This study considers the films and writings of Jorge Sanjinés, an influential Latin American filmmaker and theorist known for the collaborative methods of filmmaking he and the Grupo Ukamau created working with indigenous Andean communities, in light of two interrelated but overlooked aspects of his theory and practice: the extent to which his theories intervened in European debates about politics and cinema during the period 1966-1989 (the release dates for his first and last significant features) and his experiments using cinematic form to create a language capable of communicating an alternative, non-western subjectivity. After reviewing the history of the Grupo Ukamau, including its most significant Bolivian precursors, Jorge Ruiz, Oscar Soria, and the Insituto Cinematográfico Boliviano, as well as the group's theories of spectatorship, form in revolutionary cinema, and the practice of making a cinema with the people, this dissertation turns to three topics key to understanding Sanjinés in a properly transnational context: the importance of Bertolt Brecht's theories for Sanjinés, the sequence shot as the basis for his new cinematic language, and political parallels with other European filmmakers. Like several European political filmmakers of the period who experimented with rhetorical and non-realistic uses of the sequence shot, Sanjinés was more inspired by Brecht's theory of Epic Theater than Italian Neo-realism. Sanjinés adapted these techniques both to communicate with his local indigenous audiences and intervene in European theory, a process described here as dialectical transculturation. To create what he called the "Andean sequence shot," Sanjinés adapted Jean-Luc Godard's dialectical editing of long takes, Miklós Jancsó's portrayals of collective protagonists, and Theo Angelopoulos' use of multiple temporalities within a single shot. The final section explores the parallels among Sanjinés' theory and practice and those of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean Rouch, two European filmmakers contemporaneously engaged in theorizing the representation of alternative subjectivities, at that time a marginal concern in Europe. The affinities between these three filmmakers' theories as well as Sanjinés contribution to European theorizing of cinematic subjectivity have been obscured, it is argued, by the politics of the period.

The tragedy and aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks are reflected in American apocalyptic horror films that have been produced since 2001. Because the attacks have occurred only within the past ten years, not much research has been conducted on the effects the attacks have had on the narrative and technological aspects of apocalyptic horror. A survey of American apocalyptic horror will include a brief synopsis of the films, commentary on dominant visual allusions to the 9/11 attacks, and discussion of how the attacks have thematically influenced the genre. The resulting study shows that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have shaped American apocalyptic horror cinema as shown through imagery, characters, and thematic focus of the genre.

In recent years, film, art, new media, and music video works created by black makers have demonstrated an increasingly “post-black” impulse. The term “post-black” was originally coined in response to innovative practices and works created by a generation of black artists who were shaped by hip-hop culture and Afro-modernist thinking. I use the term as a theoretical tool to discuss what lies beyond the racial character of a work, image, or body. Using a post-black theoretical methodology I examine a range of works by black filmmakers Kathleen Collins Prettyman and Lee Daniels, visual artists Wangechi Mutu and Jean-Michel Basquiat, new media artist Nettrice Gaskins, and music video works of hip-hop artists and performer Erykah Badu. I discuss how black artists and filmmakers have moved through Darby English’s notion of “black representational space” as a sphere where bodies and works are beholden to specific historical and aesthetic expectations and limitations. I posit that black representational space has been challenged by what I describe as “metaphysical space” where bodies produce a new set of possibilities as procreative, fluid, liberated, and otherworldly forces. These bodies are neither positive nor negative; instead they occupy the in-between spaces between life and death, time and space, digital and analog, interiority and exteriority, vulnerability and empowerment. Post-black visual culture displays the capacities of black bodies as creative forces that shape how we see and experience visual culture. My methodology employs textual analysis of visual objects that articulate a post-black impulse, paying close attention to how these works compel viewers to see other dimensions of experience. In three chapters I draw from theoretical work in race and visuality, affect theory, phenomenology, and interiority from the likes of Charles Johnson, Frantz Fanon, Elena del Río, Sara Ahmed, Saidiya Hartman, and Elizabeth Alexander. This study aims to create an interdisciplinary analysis that charts new directions for exploring and re-imaging black bodies as subjects and objects of endless knowledge and creative potential.

Neste trabalho investigamos em que medida o mal-estar da sociedade americana, entre 1975 e 1978, causado por uma série de acontecimentos dos anos 1970 (fim da Guerra do Vietnã, reivindicações das chamadas minorias sociais, crise da OPEP e Watergate, entre outros), foi representado em filmes comerciais, feitos dentro de Hollywood e sem maiores ambições autorais. Os filmes analisados neste trabalho são: Rocky - Um Lutador (John G. Avildsen, 1976) e Os Embalos de Sábado à Noite (John Badham, 1977). / In this work we investigate to what extent the malaise of American society between 1975 and 1978, caused by a series of events of the seventies (end of the Vietnam War, calling claims of social minorities, the OPEC crisis and Watergate, among others) , was represented in commercial films made in Hollywood without auteurist ambitions. The films analyzed in this work are: Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) and Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977).

This thesis examines the contribution of Jewish artists to American popular culture in the mid-twentieth century and argues that the Jewish imagination contains a peculiar ability to simultaneous articulate the concerns of a specifically ethnic identity and a more universal American character. The thesis posits that by exploring how the Jewish community negotiated the space between ethnic identity and an American paradigm, Jewish artists were able to explore the middle ground between individuality and conformity, selfhood and consensus, liberalism and conservatism, tradition and change, and heritage and progress that held a wider pertinence for a more general American audience. The thesis argues that the diversity of the Jewish American imagination at this time can be united by a leitmotif that can be best described as the ambivalence of transition. By examining aesthetically dissimilar texts from a variety of artistic fields, in particular comic books, theatre, cinema, television, and literature, the thesis argues that despite the cultural evolutions that occurred throughout the thirties, forties and fifties, the Jewish voice articulated a continuing concern regarding the relationship between ethnic identity, masculine identity, the individual and mass culture. This last point hints at another preoccupation of this thesis; the texts analysed here all share a narrative focus that explores and represents notions of masculine identity and ideality. In this way, the thesis necessarily focuses upon debates about masculinity within the Jewish imagination and American culture, charting the evolution of the Jewish and American male and their relationship towards notions of performed, consensus, individual and paradigm masculinity. Although there has not necessarily been a desire to fully deny the notion of a continuing thematic preoccupation within the Jewish imaginary, previous scholarship has shown a tendency towards accentuating the eclectic nature of Jewish American culture. Whilst scholars like Paul Buhle and Stephen J. Whitfield recognise the importance of popular culture as an arena in which Jewish artists sought to articulate issues at the heart of Jewish identity and community in the US, their studies focus upon the kaleidoscopic eclecticism of Jewish American culture. The intention of this thesis is to harness the diversity inherent in Jewish cultural expression via the prevailing leitmotif of the ambivalence of transition. In this way the thesis will use the multifarious and textured fabric of mid-century Jewish culture, as well as the simultaneous articulation of both ethnic and more general concerns, to illuminate the understanding of both Jewish identity and American culture throughout the mid-century. Thus, the thesis builds upon work by the likes of Julian Levinson and Hana Wirth-Nesher that revisits ideas of assimilation and attempts to complicate the inexorable movement away from Jewish distinctiveness and identity. Similarly, the thesis builds upon studies by the likes of Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Will Brooker that attempt to accentuate the reductive understanding of the mid-century based upon boundless suburbia and unthinking conformity.

O objetivo dessa tese é investigar de que maneira Little Caesar (Mervyn Leroy, 1931) e Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1947) registram, dentro do gênero gângster, questões como a Depressão na década de 1930, e o macarthismo na década de 1940, ao mesmo tempo em que estabelecem homologias estruturais entre o crime organizado e o mundo dos negócios. Tais questões surgem nesses dois filmes por força da matéria histórica envolvida nas condições de produção. Nossa tese é de que os filmes configuram, em diferentes medidas, estratégias de representação da matéria histórica apesar das tentativas de seu apagamento, como a censura e o macarthismo. / The aim of this thesis is to analyze how Little Caesar (Mervyn Leroy, 1931) and Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1947) portray, in the gangster genre, historically relevant questions such as the Great Depression in the 1930s and McCarthyism in the 1940s, while establishing structural homologies between organized crime and the business world. These themes arise in both films due to the strength of the historical substance implicated in the conditions of production. Our thesis is that these films depict, in different proportions, strategies of representation of the historical substance in spite of attempts to suppress it, such as censorship and McCarthyism.

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar a produção fílmica do cineasta norte-americano Michael Moore, tendo como questão central a relação que se estabelece entre arte e política num momento histórico que, de um lado, aponta para a crise do capitalismo e, de outro, para a fragmentação política da classe trabalhadora. A partir da análise formal de dois de seus filmes, estabelecemos uma relação com os momentos históricos que lhes deram condições de produção, a fim de compreender o método desenvolvido pelo cineasta para lidar com a crise de representação e comunicação vivida pela arte política nas últimas décadas. Os dois filmes escolhidos para tal análise são Roger e Eu (Roger & Me, 1989) e Capitalismo: uma história de amor (Capitalism: a love story, 2009). Ambos os filmes possuem diagnósticos de momentos distintos da crise do capitalismo, juntamente com a constatação de que existe um desmonte da classe trabalhadora, fruto de uma série de mudanças econômicas, políticas e culturais, especialmente ao longo da segunda metade do século XX e início do XXI. Este trabalho faz um estudo comparativo dos dois filmes, traçando as continuidades e mudanças estéticas e políticas ocorridas na obra de Michael Moore num intervalo de duas décadas, bem como sua relação com as condições de representação da luta de classes dentro da cultura norte-americana. Esta pesquisa reflete sobre o surgimento do fenômeno Michael Moore como parte de um processo de construção e desconstrução de uma tradição da classe trabalhadora norte-americana. / This research aims to analyze the film production of the American filmmaker Michael Moore, proposing as a central question the relationship established between art and politics in a historical moment which, on one side, points to the crisis of capitalism and, on the other side, to the political fragmentation of the working class. Starting from the formal analysis of two of his films, we have established a relationship with the historical moments which gave conditions of production to them, in order to understand the method developed by the filmmaker to deal with the crisis of representation and communication experienced by political art in the last decades. The two films chosen for this analysis are Roger & Me (1989) and Capitalism: a love story (2009). Both films have different diagnoses of the distinct moments of the capitalist crisis, along with the realization of the fact there is a dismantling of the working class, result of a series of economic, political and cultural chances, especially during the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century. This research makes a comparison between the two films, tracing the aesthetic and political continuities and changes in the work of Michael Moore which happened throughout two decades, as well as its relation to the conditions of representation of class struggle in American culture. This work reflects on the rise of the Michael Moore phenomenon as part of a process of construction and deconstruction of a tradition of the American working class.

O objetivo dessa tese é investigar de que maneira Little Caesar (Mervyn Leroy, 1931) e Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1947) registram, dentro do gênero gângster, questões como a Depressão na década de 1930, e o macarthismo na década de 1940, ao mesmo tempo em que estabelecem homologias estruturais entre o crime organizado e o mundo dos negócios. Tais questões surgem nesses dois filmes por força da matéria histórica envolvida nas condições de produção. Nossa tese é de que os filmes configuram, em diferentes medidas, estratégias de representação da matéria histórica apesar das tentativas de seu apagamento, como a censura e o macarthismo. / The aim of this thesis is to analyze how Little Caesar (Mervyn Leroy, 1931) and Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1947) portray, in the gangster genre, historically relevant questions such as the Great Depression in the 1930s and McCarthyism in the 1940s, while establishing structural homologies between organized crime and the business world. These themes arise in both films due to the strength of the historical substance implicated in the conditions of production. Our thesis is that these films depict, in different proportions, strategies of representation of the historical substance in spite of attempts to suppress it, such as censorship and McCarthyism.

This dissertation is an in-depth critical analysis of four American films made during the 1970s, with emphasis placed on the films' construction of gender and sexuality. This dissertation draws from the tradition of queer film criticism presented in the writings of such theorists as Barbara Creed, Alexander Doty, Richard Dyer, Vito Russo, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Taking a queer perspective, these film readings explore how particular works implement queer codes and foster a sexually ambiguous world on film. While not typically included in discussions of Queer Cinema or New American Cinema, these four films, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975), and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), exhibit a family resemblance and as a cycle are products of a particular period in American cinematic experimentation. A detailed scene-by-scene analysis is enacted in order to bring to light queer moments in the films and queer concerns of the films' makers. Raising questions about how the camera constructs character identities in these films, this study is reflective of the ways queer perspectives inflect filmmaking from this era.

Entre 1916 et 1928, un certain nombre de films muets américains expérimentent les formes complexes d’un assemblage ostensiblement articulé entre un ou des récits situés dans le passé (historique, antique ou biblique) et un récit situé à l’époque moderne. Nous avons appelé cet assemblage le « Spectacle des Siècles », suivant la formule publicitaire rencontrée sur l’affiche d’un de ces films, Noah’s Ark (M. Curtiz, 1928). Les films du Spectacle des Siècles ne se confondent pas avec les films historiques ou bibliques également mis en scène dans le cinéma muet, et qui supposent une action unique et une diégèse centrée autour de la période reconstituée. Les films étudiés font dialoguer passés et présents en relatant une multiplicité d’époques, de décors, d’actions et de personnages. Cette recherche se propose de mettre en lumière outre la variété des contenus, les diverses solutions d’assemblage élaborées par ces films pour aboutir à l’harmonie d’une œuvre cohérente. Les formes originales imaginées par les cinéastes font apparaître les multiples passages, transferts et métamorphoses de ces parallèles entre le passé et le présent, l’ancien et le nouveau. Elles interrogent ce que les films ont à dire sur leur siècle, en instaurant un présent démultiplié et orienté vers de nouvelles promesses. Ainsi les films du Spectacle des Siècles donnent à lire un moment de l’histoire du cinéma muet américain qui connut une brève période d’activité. / Between 1916 and 1928, some American silent films are in search of putting together one or several stories set in the past (historical, ancient, biblical) and one story set in the modern times, thus displaying complex cinematic forms conspicuously articulated. We called this assembling the « Spectacle of the Ages », according to the advertising formula encountered on the poster of one of these films, Noah’s Ark (M. Curtiz, 1928). The films of the Spectacle of the Ages are not to be confused with biblical or historical films – also produced in silent cinema – which assume a single action and a diegesis focused on the reenacted period. The films we are to sudy here confront the past with the present, by telling multiple ages, sets, actions and characters. Beyond the variety of these stories, this research aims to highlight the various assembling solutions created by the filmmakers to achieve a coherent and harmoniously shaped work of art. These cinematic forms show various passages, translations, metamorphosis of the parallels between the past and the present, the old and the new, thus revealing something of their Age and of a promising future. We perceive in the Spectacle of the Ages a short-lived moment in the history of American silent cinema.