Life after Death is a significant theme in cinema but one which has not been scrutinised to any great- extent. This research focuses on depictions on, film of, in F. W. H. Myers's phrase, "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death". It includes such topics as apparitions, hauntings, mediumship, representations of Heaven, angels Near Death Experiences, possession and poltergeist phenomena: in short, the multifarious ways in which the dead interact with the living. The research begins with a historical perspective, outlining the development of pre-cinematic technology for `projecting' phantoms, and also literary antecedents, particularly the Gothic. The ways in which these approaches fed into early ghost cinema are discussed and English-language sound films are examined thematically. Finally, six of-the most significant have been selected for more detailed analysis. Excluded from consideration are vampires (who have not achieved a full post-mortem state), reanimation films (by definition the body is not dead and often only rudimentary, if any, personality can be said to have survived), and what can loosely be described as It Came From Hell' films in which a generalised diabolic force is at work. Films dealing with reincarnation, in which in any case the personality is often lost in the transition to a new body, have been left out on grounds of space.

The purpose of the thesis is to question the hegemony of auteurist, director-based criticisms of Shakespearean films by rescuing the film-editor from anonymity. By drawing my attention to the determining, yet largely disregarded work of editorial creation, I offer a reading of a selection of Shakespearean films that acknowledges the centrality of collaborative work in representing Shakespeare on film. In order to recreate the editor as a 'collaborative auteur', I propose to trace the authorial signature(s) of the editore(s) by examining and identifying in which ways and according to which specific patterns the Shakespearean pre-texts are transformed into 'Shakespearean' film texts.

My thesis examines the relationship between Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma and Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu in light of the philosophy and history of film and its interaction with literary and new media theories. In developing a correlation between the processes of visuality and time, which recalls Deleuze’s theorisation of the cinematic ‘timeimage’, I compose a critical approach that casts montage as a conceptual link between the aesthetics of A la recherche and Histoire(s) du cinéma. Building on Genette’s thesis regarding the co-existence of metaphor and metonymy in A la recherche, my project introduces montage in order to demonstrate how the nature of the image in both artworks corresponds to a shared aesthetic based on the imagined projection of images, which problematises oppositions between word and image, literature and video. My analysis of literary and videographic intertextuality brings into view an aesthetic based on the relationship between montage and the anagram, thus providing a new inter-formal perspective from which to consider the intertextual networks created by Proust and Godard. In a chapter devoted to sound, I engage with a synaesthetic approach developed by film scholarship, in order to examine how the auditory realm of A la recherche might be comparable to that of Godard’s use of sound in Histoire(s) du cinéma despite the ‘silence’ of one and the ‘noise’ of the other. My analysis of the depiction of ambiguous ‘subjectivities’ in the two works draws out the complex negotiation between the individual’s perspective(s) and the collective appropriation of those perspectives. The formal embodiment of these subjective ambiguities leads me to conclude that both works attest to the futility of the search both for a stable self and for artistic transcendence.

This thesis explores the process of 'Sovietising' the emotions through the framework of the genre film. The reorientation of the film industry in the 1930s towards mass entertainment, I argue, saw a turn to generic formulas as a means to increase the emotional impact of cinema on its audience. Although essential to the construction of 'structures of feeling' that could help support the ideological codes of Stalinist society, genre films and the affects they solicited also exposed fissures within official discourses. Whereas previous studies have emphasised the successful amalgamation of ideology and entertainment, I find an irreconcilable tension between genre cinema's tendency to excite the senses and disturb psychical balance and Socialist Realism's aim of establishing a stable, normative value system. Employing psychoanalytic theory, I posit that this tension is manifest in individual films and the contemporary debates about them, which I show, display a pervasive anxiety over affective 'excess'. Chapter one explores the conflation of 'happiness' with the masochistic enjoyment of self sacrifice in the films promoting the cult of the leader as the builder of a new joyful life. The second chapter excavates the ideological problems of incorporating the affective devices of melodrama into the Stalinist 'drama of contemporary life'. I go on to outline how the attempt to create a distinctively 'Soviet' film comedy, the topic of chapter three, prompted thorny debates over suitable forms of Soviet laughter throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Finally, chapter four explores the tensions within the Stalinist thriller between the ideological imperative of perpetuating a paranoid world view based on firm divisions between 'us' and 'them' and the genre's demand to provoke anxiety through staging the breakdown of stable boundaries. The 'education of feeling' was a deeply precarious task, I show, with the affective responses elicited by genre cinema often proving resistant to being ideologically shaped. A contribution to the history of emotions, the thesis shows the role of affect in sustaining, as well as undermining ideological mechanisms.

This thesis analyses autobiographical practices in recent films and addresses significant gaps in existing theory. I argue that the study of autobiographical films requires a new approach that must bring together diverse areas of film theory including theories of documentary, embodiment and haptics, as well as giving due attention to the use of voice. I assess the viability of the category of autobiographical film, and I demonstrate through close analysis how certain films promote complex subjectivities and effect highly emotional spectatorial engagement. I concentrate on two interrelated tendencies in autobiographical practice: the use of archival footage and the self-filming of the filmmaker. In the films I have selected for examination, all of which engage with a moment of personal crisis, the filmmaker is a dominant presence visually on screen or vocally on the soundtrack, or both. I develop a methodology based on Laura U. Marks’s (2000a) observations of archival and embodied strategies in documentary films. I extend her distinction to look also at non-documentary films, demonstrating how autobiography cuts across some of the conventional distinctions between different kinds of filmmaking. Part I focuses on archival strategies, analysing the ways in which various forms of archive can function within autobiographical films. Part II concentrates on embodied strategies, considering the performative body, illness and ageing. I argue that by considering autobiographical films in terms of archival and embodied strategies, we can better understand notions of autobiographical subjectivity, the category of autobiographical films, and the spectatorial engagement that they effect.

My thesis explores the ways cinema engages with the sense of touch. I concentrate on two periods of technological change in French cinema in order to investigate film’s tactile nature from an historical standpoint. The cinematic experience alters with the emergence of new technology both within and outside the moving images. Society’s perception of the senses also modifies with time. I ask how cinema’s relation to touch developed with social changes. My thesis is concerned with grounding touch within film theory and history by engaging with the history and philosophy of the senses. My first chapter examines the motif of the hand, exploring how its image may have altered within the two periods studied. Considering the hand as a representative for touch, I look at how its image was affected by the emergence of sound cinema. I consider the connection of the sense of touch to the senses of sight and hearing. Chapter Two explores how the cinematic representation of the body is related to changes in the history of the senses. I analyse, in particular, the filmic discourse on the two World Wars. Chapter Three investigates the technological transformations of the screen. I explore how Avant-Garde cinema of the late 1920s experimented with the screen, and what changes the widescreen processes brought to films and cinema theatres. Chapter Four considers cinema is an imprint, and is concerned with notions of memory and trace.

“Walking Pictures” is about how tourists walk London. It studies two ways of walking the city: walking tours and film. My thesis demonstrates how each is implicated in the other’s practices. Combining historical research of the development of tourist walking between 1880 and 1939 with cinematic textual analysis of London-set non-fiction and fiction films of this period, I ask: how might the views and experiences of London’s walking tourists be imbricated within the city’s cinematic incarnations? I focus on a period between 1880 and 1939, when large numbers of tourists started arriving in London via new modes of mass transport. The development of walking tours for these tourists in the 1880s and 1890s runs roughly tandem to the early days of cinema. Though films taken aboard moving vehicles proved popular, early films were often taken on the ground, embodying a pedestrian view of the city. My first chapter therefore contextualises the thesis by telling a parallel history of tourists walking London’s streets and spectators experiencing those same streets in the cinema. Subsequent chapters follow thematic routes through the city, walking a literary London, landmark London, and an impoverished London. Each chapter asks a series of questions. What were the origins of these thematic routes? How and why did these routes become codified in the form of walking tours? What did tourists see and experience on these walks? How does cinema not only reflect the experiences of tourists, but enable those unable to walk the city’s actual streets to experience them fantasmatically in the cinema? Together these chapters seek to understand the cinematic city through its walks. Contributing to larger discourses in history, geography, and film studies, “Walking Pictures” addresses how representations of the city shape the way we perceive and move through urban space.

This doctoral thesis is a study of American horror remakes produced in the years 2003-2013, and it represents a significant academic intervention into an understanding of the horror remaking trend. It addresses the remaking process as one of adaptation, examines the remakes as texts in their own right, and situates them within key cultural, industry and reception contexts. It also shows how remakes have contributed to the horror genre’s evolution over the last decade, despite their frequent denigration by critics and scholars. Chapter One introduces the topic, and sets out the context, scope and approach of the work. Chapter Two reviews the key literature which informs this study, considering studies in adaptation, remaking, horror remakes specifically, and the genre more broadly. Chapter Three explores broad theoretical questions surrounding the remake’s position in a wider culture of cinematic recycling and repetition, and issues of fidelity and taxonomy. Chapter Four examines the ‘reboots’ of one key production company, exploring how changes are made across versions even as promotion relies on nostalgic connections with the originals. Chapter Five discusses a diverse range of slasher film remakes to show how they represent variety and contribute to genre development. Chapter Six considers socio-political themes in 1970s horror films and their contemporary post-9/11 remakes, and Chapter Seven focuses on gender representation and recent genre trends in the rape-revenge remake. This thesis concludes with a discussion of the most recent horror remakes, and reiterates the findings from the preceding chapters. Ultimately, genre remakes remain prevalent because they are often profitable and cater for a guaranteed audience. They are commercial products, but also represent some of the more creative entries in horror cinema over the last decade, and their success enables further productions. Rather than being understood as simplistic derivative copies, horror remakes should be considered as intertextual adaptations which both draw from and help to shape the genre.

In the cinema of late Imperial Russia the female performer is a ubiquitous figure. This is a study of the ways in which Russian directors exploited this archetype during the period 1908-1918, a decade of social, political and artistic upheaval. By subjecting key films featuring this persona to detailed analysis, this thesis demonstrates that early Russian filmmakers used the performer archetype to examine the complex ways in which conceptions of femininity and female gender roles were evolving in the period and to chart the emergence of the so-called New Woman. It also shows how some directors used this figure to explore the broader, more timeless question of what it means to be, or to become, a woman. In exploring these thematic concerns, the thesis considers the narratives in which the female performer is placed, but focuses especially on the ways in which she is represented visually. It therefore also demonstrates that these filmmakers, artists working in a new medium, centred their explorations of the expressive potential of cinematic technology on the female performer and harnessed their search for a specifically cinematic language to their representations of this figure. The study also considers how the filmmakers’ grasp of their new medium and their representations of the female performer developed during the period under consideration. This era of filmmaking has been the subject of renewed critical attention since the late 1980s, but most commentators have approached the films made during this period as socio-cultural documents. Less attention has been paid to the technical and aesthetic elements of the early Russian film style. In developing the new approaches outlined above, this study therefore advances our understanding of both the central thematic concerns and the defining aesthetic values of a crucial period in the cinematic and cultural history of Russia.

This thesis interrogates the production and projection of British landscapes in the films of Humphrey Jennings. I argue that Jennings’s films document the sights, sounds and spaces of British cities, suburbs and countrysides to reconcile divisions within the nation, to recall the shared history of the British people and to promote particular models of citizenship. My study brings to light Jennings’s consistent engagement with changes to British landscapes and with the representations and reputations that such changes contributed to national culture. The first chapter looks at a 1934 film that plays into audience assumptions about suburban life. The final chapter considers Britain’s position in the post-war world and Jennings’s promotion of ‘the new skylines on the horizon’. Throughout, I move chronologically and use both discursive and formal analysis to investigate discussions of particular places and people and to interrogate Jennings’s contribution to these discussions through his films’ framing of the landscapes of modern Britain. My analysis of Jennings’s films helps us to understand the production and consumption of physical, social and cultural landscapes in the interwar, wartime and post-war period. It also draws out Jennings’s interest in the spaces and places produced by British modernisation and in the interplay between natural and cultural landscapes, that is, the interrelationship between the real and the representational. Other studies of Jennings’s films scrutinise their structure, symbolism and links to surrealism but not the spaces that shape, and are shaped by, the films’ exposition. This thesis is the first sustained analysis of Jennings’s cinematic landscapes and, with the exception of Kevin Jackson’s biography Humphrey Jennings (2004) and with the kind permission of Marie-Louise Jennings, it is the first critical study of Jennings’s films to draw on his personal papers and unpublished writings.