This thesis examines Iranian-Kurdish filmmaker, Bahman Ghobadi’s authorial strategies and cinematic aesthetics through the theoretical and methodological lens of hybridity. According to Homi Bhabha, hybridity can be understood as a “third space,” in which cultural meanings resist binary either/or logic, and are instead negotiated through a logic that is neither one, nor the other. Thus, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity as a “third space” provides a fruitful framework to analyze Ghobadi’s authorship and cinematic style. By analyzing Ghobadi’s neo-realist treatment of Kurdistan’s cultural and physical landscape and hybrid cinematic aesthetics in his first two features, A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) and Turtles Can Fly (2004), this research calls attention to intercultural processes that generate cultural meaning through indexical and material as opposed to symbolic registers. In addition, this thesis applies Hamid Naficy’s concept of “shifters” to examine how Ghobadi’s hybrid authorial strategies and narrative reflexivity garners international audiences in his two latest features, Half Moon (2006) and No One Knows about Persian Cats (2009). This project also examines how Ghobadi’s use of a digital camera and employment of digital cinematic techniques to capture Iran’s underground rock music culture in No One Knows about Persian Cats, testifies to the authenticity of this cultural space while simultaneously structuring the film as a global vehicle for these Iranian musicians’ performances. Ultimately, Ghobadi’s hybrid authorial strategies and cinematic aesthetics function as a means to enunciate and globally circulate diverse Kurdish and Iranian cultural identities. In doing so, this thesis illuminates hybrid modes of cultural production and hybrid cultural subjectivities that have emerged in the contemporary globalized landscape. / text

An observation, whether it be real or fictitious, has the ability to create its own meaning within the context of ones reality. With the use of video technology, I record both staged and found situations that exist in limbo states. On the surface, they appear to be familiar spaces and places that the eye would naturally pass over. For example, recording the back of a figure or a blank billboard implies without revealing, while remaining autonomous and infinite. By hyper-focusing on seemingly banal occurrences, one has the ability to become a creatively conscious observer. Regularity is deceptive, as are our poetic imaginations. These video pieces act as catalysts that engage previous experience and thought. Specific cinematic techniques function within this body of work; particularly the long take, a slow pace, the static camera, and the use of mundane subjects. Each piece reveals a visual moment extracted from a universal notion and understanding of experienced time. By suspending these particular visual moments in time, I remove them from the pace of lived reality so they can enter an alternate reality. The images persist and reverberate within individual consciousness to create unique narratives specific to ones own understanding of the minimal amount of information given to them. The familiar becomes unfamiliar again. / text

Esta investigacion se centra en la conformacion de nuevas identidades femeninas y nacionales en el cine de Maria Novaro, a partir del papel preponderante de la madre, la reconfiguracion de la familia mexicana y el desplazamiento del padre en los procesos de identidad. Se enfoca en un cine de mujer EN EL NOMBRE DE LA MADRE, un cine que reacciona contra la cultura patriarcal y el nacionalismo oficial del Estado mexicano. Este examen expone que las historias privadas de las peliculas de Novaro revelan simbolicamente el "inconsciente nacional", desplazan al Estado patriarcal y realzan a la nacion de la sociedad civil, en el marco de un cine de autora y de un cine de mujeres. En el examen, se entrevera historia y cultura, ideologia y estetica, contexto y texto, para explorar cuatro areas basicas: (1) los discursos hegemonicos de occidente en torno a la mujer; (2) las identidades hegemonicas en el cine mexicano; (3) el contexto social, politico, cultural y cinematografico de Mexico durante los ochenta y los noventa; (4) la narrativa e imagen visual de los tres primeros largometrajes industriales de la directora mexicana: Lola (1989), Danzon (1991) y El jardin del Eden (1993). La base teorica del examen son el analisis textual feminista y los conceptos de inconsciente politico, mediacion y alegoria nacional de Fredric Jameson. Asimismo, se utilizan las definiciones de meganarrador y de relato cinematografico de Francois Jost y Andre Gaudreault, para analizar las peliculas.

Death of the Celluloid Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film traces and analyses the representation of Native American women in the history of American film. In particular, the work focuses on the figure of a young Native woman who falls in love with, aids, or otherwise is connected to the white hero and dies for that choice. I have labeled this representation the Celluloid Maiden trope. It contains two primary figures that I have termed the Celluloid Princess and the Sexualized Maiden. These figures inform each other from the 1910s through the 1960s and combine to form a hybrid character in the 1970s and 1990s. The trope emerges in conjunction with the myth of the Frontier and the white American Adam/hero figure as ambiguous references to inter-racial mixing and assimilation. While each generation of media maneuvers the trope to fit the political and social milieu of the period, it remains a solidly entrenched vehicle through which colonialism and racism are enacted on the body of the Native American woman. Within the Celluloid Maiden trope, native culture, sexuality, and race conflate into interchangeable identifiers of difference that participate in a larger discourse of nationalism, itself based on a hierarchy of race and gender. Thus, the Celluloid Maiden trope and its components are deeply tied to American identity politics and an ongoing re-establishment of a white, patriarchal system of power through its narratives of belonging, nation formation, colonization and racism. Death of the Celluloid Maiden's significance lies in its dedication to understanding the ways in which our culture utilizes racialized, gendered and sexualized bodies, especially female bodies, as sites for inscribing difference. The dissertation explores the complex web of power relations that exists in the cultural arena informing film images. In particular, I am concerned with how the historical and visually reproductive relationship between whites and Native Americans in general, which informs this particular image of Native American women specifically, creates intercultural boundaries that continually reinforce social, racial, and gendered difference.

This dissertation outlines the material and aesthetic origins of the game film in order to show how video and computer games are altering film's role in the media economy specifically, and the form and function of the mass media more generally. I argue that game cinematization is emblematic of the culture industries' (1) new economic practices and (2) aesthetic and technological convergence. Chapter One introduces the dissertation and offers a precis of the history of film-based licensing in the U.S. In the chapter, I suggest that one of the primary functions of American commercial film is to brand and sell consumer goods, and that understanding the origins of this licensing function is crucial to understanding how games are redefining it. Chapter Two provides a political economy of the institutional and industrial factors that made the game film possible, focusing specifically on a sea change in game business during the late 1980s, and the joint Congressional hearings on game violence in the early 1990s. Chapter Three complements Chapter Two's historical materialist analysis with a textual one, analyzing why game films seem to draw primarily from a single genre--the fighting game. The fighting game's ability to facilitate "safe looking," along with the ways fighting games embody the very essence of genre, have helped ease the transformation of game content into film content. Chapter Four revisits Chapters Two and Three in order to show how the material and aesthetic forces that birthed the game film are among the most influential forces affecting film today. The chapter analyzes the evolution of media makers' attempts to explore and exploit the game medium, and describes the ways games have begun to reshape film business, production, and aesthetics.

This dissertation looks at Sally Potter's career by focusing upon the ways in which her directorial style has been influenced by her performance and dance background. Chapter 1 provides the reader with an introduction to Potter's major film work, the motivation for undertaking this study, and ends with an overview of Potter's early film work through Combines (1972). Chapter 2 takes up the issues of auteurism, essentialism, and genre, in an attempt to create a strategy for writing a major study of an individual filmmaker at this critical juncture in film/feminist/cultural studies. This study of Potter draws out a discernible sense of style in relation to a corresponding body of social and artistic concerns that shape Potter's work from her early experimental films through her feature films in the 1990S. Chapter 3 covers the years between 1972-1979, during which Potter performed in a variety of situations and groups around Europe. These years also provided her formative experiences in feminist groups and with early feminist film theory. In 1979 Potter returned to filmmaking and made Thriller, a remaking of the opera, La Boheme. Thriller is both a reflection of 1970s feminist thought and the precursor to feminist film theory in the 1980s and 1990s. Chapter 4 and 5 are dedicated to Potter's most recent film, The Tango Lesson (1997). Chapter 4 focuses on The Tango Lesson as a musical and explores the genre from various angles, including women making musicals, and the theme of Jewishness in Potter's exploration of the tango. Chapter 5 elaborates on the history of tango and its marketability as the exotic, and compares Potter's film, in which Pablo Veron choreographs a menage-a-quatre to Piazzolla's "Libertango," and Matthew Diamond's documentary on Paul Taylor in which Taylor choreographs a performance to Piazzolla's "Caldera." This discussion ends with a look at The Tango Lesson and Jutta Bruckner's Ein Blick und die Liebe bricht aus (One Glance and Love Breaks Out, 1985). I also place Potter's work with the tango in history of women filmmakers like Leni Riefenstahl and Maya Deren, who were also dancers and explored the exotic on film.

This thesis offers analyses of two of Michael Haneke's most provocative films, *Funny Games US,* and *The Piano Teacher.* Contrary to the popular critical conclusion that Haneke is a cinematic sadist, this thesis argues that the aesthetics and thematic concerns of his films are best understood through the dynamics of masochism, not sadism. Using a variety of theories of masochism, including the conflicting theories of Sigmund Freud and Gilles Deleuze, this project seeks to build upon the work of Gaylyn Studlar and argue for the subversive power inherent in masochistic submission in the cinema. / Cette thèse propose des analyses de deux des films les plus provocateurs de Michael Haneke, * Funny Games US, * et * La Pianiste. * Contrairement à la conclusion critique populaire qui Haneke est un sadique cinématographique, cette thèse soutient que l'esthétique et les préoccupations thématiques de son films sont mieux compris par la dynamique du masochisme, sadisme pas. En utilisant une variété de théories de masochisme, y compris les théories contradictoires de Sigmund Freud et Gilles Deleuze, ce projet vise à s'appuyer sur les travaux de Gaylyn Studlar et plaider pour le pouvoir subversif inhérent à la soumission masochiste dans le cinéma.

In this paper, I will examine how the films of Jia Zhangke operate as social analyses of the contemporary condition in China through both subject matter and the documentation of a society in transition, as well as, through the creation of an innovative film language. Jia employs cinematic techniques that problematize the borders between fiction and documentary, subjectivity and objectivity, and realism and surrealism thus challenging the underlying assumptions that shape film as a medium itself. It is this essential filmic gesture which blurs the boundaries between traditional cinematic categories that makes Jia's films unique in their ability to reveal the inherent contradictions that structure the postsocialist condition in contemporary China. / Dans cet article, j'examinerai comment les films de Jia Zhangke fonctionner comme des analyses de la condition sociale contemporaine en Chine à la fois par l'objet et la documentation d'une société en transition, ainsi que, grâce à la création d'un langage cinématographique novateur. Jia utilise des techniques cinématographiques qui problématiser les frontières entre fiction et documentaire, la subjectivité et l'objectivité et le réalisme et le surréalisme mettant ainsi en cause les hypothèses sous-jacentes film forme que comme un médium lui-même. C'est ce geste filmique, essentielle, qui brouille les frontières entre les catégories traditionnelles du cinéma qui fait des films uniques Jia dans leur capacité à révéler les contradictions inhérentes à la structure de la condition post-socialiste dans la Chine contemporaine.

Documentary studies, and Italian documentary studies in particular, is a fairly young academic discipline. My research ventures in this somewhat uncharted territory with a multidisciplinary approach and in pursuit of a twofold objective: firstly to produce a brief account and a literature review concerning the major directors, movements, and theoretical trends in and about Italian documentary from the end of the Second World War to the present, which are not available in English; secondly to explore the debates about the definition of the documentary form, with a special focus on British and North-American scholars, and propose a solution to some contentious issues. The latter part of the research combines a philosophical approach that mainly draws on the works of Jürgen Habermas, Don Ihde and Kendall L. Walton, and a sociological methodology influenced by Mary Douglas and Basil Bernstein's theories; it is based on the hypothesis that documentary is not just a series of images and sounds, in whatever format the available technology provides us with, but an institution; to look at documentary as an institution means to define its features as a routinized cultural behaviour in the social context where it develops. Insofar as documentary is an institution, individual documentaries can be considered cultural artifacts that express in fairly accessible ways subjective meanings that are then internalized and influence people in their constant process of creation and recreation of social contexts. Thus, in the last part of the dissertation, I focus on the concrete instances through which the institution of documentary becomes part of the socio-cognitive contexts of individuals. I identify four documentary types, characterized by the different weighting of a set of variables dependent on the ethical, cognitive and stylistic features of the institution of documentary that I have previously described. I then match these types with the group/grid categories of a neo-Durkheimian theoretical framework to obtain a set of conceptual tools which are put to a preliminary test through the analysis of a recent Italian documentary. / Les études sur le documentaire, et sur le documentaire italien en particulier, sont une discipline académique très jeune. Ma recherche s'aventure dans ce terroir plutôt inexploré avec une approche multidisciplinaire et à la poursuite d'un double objectif: premièrement de présenter une bref histoire et une critique de la littérature au sujet des réalisateurs, mouvements et théories du documentaire italien à partir de la fin de la deuxième guerre mondiale jusqu'à maintenant, parce que ce genre d'études ne sont pas disponible en anglais; deuxièmement de explorer le débat sur la définition de la forme documentaire, avec une attention particulière pour les théories anglaises et nord-américaines, et proposer une solutionne pour des points controversés. La dernière partie de la recherche combine une approche philosophique inspiré par les ouvres de Jürgen Habermas, Don Ihde et Kendall L. Walton avec une méthodologie sociologique influencé par les théories de Mary Douglas et Basil Bernstein; ce partie est fondé sur l'hypothèse que le documentaire n'est pas seulement une série d'images et sons, dans n'importe pas quelle technologie soit disponible au présent, mais il est une institution. Voir le documentaire comme une institution veut dire définir ces caractéristiques en tant que comportement culturel habitualisé dans le contexte social ou il se développe. Si le documentaire est une institution, les documentaires sont des produits culturels qui expriment des significations subjectives d'une façon accessible, et qui sont tour à tour intériorisés et vont influencer les gens dans leur procès de création et recréation de contextes sociaux. C'est pour ça que la dernière partie de la thèse est consacré à l'analyse de la façon dans laquelle le documentaire devient partie des contextes sociocognitives des individus. Je identifie quatre types de documentaire, caractérisé par le diffèrent pois donné à une série de variables qui dépend par les aspects éthiques, cognitives et stylistiques de l'institution documentaire que j'ai décrit précédemment. Ensuite, je combine ces types avec les catégories groupe/grille d'un système théorique nouveau-Durkheimien, et le cadre conceptuel qui en résulte est préliminairement vérifié à travers l'analyse d'un documentaire italien contemporain.

This thesis considers the films of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar as postmodern melodramas. The crux of my argument is that melodrama is known for its expressiveness and its attempt to restore a spiritual element to a post-sacred world, and is used by Almodóvar to make clear the problems and contradictions inherent in the destabilized world of postmodernity. This definition of melodrama draws primarily on the work of Peter Brooks, Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams; it is modified to apply to postmodernism as defined by Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson. The conclusion reached is that Almodóvar is deeply ambivalent about postmodernity. Chapter 2 considers the twin issues of representation and sexuality in Almodóvar’s first six films: Pepi, Luci, Born (Pepi, Luci Born y otras chicas del montón, 1980), Labyrinth of Passions (Laberinto de pasiones, 1982), Dark Habits (Entre tinieblas, 1983), What Have I Done To Deserve This? (Qué he hecho yopor merecer esto!, 1984), Matador (1986), and Law ofDesire (Le ley del deseo, 1987); with a special eye to the representation of sexual violence, it establishes how Almodóvar develops his ambivalent melodramatic imagination. Chapter 3 considers fashion as a discourse and argues that Almodóvar’s next four films use clothing to place different versions of femininity in dialogue, and uses this as a springboard to consider Women on the Verge ofa Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, 1988), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (I Atame!, 1990), High Heels (Tacones lejanos, 1991), and Kika (1993) as postmodern “women’s pictures.” Chapter 4 considers the appearance of the explicitly political along with the symbolism of the image of the map in The Flower of My Secret (Laflor de rni secreto, 1995), Live Flesh (Came trémula, 1997), and All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre, 1999). Chapter 5 uses the metaphor of ghosts to consider the draw of the past in Talk To Her (Hable con ella, 2002), Bad Education (La mala educación, 2004), and Volver (2006), pointing to both the emptiness of the present and the impossibility of returning to that golden past.