The thesis explores the cultural field of global art cinema as a potential space for the inscription of female authorship and feminist issues. Despite their active involvement in filmmaking, traditionally women directors have not been centralised in scholarship on art cinema. Filmmakers such as Germaine Dulac, Agnès Varda and Sally Potter, for instance, have produced significant cinematic oeuvres but due to the field's continuing phallocentricity, they have not enjoyed the critical acclaim of their male peers. Feminist scholarship has focused mainly on the study of Hollywood and although some scholars have foregrounded the work of female filmmakers in non-Hollywood contexts, the relationship between art cinema and women filmmakers has not been adequately explored. The thesis addresses this gap by focusing on art cinema. It argues that art cinema maintains a precarious balance between two contradictory positions; as a route into filmmaking for women directors allowing for political expressivity, with its emphasis on artistic freedom which creates a space for non-dominant and potentially subversive representations and themes, and as another hostile universe given its more elitist and auteurist orientation. The thesis adopts a case study approach, looking at a number of contemporary art films from diverse socio-political contexts. It thus provides a comprehensive account of how women are positioned within art cinema as subjects and as filmmakers. The thesis uses a social historical approach in looking at the texts as well as the contexts these texts operate within. In analysing how female directors voice feminist concerns through a negotiation of political and artistic preoccupations, the thesis aims to reclaim art cinema as a cultural field that brings the marginal closer to the mainstream and thus functions for feminism as the site of productive ideological dialogue.

This thesis examines the topic of film-maker Stan Brakhage’s occult-derived spirituality. The origins and contents of his positions about spirituality and art are traced back to an occult-derived philosophical tradition discussed by and subsequently associated with the poet Ezra Pound. Pound recovered and reworked certain occult-related beliefs which in turn had roots in a medieval synthesis of ancient Greek doctrines. These beliefs constitute a precise historical perspective against which to read and understand Brakhage’s apparently eccentric positions about art as spiritual revelation, trance states, the Muses, the artist as instrument, and the divine as ineffable. After defining the origins and substance of what I term Brakhage’s spiritual imperative, other aspects of his spiritual quest are considered. The corporeality as functional to it, positioning it beyond a mere metaphysical sphere, and the formal features through which such spirituality is articulated and manifested, constitute the other two directions of my investigation. The corporeality of the world is discussed as a vital part of Brakhage’s spiritual imperative in his stances towards science, sex, the body, and rhythm. The actual form through which it is manifested his spirituality in art, and the theoretical implications of that form, are the topic of the third and last part of the investigation. This form is identified as fragmentation, intended by Brakhage to produce not only a continuous present for the viewers of his work, but also to imply a precise model for reality. Such model relates Brakhage’s spiritual imperative with his lifelong aversion to what he regarded as constricting forms, such as narrative and grammatical structures. The thesis aims to demonstrate the origins and theoretical content of Brakhage’s spiritual ideas as occult-derived, mainly through Pound; and to assess the resulting spirituality as deeply intertwined with the corporeality of the world, and manifested through a form related to his critical stances towards language and narration.

Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles and Roman Polanski: three very different filmmakers in whose hands Macbeth becomes three very different films. For Kurosawa, who admits himself to being obsessed with exploring the "extraordinary things that lie in human hearts," the play becomes a humanist drama concerned with man's inner evil and ambition; in the hands of Welles - whose chief agenda was always extravagance and spectacle rather than character development -Macbeth becomes a more symbolic fight between good and evil; whereas Polanski, whose major concern is often with the "confrontation of evil," presents Macbeth as a gritty, psychological thriller. All three directors have remarkable filmographies - often being nominated for and winning prestigious awards as well as experiencing professional low-points which not only counterbalance this, but at times have even seemed out of sync with the rest of their careers. They have also had remarkable personal lives, variously tinged with tragedy, which often seems to be reflected in their films. Kurosawa, born in 1910, experienced first hand the Great Kanto Earthquake, which devastated Japan in 1923, killing more than 100,000, and lived through the Second World War, which cost more than 2 million Japanese lives. He also suffered great personal loss during his lifetime - one of his brothers and one of his sisters died during childhood; and both of his older brothers died when Kurosawa was in his twenties, the younger of whom committed suicide at the age of twenty-seven. Later in life, the director's personal difficulties became so great that at one point he even attempted suicide himself. Welles was born five years after Kurosawa, although his living in America meant that he was less affected by the Second World War. In other ways however, his upbringing was unconventional and not without tragedy. When he was four his parents divorced due to 'irreconcilable differences' - the reality of which was that his father was an alcoholic and his mother had had a live-in-lover for some time. He was considered a child 'prodigy' but as a result of this special treatment was somewhat set apart from other children, had very few friends of his own age, and spent a lifetime trying to live up to these early expectations of greatness. When he was nine his mother died, and six years later so did his father - who literally drank himself to death - leaving his upbringing to his mother's lover, who would act as a secondary father figure to him for the rest of his life. Like Kurosawa, Polanski grew up in politically catastrophic times, although his life may be said to have been the most affected by tragedy and controversy. Jewish, he was born in 1933 and was living in Warsaw during the German invasion of Poland, so was no stranger to the harsh realities of war. His mother was executed in a concentration camp when he was six; years later he was to relive this loss when his pregnant wife was brutally murdered by members of a crazed cult; and when he was still recovering from this tragedy, he was arrested and charged with the rape of a 13 year-old girl. This thesis aims to explore the ways in which these different personal factors affecting Kurosawa, Welles and Polanski have contributed over the years to their films and in particular, to their interpretations of Macbeth. As the play's primary concerns are the mechanisms of evil and human iniquity - subject matter they were all, in varying degrees, personally familiar with the occurrence of these themes throughout the three directors' films will be examined alongside the representation of them in their adaptations of Macbeth.

Responses to Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's work are laden with ethical inflections - as is expressed in the critical reception of the films. However, existing critical traditions fail to fully account for the impact of Haneke's oeuvre, situated as it is between int~llectual projects and popular entertainments. For while philosophy and film studies have for some years now been intersecting, the ethics of spectatorship remains critically understudied. More significantly, previo~s approaches to the subject of ethics and film have tended to focus on the morality 'of the diegetic universe within a film, using film to illustrate philosophical concepts (Carney, 1986; Brill, 1988) or to raise questions of ideology and film form, mobilising ethics primarily in service of political concerns (Mulvey, 1973; Wollen, 1979). In order to discuss Haneke's films then, and to understand the peculiar impact they have upon their audiences, a new critical framework is needed; one which straddles, but also moves beyond, existing frameworks. Drawing on the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Stanley Cavell, this thesis introduces a new way of marrying film and moral philosophy, which explicitly examines the ethics of the filmviewing experience. Taking Haneke's films as the object of empirical inquiry, it posits the theory that by foregrounding a conflict between activity and passivity, reason and emotion, which is implicit in the great majority of spectatorship theory, Haneke is able to offer the spectator a filmviewing position that is radically different to that in which other models offilmmaking place him. Rationally aware of his subjective position but nonetheless engaged with the film's events, the spectator of Haneke's films is forced to negotiate his relationship to the film autonomously. The unprecedented freedom that Haneke's films accord him thus carries with it a considerable burden of responsibility which refuses him any possibility of seeking refuge from the world in the darkness of the cinema. How Haneke achieves this break with more conventional spectatorship models, and what its far-reaching implications are for film theory in general, constitute the principle subject ofthis study.

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In this critical engagement, I attempt to link my professional practice and academic knowledge with the key socio-economic, cultural and political factors that have shaped who I am, what I do and the way I do things in a context of rapid technological change over thirty years. Combining autoethnography with a critical autobiography, I explore the key themes and threads that, like a Celtic knot, connect my personal self with my work as a film-maker and lecturer. This exploration has revealed personal skills and values that I had previously failed fully to comprehend or even acknowledge; it has helped me realise the significance of storytelling and innovation in my public works; it has improved my articulation of what I do and how I do it; and it has convinced me, a former research-cynic, that practice (action) and academic rigour (research) are opposite sides of the same coin: interlinked and of equal importance. From international disease prevention and motorcycle safety awareness, to online social networking and citizen empowerment, this statement connects what at first appeared to be disparate threads into a more cohesive whole. The audience is, in the first instance, myself, to inform further public works. Others who may find it useful are students looking to know what is required to make change in a sector that is rapidly changing, and colleagues who come from strong practice fields thinking of developing themselves as professional practitioners in higher education teaching. This doctoral undertaking has changed the way I think and work both as a professional practitioner in film-making and in higher education teaching.

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Since the release of 'Audition' in 1999, Takashi Miike has become one of the most visible Japanese directors in Western film culture. This thesis offers an extensive critical history of the reception of Miike and his cinema that has thus far been absent from English-language scholarship on the director. Miike’s work has been defined by his prolific rate of production, his protean approach to genre, and the often “extreme” content of some of his titles, yet the enduring framework through which the filmmaker has been negotiated is as a distinctly singular "cult auteur." Viewed through the specific lens of Miike’s reputation as a cult auteur, this study explores notions of cinematic authorship and of cult film in its examination of the many ways in which the director’s work has been promoted, presented, and understood. Each chapter traces a distinct phase in the development of Miike’s career, centred around the distribution and reception of a number of key releases. In a largely chronological fashion, the chapters map a distinct narrative of the "emergence," the "discovery," the "reverence," and the "internationalisation" of Miike and his cinema, since the very beginning of his filmmaking career. The studies carried out across this thesis demonstrate how Miike’s reception in the West has been significantly shaped by his distinct cult authorship, whilst working towards a definition of the concept of a “cult auteur” that considers its function as an important structuring principle in film culture.

The work of Straub/Huillet questions received notions of the essence of cinema. Against the background of the dominant stylistic paradigm of classical film style, their films challenge both the viewing and listening skills of their audience. In seeking to grasp the nature of this challenge, this thesis focuses on a feature which is common to all of Straub/Huillet's works. Taking recourse to a broad variety of representational forms, the filmmakers always engage with the specific properties and representational forms of existing works of art and documents. On the basis of four films, the formative impact of a variety of art forms and source materials is analysed. The selection includes 'Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach' in which the music of J.S. Bach provides the dominant aesthetic material; 'Einleitung zu Arnold Schoenberg's Begleitmusik zu emer Lichtspielscene', a work whose origins lie in a piece of film music for which no film had ever been made; 'Klassenverhaltnisse', an adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel fragment 'Der Verschollene'; and 'Paul Cezanne im Gesprach mit Joachim Gasquet', a film in which Cezanne's paintings are presented both as physical objects and theme. In combination with a number of other materials which feature in the films, the polyphonic music of Bach, a serial composition by Schoenberg, the prose style of Kafka and the pictorial style of Cezanne, provide the aesthetic material for the interplay between film and other art forms, which is formative of Straub/Huillet's oeuvre. A common feature emerges from the analysis of this formal and material diversity. Drawing on the distinctive features of their selected sources, the filmmakers evolve various strategies for the overt cinematic enactment of this material. A palpable split between the source material and its cinematic representation results. Stylistic operations are not merely vehicles for the transmission of meaning, but come to the fore, bringing time and space and the material features of the sounds and images to our attention. Highly unconventional forms of cinematic representation are generated in this process and classical stylistic devices are appropriated to serve new functions. A more nuanced formulation of the political nature of the work of Straub/Huillet. than it has frequently been put forward by its critics, is proposed as a result of the study's findings. This political aspect cannot be reduced to thematic concerns expressed in their works, it predominantly resides in a film form which fractures the fixed connection between modes of representation and a predetermined meaning. Inviting us to engage with the material inscriptions of human existence and history, Straub/Huillet seek to renew our perception of reality, and sensitise us to the Utopian potential in the materials they present us with.

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