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In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze distinguishes two regimes of audiovisual thought. In the regime of the movement-image, such thought is constituted by two processes. The first, differentiation/integration, expresses a whole that changes through the intermediary of the shifting relationships between the objects and people on screen. The second, specification, gives images a determinate function in a sensory-motor schema, through which perceptions are linked to actions in rational intervals of movement. With the regime of the time-image, as I understand it, thought instead comes to mean, as Deleuze puts it in Foucault, to experiment and problematize, and “knowledge, power, and the self are the triple root of a problematization of thought” (95). It is my argument in this thesis that Deleuze’s work on cinema is of great utility in carrying out filmic analyses that seek to detect and draw out the consequences of strategies of filmmaking that make knowledge, power, and self problematic. Furthermore, such a mode of analysis is particularly valuable in attending to new films that confront us with novel means of organising problematic audiovisual thought. My arguments are made through consideration of two films each from four directors: Wong Kar-wai, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. While there are many important differences between the works of these filmmakers, their films nevertheless lend themselves to an approach that seeks to determine how thought becomes problematic in specific cases. Similarities and resonances are brought out between these films and those that Deleuze uses himself in making his arguments and shaping his concepts, but I also identify new problems that we encounter in the works of these filmmakers, which extend the range of meaning of some of those concepts. One such concept that is of particular importance in this thesis is “belief in the world”. There is always something in those films that pass into the regime of the time-image that is asystematic, which breaks up and multiplies thought, multiplies the thinkers we are made to inhabit. Our relation to the world of the film is therefore unstable and uncertain, and calls for belief, since films themselves in this regime produce new links between humans and the world, rather than firmly establishing a realistic state of things, a temporal and spatial matrix that accords with that which we experience in everyday existence. Such films thus make us receptive to a thought different from that interiorised thought through which, as Nietzsche writes, the apparatus of knowledge abstracts, simplifies, and takes possession of the world and others (Will, no. 503, 274).

This thesis aims to explore how narrative films that are marked by crucial obscurities and explanatory gaps in their development manage to become coherent. More specifically, the thesis is interested in examining how these obscurities and explanatory gaps can be understood as meaningful aspects of the films' organisation. Since the function of coherence in film has rarely been examined directly, the thesis first attempts to illuminate it by drawing on the work of two aestheticians who have examined it more systematically. Thus, the first part of the thesis discusses the work of Victor F. Perkins and George Wilson, while attempting to explore aspects of the work of these two aestheticians through the analysis of specific films. The writings of Perkins and Wilson provide a good starting point for the thesis because they raise crucial questions regarding the ways through which narrative films manage to deal with significant tensions in their organisation and intelligibility. The main body of the thesis (the second part of the thesis) then examines four narrative films, each of which is marked by a significant aspect of apparent incoherence. In each case, the thesis attempts to show that this aspect of apparent incoherence - rather than merely obstructing the film's intelligibility - essentially contributes to the creation of the film's idiosyncratic internal logic. In order to understand how this becomes possible, the thesis pays close attention to the ways in which the various components of each examined film relate to each other, observing and analysing the aesthetic strategies which enable each examined film ultimately to come together.

This thesis is an exploration of the ways in which a number of important Russian writers and filmmakers of the 1910s and 1920s appropriated domestic interiors as structural, visual and literary metaphors. My focus is on the artistic articulation of the closed space of the Russian domestic interior, in particular as it surfaced in the narratives of the modernist literature and cinema of the time and became an essential metaphor of its age. In my discussion I take issue with two standard ways of understanding domestic space in existing literature. I argue that representations of home spaces in early twentiethcentury Russian culture mount a challenge to the conventional view of the home as a place of safety and stability. I also argue that, at this point, the traditional approach to the room and the domestic space as a fixed closed structure is assailed by representations that see domestic space as kinetic. The importance of the 'room in motion' means that I address cinematic as well as literary representations of domestic space, and show that even literary representation borrow cinematic techniques. My different chapters constitute case studies of various separate, but complementary, aspects of the representation of home space. The first chapter shows how domestic space in reflected in the poetical language of Anna Akhmatova. The second chapter focuses on the parallel exploration of rooms and a child's consciousness in Kotik Letaev by Andrei Belyi. The third chapter discovers the philosophy of a room built by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii in his short stories of the 1920s. The next three chapters focus on interiors of three different cinematic genres. The fourth chapter looks closely at films created by Evgenii Bauer, showing the director's innovative techniques of framing and set-design. The fifth chapter explores the film Tret'ia Meshchanskaia by Abram Room, focusing on the director's employment of the room as a structural device of the film. The last chapter analyses two lyrical comedies by Boris Barnet to show the comic effect produced by the empty room and domestic objects in his films, and also focuses on the image of staircase. In conclusion, I speculate that the representation of interior spaces in the period in question goes beyond genre, medium, and narrative structure and becomes an important and culturally dynamic motif of the time.