Until the late 1980s, films made by women were a rarity in Israeli cinema. However, during the 1990s women became a significant part of the prosperous scene of documentary filmmaking. While Israeli features have gained critical attention within academia and have become the focus of some cutting-edge research on Israeli culture, Israeli documentaries, and the proliferation of women who make film within this mode, remain a theoretical lacuna to this day. This thesis is an in-depth study of this recent film corpus of Israeli documentaries made by women. Through detailed readings of key films and reference to many others, I identify the thematic, ideological, formal and aesthetic characteristics of this body of work, and the way it relates to the culture from which it emerges. Through this close reading and by applying a variety of theoretical frameworks from film studies, cultural studies and feminist film theory, I offer another story about the Israeli place and Israeli identity as it is accounted for, reproduced and challenged in these documentaries. This 'story' is constructed around the main sites of contestation over Israeli identity: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; The Holocaust, and The Orient. These sites occupy a central place in both the national Zionist discourse and in the numerous documentaries made by women in the period in question. This thesis argues that since the 1990s, women's documentaries have emerged as a site for the cultural expression of alternative notions of subjectivity, collectivity, and engagement with historical reality. The novelty and transgression of these alternative configurations is argued for through positioning these cultural productions in the particular spatio-temporal conjunction of Israel/Palestine and in relation to the prevailing discourses in Israeli film and culture as a whole. Here, Zionist discourse - its dialectical relations with Israeli cinema and its bearings on gender identities - serves as the core reference point for the positioning of these films in contemporary Israeli culture. The thesis argues that this makes it possible to identify and draw meaning from the specific and particular strategies, aesthetics and political trajectories of these films. Elucidating those meanings and the way they come to bear on Israeli culture is both the motivation for and the outcome of this study.

This thesis explores a stylistic current within contemporary art and experimental film that will be referred to here as 'slow cinema'. This type of cinema privileges a number of distinct and recognisable tropes: the application of the long take, an undramatic narrative or non-narrative structure, a tendency toward realist or hyperrealist representation, and a pronounced stillness of composition and visual content. This thesis details the evolution of slow cinema over the course of the last three decades (in line with both dominant and marginal cultural transitions under neoliberalism), and places its aesthetics in the context of relevant innovations in post-war modern and experimental film. The first chapter outlines the contemporary shape of 'slow cinema' by describing its most typical characteristics (in relation to narrativity and modes of realism); the second chapter focuses on the device of the sequence shot and the continuing relevance of the criticism of André Bazin in relation to contemporary durational film; the third chapter situates slow cinema in the context of an opposition to the compression of temporality in neoliberal culture; and the fourth chapter encompasses a study of two recent tributes to the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, followed by an extended reflection on the digital regime of contemporary film production. As a whole, this thesis aims to map a set of unique aesthetic strategies across a number of post-war and contemporary durational films, and to place the field of 'slow cinema' within a suitably broad framework of related film-historical, cultural and socioeconomic trends.

This thesis explores how the relationship between urban space and dissident sexualities has been represented in recent Latin American cinema. More specifically, it considers how this representation disturbs, remaps and relocates broader (hegemonic) imagined geographies of sexuality and the problematic sets of binaries around which they have been constructed. The study argues that the films in question are characterised by overtly queer urban geographies, in which sexual identity, transgression and liberation appear as highly contingent phenomena that can never wholly assume a position of exteriority in relation to hegemonic power structures. The General Introduction begins by outlining the broad conceptual framework in which my discussion is situated, tracing the relationship between cities, cinema and dissident sexuality. It then outlines the scope of the thesis as a specifically critical intervention, proposing a queer methodology with regards to the analysis of the films which follows. The chapters comprising Part One examine metropolitan spaces of dissident sexuality pertaining to the cities of Buenos Aires and Medellin as they are imagined in Un ano sin amor (Anahi Berneri, 2005) and La virgen de los sicarios (Barbet Schroder, 2000) respectively. It explores how these cities are (de)constructed as centres of (de )regulation with regards to dissident sexualities, bodies and desires. In this respect, Chapter One argues SIM as it appears in Berneri' s film to be both antithetical to and yet also highly reliant on local/global economic structures. Chapter Two, in turn, suggests that the economy of violence envisaged in Schroeder's film is both conducive and detrimental to the construction of gay identity and political consciousness. The chapters comprising Part Two progress to focus on the representation of marginal sexualised spaces in filmic depictions of Recife and Rio de Janeiro in Claudio Assis's Amarelo Manga (2002) and Karim Alnouz's Madame Sata (2002), respectively, investigating how they appear both as peripheral to and yet also highly integrated into the wider urban/global fabric. Chapter Three, in this respect, proposes the misogyny and homophobia present amongst the male characters of Assis's film to be products of 'modern' Brazil as opposed to a 'sexual hinterland' still steeped in tradition. Chapter Four, takes this discussion forward in relation to Alnouz's rendering of 1920s/30s Lapa, considering how the queer discourse I associate with the protagonist disrupts understandings of sexual emancipation as an entirely contemporary and 'foreign' phenomenon issuing solely from North Atlantic domains. Diverse in approach, the films selected, unlike the frequently polarised debates occurring in the academe, do not assume inflexible subjective positions or seek to provide coherent, fully-legible accounts of highly complex issues which defy totalising explanations. In this respect, by offering a specifically queer perspective on the way in which urban space and dissident sexualities (re )produce each other in these films, this thesis seeks to decentre current debates occurring within the domain of film studies, cultural geography, sexuality politics and urban studies, and relocate them into a Latin American context.

Subtitling, as all other types of audiovisual translation, has always been influenced by cultural factors, and in turn subtitles have influenced their target readers. The close interrelation between language and culture in interlingual subtitling may raise problems, or challenging issues in translating cultural references from oral dialogue into written subtitles. The aim of this study is to investigate the problems and strategies involved in the Arabic subtitling of the cultural references in the Harry Potter movies in Arabic. Special focus will be laid on different types of cultural references such as names of people, mythological creatures, magical objects, place names, food items, neologisms, etc., which are characteristic of J. K. Rowling’s book on which the movies are based. These cultural references pose challenges for the subtitlers. The main objective of this study is to determine which factors and strategies play a significant role when subtitling Harry Potter movies for children in the Arab world. In order to achieve this aim, a descriptive approach within the discipline of translation studies has been adopted. More specifically, this approach will examine the possibility to observe any kind of consistency in the strategies applied for the subtitling of cultural references. Díaz Cintas’s model is proposed as a theoretical framework that helps in understanding and explaining the strategies available to the subtitler when subtitling cultural references. The study concludes that there is a complex of cultural, ideological, and technical aspects which have significant influence on subtitlers when subtitling for children, in particular from English into Arabic. The analysis shows that the Arabic subtitlers tend to use more strategies than others in dealing with cultural references. The conclusion attempts an explanation of the frequency of the strategies used.

This thesis explores representations of narrative space and gender in 1960s French and Algerian cinema; an era marked, in both countries, by the spectre of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Until now, the two forms of cinema which arose out of this war have rarely been analysed in relation to each other. Doing so provides a crucial insight into how the dynamics of decolonization led to analogous patterns of cinematic representation- particularly in relation to patterns of gender and space. This thesis will be split into four chapters. In the first chapter, I provide a general overview of my methodological approach, the specific theorists that have informed my research, and a socio-cultural overview of the period focusing in particular on issues of space and gender. The second chapter will then shift to textual analysis, illustrating how a number of French films of the period, including Adieu Philippine (Rozier 1962), La Belle vie (Enrico 1963), Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Resnais 1963), and Le Boucher (Chabrol 1969), critique a post-colonial modernization drive predicated upon neo-colonial processes of spatial marginalization in representing the domestic sphere as ‘contaminated’ by the figure of a traumatised appelé. In this respect, patterns of narrative space will shown to be intrinsically intertwined with the politics of anti-colonial resistance. In the second half of this chapter, I will show how this desire to critique colonialism coexists with a gendered conservatism which elides or in some cases completely ignores the feminist agenda pursued by women (and men) during the 1960s. The third chapter will then discuss how the attainment of national sovereignty impacted upon Algerian cinema of the period. Within this framework, I will firstly show how La Bataille d’Alger (Pontecorvo 1966), Le Vent des Aurès (Lakhdar-Hamina 1966) and L’Opium et le bâton (Rachedi 1969) use representations of spatial transgression (from the private to the public realm) as a signifier for anti-colonial resistance. Nevertheless- as with the French films of the era- I will then draw attention to the ways in which these films draw from a constellation of retrograde gendered ideals in their depiction of the Revolution. The fourth chapter will then explore the few films which do not fit into this taxonomy, instead using patterns of narrative space in order to critique patriarchal ideology. In this section, I will explore films including Cléo de 5 à 7 (Varda 1962), Elise ou la vraie vie (Drach 1970), La Bataille d’Alger (Pontecorvo 1966), and La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua (Djebar 1978). In focusing primarily upon the politics of representation, I believe that this project will facilitate a crucial methodological shift, from the largely ahistorical and apolitical approaches which have previously dominated critical discourse on this period, to an approach instead rooted in the socio-cultural and political reality of the era.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, institutional and cultural changes caused adolescence as a life stage to become increasingly overdetermined, while simultaneously blurring its definitional boundaries. Although the concept of youth as a culturally defined category is of relatively recent origin, adolescence is culturally recognized as a biological and social necessity; a process one must go through in order to negotiate the passageway from childhood to adulthood. Problematically, the very existence of adolescence depends on the fixity of childhood and adulthood, life stages that are themselves highly contestable. Fascination with those individuals who did not conform to culturally sanctioned ideas of adolescence during this decade, classified by such terms as “emerging adulthood,” “twixters,” and “rejuveniles,” evinces the tenuous nature of life-stage categorizations and their fluctuating role in cultural understandings of individual psychosocial formation. This thesis argues that adolescence, and consequently the subject position of the adolescent, should be understood as an assemblage of a wide array of practices employed in the management and regulation of a specific population. Accordingly, this project asserts that a shift occurred in the representation of adolescence at the beginning of the twenty-first century that worked to legitimize one particular depiction of adulthood, consequently positioning adolescents as something worth obviating and marginalizing through the censure of the performance of certain immature behaviors and attitudes. Through the exploration of “threshold moments” as represented in American film and television from 1999-2008, moments at which individuals are depicted as struggling to reach autonomy, this thesis uncovers the mechanisms that naturalize the figure of the adolescent as an attenuated individual possessing partially formed identities and skills, considering the ways in which this discursive formation operates in the new millennium as a means by which a certain type of privilege is negotiated, controlled and reasserted.

In the period since 2001, cinema has witnessed what David Butler refers to as a ‘golden age’ of fantasy film production. The majority of fantasy films released during this time have originated from British literature, and have to some extent been produced and located within Britain, showcasing a wealth of national characters, acting talent, and landscapes on screen. Yet, despite vital revisionist work conducted on British horror, science fiction and melodrama, there remains a hesitancy to embrace fantasy as a genre intrinsically connected with national cinema and domestic film production values. This thesis applies the contention that perceptions and understandings of British film and fantasy are influenced by the critical ‘writing machine’, which informs existing tensions between aesthetics, genre and film production, and also wider meanings attached to ideas around national identity and representation. However, this study argues that such discursive processes do not function as a homogenous entity and instead are prone to fluctuation across different critical sites and at different ‘moments’ in time. In order to determine how British cinema and fantasy genre are appropriated by the critical ‘writing machine’, this research adopts a historical reception studies approach to examine meanings and associations as generated by the contemporary British mainstream press in the subsequent decade since 2001 onwards. Building on work conducted by Barbara Klinger and Kate Egan, amongst others, this thesis examines a broad range of critical materials, including press reviews and film-related articles, which circulated across a national, regional and local spectrum of mainstream distribution. This research contributes to existing scholarship by investigating how the critical ‘writing machine’ operates to inform and influence cultural appropriations of British cinema and fantasy genre, and considers how these meanings can shift over time.

This thesis looks at screenplay development as an industrial process, worthy of critically rigorous industry-level study. It analyses in particular how screenwriters, producers and development executives in the UK industry make knowledge claims, how they talk about gaining this knowledge and how they talk about the aims and practices of screenplay development – all through the prism of in-depth interviews. In doing so it contributes to Production Studies debates around film, specifically by arguing for and illustrating the importance of the development process. This analysis further leads to a new model of film screenplay development as a separate field of cultural production, one whose norms, conventions and constitution have a great bearing on the industry as a whole. This thesis also adds to the current debates around screenwriting and the screenplay. In particular, in addition to explicating how those practitioners engaged in the work see the process, this study proposes a new way of looking at the purpose of the screenplay that has hitherto been underplayed.

The thesis examines cinematic representations of Finnish suburbs between 1960 and 1980. It demonstrates how filmic strategies are employed to critique welfare state politics and how the films channel popular anxieties about rapid urban change. The research is divided into five chapters each focusing on the analysis of one film. The films are presented in chronological order drawing out a timeline for cinematic, social and architectural change, beginning with the planning of the suburbs and ending with the second generation of dwellers. The films recreate architecture and space on screen in different ways, whilst addressing a variety of themes such as nostalgia, surveillance, mapping and navigation. The analysis of these themes draws on classic and recent critical theory on space and cinema including Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Marc Augé, Laura Marks and Giuliana Bruno. The thesis approaches the spaces through three lenses, each highlighting a dimension of the suburban environment. The first lens excavates the social and political context which led to the building of the suburbs, drawing attention to the policies of the Finnish welfare state, and shifts in social landscape brought on by urbanisation. The second lens regards the architectural designs and urban planning, and ways in which they translated social ideals of the welfare state into physical reality. Finally, and most importantly, the third lens studies how film reinterprets these spaces, infiltrating the choreography of everyday life. Moving through the lenses, the image of the suburb is refracted and transmuted. The potential of the cinematic world to negotiate the intersection of physical environment and lived experience is at the core of the thesis. It introduces new readings of pivotal Finnish films, examines their larger socio-political context and asks broader questions of the relationship of the cinematic spaces to their real life counterparts.

This study traces the emergence of Greek-Cypriot Cinema in Cyprus since 1974, arguing that it is the product of a historical moment. 1974 marks a watershed in the island’s protracted political conflict which culminated in ethnic violence, a coup and war. Whilst the war has been the subject of wide ranging scholarly research its impact in forging a distinctive national cinema remains unexamined. This thesis attempts to re-address this absence. My approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on historiographical studies as well as Film Studies, Cultural Theory and Film Philosophy. Primary research includes extensive dialogues with filmmakers. All of the films examined deal explicitly with facets of space, time and memory in connection to the experiences of the war. In view of these prevalent themes the thesis makes the case for reading Greek-Cypriot Cinema through the cinema work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whilst holding the films’ cultural and national contexts in view. It proposes that Cinema 1:The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2:The Time-Image (1985) explore the interconnection between real spaces outside of cinema and the creative spaces inside, through the categories of time and space. Centring on the conceptual shift in these volumes from a cinema of movement to a cinema of time and memory I argue that Deleuze’s paradigm offers a conceptual engagement with the distinctiveness and complexities of Greek-Cypriot Cinema; as it negotiates the real and abstract time and spaces which are imagined, reflected and visualised on the screen. Part one conceptualises Greek-Cypriot Cinema within existing studies of cinema and nation, examining Deleuze’s descriptions of modern and political cinema. Part two examines time and recollection-images in the films of Georgiou, Florides and Nicolaides, Tofarides and Koukoumas. Part three scrutinises how the changes in the political landscape after 2003 are reflected in films which imagine a new dynamic between time and spaces, creating new cinematic images in works by Farmakas, Stylianou and Danezi-Knutsen.