Posthumanism is a contested term, seen by some as leading towards a merging of human bodies and technology and by others, more critically, as a renewal of the ethical debate regarding human exceptionalism. Through a study of this critical approach and its potential relation to expanded cinema, a set of propositions is formulated. New knowledge emerges through the application of these propositions towards the expression of critical posthumanism. By looking at formal, conceptual and methodological underpinnings, existing tendencies in expanded cinema are analysed and reviewed. Firstly, aided by Timothy Morton's 'ambient poetics', environmental orientations in artist film and expanded cinema are investigated. Secondly, conceptual ideas 'beyond the human' in this field are discussed. Finally, the environmental footprint of moving image production is considered. Central to this investigation is the desire to change prevailing narratives regarding nature and environment. Instead of regarding environment as a subject outside the cultural domain, environmental immanence and shared consciousness are regarded as central cultural values within a productive posthuman debate. This theoretical approach is set in motion through a practice-based project in which organic processes are applied to generate images on discarded and outdated 35mm film. By using plants, mud and salt in conjunction with alternative photochemistry, images are 'grown' on motion picture film. Moreover, digital images are gathered using a camera extension that allows a point of view beyond the human. Background and foreground are reversed in order to reveal the prominence of natural elements in an urban setting. These images are used in a performative or spatial context that places the viewer within the work. By bringing together theory and practice a conclusion emerges, opening up further possibilities to develop and apply the newly found knowledge, not only in expanded cinema but also to other fields.

This practice-based PhD has at its core six short films, made by and featuring the author (Dean Kelland), which take as their inspiration certain male characters from TV sitcoms from the 1950s-1970s. Those characters are: Tony Hancock (Hancock’s Half- Hour, 1956-59, BBC1 UK); Harold Steptoe (Steptoe and Son, 1962-65, BBC1 UK); and the two “Likely Lads”, Bob Ferris and Terry Collier, (Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?, 1973-74, BBC1 UK). The research is an investigation into the construction of masculine gender stereotypes, explored through a process of a performance-led visual arts practice that incorporates the use of interdisciplinary approaches. This interdisciplinarity is aligned to Lisa Lattuca’s definition of “informed disciplinarity” as being “informed by concepts or theories from another discipline or relying upon methods from other disciplines.” (History of Intellectual Culture, 2003). Disciplines and fields include: comedy studies, performance art studies, television studies, gender studies and cultural studies. The selected sitcom examples were hugely popular and influential in the eras in which they were first broadcast, a period in post-war British history when constructions of class were changing. The PhD provides analysis of: location; both geographical (the parts of the UK in which the programmes were set) and in terms of domestic setting; class-derived identity (including distinctions of taste); and sociologically/historically based perspectives. In my performance-led practice, I create scenarios that have emanated from the research, focusing on specific scenes from the programmes (identified for their relevance to the research questions). I then re-purpose these scenes in order to show them in a new light, specifically by inhabiting the characters utilising traditional acting methodologies combined with performance art techniques. Each mimetic repetition exposes the blurring of one identity into another, and so interrogates the intersubjective identifications between actor, projected character and audience, mobilized through “performing masculinity”. Drawing on my own memories, and the sense of nostalgia that has been created by my exposure to these (repeated) programmes, I ask new questions about subjective experience within fine art practice (in other words, how the modes of such practice have been used to address the relationship between 7 the body, the external world and self-representation). Often this involves “rupturing” the meaning of the programmes, and revealing what might loosely be termed the horror beneath the comedy. The resulting dialogue between historical source material and contemporary artwork creates a critical interrogation of culturally constructed gendered stereotypes within a specific television entertainment genre. The research journey is carefully logged (sketchbooks, digital portfolio) and analysed (written thesis) in accordance with a reflective, practice-based, methodology.

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This thesis is a critical reflection on Vision Machine's North Sumatran film project, articulating a cinema practice that seeks to address a genocide that has barely been investigated. The primary footage comprises extensive interviews, re-enactments and dramatisations of the various practices and procedures that constituted the core of the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide in Sumatra's plantation belt. The participants in these dramatisations and enactments are, for the most part, death squad leaders and members who participated in the killing. This data, comprising over 100 hours of video, constitute revelatory primary research into the history and operation of the Indonesian genocide. This research forms the historical context for the project, and is therefore summarised in the thesis. The reflection on the epistemological, cultural and historical status of these re-enactments constitutes the basis for the core argument of this thesis. To this day, in North Sumatra, the genocidaires remain largely in power. This fact transforms our film project into a unique laboratory for exploring the cultural politics of film, media and history within a context of victory and impunity. Specifically, the project examines the ways in which historical narrative - inevitably told by victors - becomes an instrument of terror within a spectral economy of terror. This project is both an intervention into this economy, as well as an analysis of its mechanisms and protocols. As such, the thesis comprises both completed films, extracts from works-in-progress and this writing, and lies at the intersection of the disparate fields of cinema studies, Indonesian area studies, trauma studies and film practice. This thesis proposes a theory of performativity, spectrality and genres of historical performance; specifically, it is argues that spectres are performatively conjured as the obscene to any symbolic performance - including both historical acts as well as their rehearsal and restaging in re-enactment, testimony, or dramatisation; such spectres constitute a power that may be claimed by the performer. This power interacts with actual structures of power, as well as processes that seek to record, circulate or excavate such historical performances, including our filmmaking process. In the case of this film project, perpetrators are lured by the apparatus of filmmaking into naming names and revealing routines of mass murder hitherto obscene to official histories, and they do so through dramatisations and re-enactments manifestly conditioned by the codes of film and television genres. This latter point reveals the complex ways in which remembrance is always already well-rehearsed, scripted and generic. Thus does the research excavate (by catalysing) perpetrators' performative use of film genres to conjure as a spectral force that which must remain obscene to the codes of genre. And thus does the research excavate (by miming) the way genre fashions historical narratives into instruments of terror. As perpetrators of the genocide name names and reveal secrets, the process by which they seek to claim and manifest their spectral power is short-circuited by the filmmaking process, which condenses a miasmic spectral into specific ghosts. By shorting one circuit, the filmmaking closes another through which the process of remembrance, working through and redemption may begin for survivors. From this emerges an understanding of both the filmmaking process and its products (i.e., the completed films) as filmic interventions into a spectral economy of terror. This thesis describes a film practice that is necessarily a social practice, at once producing works and doing work. Building on models of collective filmmaking developed by Jean Rouch and George Stoney, we incorporate experimental production techniques including spirit possession, re-narration, infiltration, and genre-based fiction filmmaking in order to define a new model for film production that the author has termed "archaeological performance". Moving beyond the interview-based approaches of Lanzmann and Ophüls, archaeological performance suggests a hybrid and interventionist form of cinema adequate to addressing a history whose very incoherence has served as an instrument of terror.

This thesis explores the Theatre of the Oppressed's practices at the point of interaction with peasants of Brazil's Landless Movement. It uses the interactive docufragmentary entitled Rehearsing Reality to explore the social and political role of art, and to ask whether particular applications of theatre and film can be used to understand and possibly transform points of view and raise consciousness about contemporary issues in the world. The Theatre of the Oppressed created by Augusto Boal comprises a series of interactive games, exercises and other theatrical methods developed with the purpose of using these drama techniques as a subjective medium contributing both to question and search alternatives for personal and social problems. Amongst its theatrical methods is Forum Theatre, the main practice adopted by Brazil's Landless Movement. This technique breaks with the conventions of the traditional language of theatre. Its main aim is to transform passive audiences into active participants of a theatrical scene. This thesis argues that Forum Theatre is an open medium that offers people the chance to participate democratically in the theatrical space in order to suggest and rehearse new ideas to be applied into their lives. In order to explore how these theatrical experiences work in practice this thesis includes a central element entitled Rehearsing Reality, which is specifically designed to adapt some of the main features from Forum Theatre to film language. Its aim is to activate viewers to interact with the film process. This thesis also explores the historical developments of the Theatre of the Oppressed with major emphasis on Forum Theatre and its practices amongst members of Brazil's Landless Movement living in camps and settlements in the hinterland of Sergipe State, North-East of Brazil. The structure of the thesis is divided into five parts: Chapter One analyses the relevant literature on the subject; Chapter Two provides a reflective account of the filming period; Chapter Three offers an overview of Boal' s life and the development of the Theatre of the Oppressed methods; Chapter Four briefly looks at the history and development of the Brazilian Landless Movement and provides a practical analysis of the experiences of Theatre of the Oppressed amongst the Landless Movement and Chapter Five analyses the creative process of making the docufragmentary Rehearsing Reality. The Conclusion suggests that the social and political aspect of art can significantly contribute to the process of comprehension and transformation of the world.

This practice-based thesis offers a new approach to editing processes that take place during the recording and subsequent editing of an individual speaking directly to a camera. Rosalind Krauss identified all performance to camera as narcissistic (1976), which includes the subset of artists’ direct address to camera, and since then the area has been widely understood within a psychoanalytical framework. This new approach provides a non-psychoanalytical perspective on direct address to camera, taking into account linguistic self-editing during the generation of speech (Skinner, 1957, p. 370) and technological editing processes once the speech has been recorded. While ‘artists’ film and video is a distinct form of cultural practice with its own autonomy’ in relation to mainstream film (Rees, 1999, p. vii), editing practices within the field of artists’ direct address to camera show no such independence and widely adopt techniques and terminology from the mainstream canon. I consider ways that the language and practice of editing can be expanded beyond the mainstream, and I introduce a transdisciplinary approach to the editing of speech, which is between, across and ‘beyond all disciplines’ (Nicolescu, 2008, p. 2). My practice plays a major role in developing a context for this enquiry. I use the video process, artist’s books, transcription, drawing and text to add to the existing vocabulary of mainstream editing. I create a new technique called blindediting, which involves cutting out video material without looking at it. Finally, I discuss my publication A Relational [Video] Grammar: Extrapolation (2013) which illustrates my transdisciplinary approach and explores the new language that I have developed for editing speech. My research provides a new perspective on the editing of speech in artists’ direct address to camera and suggests that a transdisciplinary understanding of editing practices can shed light on existing works within artists’ film and video.

Going against phalloculocentrism’s situation in a hom(m)o-sexual paradigm and structuration of the male gaze and moving towards a gyneacentric perspective, the thesis explores how a feminised process of reception and interaction with artworks might arise. My installation and moving-image practice-led research is driven by a central question: How might a feminised form of spatiality, based on a gyneacentric model, deform an audience’s phalloculocentric reading of an artwork? The purpose of this thesis is to find a practice-led feminist method of producing an artwork that actively represents the feminine and de-centres an audience’s (male) gaze. By dislocating the eye from the lens of a camera, I propose to alter an audience’s usual cinematic experience of an image of the feminine through my artwork. This is developed through my proposition for composing an experience of her image through inter-relational exchanges in order to shift the register of reception from gazing to “touching”. I claim this could provide a potential for an embodied feminised process of spatiality and perception. A method of cartographically mapping the feminine through diagrams, photographs, drawings and video is developed in the preparation and installation of the central artwork that structures the thesis, (f)low visibility, in a nightclub. Feminist (installation and video) practitioners’, Martha Rosler, Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum and Pipilotti Rist, approaches to representing the feminine are also investigated. The preparatory designs attempt to subvert the potential for a voyeuristic reception and/or exhibitionistic composition of the installation. This forms an investigation into how the reception and interaction with a feminised image might arise through a tactile process of exploration. I propose that although (f)low visibility produced ungraspable feminised on-screen images it afforded embodied partially locatable inter-relational exchanges in its reception of her. Luce Irigaray’s and Donna Haraway’s theories of embodiment are developed and intertwined in my conclusion. I claim that interaction with and reception of monstrous cyborg images on-screen occurred through the navigation of a fantasy of intrauterine “touching” in (f)low visibility’s installation as a feminised process of spatiality.