Since the publication of Vito Russo's now classic study, The Celluloid Closet, in 1981, much has been written on the representation of queer characters on screen. However, no full length work on the representation of queer sexualities in silent and early sound film has yet been published, although the articles and chapters of Dyer (1990), Kuzniar (2000) and Barrios (2003) are currently taken as the definitive accounts of these issues. However, each of the above studies deals with a specific country or region and, since their publication, a significant number of silent films have been discovered that were previously thought lost. There has also been a tendency in the past to map modern concepts of sexuality and gender on to films made nearly one hundred years ago. This thesis, therefore, compares the representations of male queerness and male-male intimacy in the films of America and Europe during the period 1912 to 1934, and does so by placing these films within the social and cultural context in which they were made. This allows us to understand not how modern audiences read them, but how they were understood by audiences when they were initially released. While previous studies have concentrated on a relatively small group of films, this thesis looks far beyond this and, although it does re-examine these core works, it also explores previously neglected films, those that have only recently been rediscovered and, through a study of newspaper articles, reviews and advertisements, films that are now lost. This approach has produced some surprising conclusions, not least that, aside from the core group of European “gay-themed” films (Vingarne, Anders als die Andern, Michael and Geschlecht in Fesseln), it is in America that queer characters were dealt with more sensitively and with more compassion in the films of this period. It has also been possible to re-examine friendships or relationships on film that were previously regarded as having a homosexual subtext and, instead, demonstrate that these were actually representations of the “romantic friendship” popular in the late nineteenth century in America or the comradeship experienced by those that served in the battlefields of World War I.

This thesis examines the cultural politics surrounding public femininity in Britain and the United States between 1939 and 1949 in relation to glamour and the figure of the film star pin-up. Using Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth – the era’s most popular Hollywood pin-ups - as its case studies, the study reveals the issues of taste, class, national identity, modernity and propriety which informed the wider reception of the film star pin-up in wartime Britain and America. A range of primary sources including magazine and newspaper articles, trade publications, promotional materials and advertising tie-ups, as well as contemporaneous surveys of public opinion which engage with these stars and with pin-up and with glamour are discussed with a view to exposing the varied and nuanced discourse surrounding female sexuality in circulation in Britain during this era and exploring the translation, understanding and acceptance of American mores when such products are imported into differing cultural contexts. Informed by Bourdieu’s theorisations surrounding taste and cultural capital, Skeggs’ work on glamour and working class respectability, Buszek’s discussion of pin-up and sexual agency, Moseley’s notion of resonance and Dyer’s work upon star personas this study elaborates upon existing discussions (from the 1930s up to the current day) regarding Hollywood’s female representations at large and the Hollywood pin-up in particular as either objectifying and oppressing its female subjects and audiences within a wider discourse of patriotic ‘beauty as duty’ or offering a potentially radical and empowering form of female sexual agency. This study therefore forms part of a wider reassessment of the film star pin-up and Hollywood glamour at large and of two popular Hollywood stars in particular, whilst contributing to revisionist histories of British and American women in the Modern era, of the study of class and taste, of transatlantic cinema audiences in the Second World War more generally.

This thesis proposes a concept of the trauma aesthetic in order to make sense of the ways in which particular texts have responded to the events of 9/11 as an intensely mediated and vicariously experienced cultural trauma. A central argument within existing studies of 9/11 and its cultural impact is that, in the immediate aftermath at least, the dominant interpretation of the events often relied on crude and simplistic notions of national identity and American exceptionalism. Drawing on a variety of the cultural, political and aesthetic discourses which have emerged in post-9/11 studies, this thesis argues that the trauma aesthetic (re)mediates the cultural narrative of 9/11 in more complex and nuanced ways. The thesis examines four novels: Falling Man (Don DeLillo, 2007), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer, 2005), Man in the Dark (Paul Auster, 2008) and The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2006), and four films: A History of Violence (d. David Cronenberg, 2005), In the Valley of Elah (d. Paul Haggis, 2007), 25th Hour (d. Spike Lee, 2002) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (d. Michel Gondry, 2004). All of these texts respond to the trauma of 9/11 either directly or indirectly and explore similar themes of masculinity, culpability and the nature of traumatic experience. My analysis identifies a series of metaphors, common to all of these texts, which are used to (re)mediate the sense of absence and emptiness integral to the experience of 9/11 and the sense of vulnerability which it inflicted upon American national identity. These include: falling, timelessness, placelessness and the absent body. By drawing on and adapting existing trauma theories from scholars such as Cathy Caruth and Kali Tal the thesis proposes the trauma aesthetic as a new critical tool for the understanding of post-9/11 film and literature.

The American exploitation film functioned as an alternative to mainstream Hollywood cinema, and served as a way of introducing to audiences shocking, controversial themes, as well as narratives that major American studios were reluctant to explore. Whereas American exploitation cinema developed in parallel to mainstream Hollywood, exploitation cinema in Britain has no such historical equivalent. Furthermore, the definition of exploitation, in terms of the British industry, is currently used to describe (according to the Encyclopedia of British Film) either poor quality sex comedies from the 1970s, a handful of horror films, or as a loosely fixed generic description dependent upon prevailing critical or academic orthodoxies. However, exploitation was a term used by the British industry in the 1960s to describe a wide-ranging and eclectic variety of films – these films included, ―kitchen-sink dramas‖, comedies, musicals, westerns, as well as many films from Continental Europe and Scandinavia. Therefore, the current description of an exploitation film in Britain has changed a great deal from its original meaning. Moreover, the films currently described as exploitation films include not only low budget independent films but also films made by large filmmaking companies like the Rank Organisation. The filmmaker Robert Hartford-Davis, whose career spans the 1960s, is frequently described as a director of British exploitation films. How can Hartford-Davis‘ films help us to identify and understand the role of these films which are perceived as outside of the cultural mainstream, and how do these films fit into the narrative of British cinema? Hartford-Davis‘ films, although now described as exploitation, were made to compete with the rest of the British film industry, unlike American exploitation which was sustained in opposition to Hollywood. Nonetheless, Hartford-Davis‘ films exposes the tension that existed throughout the 1960s, between British low budget independent companies and companies like the Rank Organisation and other larger British film companies. Moreover, Hartford-Davis‘ films throw up wider questions, not only about the definition and meaning of British exploitation films, but also about the accepted narrative of post-war British film culture, as well as the structure of the domestic industry during the 1960s. Furthermore, if the outsider status of British exploitation filmmakers is removed, then perhaps the accepted opposition between the ―quality‖ film and lowbrow film is also considerably blurred, and supported only by an existing critical and academic consensus.

The aim of this thesis is to offer a diverse perspective on the representation and conceptualisation of male homosexuality in Spanish cinema over the past twenty years. Key questions considered include: how is male homosexuality represented on screen? With what particularities and ideological inflections has Spanish cinema categorised gay male characters? What is included and excluded in such representations? What do these representations say about Spanish society? Also, how are those representations related to the past – and, possibly, the future? National cinema is invariably shaped by, and in turn shapes, the social, political, and legal contexts in which it is forged, and Spain’s cinematic traditions are no exception. The aim of this thesis is to explore the interrelationships between Spanish film conventions and changing legal, discursive, and visual frameworks. The thesis explores the interrelationships between these frameworks and focuses on three thematic areas: Space, Body, and Family. In Queer Spaces I analyse the representation of Madrid’s gay district Chueca in Spanish cinema over the last two decades, and how it has evolved from an underground and liminal area of jouissance in the 1980s and early 1990s to a commercialised and globalised ‘village’ in the 2000s. I also examine how films subvert those binary oppositions often associated with space, such as hetero/homo, local/global or private/public. Gay Male Bodies focuses on the medicalisation of the male gay body and the discourse of homosexuality as ‘the other:’ I discuss how discourses that originated in Spain during Franco’s regime can still be seen in some contemporary films, and what this means for the progressive representation of male homosexuality on screen. The final section, Same-Sex Families, questions the notion of ‘family’ and ‘family values’ in regard to gay characters, and I consider key issues in contemporary GLBT politics, including gay marriage, gay families, gay adoption and the relationships between gay and heterosexual family members.

No description available.

For many years adaptation has been passed between literature and film studies, frequently dismissed as ‘shadowy copies’ and parasitic reproductions, the unwanted bastard child of the disciplines searching in vain for an academic home. Despite the emergence of insightful new scholarship into the development of Austrian film in the twentieth century, the role of the adaptation genre within Austria’s film industry and literary landscape remains an academic blind spot. This study aims to address this gap in critical knowledge, reviewing the potential function of filmic adaptations within the field of Austrian studies. Through five case studies of canonical works of post-war Austrian literature, this thesis sets out to establish adaptation both as a critical tool through which to approach literature and as an object of academic interest in its own right. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and its application in film studies, these studies compare and contrast the position occupied by the film’s implied spectator with the relationship of the implied reader to the literary text. Rereading the novels retrospectively in light of their adaptations, this approach has the ability to ‘light up dark corners’ of the novels, illuminating those aspects hitherto left in the shadows by literary criticism. It will be argued that adaptation is uniquely positioned to hold up a mirror to literary texts, reflecting their concerns not through the filters of established grand narratives and generic taxonomies but through their creative, cinematic reworking of the novels. In challenging those assumptions that have become commonplace within Austrian literary history, this study calls for a more nuanced approach to literature of the Second Republic and proposes adaptation as the means by which this may be achieved.

The current tum towards more subjective models within the field of non-fiction filmmaking has sparked consistent academic interest on the essay film as form and on the work of Chris Marker, Harun Farocki and Jose Luis Guerin as an example of an essayistic approach to cinema. A recent wave of articles, book chapters and monographs has laid the foundations of scholarly discussions of the subject. Nonetheless, these attempts to come to terms with essayistic filmmaking seem to get consistently bogged down in the problem of finding a valid definition for the form. This thesis sets out to consciously circumvent the problem of generic definition, focusing on the connective lines that link theorisation of the literary essay as form with the cinematic work of Harun Farocki, Chris Marker and Jose Luis Guerin, without proposing such connections as a coherent generic formula. Further contradictions within the nascent debate on the essay film have also been addressed. This thesis rejects current attempts to integrate the cinematic essay within the realm of documentary filmmaking. It argues for essayistic discourses in film as autonomous forms, which are non-fictional mainly by virtue of their selfreflexive approach to images. A historical overview of the assimilation of essayistic discourses by cinema is also provided, in the conviction that it is only through an understanding of how essayistic discourses have developed at different historical and cultural junctions that a proper discussion around the essay film as form can actually take place. The final section of the thesis also contains a complete analysis of essayistic filmmaking as a dialogical practice. Using structural and specific elements within Bakhtin's theoretical approach to language and the novel, aspects such as the exploration of subjectivity in direct relation to alien discourse, the promotion of active patterns of spectatorship and the conception of reality as dialogised by film images have been addressed with reference to work by Chris Marker, Harun Farocki and Jose Luis Guerin.

Since the 1930s, realist cinema has maintained a consistent but ever-diversifying presence within the heart of British film culture. The broad term of social realism has come to represent numerous examples of films that reflect a range of social environments and issues, in a manner that rejects the artifice and escapism of more classically-oriented narrative models. Yet, there has been a tendency to view such films in the context of what they have to tell us about the issues and themes they invoke, rather than what they say about their art. When we think of the New Wave in France, or Neo-Realism in Italy we think of film movements which reflected their subjects with veracity and conviction, but we also see their products as cultural entities which encourage interpretation on the terms of their authorship, and which demand readings on the basis of their form. We are invited to read the films as we would approach a poem or a painting, as artefacts of social and artistic worth. Despite the continued prevalence of social realism in British cinema, there is no comparable compulsion in our own critical culture. This study seeks to address this imbalance. Beginning with the documentary movement of the 1930s and the realist cinema of wartime, I chart the history and progression of social realism in Britain, covering a wide range of directors such as Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Alan Clarke and Shane Meadows and a number of film cycles, such as Free Cinema and the British New Wave. The key focus of my analysis lies on the aesthetic and formal constitution of the mode. I seek to highlight hitherto unrealised depths within the textual parameters of British social realism in order to propose its deserved status as a genuine and progressive national art cinema.

This is a PhD project partly about my class and ethnic background and consciousness: how I have lived them as a white man and a documentary filmmaker, and how they are connected to the ghost of my great-grandfather, who was a soldier in the British Army in Sierra Leone in the 1880s. But it is also a project about autobiographical documentary filmmaking, and is submitted for examination in two main components: the first a video-diary based film (A Whited Sepulchre) in which I investigated the form/genre of the video diary by making one myself - filmmaking as a research method; the second, a text which has an independent relationship to the film - not one of ‘illustration, description or explication’ but hopefully of ‘expansive enrichment’ (Trinh T. Minh-Ha quoted in McLaughlin & Pearce (eds) 2007: 107). A Whited Sepulchre is a video which draws on the stories of two journeys: my great-grandfather’s account of his posting to Sierra Leone, and my own ‘video diary’ of a trip that I made in December/January 2004-5, following in his footsteps but seeking a different understanding of Africa and of myself as a white ‘Englishman’. The (written) textual component maps the intellectual and creative terrain that the project as a whole explores. It includes a survey of first-person and autobiographical film and video making in the context of contemporary media, but also makes a case for writing autobiographically, ranging across my family history before focusing on my own formation both as a white man from a particular class, and as a filmmaker and video-diarist. The text concludes with an argument - at odds with some postmodern orthodoxies - advocating the cultural and political importance of a ‘sincere’ and direct mode of autobiographical address.