Despite the growing academic attention to film festivals, there has been little critical discourse about such events staged outside the West. This thesis aims to address this gap by providing a social, political and cultural exploration of the Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) in South Korea between 1996 and 2005. The thesis utilises empirical research to reveal how the festival staked out a unique and influential position within a rapidly changing global landscape. Particular attention is paid to the organisersors' use of an Asian regionalisation strategy to promote the festival locally and globally. This study claims that PIFF has gone further than any other film festival in constructing a regional identity and maintaining a strong and mutually beneficial link to its national film industry. Research into PIFF's special relationship with both the national and regional film industries uncovers the previously unexplored roles that film festivals play in film production, in addition to their traditional functions of exhibition and distribution. To place this analysis in context, the thesis examines the politico-economic factors that influenced the establishment of the festival, its programming, the project market (the Pusan Promotion Plan), and its tenth anniversary in 2005. The study argues that analysis of PIFF reveals tensions and negotiations between the "national" and the "transnational" in the wake of economic and cultural globalisation in East Asia. The thesis serves as a case study of how contemporary film festivals adjust their roles and identities to adapt to local, regional and global change.

Since the 1960s strategies of recycling, revision, and reframing have dominated art practice, and are particularly evident in artists’ films since the 1990s. A majority of these films take the classical Hollywood film text as their object of revision, producing a diverse range of interventions that both reproduce and obstruct its governing conventions. This thesis proposes that the imitative tendency in contemporary moving image art constitutes a parodic revision of the classical film text and its attendant assumptions, and is currently a productive site of critique of dominant cinematic forms. Theorist Linda Hutcheon provides an inclusive definition of modern parody as extended repetition with critical difference; an ambivalent combination of conservative and revolutionary drives, a form that necessarily reproduces the very values it simultaneously displaces. Of particular interest is the effect of these parodic acts on Hollywood inscriptions of gender norms. Feminist film theory since the 1970s has argued convincingly that the decorative image of woman is the linchpin of the classical film text. Therefore, any critique of that text accordingly revises her placement; whether or not such a revision is the work’s explicit intention. In place of a complete rejection of narrative cinema and its problematic repetition of reductive stereotypes of gender (and race and class) influential feminist theorists such as Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey have insisted that a counter cinema must engage with both the form and content of the mainstream text. Only by inhabiting the language of that text can its assumption be undermined. Hutcheon defines the challenge to dominant aesthetics produced by such parodic revisions as a complicitous critique, and views parody as a key feminist strategy. Yet, taking into account recent developments in theories of gender, race, and sexuality, this investigation does not exclusively focus on films by women, or by self-proclaimed feminist or queer filmmakers (who might be said to have as their main aim a re-writing of the place of ‘woman’, and therefore ‘man’, in cinema).

Studies of the relationship between British cinema and national identity have tended to focus on the subjects and themes of a select number of films, part of a canon generally agreed to represent the qualities of the British ‘character’. Yet several authors have identified limitations to this approach, and presented a range of theoretical and empirical obstacles to the concept of ‘British cinema’. This problem of provenance has been the mainstay of critical debate about the British film industry since its inception, but in prioritising textual analysis, this interpretation often ignores the additional factors involved in the development of notions of ‘Britishness’. In contrast, this thesis focuses on how the concept of what became known as ‘British cinema’, was created during the early twentieth century, addressing the contextual elements of the cinema experience, and arguing that they were extremely important in determining what ‘British cinema’ would come to represent. Using a range of private papers, government records and marketing materials, I chart the development of the link between ‘British’ cinema and national identity, and the various ways that this concept was presented to the public both in Britain and across the globe. Rather than conceive of this as a definitive form ab initio, I argue that it was a complex process of invention, a myth augmented over time and which was so potent it could accommodate a divergent range of films and filmmakers. Thus, this thesis is not a critique of what British cinema represented, but how it came to represent it.

The thesis analyses representations of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ and dominant postapartheid themes in South African films between 1987 and 2014. The term South African films or cinema is used to encompass films that are co-produced between South Africa and other nations, as well as films that may find their South African articulation only in content and narrative composition. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ scholarship, the thesis sets out to explore whether a new structure of feeling can be identified in post-apartheid films. The thesis also engages trauma in the post-apartheid films about the ‘Rainbow Nation’. In being able to identify how new South African films show and grapple with post-apartheid identities as ‘acting out’, ‘working through’ and ‘making sense’ of the past, the thesis concludes that post-apartheid films are in some ways critical of the past and in other ways, hopeful for the future. However, the more the country settles into its new national identities, the more variations are present in filmic representations and the more possibilities exist for seeing the complexities of post-apartheid cinema. The thesis is divided into three sections and follows a thematic approach as well as a form of periodisation that has not been used in previous scholarship about South African cinema. Section One considers the moment before the end of apartheid in the films A Dry White Season (Euzhan Palcy, 1989), Cry Freedom (Richard Attenborough, 1987) and Mapantsula (Oliver Schmitz, 1988). Section Two is constituted of two chapters which focus on the representations of the end of apartheid, trauma, guilt and ‘acting out’ seen in the films Red Dust (Tom Hooper, 2004), In My Country (John Boorman, 2004), Forgiveness (Ian Gabriel, 2004), Zulu Love Letter (Ramadan Suleman, 2004), Disgrace (Steve Jacobs, 2008) and Skoonheid (Oliver Hermanus, 2011). Section Three explores the possibility of a new structure of feeling through analysis of the representations of youth identities and coming to terms with the past in Hijack Stories (Oliver Schmitz, 2001), Tsotsi (Gavin Hood, 2005) and Disgrace (Steve Jacobs, 2008). In the final chapter, the films Disgrace (Steve Jacobs, 2008), Fanie Fourie’s Lobola (Henk Pretorius, 2013) and Elelwani (Ntshavheni wa Luruli, 2012) are analysed to show how traditions and rituals are fashioned as important, unexpected vehicles, through which to navigate emergent post-apartheid South Africa and its identities.

This thesis examines Slow Cinema, a stylistic trend within contemporary art cinema, although one with a longer pre-history. Its distinguishing characteristics pertain ultimately to narration: the films, minimalistic by design, retard narrative pace and elide causality. Specifically, its aesthetic features include a mannered use of the long take and a resolute emphasis on dead time; devices fostering a mode of narration that initially appears baffling, cryptic and genuinely incomprehensible and offers, above all, an extended experience of duration on screen. This contemporary current emerges from a historical genealogy of modernist art films that for decades distended cinematic temporality and, furthermore, from the critical and institutional debates that attended to it. This thesis, therefore, investigates Slow Cinema in its two remarkable aspects: firstly, as an aesthetic practice, focusing on the formal aspects of the films and their function in attaining a contemplative and ruminative mode of spectatorship; and, secondly, as a historical critical tradition and the concomitant institutional context of the films’ mode of exhibition, production and reception. As the first sustained work to treat Slow Cinema both as an aesthetic mode and as a critical discourse with historical roots and a Janus-faced disposition in the age of digital technologies, this thesis argues that the Slow Cinema phenomenon can best be understood via an investigation of an aesthetic experience based on nostalgia, absurd humour and boredom, key concepts that will be explored in respective case studies. My original contribution to knowledge is, therefore, a comprehensive account of a global current of cultural practice that offers a radical and at times paradoxical reconsideration of our emotional attachment and intellectual engagement with moving images. The introduction chapter begins with a discussion of the Slow Cinema debate and then establishes the aims of the thesis, its theoretical framework and elaborates on the adopted methodologies, namely formal analysis and aesthetic historiography. Chapter 2 examines Béla Tarr in light of the evolution of the long take and attributes Tarr’s use of this aesthetic device as a nostalgic revision of modernist art cinema. Chapter 3 explores the films of Tsai Ming-liang, which embrace incongruous aesthetic features, envision an absurdist view of life, create humour through duration and are situated within the minimalist trends of the international film festival circuit. Chapter 4 focuses on Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose films emerge from the aftermath of the collapse of a domestic film industry and intervene into its historical heritage by adopting fundamental features of boredom as well as transforming its idleness into an aesthetically rewarding experience. The conclusion chapter incorporates the case studies by stressing the role of Slow Cinema within the complex negotiations taking place between indigenous filmmaking practices and the demands of global art cinema audiences as well as the circulation of art films through networks of film festivals and their respective funding bodies.

This thesis explores how selected contemporary U.S. and Chilean films and television shows depict political torture, in relation to visual documentation of factual cases. The films explore the uneasy complicity in seeing or watching torture, which concerns both the spectacle of cinema, the nature of torture as well as the position of the audience or witness. Casting a wider net on the definition of torture, I suggest that these media products can help broaden our comprehension of the event torture, in its collective and emotional dimension, its long-term social effects as well as its links to other cultural concepts. Moving beyond dominant and limiting frameworks based on representation and identification, this thesis integrates affect, film and media theory with textual analysis. Some of these films and television shows offer a public and emotional space to explore subject positions crucial to acknowledge a sense of social pain, often missing in official accounts. These films’ heterogeneous aesthetic responses speak to a similar set of epistemological and ontological queries, which are fundamentally related to the truth claims of images. In its inherent need for an ethical stand and trust in documented truth, torture offers a research axis to discuss current anxieties regarding the reliability of visual evidence, coinciding with a historical moment that interrogates (moving) images’ powers and reliability to document the real. Ethical questions regarding documentation are reconfigured in epistemological terms. If vision is problematic as means of verification, how do the films pursue authenticity, and what kind of truth do they offer? Responding to current interventions regarding the nature of the cinematic medium, the films propose a new poetics of the real that does not rely primarily on visual evidence. I argue that in a situation of contested, censored or plainly missing documentation, these films produce a “cine-poetic archive,” images that highlight both their constructedness and their roots in the historical real. In this way, the films help understand something fundamental about how we relate to our current reality through our images.

This thesis examines how the conventions of four distinct genres, the star personas of two key Hispanic male stars and conceptions of Hispanic men as 'macho' intersected in constructing images of Hispanic masculinity in Hollywood between the years 1998 and 2008. The work makes an original contribution to knowledge as the first extensive study of Hispanic masculinity in contemporary Hollywood and affording new insights into the way in which genre conventions and star personas contributed to these representations. The structure is based around four genre based case studies. The first analyses how Hispanic masculinity has been represented in action adventure films, with a specific focus on Antonio Banderas' performances in The Mask of Zorro (1998) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003). The second case study chapter examines representations of Hispanic masculinity in the contemporary family film, its two case studies being the male members of the Cortez family of spies in Spy Kids (2001) and the animated Puss in Boots in Shrek 2 (2004). The third focuses on the cross genre form of the border film discussing images of Mexican masculinity in the drug trafficking drama Traffic (2000),with a specific focus on the performance of Benicio Del Toro, and border Western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005). The fourth and final case study chapter centres around the representation of Hispanic masculinity in contemporary Biopics, analysing the performances of Banderas in And Staring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003) and Del Toro in Stephen Soderbergh's Che (2008). This research demonstrates that, in a decade where Hispanics became the US' largest ethnic minority, Hispanic males were cast in increasingly central and heroic roles across a range of genres but were still subject to long standing stereotypes than represent Hispanic men as excessively macho.

My area of research is best described as the promotion of a new methodological approach to the study of film. It is an approach that is founded upon a spatial reading, based on an exploration into abstract aesthetics and pays particular attention to the interactions between sound and image. Whilst this methodological approach can be utilised to read any film, this thesis looks particularly at the musical genre and, more specifically, the musical number and its representation of space. The need to delimit my study notwithstanding, the musical has been taken as a case study in order to demonstrate how this spatial methodology should pay attention to, and be aware of, the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies that genres encapsulate. My thesis challenges the dominance of cognitive theory by providing an approach based upon gestalt theory, making use of ‘forensic’ analysis to remove aesthetics from their narrative context. Theorists such as Rick Altman (1989, 1999) and Jane Feuer (1993) have long discussed the structural qualities of the musical genre in an attempt to delimit the musical number from that which surrounds it. A different representation of space emerges in the musical number, one that permits a deeper exploration into the negotiated relationship between sound and image. In this thesis I examine this space closely utilising a range of innovative analytical techniques including virtual reconstruction and diagrammatic notation. This ‘forensic’ analysis is considered within the overarching framework of gestalt theory: that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. This thesis studies film as an audio-visual medium and considers a range of different spatial realms in order to best understand the complex negotiations between sound and image. Previous scholars of the musical genre have largely focused upon narrative readings of either new or canonical filmic texts. I argue that these narrative readings, whilst 4 providing significant contributions to the field, are ultimately deficient as they fail to adequately explore the finer qualities of film language.

The most important and celebrated chapter in the history of Bangladesh is its nine-month long Liberation War (Muktijuddho in Bengali) of 1971. My research explores the ways in which memories and histories of the war are shaped by the gender dynamics of nationalism in different periods through examining war-themed films of Bangladesh. By covering both mainstream and alternative war films produced just before, during and after the war, from 1970 to 2011, I trace the various ways in which men and women are represented in war films and construct the idea of nation. I also aim to unpack the politics and aesthetics of war films, contextualizing them as they intersect with the socio-historical contexts. Employing textual and visual analyses with using solid theoretical scholarship, both from the East and the West, concerning cinematic representation of the past, women and nation, I argue that the different power structures of men and women constructed in war films are in accordance with the dominant ideology of the society. The Liberation War was a people’s war, involving manifold participation of both men and women from different classes, religions and localities. Despite this reality, cinematic representations of the War have always portrayed the combat experience as an exclusively masculine enterprise. By contrast, women have been constructed in the films as passive victims or in subordinate roles. Woman is valorized in one instance, in her idealized portrayal as the ‘mother-nation’; this iconic projection of woman, however, highlights men’s heroic defence of their motherland. On the other hand, female rape victims in the war are framed as shame or dishonour for the nation and are offered a customary exclusion by suicide, death or occasionally by some other means at the end of the war films. I have argued that war films exclude the raped women from the narratives in order to maintain a perceived purity of the nationalist discourse, following the national politics, culture and historiography of Bangladesh.

This thesis is an investigation of the explosive growth of Bhojpuri cinema alongside the vernacularisation of north Indian media in the last decade. As these developments take place under the shadow of Bollywood, the thesis also studies the aesthetic, political, and infrastructural nature of the relationship between vernacular media industries – Bhojpuri in particular – and Bollywood. The thesis then argues that Bhojpuri cinema, even as it provincialises Bollywood, aspires to sit beside it instead of displacing it. The outrightly confrontational readings notwithstanding, the thesis grapples with the ways in which the vernacular departs from its corresponding cosmopolitan form and how it negotiates cultural representation as an industry. The two chapters in Part I provide a narrative account of the discourses and media-texts that saturate the Bhojpuri public sphere. The prevailing discourses and the dominant texts, the thesis argues, resonate with each other, but also delimit the destiny of Bhojpuri film and media. The tug of war between the cultural and economic valuations of the Bhojpuri commodity, as between enchantment and discontent with its representative prowess, as also between ‘traditional’ values and reformist ‘modernity’, leaves us within an uncomfortable zone. The thesis shows how aspirations to male stardom consolidate this territory and become the logic by which the industry output keeps growing, in spite of a failing media economy. Each of the three chapters in Part II traces the historical trajectory of language, gendered use of public space, and piracy, respectively. In this part, the thesis establishes the analytical provenance for the emergence of Bhojpuri cinema in particular, and vernacular media in general. While Bhojpuri media allows Bhojpuri to seek its autonomy from state-supported Hindi, it also occupied the fringe economy of rundown theatres as Bollywood sought to move towards the multiplexes. If the advent of audiocassettes led to the emergence of Bhojpuri media sanskar, the availability of the single-screen economy after the arrival of multiplexes cleared the space for the theatrical exhibition of Bhojpuri cinema. The suboptimal transactions of counterfeit media commodities, on the other hand, regulate the legal counterpart and widen the net of distribution beyond the film theatre. I argue that the suboptimal practices are embedded within the unstable meanwhile. As an occupant of this meanwhile temporality, Bhojpuri film and media, whether in rundown theatres or on cheap mobile phones, grow via contingent and strategic coalitions. This thesis, then, argues that cinema as a form makes it possible for Bhojpuri speaking society to confront, and reconcile with, its own corporeality – the aural and visual footprints, the discursive and ideological blind spots, and the aspiration to break free. On account of the media economy and its power to ratify a new order of hierarchy via celebrity, Bhojpuri media threatens to transform the social order, yet remains open to the possibility of manipulation by which the old order could rechristen itself as new.