Heterosexuality is coded on-screen in many musical films from the last century as a “celebratory ideal.” 1 This thesis explores the queer possibilities of the so-called heterosexual male in three films spanning a decade from 1977 with Badham's Saturday Night Fever and Grease (Kleiser, 1978), to 1987's Dirty Dancing (Ardolino). Each of the films I have examined foreground heterosexual romance. However, by looking at the male body in these films I have argued for the ways in which the male, dancing body works against these films' assertion of a narrative heterosexuality. I have shown how these films can be read as queer by the way they highlight the performativity of the male body, and through their camp aestheticism which complicates normative ideas about desire, sexuality and gender. I interrogate claims emerging from work in musical genre theory, which describes the musical as “the most heterosexist of all the Hollywood filmic forms.”2 By examining existing theory on the role of the camp sensibility within musical film I argue that there are ways that the musical films analysed dismiss their narrative heteronormativity and instead mark themselves as queer. The films do this by aligning the performativity of dance with the queer discourse that uses as its cornerstone the notion of the performativity of gender and sexuality. I have argued that these films portray an embattled masculinity coming to the fore within society (and cinema) in the 1970s, into the 1980s. The chapters in this thesis are organised according to the analyses' of the three films. The chapters explore themes of camp aesthetics by understanding camp's tendency to disrupt the clear disparities between ‘being and seeming'.

<p> The purpose of this project report is to evaluate my role as producer, writer, and actor on the short film, <i>Intervention X</i>. The film was produced to fulfill the thesis requirements for the Master of Fine Arts in Television, Film and Theatre at California State University, Los Angeles. This report will emphasize each aspect of my work differently. The first portion of the report explains my process creating a lead male character who does not necessarily fit the regular cinematic stereotypes. My next goal was to create an antagonist who would challenge my protagonist&rsquo;s free will. After watching the film, I hope my audience will examine the notion of spiritual forces against their own free will. This paper explains how the genre of magical realism influenced the film. This project allows me to embrace my experience from when I was in my home land, Haiti, and my experience here in the United States. In addition, it allows me to address human struggle and ways of life utilizing a philosophical approach. When I did research for this project, I was on a quest to collect information from people I met or had a close relationship with. So even though the story of this film is fictional, it&rsquo;s closely related to people&rsquo;s real-life problems. I hope my readers and viewers will explore this project and find a source of light in it.</p><p>

This thesis examines the different ways the cinemas of Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard adapted literary and artistic motifs characteristic of the nineteenth-century romantic and realist traditions, from the 1960s to the 1980s. The selection of these four directors is based on their early and formative commitment to the politique des auteurs, a film criticism trend that was significantly indebted to central aesthetic precepts of the realist and naturalist novels. The profound social changes of the 1960s led directors, artists and writers to question long-accepted ideas about representation and authorship. The left-wing culture in France, which envisioned art and political protest as an inseparable whole, extensively criticised the nineteenth-century discourse on the realist novel as the outward revelation of the author's inner life. As a result, critics rapidly considered the politique des auteurs and, by extension, the universalist and openly westerncentric premises of the Nouvelle Vague as unpersuasive and dismissible. This thesis acknowledges that the relation these directors maintained with nineteenth-century thought has been overshadowed by scholarship on their individual careers, a research tendency that consolidates the notion of rupture and discontinuity between Rohmer, Rivette, Truffaut and Godard's filmographies. However, each one of them commonly returned to nineteenth-century sourcing and imagery in the post-1968 period through adaptations and transpositions of Heinrich von Kleist, Honoré de Balzac, Adèle Hugo, Prosper Mérimée and so on. As the first work to regroup this 'gang of four' in the aftermath of Rohmer's forced resignation in Cahiers du cinéma, this thesis argues that their approaches to the nineteenth-century cultural legacy should be assessed as distinct forms of reaffirming, revising, challenging and commenting on their former vision of cinema as a novelistic space, able to manifest the essence of sheer appearances. As the chapters will demonstrate, their engagements with nineteenth-century art and literature are complex. They are, on the one hand, inflected by their personal responses to the politicisation of the 1960s and 1970s French film culture and, on the other hand, informed by their individual understanding of the role of nineteenth-century narratives and aesthetic patterns within the framework of modern filmmaking. The introduction chapter lays the theoretical foundations of the Nouvelle Vague's early engagements with notions of romanticism and realism and, in light of the existing scholarship, establishes the aims and methodology of this thesis. Chapter two examines Rohmer's cinematic transposition of Balzac's rhetorical realism and analyses the paradoxes and modernist potential of the director's neoclassical film aesthetics in Die Marquise von O ... (1976). Chapter three explores the ways Rivette turns the Balzacian myths of Icarus and Pygmalion into more immediate accounts on his contemporaries' struggle for unalienated and totalising works of art through Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991). Chapter four analyses Truffaut's long series of engagements with nineteenth-century imagery and explores the reasons why L'enfant sauvage (1970), Les deux anglaises et le continent (1971), L'histoire d'Adèle H. (1975) and La chambre verte (1978) coincided with his growing conservatism. Chapter five develops Godard's relationship with the romantic legacy through the case-studies of Passion (1982) and Prénom Carmen (1983) - films which allude to Charles Baudelaire's entangled notions of spleen and the ideal and give an unprecedented attention to the aesthetics of chiaroscuro. The conclusion chapter establishes points of convergences and contrasts between the four directors through a comparative account that also addresses the ways in which their individual stands towards the romantic and realist legacies have evolved.