"Life after Birth" considers the relationship between the Ku Klux Klan and cinema during the 1920s, highlighting how the Klan used, produced and protested against film in order to recruit members, generate publicity, and define itself as a traditional Protestant American organisation. In my opening chapter I reassess the significance of The Birth of a Nation in the development of the Klan, and introduce a number of other overlooked films, such as The Face at Your Window that Kleagles (Klan recruiters) used after 1920. In the second chapter, I consider the discourses between the Klan and the film industry, assessing the Klan's protests against individual films, such as Chaplin's The Pilgrim (1923). I show how the opportunistic Klan redefined popular conservative discourses around film, Hollywood and cinema exhibition in order to generate publicity, and to define itself against what it perceived as an immoral 'foreign' industry. After considering how the Klan and the film industry addressed each other on a discursive level, I then question how this relationship was extended onto film. In chapter three I consider how the industry presented the Klan, and question what these films reveal about the industry's attitude towards race, ethnicity, and its own role in modern society. Chapter four uncovers a series of independent films produced by the Klan. I explore the ways in which the Klan represented itself through film, and through the publicity and exhibition contexts in which these films were shown. Using extensive primary research, I chart an unknown history of Klan film production and exhibition, and highlight the problems faced by independent Klan film enterprises. In the final chapter, I consider the decline of the Klan after 1925, through a close examination of the Klan's continued engagement with cinema. My thesis offers insights into the film industry, non-theatrical exhibition, censorship, and also racial attitudes within America. This interdisciplinary work, using archives previously unaccessed by cinema scholars, extends our knowledge of this crucial and overlooked moment in social and political culture and in American cinema history.

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This thesis examines the creation, transmission and preservation of the idea of Britain as a 'maritime nation' on film from 1900 to 1960. By placing an analysis of maritime films' frequency, content and reception into the broader maritime sphere and the British film industry, this thesis explores how maritime symbols functioned to project national identity. Films are used as the major source to provide an evidential frame through which to assess the depth and functioning of maritime culture in mass culture. The thesis traces the origins of key concepts associated with a maritime identity to establish the configuration of maritime history in popular culture by 1900. It then examines the importance of maritime film production during the period 1900-1939; the representation of shipbuilding from the 1930s; maritime scenarios in Second World War film; maritime comedies; and post-war maritime films. It concludes by suggesting the reasons for the decline in the frequency of maritime film after 1960. The thesis argues first, that the relationship established in the Victorian period between the nation and the maritime sphere endured with remarkable strength. Only after 1960 was the contemporary element of this connection broken by a combination of the decline of the subject matter and by political and social change. The second argument is that to understand these films it is essential to consider them as a complete body of evidence as well as individual films in discrete time periods. By setting these films back into the tradition from which they came is it possible to understand how symbols of national identity became so embedded that they became unquestioned: the most powerful level at which such symbols operate.

Major differences in British Second World War films produced in wartime 1939-45 (idealising the 'People's War') and post-war versions produced between 1945-65 (promoting the return of elite masculinity) suggest a degree of cultural re-conditioning concerning the memory of war, by Britain's middle-class film-makers attuned to national and international concerns. Therefore, the focus and main aim of this thesis is to identify and examine previously ignored or inadequately scrutinized themes within the post-war genre to explain how, and why, film-makers redefined the Second World War and its myths, tapping deeply into the national psyche, stimulating and satisfying a voracious, continuing, British appetite. In examining the genre, and as established by historians such as John O'Connor, Pierre Sorlin and Jeffrey Richards, this thesis employs contextual analysis, using feature film as a primary historical documentary source. This involves close reading of the films in their historical and political context and the social situation which produced them - backed-up by empirical data, analysing what film-makers were saying at textual and sub-textual levels, and exploring structure, meaning and iconography as conveyed by script, image, acting and direction. The production, content and reception of these films have been evaluated and attention directed towards dialogue and language. In support of this, a wide variety of sources have been scrutinized: articles; fan magazines; novels; biographies; autobiographies; memoirs, film histories and wider historical and political works. The BFI Library and Special Collections Archive have been extensively mined with particular emphasis on press and campaign books and cinema ephemera. Newspapers and journals such as the Times, the New Statesman, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Worker have provided a range of perspectives. A sense of British ownership of this war pervades the genre. Accordingly, this thesis identifies four over-arching themes through which to explore it: the fusion of class, masculinity and national identity; women and femininity; reconciliation with the enemy; and the process of personal and national redemption and regeneration through the war experience. The study's fundamental originality rests in its approach. In offering a "political" (in its widest sense) reading of the films and an untried level of detailed analysis, it presents the genre's first full conceptualisation, challenging criticisms and assumptions that the genre was either a nostalgic replay of the Second World War, a recruitment vehicle or a catharsis. Several key findings have emerged from this thesis: Elite masculinity was used, not to devalue the 'People's War', but as exemplar of national identity, regeneration and British leadership. Recognizable through his metamorphosis from literature's well-loved pre-1914 imperialist hero, the officer hero was now a democratised master of the technology provided by Britain's brilliant, unthreatening scientists. Through them, Britain's unrivalled experience as a world leader was promoted at a time of international tensions and challenges to national supremacy. This study offers the first in-depth analysis of the prisoner-of-war sub-genre, and recognizes film-makers' efforts to ensure that serving homosexuals were also credited with fighting the Second World War. Crucially, far from being airbrushed from the genre, women were very definitely present and active in war films post-1945. Previously unsuspected balances, continuities and cross-overs between the 193945 films and of those of 1945-65 have been identified. Received wisdom that, with Cold War political pragmatism, the genie offered only revisionist depictions of Germany is also challenged. Evidence of film-makers' Janus-faced ambivalence towards German brutality and collective guilt has emerged and, whilst the Italians were redeemed, Japanese barbarism was vehemently expressed. Through its exploration of war's dysfunctional residue, this thesis has shown that combat dysfunction acted as 'heroic reinforcement', yet another way to praise, whilst allowing modest fallibility. Further insights into reactions to war were provided by depictions of malingers, revellers and those redeemed by war. British cinema offered a rare level of social comment with the homecoming legacy, as dysfunction embraced disaffected officers, crime and the failure of the 'New Jerusalem'— although it offered little on failed repatriation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, film-makers also showed that middle-class hegemony, always pragmatic, was elastic enough to offer critiques of officer elite heroics with the decline of deference, and to be more open in its depictions of women. These findings demonstrate that as a collection of primary documents, the genre's films reveal much about contemporaneous issues. Significantly, although its target audience was British youth, it reached global audiences.

This thesis examines war trauma in film; it is a comparative reading that aims to study the relationship between films made after the First World War in the 1920s and films made during and after the Vietnam War. I use thirteen focus film texts, some which explicitly engage with war and some that do not. This thesis will argue that the production of these particular films was inflected by the collective trauma that the wars produced in American society. There was not, for example, an explicit combat film made for seven years after the First World War and thirteen years after the Vietnam War. This gap, I will argue, is symptomatic of the cultural climate that existed after each war, but can also be understood in terms of the need for temporal space in which to assimilate the traumas of these wars. An engagement with recent debates in Trauma Theory will be utilised to explore this production gap between event and film, and to suggest that trauma exists not only within the narratives of these focus films but also within the production process itself. This thesis contributes significantly to recent debates in Trauma Studies. As it presents film history scholarship, First World War and Vietnam veteran experiences and archive newspaper research as compatible disciplines and uses the lens of trauma theory as a methodological thread and tool of analysis.