This thesis examines the treatment of Soviet history in the cinema of the Thaw. It aims to show how Soviet filmmakers of the post-Stalin period strove to create a new master narrative in which Soviet history was represented and told in a fundamentally new way. Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ redefined the image of the Soviet past, and thus reconfigured the messages concerning Soviet identity which were to be extrapolated from it. The cinematic Thaw in Soviet culture closely followed the model of this new defining narrative, which combined cultic celebration of the Soviet founder and the revolutionary foundational myth of the Soviet State with shocking, unprecedented iconoclasm and attacks upon Lenin’s previously deified successor. For the cinematic renaissance of the Thaw was not simply about the jettisoning of the subjects, practices, and professional relationships of the pre-1953 period, and their rapid replacement with new themes relating to contemporary life and wartime humanity. It was primarily concerned with the complex, often faltering process of injecting established themes and approaches with a new humanity and ‘truth-to-life’, and combining them with the depiction both of more realistic, engaging Soviet historical characters, and of particularly damaging, difficult periods of the more recent Stalinist past. Like the ‘Secret Speech’, Thaw cinema principally looked neither to the present nor to the future, but to the past, both to a time of revolutionary heroism and to one of destructive ideological distortion, in an effort to find a new cinematic narrative which would be both celebratory and meaningful. Soviet cinema during the Thaw was thus defined by its new use and portrayal of subjects which were familiar to Soviet audiences, both from their cinema-going and real-life experience, and it was in this pioneering synthesis of historical myth and truth where the tremendous popularity of Thaw-era Soviet cinema truly lay.

My thesis examines the intersections between railway and cinema spaces to demonstrate how crucial these technologies were in altering life in Britain. The project focuses on the period between 1895 (the birth of film) and 1948 (when the railways were nationalised). Access to railways and cinemas was predicated on payment rather than birthright: in carriages and auditoriums, consumerism was—in theory—inclusive. The two technologies were thus crucial in transforming public space from one of privilege to one of mass consumption. I analyse three spaces: inside carriages, the interiors of auditoriums and the space onscreen to demonstrate how trains and moving images affected in material ways people’s experiences of modernity in everyday life. I also connect the intersections between the railway and cinema to a broader narrative about Britain’s democracy and industrial and political change in the period. This interdisciplinary thesis draws on a variety of fields including film theory, history, geography and sociology to provoke a reinvestigation of the cinema and the train in British culture. Archival research is central to the thesis, as primary sources create a material history of both the railway and cinema’s impacts on life in Britain. The project’s historical narrative is also interwoven with conceptual analysis. I use moving images as archives, proposing that films help us access the past by releasing stored time and space onscreen. In exploring the connections between the two technologies and everyday life, the thesis also addresses transformations of public and private space, gender and work, domesticity, tourism, and British industry. My research is articulated through a series of case studies incorporating royal rail travel, ambulance carriages, passenger trains, and railway movie theatres.

The representation of the supposed free space of the holiday by a medium of mass entertainment offers a highly condensed image that demands analysis. In my thesis I question the ways in which the holiday film constructs a sense of Britishness based around the idea of community that is shaped and pressured by forces at different historical moments. Modern capitalist society offers us a structure where the holiday is presented to us as the ultimate contrast from work. It is commodified, and we choose to enter into this ideology, take our break, and return to work, refreshed. The holiday also offers a particular type of freedom, which distinguishes it from other forms of leisure. It can be considered as more of an ‘event’ than a weekend break from work, for instance. The emergence of the holiday as a form of mass entertainment for the working class appears to coincide with the birth of cinema in the same respect. By studying the holiday film I try to reveal what it tells us about British culture, the nation and British life, and how cinema audiences may have engaged with and responded to these texts. As well as providing textual analysis of the films, I also address the holiday as a liminal, carnivalesque space (Inglis, 2000, Shields, 2002), and also consider how the landscape is mediated through the tourist gaze (Urry, 2002, Bell and Lyall, 2002). I explore the ways in which the cinematic representation of the holiday shifts in relation to changing social contexts – in new formations of leisure, class and landscape. I also consider how audiences might actively respond to these films, and how these texts might construct an ideal working-class community pre- and post- World War II. Overall, I argue that representations of the traditional British holiday in these films are mostly white, working-class and raucous, but that these representations are not fixed, and are subject to change according to historical and social pressures.

Since the early 20th century, artists have explored the seemingly endless potential inherent in the complex blend of visual art and cinema that is experimental animation. Contemporary artists make use of both traditional and modern techniques to produce works of animated visual art that subvert conventional viewing practices and the normal perception of moving images. Despite an increased output of scholarly studies of animation and avant-garde media over the last twenty years, contemporary works of experimental animation rarely receive the kind of close, in-depth analysis that their formal and conceptual intricacies demand. This research draws from various philosophies of experience (e.g. existential phenomenology, cognitive and gestalt psychology, and empiricist philosophies of science and epistemology) to examine the unconventional aesthetic experiences offered by a diverse range of works by contemporary North American and British artists. These selected artists’ works are materially, formally, and aesthetically heterogeneous, and each of this dissertation’s four chapters explores the particularities of several artists’ works in relation to a common philosophical area of enquiry. Each chapter establishes a wider historical and theoretical context for the selected artists’ works before pursuing a more philosophically focused analysis of individual works. A phenomenological approach to the aesthetics of abstract animation is developed in relation to the works of Steven Woloshen and Bret Battey; works by Frank Mouris, Katy Shepherd and Jeff Scher are investigated regarding issues of personal memory and selfhood; epistemic aestheticism is examined in Stuart Hilton’s and Semiconductor’s nonfiction works; and a hermeneutics and allegoresis of oblique narrative is elaborated for Lewis Klahr’s and Kelly Sears’s collage animations. Rather than attempting to fit these artworks within a broader ontological theory of experimental animation, this dissertation engages in a discussionof spectatorship that investigates the complex and challenging experiences individual artworks invite spectators to actively participate in.

This thesis explores film resonances and film-landscape interactions. Film resonances refer to the multiple and varied ways people respond to films. Film-landscape describes the interaction between film and people's experience of landscape, containing a notion that landscape is always-in-the-making. Film resonances and film-landscape . interactions are explored in the contemporary New Zealand context, focusing on The Lord of the Rings and Whale Rider. The thesis explores film resonances at several levels: analysing film-tours in terms of film-landscape interactions; exploring how the same films have different resonances and reactions in different places; interrogating the relationship between popular, government and business responses to films; and examining the relationship between film and national identity narratives. Together, The Lord of the Rings and Whale Rider can be used as a prism through which to highlight particular elements ofthe New Zealand contemporary moment. A multiple method approach is used, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, conversational interviews, participant observation and analysis of newspaper articles and internet movie databases. This thesis adds to and extends current literature by considering The Lord of the Rings and Whale Rider with a more-than-film approach. It draws on a mixture of theories, arguing that considered separately, current literature does not fully address the potential of film-landscape and film resonances. Through a more-than-film approach, the thesis engages with film resonances and film-landscape interactions in ways that acknowledge the work film does outside of production or viewing. The thesis will also be of interest to all those concerned with the power of film and how it has the potential to influence our landscapes, our imaginations and our identities.

Since the foundation of the modern Greek state in 1832 there has been a major controversy amongst Greeks as to what is truly Greek. Two central viewpoints stand out and form the two versions of the Greek national identity - the Hellenic and the Romeic. Each notion of Greekness is depicted by distinctively different characteristics in terms of its origins, mentality, behavioural norms, musical preferences as well as domestic and international relations. For most of the twentieth century the Hellenic and the Romeic were expressed through cultural discourses such as film and music. The purpose of this study is to examine the expression of these versions of Greek identity in Greek Cinema and the various ways in which this leads to gender representation. Three films are used as case studies: Stella (1955), Never on Sunday (1960) and Diplopennies (1966). Through musical, textual, sociological and historical analysis, the thesis identifies the ways in which the two notions of Greekness are portrayed in the films, primarily through the personification of these identities in the male and female protagonists. The thesis illustrates how these portrayals result in the engendering of the two identities and the attribution of gender traits to the main characters. Moreover, the study delineates how in Greek Cinema the musical genre Rebetiko became indissolubly associated with the Romeic identity and, indeed, its prime signifier. Rebetiko, through its association with the protagonists, contributes to their personification of the Romeic identity and, with its gendered traits, constitutes a central factor in the formation of gender in the films. Finally, the thesis elucidates how the film musical, the only film genre in Greek Cinema to be associated with the Hellenic identity, forms the battlefield on which the two identities confront each other and are expressed more distinctly and dramatically than in any other genre.

Political names define the symbolic organisation of what is common and are therefore a potential site of contestation. It is with this field of possibility, and the role the moving image can play within it, that this dissertation is concerned. This thesis verifies that there is a transformative relation between the political name and the cinema. The cinema is an art with the capacity to intervene in the way we see and hear a name. On the other hand, a name operates politically from the moment it agitates a practice, in this case a certain cinema, into organising a better world. This research focuses on the audiovisual dynamism of the names ‘worker’, ‘factory’ and ‘people’ in contemporary cinemas. It is not the purpose of the argument to nostalgically maintain these old revolutionary names, rather to explore their efficacy as names-in-dispute, as names with which a present becomes something disputable. This thesis explores this dispute in the company of theorists and audiovisual artists committed to both emancipatory politics and experimentation. The philosophies of Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou are of significance for this thesis since they break away from the semiotic model and its symptomatic readings in order to understand the name as a political gesture. Inspired by their affirmative politics, the analysis investigates cinematic practices troubled and stimulated by the names ‘worker’, ‘factory’, ‘people’: the work of Peter Watkins, Wang Bing, Harun Farocki, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. These are practices affected by their engagement with political names that generate audiovisual assemblages exceeding standard sociological representations. These practices do not adapt the names ‘worker’ or ‘people’ to modern times. These are inventive practices undoing simplistic dichotomies between the obsolete and the new and articulating images and sounds with which to resonate in the endless assemblage of the present.

The purpose of the project is to investigate the politics of hegemonic white Atlantics in film. Case studies were selected as paradigmatic of specific historical moments in the development of white Atlanticist discourses. The focus of analysis in each case was the representation of racialised whiteness in a context of its gradual decentring and a concomitant emergence of transnational identities in a post-national discursive paradigm. The argument presented here is that the white Atlantic is a political construct variously both resisted and produced in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic paradigms of racialised transatlantic whiteness. As such it is capable of mutation and inflection as it is deployed in the mobilisation of power. A range of textual analysis techniques and tools, including semiotics, genre and narrative analysis, were applied to the selected case studies. The methodology employed was derived from post-structuralist accounts of discourse as both constitutive and productive of identities, in which film may be understood as part of the cultural repertoire of signifiers of 'what is on the mind' of the producers and readers of white Atlanticist discourse. The project is limited by its substantive scope and methodological approach. Substantively, its scope is limited to film. Interrogation of other expressive forms would enlarge the scope to readings. The methodology also leads to an emphasis on a reading of the text, while the audience is assumed. An ethnographic methodology may offer different results. Most significantly, the project is limited by its case study scope. A fuller interpretation of the development of the white Atlantic in film requires a considerably more substantive transatlantic genealogy to interrogate its polyvalence in different times and locations. The project extends the academic study of racialised whiteness which has mainly been focused within national boundaries. It also extends the contemporary development of work on transatlantic whiteness of which the substantive research has been mainly of a historical nature. In extending the range of research in these ways, the project identifies and offers a reading of contemporary white Atlanticist discourses and their development. The case study readings suggest that, in the context of the progressive decentring of whiteness, polyvalent discourses of racialised transatlantic whiteness have emerged, articulated, in particular, via available tropes of romance and masculinity.

The 1950s saw perhaps the largest number of American films set on and around the US-Mexico border of any period of the twentieth century. This thesis investigates why this concentration of films appeared at this point in time. It argues that rather than responding to the changes in policy and practice along the borderline that were taking place in the 1950s, these films engage with cold war politics as they explore the relationship between the United States and Mexico through ideas of romance, revolution and regulation. The thesis contributes to the growing field of cultural studies of the Cold War by contending that these movies engage with cold war discourses of colonialism. I argue that through images of the US-Mexico border, colonialism is interrogated and that the international boundary is thus produced as a site through which concerns about the United States’ place in the cold war world are articulated. While much existing scholarship has examined the relationship of specific genres such as science fiction, westerns and film noir to cold war politics, this thesis moves away from such generic constraints to focus on films of different genres which feature representations of the US-Mexico border. The thesis’ central contribution therefore lies in its assertion that a study which is attentive to cinematic space and focused on a particular cinematic location can provide new ways of understanding cold war culture, and that American cinematic engagement with the Cold War is not limited to or defined by generic frameworks.

The thesis will examine how DVD distribution can affect Japanese film dissemination in the UK. The media discourse concerning 4Digital Asia and Third Window proposes that this is the principal factor influencing their films' presence in the UK from 2008 to 2010. The distributors' actions establish the UK market that exists for Japanese films, and that these consumer demands are best pursued through the medium of DVD. As a result, the distribution and marketing materials for the film releases often highlight the discs and their DVD labels as much as the production background and content of the films. This fact leads to the following questions: how are DVDs of Japanese films made distinctive? How important is the DVD format itself, as well as the labeling of the films as Japanese? An effective methodological strategy is needed to answer these questions. The thesis' approach allows for an integrated analysis of relevant sources within the fields of Japanese film, DVD media, and film distribution and marketing. DVD packaging, special features, trailers, websites and reviews are all essential parts of 4Digital Asia and Third Window's DVD distribution processes. Multiple analytical approaches can integrate methods of close textual analysis required for the study of various sources that represent film distribution. Therefore, the discourses circulating the DVDs, and the influence of DVD dissemination strategies of Japanese films in the UK, will be investigated. They reveal that the distributors' practices communicate how Japanese cinema is distribution on DVD in the UK, and act as a means of identifying the market that exists for these films.