The purpose of this thesis is to offer a better understanding of some contemporary French films, whose aesthetics result from the borrowing of visual and/or technical elements pertaining to the genres of horror or pornography. To do so, I adopted an inductive approach, based on a semiotic analysis of the film image. My goal is to unearth some patterns that would allow us to have a better comprehension of the image, as filtered through the process of borrowing. Throughout the six films I offer to analyse, I wish to come up with a visual typology of the different forms of borrowing, in order to see how the latter operates, and to comment on the repercussions it has, on the level of the image itself as well as on the audience who has to integrate these images and make sense of them. My analyses are centered around the reexamination of five concepts that are instrumental to the organisation of this thesis ; I will first observe how the process of borrowing calls for a redefinition of the concept of film genre , where the latter has to be understood, not as the sum of immutable visual and thematical elements, but rather as an ever-changing concept whose meaning always has to be redefined. I will then reevaluate the concept of hybridity , as the result of the combination of two different film genres (i.e. the genre of horror or pornography and the genre of the film where the hybridization process takes place). This will lead me to analyse the role of the spectator, when confronted to this new type of images. I will demonstrate that the redefinition of the image operated by these films calls for a different kind of spectatorship, whose role is to actively participate in the meaning-making process of these films. I will finally see that the process of borrowing from another film genre, whether it be horror or pornography, is always concerned with the human body. I will show that each one of the films of my corpus revolves around the desire to subvert traditional representations of the body. / French Language, Literatures and Linguistics

This dissertation is an authorship study of the controversial contemporary French film director Catherine Breillat. Using screen captures to provide visual evidence for the philosophical and theoretical perspectives staked out by Breillat, I perform close analysis of the following six films: Une Vrai Jeune Fille (1976), 36 Fillette (1988), Romance (1999), À Ma Soeur (2001), Brève Traverseé (2001), and Anatomie de L'enfer (2004). Using theory only to supplement interpretations, I draw on the work of George Bataille, Stanley Cavell, and Slavoj Zizek. Breillat's films work through a series of important philosophical ideas integral to an account of eroticism: the paradox of speaking about silence; achieving purity through an encounter with disgust; the singularity of individual desire; the split in identity between the mind and the body; the relationship between sex and death; the relationship between the taboo and transgression; and the violence of female desire. Breillat's films encourage viewers to alter their thinking about sexuality and liberate themselves to lead a more fully erotic life. The capacity of Breillat's films to free eroticism is their most important contribution not only to film history, but also to the totality of human experience.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-03, Section: A, page: 0756. Adviser: Joan Hawkins. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed March 16, 2007)."

The Road Less Traveled is about engaging film from a geographic perspective, specifically analyzing the underlying structures, cultural contexts and forces affecting the movements of the two main protagonists of the film The Motorcycle Diaries. The focus at the individual scale aims to reveal not just how and where, but why people chose to move where they do. The paper is divided into five main chapters: mobility as resistance, mobility as structured process in the form of motility and moorings, forced mobility as distinctive from chosen mobility, mobility as discovery and a final body chapter that demonstrates examples of all these types of mobility. These sections will mainly flow as neoformal, mostly chronologic descriptions of the film text, but will also occasionally reference the written text of the two diaries on which the movie is based. While the main character of the film is Che Guevara, no attention will be dedicated to his revolutionary life outside of the time frame encompassed by the film. / text

This thesis examines the central role of performance in three of the films of John Cassavetes. I identify Cassavetes’ unique approach to performance and analyze its development in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Shadows (1959) and Faces (1968). In order to contextualize and define Cassavetes’ methodology, I compare and contrast each of these films in relation to two other relevant film movements. Cassavetes’ approach was dedicated to creating alternative forms of performative expression in film, yet his films are not solely independent from filmic history and can be read as being a reaction against established filmic structures. His films revolve around autonomous performances that often defy and deconstruct traditional concepts of genre, narrative structure and character. Cassavetes’ films are deeply concerned with their characters’ isolation and inability to communicate with one another, yet refrain from traditional or even abstract constructions of meaning in favour of a focus on spontaneous, unstructured performance of character. Cassavetes was devoted to exploring the details of personal relationships, identity and social interaction. In his films, acting and the creation of character depicts the blurred divide between artifice and reality that exists within much social performance in lived experience. The filmmaking process itself was crucial in the generation of improvisatory performances in Cassavetes’ films. His work displays an intertwinement of creative process and the final filmic form.

This work emerges out of a desire to explore cultural production of this place and this time in its broadest interdisciplinary context. A geography of capitalism, since it is an eminently urban form, is what is missing from current critiques of Spanish cultural production and what this project (inspired in large part by the theories of the geographer David Harvey and the philosopher Henri Lefebvre) provides. The first and second chapters of this dissertation explore how Madrid from 1914-1936 was the site of competing discourses of the modern in material and ideological terms and how this tension plays itself out culturally. The third chapter focuses specifically on the writings of Carmen de Burgos that narrate Madrid's urban environment. The fourth chapter locates Jose Diaz Fernandez's novel La Venus mecanica and his collection of essays El nuevo romaticismo within this same urban process. His comments on the dehumanizing effects of the fashion industry question the ideals of technological progress and critique the increased commodification of culture in Spain in general. The fifth chapter is a close reading of Cinematografo, by Andres Carranque de Rios, and its relationship to the fledgling Spanish film industry in the 1920s and 30s.

This study interrogates the figuring of the woman, and/or the feminized immigrant, in texts produced within the United States, in times of national dissonance, where the immigrant serves as the rupture in the text assuaging a contemporary cultural anxiety. I begin with the assumption that while cultural artifacts contribute to the construction of an "American" national narrative, one which I argue has traditionally sought to establish an originary "folk," and which sees capitalist expansion as necessary to that ongoing narrative, these texts point to the instability of this assumption. In examining two novels, Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861) and Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918) I argue that, as the novel form historically mimics the structure of the nation, these novels are sources for investigating the use of the woman/feminized immigrant as an intervening point in a divisive socio-political issues unique to the United States. Life in the Iron Mills uses the immigrant iron worker, to subtly argue against Abolition. My Antonia presents a personal solution to the divisive debate surrounding Eastern European immigration, suggesting that the Bohemian woman immigrant serves as keeper of a museum enclave, preserving an originary America in the face of industrialization. As film has become the most globally, widely consumed text, I examine a Science Fiction film, Species, and a Western (a quintessentially American genre) each juxtaposed with a contemporary response to immigration; Species addresses the hysteria surrounding increased Latino/a influx, resulting in the passage of Proposition 187 in California; Unforgiven uses seemingly marginalized immigrant figures to present a white, male, capitalist disseminator of "story," as the new American cowboy.

This dissertation is concerned with the monstrous, specifically as it enters our understanding of reproductive technologies, and is represented through a series of films, beginning in the 1930s. In looking at filmic representations of reproductive technologies, this study indicates how the use of, and the results from, those technologies are characterized as monstrous. Because technological reproduction is demarcated as monstrous, non-technological reproduction is naturalized. Importantly, this naturalized reproduction in the films is not only non-technological, but specifically derived from heterosex and racially consistent. In this examination, I argue that the kinds of cultural stories we tell about family-making resemble those we tell about gays and lesbians and non-whites: that in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century US, our culture operates under a double discourse in which those we pity become those whose lives we restrict. In the realm of reproduction, these seemingly contradictory positions enable attempts to limit or eradicate the reproduction of certain people, the egregiousness of which is ameliorated by expressions of sympathy for the life circumstances of those same people. The insights of this project are built on the naturalization of white, heterosexual reproduction in popular film, as well as the historical construction of desired reproduction through eugenics. Some feminist scholarship about reproductive technologies has directly linked those technologies to eugenic attempts to control reproduction, but do so by naturalizing motherhood and reproduction. The "unnaturalness" of reproductive technologies, in the form of masculine medical institutions, these writers claim, looks exactly like the masculine control of human reproduction during the eugenics movements. I seek to extend and complicate this scholarship by pointing out how such a reductive version not only negates the social welfare movements aspects of eugenics but also makes heterosexual reproduction via sexual activity the norm, thereby de-valuing gay and lesbian family-making. On the other side of the reproductive technologies issue, other feminist scholars herald these technologies as capable of eradicating inequitable social relations. Conversely, I argue, these technologies continue to exacerbate the system of differences through their re-inscription of the varying degrees of "quality" assigned to the reproduction of women of color.

<p> This study analyzes "culture" in late colonial Korea, 1937 to 1945, with the methodology of worldly repetition. By embedding culture between quotation marks, I intend to clarify that the object of this study is not an object per se. Korean "culture" is constructed around the three names that the present researcher is barred from objectifying. The names Yi Sang, Ch'oe Chaeso&caron;, and Mun Yebong are not mere indexes of three persons with their particular intrinsic qualities. They are names that represent the Korean culture of the time. However, their representativeness does not mean that they enable the present researcher to reconstruct a general view of Korean culture of the time through them. They are representative to the extent that they allow the present researcher to reflect his own positionality in his research on a past event in history. This reflexive return is induced by the names' essential self-reflexivity; reflections on them are not to be objective if they are aiming at others through the names. The three names are representative of Korean culture of the time to the extent that they are the "origin" of the "culture" that is being formed within the present researcher's time.</p>

The fascination with the image of the prostitute in contemporary German and English language film betrays certain ideological underpinnings of our Western, patriarchally structured culture and political system. By analyzing the contemporary filmic representation of the prostitute, it can be demonstrated that woman's place in society has become more visible and vocal. While objectified images of women still dominate in the films of English and German speaking countries, the depth and identificational quality of these characters has greatly improved, suggesting that the inequities of a patriarchal society are slowly being recognized and rectified.