This dissertation seeks to read contemporary films as symptoms of the societies they are made in, mainly contemporary Western societies, which I argue to be subtly but intensely homophobic. Films imagine/represent their own subject matter in terms of symbolic, encoded scenes. The decoding for the films I chose occurs through a use of very specific, heavily coded spaces as visualisable shorthand for a complex of homophobic reactions. Filmic texts do not have to have denotative non-heterosexual elements to be termed 'queer'. These texts become queer often in their reception by non-heterosexual audiences. In 'queering' these spaces and films, I extensively make use of tools of social geography, film studies and cultural studies The films I chose are not random choices, but they include certain themes that I believe to reflect the subtle homophobia in our societies. In the first chapter, Geographies of Cruising, I analyze the representation of streets and the leading character's cruising on the streets in Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999). The second chapter, Geographies of Effeminacy, concentrates on the denial of space to non-masculine men exemplified in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). In the third chapter, Geographies of Exclusion, the representation of a cellar in Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, 2003) serves to display the links between paedophilia and homosexuality. The fourth and final chapter, Geographies of Abuse and Rape, is an exercise on “out of placeness” and examines the connections made between male/male rape and homosexuality in I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (Mike Hodges, 2003). The last chapter is an extended reading of Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), in which the tension between closed spaces and wild spaces leads to a discussion of contemporary representation of homosexuality and a summary of the chapters.

This dissertation focuses on novels and films produced in the second half of the twentieth century that critique traditional notions of home in contemporary America to expand on the large body of work on American domesticity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These texts demonstrate the damaging power and overwhelming force of conventional domesticity, complicating traditional notions of home by speaking from positions of marginality. In each text, key figures react to limited ideologies of domesticity that seek to maintain sameness, silence, and servitude by enacting embodied resistance to domestic entrapment. The areas of convergence between the figure of the conventional, middle-class home, and the material and psychic reality of home disavow the expectations of the middle-class home ideal and offer real resistance to narrow, and often damaging, visions of home. These spaces allow for new conceptions of home and suggest that it may be possible to conceive of home as something other than fixed in place, governed by family and community, or created by prolific consumption of goods. In this way, this dissertation intervenes in the established binary of home/stability in opposition to mobility/freedom, which maintains the limits of appropriate ways of establishing and enacting domesticity along gender and class lines. By considering portraits of domesticity that are often left out of discussions of home in the United States my research intersects with a broad range of theoretical fields and discourses about mobility, historical and popular culture representations of the tramp, the body and surveillance, the home as spatial construct, and housekeeping as both oppressive and subversive. Drawing on historical and theoretical examinations of women within the home space, coupled with literary criticism and close-readings, I seek to determine the nature of confining domesticity and examine the varied ways that different groups of people respond to their entrapment. At stake in this dissertation is a deeper understanding of the ways that literary and filmic representations of home at the end of the twentieth century suggest a conflict between the ways that home and houses, are popularly represented and the fact that home remains a contested and dangerous space.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how God and Moses are depicted in three contemporary American film adaptions of The Exodus story. The films I have analyzed are: The Ten Commandments (2006), The Bible: Exodus (2013) and Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). For this, I have used a content analysis and Bruce Lincoln’s theory of religious maximalism and minimalism. This study has shown that the first two films are characterized by an almighty God who helps Moses from the very first step, while the third gives a more scientific explanation of e.g. the ten pledges and the crossing of the Red Sea. While God in The Bible: Exodus (2014) is also portrayed as a god who acts out of love and compassion for his people, this is not the case in the other two films which instead portray him in a much more negative light. My conclusion is therefore that these three films do not only differ in how God and Moses are depicted but that they provide us with different messages about God and religion in general.

Submitted by Jordan (jordanbiblio@gmail.com) on 2017-02-07T15:13:52Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DISS_2012_Juliana Cristina Curvo.pdf: 907954 bytes, checksum: 63eb156bf854ba8e430566b0d5b39c3d (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Jordan (jordanbiblio@gmail.com) on 2017-02-07T15:22:34Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DISS_2012_Juliana Cristina Curvo.pdf: 907954 bytes, checksum: 63eb156bf854ba8e430566b0d5b39c3d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-02-07T15:22:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DISS_2012_Juliana Cristina Curvo.pdf: 907954 bytes, checksum: 63eb156bf854ba8e430566b0d5b39c3d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-02-24 / CAPES / O Processo de criação cinematográfico é o foco deste trabalho, quando este é exposto na internet, um estudo de caso com o filme brasileiro "Os Famosos e os Duendes da Morte" (2009). Procedimento que pode ser característico da arte contemporânea, a exposição do processo disponível na internet traz a idéia de que as coisas se expandem e se convergem para a elaboração de um novo fazer cinematográfico, com uma poética contemporânea, onde o resultado final é elaborado em conjunto, cheio de sobreposições e contaminações. Os indícios de criação disponíveis na internet levaram ao acesso dos documentos de criação do filme e às misturas de atividades que gerou a obra, dando idéia de um procedimento que apresenta linguagem originada pela colaboração artística e é polifônica com a supressão de autoridade na relação entre autor e personagem. Com a observação do processo, reconhece-se um fazer cinematográfico não representativo e abrangente, recolhendo outras manifestações artísticas no seu percurso. Neste trabalho é abordado o processo de criação, mais precisamente, na análise dos rastros que a obra deixou em aberto pelo mundo virtual, pelo ciberespaço, com base em Almeida Salles. A crítica genética foi o método escolhido para cercar a criação. / The process of creating film is the focus of this work, when it is exposed on the Internet, a case study with the Brazilian film "The Famous and the Dead" (2009). Procedure that may be characteristic of contemporary art, the exhibition process available on the Internet brings the idea that things expand and converge to the development of a new filmmaking, with a contemporary poetics, where the end result is drawn together , full of overlapping and contamination. The evidence provided in the following internet access of documents led to the creation of the film and mixtures of activities that generated the work, giving the idea of a procedure that has caused the language is polyphonic and artistic collaboration with the abolition of authority in the relationship between author and character. With the observation of the process, it is acknowledged making a film that is not representative and comprehensive, collecting other artistic events on your route. This paper addresses the creation process, more precisely, the analysis of traces that the work has left open the virtual world, in cyberspace, based in Almeida Salles. The genetic criticism was the method chosen to surround the building.

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My thesis is dedicated to the study of popular, commercial cinema as a force within the discourse of national and personal identity in the rapidly changing mega-economies of India and China, and their diasporas, since the watershed year of 1990. Its purpose is to reveal the unique pattern of like and unlike that exists between the "Social Representations" (Serge Moscovici 2000) of contemporary India and China on screen through a juxtapositional comparative approach, close visual analysis, and the development of original theoretical tools. Tense networks of fantasy and anxiety emerge as popular culture actively circulates their shared experiences of changing global status, uneven economic growth (Gong Haomin 2012), and social change. Transnational subjects, Hua and Desi, arrive on screen ready to carve out culturally inflected modernities, in search of "tradition" and "values" to suit contemporary cultural-nations-beyond-borders. I treat film as consumer product, diegetic entity, and text: hence narrative, visual, linguistic and contextual aspects of over fourteen popular commercial films ("Bollywood" and "Yulepian"), are explored. My analysis comprises two interlocking halves: the first two chapters focus chiefly on identities - Hua and Desi, and diasporic persons. The former, conduits for the cultural nation to re-think modernity, the latter a dreamed vanguard of "claim-staking" ethnicised global consumers, defenders of the cultural nation in the "host" country. Chapters Three and Four focus on genres - comedy and history films. Through comedy, these films create state-serving heterotopias or challenge the status quo; perhaps they build cultural nationalist mythos, or lace cynical questions through lavish history film. To understand internecine relationships between economics, society and the imagination, entertainment film cannot be dismissed - in India and China, where change has had intended and unintended consequences unfolding even as uncertainty looms, I show that fresh study, especially in comparison, is absolutely essential.