My body of work involves photographic and video explorations around the concept that cinema has a great influence over who we are as a culture and as individuals. I use the tableaux technique to illustrate the archetypal language of film through fictional film stills. Congruously, I use video to interject myself into scenes from movies, referencing the way viewers mentally project themselves into movies as they watch them. I am interested in decoding visual stereotypes promoted by cinema through the lens of my own experience with movies.

Cinemas of Endurance begins by questioning the way in which critics and scholars have addressed art cinema over the last decade, specifically the films referred to as “slow cinema.” These films have garnered widespread attention since the start of the 21st century for how they deploy what many believe to be anachronistic and redundant formal techniques, often discussed in terms of nostalgia and pastiche. This dissertation argues that these films have been unfairly couched within this discourse that largely judges their validity based on their stylistic similarities to the art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Breaking from this direction, this project proposes we take these films and their aesthetic seriously, not for stubbornly refuting the prevailing formal trends in filmmaking, but for how it creates a critical optic that grants us a greater capacity to recognize some of the most prevailing social, political, and economic issues of the last decade. Further, by using stylistic techniques that can often register as out of place, or protracted, these films can help us to understand the way our physical, mental, and affective coordinates have shifted in this historical moment. Each chapter of this dissertation takes an exemplary film from this subset of art cinema and addresses how the aesthetic works against established modes of viewing to render visible modalities of life that often escape critical ire because they are expected. This project relies on the theories and methodologies of film and media studies, aesthetic theory, realism, materialism, accelerationism, cultural studies, continental philosophy, and political philosophy. The films and filmmakers analyzed include: The Limits of Control (2009), dir. Jim Jarmusch; Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2006), dir. Pedro Costa; Dogville (2003), dir. Lars von Trier; and, 2046 (2004), dir. Wong Kar-wai.

I syfte att undersöka likheterna och skillnaderna mellan klassisk Hollywooddramaturgi och alternativ dramaturgi har denna uppsats utfört en innehållsanalytisk undersökning av manusen till Pirates of the Caribbean: Svarta Pärlans Förbannelse och Naked. Frågeställningarna har formulerats för att komma fram till hur aspekten mål påverkar ett manus, hur målen påverkar handlingen och vad för dramaturgi som går att urskilja via denna aspekt i de två valda manusen. Resultaten visade att protagonisterna i manusen hade likheter, främst vad gäller deras skicklighet att använda tal som ett vapen, dock i två olika syften. Måltydligheten i manusen skiljde sig, där manuset till Pirates of the Caribbean: Svarta Pärlans Förbannelse, visade på en måltydlighet som inte återfanns i Naked. Analyserna resulterade i slutsatsen att klassisk dramaturgi är svår att följa till punkt och pricka i praktiken och att manus ofta kräver ett bryt av den norm som dramaturgier utgör.

Depuis une vingtaine d’années, le scénario américain s’est imposé comme modèle du scénario de fiction auprès des acteurs de la production de cinéma et de télévision pour sa performance et sa rationalité narratives. Conçu pour assurer au film de fiction le maximum de chance de succès, il subordonne la création audiovisuelle à un dispositif narratif assurant l’identification du spectateur et sa satisfaction émotionnelle. Or, eu égard à une ambition artistique du cinéma, sa légitimité est problématique. La présente recherche développe une alternative à la formalisation narrative du film à travers un mode de scénarisation qui subordonne la narration au discours filmique. L’identification au personnage y compte moins que l’expression d’une vision-audition du monde. / Since about twenty years, the American screenplay stood out as model of the script of fiction into cinema and TV production for its narrative performance and its rationality. Designed to insure public success to fiction movies, it subordinates the audiovisual creation to the narrative device, insuring identification of the spectator and its emotional satisfaction. But, in consideration of the artistic ambition of the cinema, its legitimacy is problematic. The present research develops an alternative in the narrative formalization of the movie through a mode of « scénarisation » which subordinates the story to the cinematic discourse. The identification of spectator to the character matters there less than the expression of a vision-hearing of the world.

This dissertation is a politically conscious, comparative-historical formal analysis of long takes at the intersection of art and mass-market cinemas in the post-WWII era. Given the contemporary fascination with long takes in the critical discourse of film along with its fairly rampant employment in contemporary mainstream cinema, the discipline has lacked scholarship carefully examining formal techniques as such while remaining alert to the non-reductive possibilities for their political significance. Enlisting and building on the analytical approach of a cinematic poetics, the project outlines numerous contingencies in the practice of very long takes and their function in producing meaning before attending to the technique at the levels of cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scène in separate chapters. Objects of analysis are roughly divided in each chapter between progenitors of contemporary long-take practice—Italian neorealist films, Rope (1948), the 1960s and 1980s films of Jean-Luc Godard, and Jeanne Dielman (1975)—and more recent examples—Timecode (2000), Children of Men (2006), Birdman (2014), A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014), and Too Late (2015). The dissertation invests in the inseparability of form and content, as well as the political stakes of long take practice at both levels by parsing out the historical, technological, cultural, and diegetic contexts of long takes. In so doing, the approach exemplifies previously unrecognized possibilities for employing a historical poetics in a manner acknowledging a formal technique’s commitments to and participation in social power dynamics. These dynamics are legible within a film, in its production, and in its participation in the historical tradition of authorship as constructed in European art cinema.

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This thesis explores the potential of domestic space to act as the ground for new forms of community and sociability in Argentine and Chilean films from the early twenty-first century. It thus tracks a shift in the political treatment of the home in Southern Cone cinema, away from allegorical affirmations of the family, and towards a reflection on film’s ability to both delineate and disrupt lived spaces. In the works examined, the displacement of attention from human subjects to the material environment defamiliarises the domestic sphere and complicates its relation to the nation. The house thus does not act as ‘a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’ (Bachelard), but rather as a medium through which identities are challenged and reformed. This anxiety about domestic space demands, I argue, a renewal of the deconstructive frameworks often deployed in studies of Latin American culture (Moreiras, Williams). The thesis turns to new materialist theories, among others, as a supplement to deconstructive thinking, and argues that theorisations of cinema’s political agency must be informed by social, economic and urban histories. The prominence of suburban settings moreover encourages a nuancing of the ontological links often invoked between cinema, the house, and the city. The first section of the thesis rethinks two concepts closely linked to the home: memory and modernity. Analysing documentary and essay films, Chapter 1 suggests some political limitations to the figure of the fragment which dominates scholarly discussion of memory in Latin America. Chapter 2 studies films which explore the inclusions and exclusions created by modernist domestic architecture. The second section focuses on two human figures found on the threshold of the home: the domestic worker and the guest. Chapter 3 analyses unorthodox representations of domestic work, and explores how new materialist approaches can enhance readings of the political potential of ‘art cinema’. Finally, in Chapter 4 I examine films depicting household visitors that upset urban class divisions, and question the possibility of ‘domestic cosmopolitanism’ (Nava 2006) in contemporary Latin America. My comparative analysis of these films explores a rupture between physical dwelling and imagined home that points towards new political practices in a neoliberal, post-dictatorship context.

金馬影展對台灣藝術電影影迷而言，就像是場神聖的盛宴，在這場儀式中，透過群體的力量，讓信念的力量益發強大。本研究嘗試依循「朝聖」（pilgrimage）的角度，將金馬影展的觀影者，視為一種信仰著藝術電影教派（cult）的信徒，他們的身份不只是閱聽人或消費者，而是一種參與者（participants）。 本研究分為三階段進行。第一階段針對金馬影展三十年來（1980～2009）的影片清單進行歷史性檔案研究，歸納出金馬影展播映影片的脈絡。第二階段對影展觀眾進行問卷調查與參與觀察，以期歸納出金馬影迷的外在觀影行為，並透過田野調查實際了解金馬影迷的參與過程。第三階段則是對影迷進行深度訪談與生命史訪談。在影展現場找尋了78位金馬影迷進行訪談，另針對3位具代表性的影迷，分別透過他們參與金馬影展的經歷，來進一步認識歷年金馬影迷參與的過程。 本研究發現金馬影展的儀式概念（The Cult of Film Festival）主要來自於三者：在時間性而言，因一年一度有如逢年過節的「週期性」而營造了儀式感；在空間性而言，因影片與影迷的「齊聚性」而營造了儀式感；除了這兩者之外，要達到類宗教的景仰標準，勢必還要有「神聖性」的概念，其神聖感則是來自於電影大師的作品，所帶來的崇拜心態。 至於影迷的朝聖歷程，本研究以三位影迷的生命史作為引述，介紹20、30、40歲各個世代的影迷，究竟是什麼樣的樣貌。而後根據大量深度訪談、田野觀察與問卷調查的結果，搭配儀式結構的模式，描繪出金馬影迷單次旅程與生涯歷程。在單次旅程的部份，可以分作「前影展時期」、「影展時期」與「後影展時期」，三者中尤以前影展時期的套票搶購與排隊劃位最具儀式性特質。在生涯歷程的部份，亦可分作「前影迷階段」、「影迷階段」與「後影迷階段」，此三者之間主要差異，是以對電影的重視、迷戀與可犧牲程度作為劃分標準。 / For art cinema fans of Taiwan, Golden Horse Film Festival just like a sacred Feast, fans gathered together every year, that increasingly the forces of faith in the ritual. This study attempts to follow the "pilgrimage" view, to imagine that Golden Horse Film Festival audience as the cult followers, their identity is not just the audience or consumers, but a participants. This study is divided into three stages. First is the archive research of Golden Horse Film Festival for the thirty years (1980~2009). Second is the festival audience questionnaire survey and participant observation, to understand the fans viewing behavior. The third stage is life history interviews. The study found that the “ritual” or “cult” concept of Golden Horse Film Festival mainly from the three points: the timing, the result of annual holidays, like the "cyclical" and created a sense of ritual; in the space, for film and fans of the "gather" of the ritual to create a sense; In addition to these two, the religious admiration to achieve the standard class is bound to also have "sacred" concept, its sacred sense is from master's work in the film, brought the worship mentality. For fans of pilgrims journey, the study quoted by three fan’s life history, describes the various generations of 20,30,40 years old. Then according to a large number of interviews, field observations and findings of the survey, with the ritual process model depicts a single journey and the career of the cinephiles. In a single part of the journey, we can divided into "pre-festival period", "Film Festival Period" and "post-festival period". Part in a career of the cinephiles can be divided into "pre-cinephile stage", "cinephile stage" and "post-cinephile stage", the main differences between the three is based on the film's importance, degree of obsession and expendable as the division of standard.

My thesis examines visual and written culture of the interwar Soviet Union dealing with the body as an object of public observation, appreciation, and critique. It explores how the need to construct new Soviet subjectivities was realised through the figure of the body. I explore the representation of ‘physical culture’ (fizkul’tura), with reference to newspapers, specialist fizkul’tura and medical journals, and Party debates. This textual discourse is considered alongside visual primary sources – documentary and non-fiction film and photography, painting and sculpture, and feature films. In my analysis of these visual primary sources I identify three ‘categories of looking’ – surveillance, aesthetics, and spectatorship – that I claim structure representations of the embodied Soviet subject. My introduction incorporates a brief history of early Soviet social psychological conceptualisations of the body, outlining the coercive renovative project of Soviet subjectification and introducing the notion of surveillance. My first and second chapters explore bodily aesthetics. The first focuses on non-fiction media from the mid- to late-1920s that capture the sporting body in action; this chapter introduces the notion of spectatorship and begins to unpack the ideological function of how bodies are observed. The second further explores questions of bodily aesthetics, now in relation to fizkul’tura painting and Abram Room’s 1936 film, Strogii iunosha. My third chapter looks at fizkul’tura feature films from the mid- 1930s to explore how bodies were related to social questions of gender and sexuality, including marriage and pregnancy. My final chapter focuses on cinematic representations of football from the late 1930s and the relationship between bodies on display and onlooking crowds. These two chapters together indicate how the dynamic between the body and its spectator (whether individual or in a group) was reimagined in the late interwar years; the body’s aesthetic appeal is now of little importance compared to its ability to constitute a public subjectivity through the manipulation of emotion, trauma, and pathos.

Welche Möglichkeiten hat ein Kunsthistoriker einen Film spezifisch zu analysieren? Ist das Fotogramm oder die Einstellung sein Forschungsgegenstand? Oder etwa die Wechselwirkung zweier Fotogramme, zweier Einstellungen? Der Künstlerfilm in all seinen Formen, also die vielfältigen Beziehungen von Bildender Kunst und Filmkunst, standen seit Beginn der kunsthistorischen Betrachtungen des Mediums in einem besonderen Fokus kunstwissenschaftlicher Neuorientierungen. Am Beispiel eines „prototypischen Künstlerfilms“, Jacques Rivettes „La Belle Noiseuse“ von 1991 untersucht der Autor, wie sich eine fotografische Filmanalyse verstehen und anwenden ließe. Ausgehend von klassischen Schriften, die die ästhetischen, bildnerischen Funktionen der Kamera theoretisieren, wird somit ein Zugang versucht, der, in Ergänzung zur vergleichenden filmhistorischen Analyse, zur filmpsychologischen Analyse und der feministischen Rezeption des Films, die Reflexionsebenen erweitern soll.