Title of CD-ROM is "Unwritten Letters", written and directed by Alyxia Geanotes. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation sets out to explore the complexities inherent in working with children in a filmic context. The focus is on creating a set of guidelines for other emergent filmmakers to use when and if they choose to work with children in film. It will analyse how the complex dynamics of children and film together create both the obstacles and inspirations in filmmaking. The film Unwritten letters forms the platform for the analysis and discussion around the nature of children and the filmic environment with specific attention to Directorial techniques and Professional practice. It forms the basis for posing a number of theoretical questions about Realism and the intricate dynamics at work when dealing with children in film.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 13-15). / The aim of the creative project was to adapt an autobiographical illustrated novel, Ek is Suzie, into a screenplay for a full-length feature film. Using a combination of live action and animation, the two main narratives play out parallel to one another – representing the past and present tense. The explication is intended to offer a reflection on the process of writing the screenplay, on filmic influences that shaped it and on the kinds of theory that illuminate what I was trying to accomplish. Thus, I investigate various creative and technical decisions made during the writing of the screenplay – dropping the novel’s narrator, the mixing of languages, the use of dream and, especially, the play between live action and animation. I note the debate on fidelity in adaptation especially as this debate applies to graphic novels and take special account of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, not only because of its engagement with the process of adaptation, but also because of it seminal use of animation as a serious medium of communication, dealing with trauma and childhood. Other (popular) filmic influences are In America, My Left Foot and Garden State, dealing with the dominant themes in my screenplay – childhood trauma, self-discovery, friendship, family and love.

The departure point for this creative project is based on my experience as an African living in diaspora. While I felt many things during my time ‘away' from the African continent, one constant was always this feeling of unbelonging, and this need to find belonging. As such, this project centers around the theme ‘finding belonging in diaspora'. Growing up in Kenya, I had never really come to terms with the politics of my Kenyanness not to mention my blackness. I had simply just been me. While in Kenya, the only real identifiers I had to contend with that carried heavy politics were my gender and my tribal affiliation. After leaving Kenya and arriving in Canada for school at the age of 16, for the first time in my life I felt black and I felt African. Both identities I felt did not belong in this Canadian space. Over the course of 9 years, I lived in both Canada and London and neither ever warmed me like home. In most, if not all the predominantly white spaces I frequented, I always felt too little of something and too much of something else. As such,, I found myself intentionally and unintentionally drawn to those like me, in colour, in language, and culture. It is only today I have realised that those intentional and unintentional unions I formed were a result of my search for belonging, which I came to find is common in the diaspora experience. Ann Hua, a black diaspora scholar, defines diaspora as a community of people who have been dispersed from their homeland to other locations because of genocide, slavery, migration, and war (Hua, 2013; 31). It's important to note that for many, induction into the Afro-diaspora is involuntary. As Hua notes, political unrest, genocide, war, and slavery has forced many to leave their homes and either seek asylum or become indentured laborers elsewhere. We have seen this throughout the eras, from the 15th-century trans-Atlantic slave trade, capturing of Africans, transporting them to the Americas and coercing them into slavery (Gates Jr., 2017), to the 20th-century dispersion of Rwandese nationals fleeing genocide§ (Guichaoua, André & Webster, Don E. 2015). The identity of diaspora comes in both anticipated and unanticipated ways. Fortunately, my induction into the Afro-diasporic community was a voluntary one and the bulk of this project interacts with voluntary Afro-diasporic migrants. During my time in Canada and London, I met many members of the Afro-diasporic community who ended up in these countries in a variety of different ways and for a variety of different reasons. The theme of ‘finding belonging' was omnipresent among my fellow Afro-diasporic community members and it would manifest itself in various ways. For instance, wanting to go to African restaurants to feel more ‘at-home', or wanting to visit African night clubs to listen to more music from ‘home'. Interestingly, I also began to see that this journey towards ‘finding belonging' also manifested in Afro-diasporic communities rejecting assimilation into their new societies and creating spaces of resistance, through organising protests or hosting discussions that centred around issues of race.

My dissertation uses, as starting point, an interview with Michael Haneke in which the Austrian filmmaker criticises Downfall and Schindler's List for manipulating audiences and for generating entertainment from real-life and unspeakable horrors. He argues that filmmakers have a responsibility to enable audiences to form their own opinion regarding a film and its subject matter. I set forth to engage, theorise and develop Haneke's call for responsibility by asking the following questions as I move chronologically through his films: why is responsible filmmaking important, how does Haneke approach his own filmmaking and how does a responsible approach to filmmaking influence the position of spectators. Firstly, I draw from Stanley Cavell's film theory to read our current experience in a media saturated society, describing the ways in which the media positions and influences the characters' understanding of the world and their relationships with each other in The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. Thereafter, I discuss Haneke's use of genre in Funny Games, the long take and continuity editing in Code Unknown, music in The Piano Teacher and sound in Time of the Wolf to analyse Haneke's approach to filmmaking. My readings are underpinned by Cavell's understanding of automatism and the manner in which Haneke uses and reflects upon film's automatisms. Finally, I illustrate Levinas' concept of responsibility for the Other through a reading of Georges and Majid's relationship in Caché, Kelly Oliver's work on witnessing in The White Ribbon and Judith Butler's work on responsibility in Amour in order to demonstrate how Haneke's responsibility ensures the audience's response-ability.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-140). / In this thesis I examine the differences between music in the two cinemas. Concentrating on exemplary films from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, I show how the apparent differences are manifested, and by analysing a number of key British films, I illustrate the modes of musical expression used. There are many ways to approach film music. My own interest lies in the connection between music of the romantic period of the 19th century and what became of it during the 20th. "Serious" music from Schoenberg onwards became increasingly dissonant, but the rich melodic tones of romantic music appear to have found a new home in the cinema, and in this thesis I explore how film composers kept the previous traditions alive.

This dissertation centres on an examination of Gummo, the provocative directorial debut by filmmaking enfant terrible, Harmony Korine. While largely dismissed by critics who were put off by the film's visceral intensity, unconventional narrative structure and unsentimental depictions of marginality, I want to counter such criticism by arguing that Gummo in fact offers a refreshingly new approach to cinematic representations of white poverty in the United States. While U.S. cinema has often furnished us with representations of poverty, the majority of these ï¬ lms have tended to focus on characters' economic hardships. By contrast, Gummo is almost unique in privileging the cultural and ideological dimensions - concerns with weight and sporting success, attaining and retaining certain norms of masculine strength and appearance, repeated references to celebrity culture, to name but a few examples - while locating such normative dimensions within the bleak material realities that mark life on the breadline. In so doing, Gummo draws attention to the paradoxical cultural question of poverty in the so-called First World: How does one engage with the daily barrage of ideologically imposed social and cultural norms when one's basic living conditions are diametrically opposed to such norms? While most films tend to treat the poor as always outside and in binary opposition to the normative order, I want to propose that we re-think poverty and marginality's cultural identity as always hybrid and in-between the margin and the norm. Such an interstitial position is articulated by Gummo's highlighting of two very different representational approaches: one based on an abject materiality that is often framed in an almost tactile and disconcertingly visceral manner, the other relying on the maintenance of a plastic or surface aesthetic through which symbolic cultural norms and ideals are semiotically conveyed. Rather than seeking to resolve such approaches' contradictions to one another, Gummo gives cinematic expression to the ambivalent position that results when one occupies both spaces simultaneously. This encourages us to think of marginality interstitially, rather than conceiving of it as merely 'other' to what is considered normative or mainstream. In theorising Gummo's representation of white marginality as an interstitial phenomenon, I have drawn primarily on the work of three quite different thinkers: post-colonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, gender theorist Judith Butler and film theorist Vivian Sobchack. Chapter one engages with Bhabha's ideas about cultural hybridity, seeking to demonstrate how Gummo represents marginality as a decidedly heterogeneous affair, one that blurs all clear notions of centre and margin. Chapter two explores this breaking down of binary value further by investigating how, through subversive acts of re-signification, the norm or centre can become 'contaminated' by the margin. Here I employ Butler's notion of performativity and citation, which demonstrates how norms can be materialised and cited in non-normative circumstances that challenge the validity of the dominant discourse. Such 'non-normative' materialisation blurs the boundary between that which is normative and that which is 'other'. Chapter three expands this notion of re-signiï¬ cation and hybridity still further. Drawing upon the phenomenology-based theory of Vivian Sobchack, I explore those aspects of Korine's film that - like Sobchack's theory - privilege materiality and the body as sites of experience. I then proceed to read Sobchack in relation to Butler and Bhabha, arguing that the manner in which Korine almost tactically frames the harsh, abject materiality of Gummo's setting plays off and meshes with the presence of symbolic norms and ideals. Gummo and its characters are thus ï¬ rmly lodged in a hybrid Third Space; in-between the cultural signs of 'normalcy' and a materialised space of messy abjection. It is between these two seemingly incompatible dimensions that the film and its characters make meaning and forge a sense of cultural identity.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis examines cinematic depictions of traumatic loss and mourning, with particular focus on representation. My study merges a theoretical and analytical investigation. I aim to defend cinema against the wider post-structuralist claim that trauma refutes the possibility of representation and argue, instead, that an increasing array of filmic examples demonstrate cinema's potential to provide valuable insights into the complexities of the subject. I use Freud's discussion of trauma as a belated, repetitious experience as an entry point to illustrate the ways in which cinema, a medium bound to temporality, can develop a relationship between linear and traumatic time...

This dissertation examines the role of nostalgia in reality television’s representation of rural lives. My study merges a theoretical and critical investigation. I take Alaska: The Last Frontier as my case study and argue that the programme responds to social change and urban living conditions in the United States by creating a nostalgic and idealistic representation of preindustrial American life. While the text is largely reactionary and calls upon a restorative nostalgia that imagines ideal American life as rural, white and heteronormative, the show also exhibits elements of reflective nostalgia, using the Kilcher family’s lifestyle to critique contemporary late capitalist lifestyles. Furthermore, I argue that this use of nostalgia conveys a dissatisfaction with post-industrial and urban life by foregrounding an idealistic settler narrative that implies it is not through progressive reform that America will find its nostrum but through a return to conservative values. The chapters in this thesis examine aspects of contemporary urban life that have drastically changed since the onset of America’s industrial revolution. My first chapter argues that nostalgia can manifest in an individual and potentially, a nation. I also argue that reality television plays a significant role in evoking nostalgia and uses it to respond to the sociological conditions of late capitalist urban life. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between the wilderness and nostalgia. In particular, I consider how the 'frontier myth’ structures the show’s nostalgic representation of rural living. In my third chapter I discuss how Alaska: The Last Frontier evokes nostalgia for a lost sense of kinship and community, reminiscent of a preindustrial revolution American culture. This chapter also uses the condition of anomie to further understand how the seemingly disparate relationship between the urban setting in which the programme is largely consumed and the nostalgia for a sense of family and community that the programme evokes, relate. Chapter 4 argues that the representation of labour in Alaska: The Last Frontier constructs a 'fantasy of wholeness’ and that this process potentially evokes nostalgia for an idealised set of labour relations that are perceived to be lost in the late capitalist age. I present a case study from Alaska: The Last Frontier to show how the programme constructs a 'fantasy of wholeness’ through representing idealised labour relations that are in stark contrast to Marx’s theory on how capitalist labour conditions are experienced. Finally, my fifth chapter reflects on the complex and integral role that nostalgia plays in Alaska: The Last Frontier’s representation of rural lives and discusses how the work I have presented in this thesis may provide a basis for future enquiries.

Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation takes theories of voice-over narration that are typically applied to fiction film and applies them to documentary film. It looks at issues of representation and truth values in the documentary films of Werner Herzog, John Marshall, Luis Buñuel and Karin Jurshcick. It argues that the choices filmmakers make regarding types of voice-over affect these issues and are therefore worthy of study. It argues that the unconventional story-weavers in documentaries like those of Marshall and Herzog‘s can inadvertently marginalise their subjects. It looks at Buñuel‘s Land Without Bread as an extreme example of an (intentionally) manipulative narrator. It suggests that a voice-over narrator that follows Chion‘s conceptualisation of the complete acousmêtre encourages audiences to engage on a more critical level. Finally, it argues that even a seemingly traditional narrator as seen in Jurshick‘sIt Should Have Been Nice After That can be unconventional and reveal an - ecstatic truth.

Includes bibliograpical references. / This dissertation investigates the filmic representation of surrealism in the films of Jan Švankmajer between 1964 and 2010. These films were analysed in light of two key areas expressed in recent literature regarding the representation of surrealism in film. The first key area is the complicated relationship between surrealism, film, and fantasy film, which has resulted in misconceptions about surrealism and its relationship with reality. This was examined with regard to the misconception of surrealism equating to fantasy and escapism. The second key area is how the filmic representation of surreality by the surrealist filmmaker Švankmajer supports the relationship of the movement with reality. This is analysed in terms of Švankmajer’s filmic engagement with the socio-political context at the time of production and his beliefs regarding a civilisation in crisis. Contingent to Švankmajer’s filmic representation of surreality is an examination of his style, aesthetics and techniques used to convey surreality or the notions of surrealism in his films to depict the affinity of the movement with reality. The main issue addressed in relation to all his films is the narrative on repression. This dissertation examines his narrative on repression, its dimensions and its role in reaffirming the affinity of surrealism with reality. The examination in this study of the subject matter included a diverse field of relevant sources, which was necessitated by the status of the surrealist movement as a belief rather than a formal theoretical framework. This includes, but is not limited to, surrealism and its main considerations and the relationship between surrealism and film compared to fantasy and film with regard to their relationship with reality. This was extended to include significant theoretical considerations with regard to Švankmajer’s filmic representation of surreality, including the representation of loss, the significance of childhood, the presence of objects and the role of tactility. The study entailed an analysis of his films within the ideas expressed in Švankmajer’s filmic representation of surreality. The films were then analysed within the context of the socio-political atmosphere at the time of their production, specifically during the former Czechoslovak communist oppression, followed by the emersion of the Czech Republic into the global consumerist market. The findings of the study indicate that the filmic representation of surreality in Švankmajer’s films portrays a heightened awareness of the socio-political reality of the former Czechoslovakia as well as the current Czech Republic, while resonating universal truths on civilisation. The films challenge the misconceptions on surrealism and its filmic representation as equating to fantasy and escapism. The findings further revealed that Švankmajer’s filmic representation of surreality counters such misconceptions, with the films reflecting Švankmajer’s experiences in Czechoslovakia as well his intimate account of the destructive nature of civilisation.