to the film. Doing so reveals the qualities of the intertextual networks that comprise a superhero franchise. I then analyse the strategies that Superman: The Movie deploys to adapt and enter the network of Superman texts, before situating the film in the context of the emerging blockbuster paradigm in 1970s Hollywood. Chapters two and three analyse films produced in the twenty-first century, as superhero blockbusters gained a central position in Hollywood production. Chapter two evaluates the aesthetics of the Spider-Man trilogy (2002, 2004 and 2007) in relation to two contexts that are often considered to have facilitated the superhero blockbuster’s twenty-first century success: the increasing use and sophistication of digital filmmaking technologies in Hollywood, and the contemporary sociopolitical climate. Looking at the representation of bodies and space elucidates the ways in which the films incorporate digital filmmaking technologies into their adaptive practices and offer a sociopolitical commentary. Chapter three examines the strategies that films produced by Marvel Studios, with particular focus on team film The Avengers (2012), deploy to adapt the model of seriality that superhero comic books use to interconnect multiple series in a shared diegesis. The analysis focuses on ways in which The Avengers uses bodies and space to compress the expansive diegetic universe into a single film, and interrogates how these strategies shape the film’s sociopolitical meanings. My case studies demonstrate that the approach developed in this thesis illuminates the complex and equivocal meanings that the adaptive practices of superhero blockbusters generate.

This thesis examines the representation of home movies in UK and US feature fiction films released between 1939-2013. For the purposes of the thesis home movies are defined as a subset of amateur (i.e. non-professional) film concerned with the representation of home and family and intended for domestic consumption. Home movies are further distinguished from home video and domestic productions recorded digitally referring specifically to films shot on, or connoting, small-gauge film. Drawing on James Moran’s notion of the ‘imaginary medium’ (There’s No Place Like Home Video, 2002) and the scholarship on the Imaginary in media, this thesis advances the concept of the ‘home movie imagination’ to describe the way in which cinema constructs home movies in the process of representation. Using textual analysis, this thesis identifies a series of shifts in cinematic depictions of home movies. Accordingly, each case study chapter focuses on a selection of examples which best exemplify these transitions and continuing trends. Placing cinematic home movies in the context of the histories of amateur film and small-gauge technology, this thesis demonstrates that home movies in fiction films should not be perceived as a reflection on developments of the technology, but studied specifically as fictional stylisations. The first chapter explores the emergence of home movies as a motif in feature fiction films, interrogating the technology’s pervasive association with wealth and spectacle in films released between 1939-1949. The second elaborates on these concerns, observing an incongruity between cinema’s continued affiliation of home movies with affluence and the developments in the social history of amateur filmmaking following the Second World War. Chapter Three looks at films released between 1964-1980, investigating the dual role of home movies deployed as sentimental reminders of lost familial cohesion and a tool to challenge the family ideal. Chapter Four focuses on the adaptations of Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon (1981) — Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986), Red Dragon (Brett Ratner, 2002) — charting the impact which the advent of home video had on the representation of cinematic home movies. Home movie obsolescence is explored further in Chapter Five which interrogates the transition of home movies from an aim to memory (prop) to texture of memory (aesthetic). The final chapter focuses on the depiction of home movies in Super 8 (2011) and Frankenweenie (2012), investigating the nostalgia which they express towards the materiality of small-gauge technology. This thesis argues that home movies in feature fiction film constitute a unique, and widely overlooked, object of study. As films-within-films they frequently function as a self-reflexive device, a tool for filmmakers to reflect on their art. However, they are also specifically a domestic technology, focusing an inquiry into the role which media and mediation play in the cinematic construction of family narratives. Exploring the ways in which cinema constructs home movies in the process of representation the home movie imagination offers an innovative approach for studying the depiction of domestic moving image technologies, one which recognises their character as stylisations and responds to their historical variability.

This thesis maps out and analyses images of queer masculinities in recent Irish cinema to investigate what forms of queerness are enabled through their intersections with national specificity. In recent years images of non-normative masculinities have become increasingly visible in Irish cinema. These images can be seen as resulting from economic, political and social changes taking place in Ireland and globally, as well as the Irish Film Board’s (IFB) revised mandate in 1993 of encouraging indigenous filmmakers to cater to international audiences and more mainstream appeal. Yet while non-normative masculinity, and specifically non-normative male sexuality, is becoming more visible on Irish screens, the on-screen subject is frequently evacuated of his sexuality to function as allegory for the Irish nation. Using non-normative sexuality as allegory risks reinforcing heteronormative power structures and prevents any sustained critical engagement with representations of sexual desire in Irish society. In this thesis I offer a more rigorous critical engagement with the sexual politics and socio-cultural conditions that have determined the shape and evolution of these representations, while also interrogating the relationship between on-screen visibility and progressive sexual politics. Irish identity has historically been delimited by Ireland’s complex colonial history with Britain and its struggle for independence, which have shaped Ireland’s national narrative and privileged political and sectarian identities over other forms of identification. Nationalist and Catholic discourses in Ireland have promoted rigidly defined gender identities and sexual norms to reinforce a dominant patriarchal and heteronormative order, and to maintain the perceived stability and political hegemony of the nation. In this thesis I use a queer analytic approach to explore the conflicted and often contradictory relationship between ‘national’ and ‘queer’, positing identity as fluid, historically contingent and discursively constructed, and locating identities in-between gender and sexual binaries. This thesis focuses on eleven Irish films released between 1984 and 2007. I use close textual analysis that foregrounds space to examine how the queer Irish male subject negotiates his identity in relation to his surroundings, and how specific social and spatial sites reinforce dominant norms and heterosexual privilege through the construction, regulation and policing of queer identities, communities and cultures. By examining the ways in which films represent social and sexual marginality through the use of space, and how relations of power and difference shape and are reproduced through social discourses and spatial practices, I am able to offer a fuller understanding of these representations, and the ideologies and norms that underpin them, as well as provide insights into a variety of different forces that shape how these representations are framed.

My doctoral research analyses contemporary North American romantic films and the meanings brought to and made from them by socially and economically diverse audiences in London. It does so in the context of a historicised and ideologically alert account of connections between biological, psychoanalytic, anthropological and sociological theorisations of romantic love and its screen depictions. In particular, my audience-led textual analysis of discourses of Euro-American romantic love is driven by an engagement with three claims: First, that neoliberal or late-capitalist individualism has engendered a ‘crisis of romantic love’ which has reshaped the social and personal promises of coupledom and intimacy. Second, that popular film, the prime contemporary medium of representation for romance, cynically portrays this supposed crisis in an effort to capitalise on audience fears; and third, that audiences of these films experience the ‘crisis’, fashioning their romantic identities and practices in its shadow. Methodologically, the study involved a reflexive and recursive textual analysis of five North American films: Blue Valentine, (500) Days of Summer, Don Jon, Her, and Once. Using these films, I carried out 36 group interviews with (87) inhabitants of the multicultural Borough of Hackney, in East London, the results of which then fed into and informed my readings of the films. Subsequent thematic coding of group interviews revealed overlapping areas pertinent to the project: Technology, class, gender and coupledom. Findings include the suggestion that both romantic films and their audiences in Western Europe are currently adapting strategies, practices and ideas of romantic love and relationships to a new environment of precarious intimacy, technological mediation, and anxiety over economic, professional and personal stability. My analysis concludes that while intersections of class, race and gender continue to inflect audience experience and meaning-making, the current romantic environment that audiences are navigating - and that romantic films purportedly represent - is indeed markedly different from that of the last century. However, claims about the crisis of romantic love are not only greatly exaggerated, but usually also erroneously conflate the pain, anxiety and frailty of contemporary relationships and intimacy with a narcissistic, ego-centric definition of love as a form of consumption.

This thesis uses postmodern theory to explore aesthetic shifts in post-millennial Bollywood cinema, with a particular focus on films produced by the Bombay film industry over the past nine years (2000-2009) and the recent boom of Hindi cross-cultural and self-remakes. My research investigates reasons behind the lack of appeal of Bollywood films in the West (particularly in their contemporary form), revealing how our understanding and appreciation of them is restricted or misinformed by a long history of censure from critics, scholars, educators and ambassadors of the Indian cinema. Through my analysis of the function and effects of cultural appropriation and postmodern traits in several recent popular Indian films, I expose Bollywood's unique film language in order to raise our appreciation of this cinema and suggest ways in which it can be better incorporated into future film studies courses. My analysis is based on a study of over a hundred contemporary Bollywood remakes and includes close textual analysis and case studies of a wide variety of popular Bollywood films, including: Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Abhay (2001), Kaante (2002), Devdas (2002), Koi…Mil Gaya (2003), Sarkar (2005), Krrish (2006) and Om Shanti Om (2007). In my conclusion, I offer a redefinition of contemporary Bollywood and I consider postmodernism's usefulness as a tool for teaching Indian cinema and its value as an international cultural phenomenon.