Nanni Moretti has been an important filmmaker in Italy for the last four decades, and many studies of his films have been carried out which have concerned either the analysis of individual films or a thematic exploration of his work, dealing specifically with autobiography, humour, family and politics. However, there has been little investigation of the aesthetics, structure or formal film language of his oeuvre up to this point. The study of space is currently a significant and growing trend in many aspects of the < humanities, including Film Studies. Nonetheless, very few studies involving space have been undertaken in Italian film thus far. This thesis aims to cover new ground in research on Italian cinema by investigating the use of narrative space in Moretti's work. This study begins with an examination of the notion of narrative space as defined in the works of Stephen Heath and others and then offers a definition of the term based on the three aspects of Place, Setting and Perspective. Place relates to the geographical aspect of narrative space and specifically concerns cityscape, landscape, to include interior and exterior position in the real world of the diegesis. Setting concerns the cinematic characteristics of narrative space, notably its use in genre, encompassing fantasy and gender based notions. Perspective involves both the point of view taken optically by the camera and the attitudinal standpoint of the personal philosophy expressed by the filmmaker through the narrative. This thesis is based on close textual analysis of Moretti's ten major feature films to date, using the formal film language of mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing and sound. The aim is to show how Moretti selects; organises, constructs, assembles and manipulates narrative space, through the elements of Place, Setting and Perspective, into an entire work of art, which gives meanings and pleasures to the spectator.

This project is concerned with the European careers and early Hollywood films of Rene Clair, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock and deals with the period from 1919 to the early 1940s, arguing that these three directors were engaged with an examination of modern life, which is best considered under a paradigm of ' mobilities'. Their presentation of modernity makes particular use of tourist imagery or 'film tourism', expressed through movement within the shot, editing and camera mobility. Their films draw attention to the flaws of an apparently 'mobile' capitalist world through a complex aesthetic, setting cinematic movement against cinematic stillness, in a dialectical manner, in order to challenge social immobilities. This offers the potential for critical reflection and questions how far the current formation of modem mobilities can be considered a 'natural' or ' ideal' form of social reality. Challenges to the dominant view appear in the directors' work, drawing on ' alternative' cinematic styles such as 'documentary' and 'mi cinema' to counter the industrialized nature of commercial cinema. This appear::> particularly through a challenging of conventional forms within cinema, which are seen to often provide a limited vision of modern life. A key dialectic that occurs throughout these directors' work is one between the national and the transnational, which primarily appears through the consideration of national cinemas within Europe and the global dominance of Hollywood cinema. The central dialectic in each of these directors' films, however, is one between individualism and collectivism. This dialectic can be considered a result of each of these directors' engagement with the ways in which capitalism constructs flawed forms of 'subjectivity' and ' objectivity' within cinema, as well as within modernity as a whole. Each of these directors this provides a vision that draws attention to the problems within the mobilities of modern life.

Through a detailed study of the Hitchcock-related work of artists such as Matthias Muller and Christoph Girardet. Jahan Grimonprez, Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, and Atom Egoyan, this project facilitates a dialogue between the creative appropriation of Hitchcock's films and the cinematic practices that increasingly inform the wider field of the contemporary visual arts. Each chapter is structured around a consideration of how the art work in question has reconfigured, or 'remade' key Hitchcockian expressive elements and motifs - in particular, the relationship between mise en scene and the mechanics of suspense, time, memory, history, and death. In a career that extended across silent and sound eras, the British, European and Hollywood industries, and was always available to new audiences and technical innovations, Hitchcock film oeuvre is nothing if not a history of the cinema itself. As the work of these contemporary artists and artist-filmmakers shows, it was also a history of the future, a paradigm case par excellence .

Hal Ashby's career as a Hollywood film director and the films he directed have been largely marginalized in the critical discourse on the New Hollywood era. While interest in Ashby has shown some recent signs of increasing. during m OSI of the thirty years since the end of New Hollywood, scholarship has struggled to accommodate him or his films in received definitions of New Hollywood. A period that has been the focus of increased scholarly attention, New Hollywood is regularly described as an era of great directors, auteurs whose practise was driven by and constructed upon their individual talent and their ability to express their ideas and vision in manners unique to them. Some results of this model have included limited attention to the contributions of non-directing cast and crew, and an overriding tendency to downplay the films of directors such as Ashby who were open to practicing a more collaborative, multiple-author approach to filmmaking. This thesis interrogates Ashby's historical and critical positioning in regards to New Hollywood. In doing so, it relies on extensive historical and archival analysis to evaluate Ashby's status within 1970s Hollywood and his reception by film scholarship. It also combines film analysis with detailed examination of Ashby's filmmaking practise in order to recognize the individual and combined contributions of Ashby and his cast and crew as multiple authors of the films he directed. By analysing several of Ashby's films as well as placing his films and career within the context of the New Hollywood era, this thesis argues for a re-evaluation of Ashby and his films in light of emerging scholarship on multiple-authorship and its role in the making of Hollywood films. Consequently, the thesis opens the door for further reassessment of prevailing constructions of authorship and canonicity in this vital period of Hollywood history.

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This thesis is a study of the oeuvre of Krzysztof Kielowski. In particular, I examine claims made by Kielowski and many critics that in the 1980s the director moved away from filming the public world, which had been crucial to his work since he began filming in the late 1960s and became instead primarily concerned with the inner world. Although I agree that Kieslowski increasingly shifted his emphasis to the inner life, I argue that any attempt to abandon the public world in his later films was in fact of more limited scope than his claims suggest and his focus on the inner sphere neither absolute nor lacking in ambivalence. I distinguish between three realms of existence in Kielowski's narratives: the public sphere, namely, public life be it socio-political, economical, or work-related; the personal sphere, consisting of the individual's family and close friends; and the inner sphere, comprising the intimate emotional and mental life of the individual. By extensively examining Kielowski's treatment of these spheres and how they interact with and inform both one another and the films, I aim to demonstrate that the public and personal realms continued play a significant part in the productions of the 1980s and 1990s, regardless of Kielowski's claims otherwise, and result in more complex, multi-layered, and ambiguous narratives than is usually recognised. In distinguishing between the spheres that make up the individual's existence, I discuss the concomitant differences between public and inner realities. I examine the complications and ambiguities that arose from the combined presence of these quite distinct realities in the final works and end by looking at how they influenced Kielowski's decision to abandon fihnmaking in the mid-1990s. My thesis is also a career-survey of Kielowski's oeuvre and; in addition to substantiating my arguments, I simultaneously discuss what I believe to be other interesting and important aspects of Kielowski and his work, including the financing and censorship of his films, his political tendencies, his representation of his male and female characters as well as his distinction between youth and adulthood, his collaborative method; his relationship with his audience, and his critical reception. In doing so I aim to provide a detailed overview of Kielowski's entire career which can stand alone as a self-contained and comprehensive reference work and thus fill the current gap in English-language studies of Kielowski.

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