This thesis uses Higson’s (2000) approach to national cinemas (that they look inward and outward to define their boundaries) to investigate how Spanish stardom interacted with the national between 1992 and 2007. The thesis examines four specific stars as case studies, and finds that there is a correlation between the cinema produced and the stars created, and that stars are as reflective of their national cinema as they are of current cultural perceptions and conceptions of nationness. The thesis therefore provides a detailed investigation of contemporary Spanish stardom within the framework of the interrelations between Spanish cinema and the four chosen stars in their reflections and projections of the national. Perriam (2003), Babington (2001), and Vincendeau (2000) show that the relationship between stars and the national informs the shape and content of their stardom, but this thesis argues that stars negotiate industrial imperatives as well as the cultural contexts of their nation; the national, cultural, and industrial converge in the star image. In investigating the stardom of Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Eduardo Noriega, and Paz Vega –who emerged at different points during the period– this thesis finds that the manner in which Spanish stars interacted with the national onscreen gradually changed owing to factors specific to the Spanish film industry in this era. Textual analysis of star images and performances and cultural contextualisation are employed to argue that as the influences within Spanish cinema have become more culturally diverse, and the boundaries of ‘Spanish cinema’ have expanded, newer Spanish stars are less obviously ingrained with Spanishness and their reflections and projections of the national become less overt. Although this is suggestive of a gradual dilution of national characteristics within Spanish cinema and stardom, this thesis finds that the newer stars nonetheless still reveal something of their changing Spanish culture and society.

This thesis examines how the concept of the auteur functions in contemporary Hollywood film industry and popular culture through a consideration of extra-textual components of cinematic discourse. By analysing a director’s films along with the industrial and cultural factors surrounding those films, a method for understanding contemporary auteurism in Hollywood is presented. Case study Christopher Nolan has earned a reputation as a director who produces films which are critical and popular successes and also reveal stylistic and thematic consistency across genre and industrial contexts. Building on ideas from Michel Foucault and Timothy Corrigan, this thesis adapts the ideas of the author function and the commercial auteur to examine how Nolan’s auteur persona is developed and used by industry and audiences in understanding his films. Drawing on a hybrid theoretical framework incorporating auteur, star, and reception studies as well as post-structuralist theories on authorship, this thesis analyses how Nolan’s auteur persona is constructed across a range of texts, but especially through DVD extras (official discourse), professional reviews (critical discourse), and responses from the general public (audience discourse). The analysis exposes the mechanisms within the discursive surround which create a distinct auteur persona that helps differentiate Nolan and his films in the marketplace. The research demonstrates that the auteur is an enduring and dynamic concept that is prevalent through all aspects of film culture including in the films, but also from production to critical reviews to audience discussion. Furthermore, due to technological changes, audience discourse plays an increasingly active role in shaping the auteur persona, often adapting the auteur concept to negotiate meanings for films. Ultimately the auteur persona acts as a way to understand not only how the auteur concept functions in cinema to organise economic, artistic, and cultural conditions, but also how film knowledge is developed intertextually in contemporary culture by varied audiences.

This thesis is the first in-depth, historical study of Hollywood’s relationship with the ‘family audience’ and ‘family film’. Since the 1970s, Hollywood family films have been the most lucrative screen entertainments in the world, and despite their relativelyunexplored status in academic film criticism and history, I will argue that the format is centrally important in understanding mainstream Hollywood cinema. How have ‘family films’ become so globally dominant? One answer is that Hollywood’s international power facilitates the global proliferation of its products, but this explanation, in isolation, is insufficient. I will argue that Hollywood family films are designed to transcend normative barriers of age, gender, race, culture and even taste; they target the widest possible audiences to maximise commercial returns, trying to please as many people, and offend as few, as possible. This they achieve through a combination of ideological populism, emotional stimulation, impressive spectacle, and the calculated minimisation of potentially objectionable elements, such as sex, violence, and excessive socio-cultural specificity. Initially, the audience for family films was predominantly domestic, but with the increasing spending power of international audiences, family films are now formulated on the belief that no market is inaccessible. For this reason, they are inextricably linked with Hollywood – the only film industry in the world with the resources and distribution capacity to address a truly global mass audience. The ‘family film’ originated in early-1930s Hollywood as a mixture of propaganda and commercial idealism. Hollywood cinema was already an international cultural phenomenon, but was founded upon a claim to universality that was undermined by the predominance of adult-orientated films. The family film was the result both of external pressures to make films more morally-suitable for children, and the desire to engage a more middle-class mass audience. Films targeting the so-called ‘family audience’ were excellent propaganda for Hollywood, suggesting superior production, inoffensiveness and broad appeal. Although such movies have not always commanded the mass (‘family’) audiences for which they are intended, they have flourished in the domestic and international media marketplace since the 1970s, and their commercial and cultural dominance appears likely to extend further in the years to come. Whilst the idea of a universally-appealing film remains an impossible dream, mainstream Hollywood has pursued it relentlessly. It is the Holy Grail for mainstream producers, and has attained considerable importance in U.S. – and increasingly international – culture, as audiences flock to see films which appear to transcend run-ofthe- mill screen entertainment by providing universally-intelligible aesthetic and/or emotional satisfaction. This thesis maps the history of the Hollywood family film, documenting the motivations and strategies involved in its emergence and development, analysing the form creatively and ideologically, evaluating its place within global mass entertainment, and underlining its considerable importance.

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This practice-led thesis, with its accompanying artefact, a documentary film, explore the issues that confront the Black African film-maker. Its specific focus is on feature film production in Zimbabwe and the importance of story choice and screenwriting techniques to a film's success as an art form and as a commercial practice. The mode of analysis is empirical but this enquiry is informed by and engages with the broader historical, political and conceptual issues that shape the practice of all African filmmakers: the liberation from colonial rule; Third World cinema; the global dominance of Hollywood cinema; the nature of ' African cinema'; post-colonialism; the role of regional and national cinemas; and diasporic and transnational forms of film-making. The Introduction, chapter 1, describes the approach and methodology of the thesis and chapter two reviews the most significant literature on the central issues and the major shift - in film practice and in theoretical writing - from a homogeneous conception of an overtly political pan-African cinema to one that is heterogeneous and hybrid. Chapter three is a detailed contextual and aesthetic analysis of the development of Zimbabwean national cinema from its roots in British colonial rule to the present day, drawing on a variety of primary as well as secondary sources. Chapters four. five and six are case studies of three feature films - Neria (1 993), Flame (1996) and Matters of the Spirit (1998) - based on original interviews with their respective film-makers who were central to the development of Zimbabwean cinema. The chapters discuss their production and reception histories and analyse the nature of their story choice and narrative development. Chapter seven is an analytical auto-ethnographical account of the author's own history as a film-maker culminating in a detailed production history of the artefact, a documentary film, Camarada Presidente, about the Republic of Mozambique's first president. Samora Machel. The Conclusion summarises the issues facing the Black African film-maker and the particular instance of Zimbabwe and the continued importance of story choice and screenwriting techniques. It considers the author's future plans as a diasporic filmmaker who remains committed to full-length feature film production that combines indigenous subject matter with a well-honed screenplay to create audience appeal.

Via an interdisciplinary framework that draws upon post-structural, post-colonial and feminist theories, this thesis considers representations of ethnicity in French film and photography since the 1980s. Very few studies of the representation of ethnicity in French photography have been undertaken and French film and photography are seldom analysed together. The corpus of images discussed is diverse. Each chapter contrasts examples of photographic practice with film within France. Chapter One considers how national identity has been pictured within France. Chapter Two analyses the representation of an important regional centre: France's second city, Marseilles. Chapter Three examines the parameters of Jewishness within French film and photography. Chapter Four explores how women of Algerian origin have been portrayed since 2000. Recurrent themes are found regardless of the genre, medium or ethnicity in question. Important differences are highlighted between representations of France's white majority and ethnic minorities, and within these groups according to gender, sexuality, age and social class. I conclude that ethnicity has remained a crucial and contentious subject within French film and photography throughout the last twenty-five years and that further such studies are now needed.

"Stasis was defined according to Schrader as the form that links the everyday in something unified and permanent". Central to my research is the aim to create a still-life image from filmed scenes documenting the everyday actions in my living environment. In some cases however the scenes being staged function as allegories of the states and situations of daily life. I decided to mix staged and 'real' scenes because I did not want to create a documentary about the activities in my environment but to transform everydayness, as I perceive it, into the permanent and unified quality of the still-life genre. Since I work with video and the moving image it is important to examine structures of movement and time and see in which ways movement once disconnected from time may confront a stasis. Gilles Deleuze's ideas about the movement-image and the time-image will provide my theoretical framework with particular reference to the notions of movement and time in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. Deleuze defines three levels of analysis of movement and time: "(1) the sets or closed systems, which are defined by discernible objects or distinct parts; (2) the movement of translation, which is established between these objects and modifies their respective positions; (3) the duration of the whole, a spiritual reality, which constantly changes according to its own relations".^ From these levels derive the two aspects of movement: that Which happens between objects or parts; and that which expresses the duration of a whole. Deleuze explains it as follows: "we can consider the objects or parts of a set as immobile sections; but movement is established between these sections, and relates the objects or parts to the duration of a whole which changes, and thus expresses the changing of the whole in relation to the objects and it is itself a mobile section of duration". In relation to the cinematographic concepts, Deleuze maintains that what determines the whole and produces movement is montage, by means of continuities, cutting and false continuities. Through montage and the movement of the camera the shot can express both the relationship Between objects or parts and at the same time the state of the whole.

This thesis will show that postclassical gangster films refer back to the films of the classical era and are heavily influenced by those earlier films, but that they also offer different perspectives. Firstly, I shall provide an overview of gangster films produced between 1967 and 1999. Within this era I shall identify three distinct cycles of gangster film production, and suggest some categories for certain thematic trends that occur. I shall identify various elements that distinguish postclassical gangster films from earlier films. These elements will include a tendency to place narratives in the past, to focus on the collective rather than the individual, to allow gangsters to survive at the end of narratives and to refer to Mafia myths that have developed since the fifties. However, identifying these differences is not the sole purpose of this thesis. I will also focus on the ways in which gangster films have been previously assessed,a nd to what extent these approaches are useful for postclassical gangster films. I shall focus on four key aspects of gangster films, genre, myths, masculinities and ethnicities and examine the ways in which they are articulated in gangster films, and consider the functions of such articulations. Finally, I shall discuss how and why the films might encourage contradictory readings. The overall intention is to focus on the film texts, but certain extratextual evidence such as journal and newspaper reviews will be used to support my discussions. It is my view that while previous critical work on gangster films provides a useful assessment of the films of Hollywood's classical era, they do not offer sufficient assessment of postclassical films. My thesis will extend previous critical works to provide such an assessment.

Drawing extensively from empirical research into British film fan magazines such as Picture Show and Picturegoer, this thesis demonstrates how such secondary media were crucial in shaping Novello's star persona and the ways in which nuanced references to Art History, Philosophy and Classical Greek iconography and myths informed his iconography. Juxtaposing such eclectic influences with textual analysis of his films themselves, I argue that Novello's most singular stardom in the twenties -- an extension of the fame he achieved through his composition of one of defining songs of the war, `Keep the Home Fires Burning' -- is founded on a historically specific and, in the broadest sense, queer appeal to the disparate elements of his mass audience. This appeal, I demonstrate, engages with a range of contemporary discourses around nostalgia, sexuality and the symptoms of war-trauma. I argue that in the films of Ivor Novello we apprehend an essentially modern, quite paradoxical and sometimes disturbing product of his time, rather than the anachronistic, histrionic figure presented thus far by critics.