Coming Into Clover traces the evolution of cinematic representations of Ireland and the Irish in early American cinema. From the birth of the medium in 1895 until the full emergence of the so-called classical cinema in 1917, these images underwent a fascinating evolution with the crude "stage Irish" stereotypes of Paddy and Bridget steadily giving way to a more positive and diverse set of representations beginning in the early- to mid-teens. The reasons for this transformation are many, but can be traced to two seemingly separate yet inter-dependent factors. Firstly, the social and economic forces that gave rise to the classical mode of production demanded an overall gentrification of the form and content of American cinema. Secondly, an increasingly powerful and influential class of Irish-Americans took an active role in transforming the nativist perceptions that for so long had worked to ostracize them from mainstream society. The result was the emergence of set of visual and narrative tropes that would define Hollywood's representation of the Irish for next three decades.

This dissertation analyzes the post-conflict cinema in the region of the former Yugoslavia, and the way that this particular form of cultural production establishes affective regimes within which bearing witness to trauma becomes variously articulated to national identity, history, politics, and memory. Using affect and trauma theories as organizing frameworks, my project looks at the way in which post-Yugoslav cinema has become a pivotal outlet for the process of working through the trauma of recent violent history in the region. I examine this process through its various iterations, from its applications to identity - be it ethnic, national, class, age, gender or sexuality-based - to its influence on normativizing some narratives as history while concealing others. One of the key arguments of this dissertation is that certain trauma narratives represented through cinema have the potential of destabilizing the essentialist locating of trauma within singular (here predominantly ethno-national and heterosexual) identity, by offering a pathway towards affective attachments of empathy towards the Other instead.

Heterosexuality is coded on-screen in many musical films from the last century as a “celebratory ideal.” 1 This thesis explores the queer possibilities of the so-called heterosexual male in three films spanning a decade from 1977 with Badham's Saturday Night Fever and Grease (Kleiser, 1978), to 1987's Dirty Dancing (Ardolino). Each of the films I have examined foreground heterosexual romance. However, by looking at the male body in these films I have argued for the ways in which the male, dancing body works against these films' assertion of a narrative heterosexuality. I have shown how these films can be read as queer by the way they highlight the performativity of the male body, and through their camp aestheticism which complicates normative ideas about desire, sexuality and gender. I interrogate claims emerging from work in musical genre theory, which describes the musical as “the most heterosexist of all the Hollywood filmic forms.”2 By examining existing theory on the role of the camp sensibility within musical film I argue that there are ways that the musical films analysed dismiss their narrative heteronormativity and instead mark themselves as queer. The films do this by aligning the performativity of dance with the queer discourse that uses as its cornerstone the notion of the performativity of gender and sexuality. I have argued that these films portray an embattled masculinity coming to the fore within society (and cinema) in the 1970s, into the 1980s. The chapters in this thesis are organised according to the analyses' of the three films. The chapters explore themes of camp aesthetics by understanding camp's tendency to disrupt the clear disparities between ‘being and seeming'.

This thesis utilises a sample of major documentary films on the Bushmen of Southern Africa as primary sources in investigating change over time in the interpretation and visualisation of Bushmen peoples over seventy-five years from 1925 to 2000. The primary sources of this thesis are seven documentary films on the subject of Bushmen people in southern Africa. These films are as follows The Bushmen (1925), made by the Denver African Expedition to southern Africa; the BBC film Lost World of Kalahari (1956) by Laurens van der Post; The Hunters (1958) by John Marshall; the 1974 National Geographic Society film Bushmen of the Kalahari; John Marshall's 1980 film N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman; and the South African films People of the Great Sandface (1984) by Paul John Myburgh and The Great Dance (2000) by Craig and Damon Foster. All of these films reflect, to varying degrees, a complex interplay between generic images of Bushmen as pristine primitives and the visible evidence of many Bushmen peoples rapid decline into poverty in Southern Africa, a process which had been ongoing throughout the twentieth century. The aim of the thesis has been to explore the utilisation of film as a primary source for historical research, but focussing specifically on a subject related to the southern African historical context. The films under analysis have been critically appraised as evidence of the values and attitudes of the people and period that have produced them, and for evidence about the Bushmen at the time of filming. Furthermore, each film has been considered as a film in history, for how it influences academic or popular discourses on the Bushmen, and finally as filmic 'historiography' that communicates historical knowledge. This thesis, then, utilises a knowledge and understanding of film language, as well as the history and development of documentary film, to assess and consider the way in which knowledge is communicated through the medium of film. This study has attempted to investigate the popular and academic indictment of documentary film as progenitor and/ or reinforcing agent of crude, reified mythologies about Bushmen culture in southern Africa. It is shown here that the way major documentary films have interpreted and positioned Bushmen people reveals the degree to which documentary films are acute reflections of their historical contexts, particularly in relation to the complicated webs of discourse that define popular and academic responses to particular subjects, such as 'Bushmen', at particular historical moments. Critical, visually literate analysis of documentaries can reveal the patterns of these discourses, which in turn reflect layers of ideology that change over time. A secondary finding of this thesis has been that documentary film might constitute a source of oral history for historians, when the subjects of a documentary film express ideas and attitudes that reflect self-identity. It is proposed that the approach to analysis of documentary film that has been utilised throughout this study is a means of 'extracting' the oral testimony from its ideological positioning within the world of the film. The historian might evaluate the usefulness of a subject's oral testimony in relation to the ideological orientation of the film as a whole, to decide whether it is worthwhile being considered as das Ding an sich or should be seen purely as a reflection of values and attitudes of the filmmaker, or something in between. It is shown in this thesis that documentary film constitutes an important archive of oral testimony for historians who are properly versed in reading film language.

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This thesis re-imagines cultural-historical texts from contemporary perspectives to argue for the visibility of the femme fatalist figure in classic Hollywood cinema. The project contends that the femme fatalist, as an identity, more substantively accounts for women's multidimensionality as filmic characters, beginning with an assessment of this figure in two films noir and arriving at an assessment of her presence in a psychological thriller. To demonstrate the necessity of re-envisioning female multiplicity in the cinema, this study investigates how the motion pictures The Killers (1946), Gilda (1946), and The Spiral Staircase (1946) contribute to an understanding of the femme fatalist phenomenon. Through an extended analysis of critical scenes and the ableist, masculine-hegemonic rhetoric that perpetuates the sociobiological hierarchies of power depicted in the films, this project determines the extent to which the women portrayed in these motion pictures may unfetter themselves from patriarchal values of femaleness without compromising their ability to belong to this gendered iconography. The femme fatalist derives from the femme fatale while remaining distinct from this entity. In other words, a woman does not need to signify as a fatale to project fatalist-ness. However, the woman who chooses to embrace fatale-ness or whom society Others because of her non-traditional identity cannot re-integrate into conventional culture once alienated. Only by performing a role—that of the femme fatale or the femme fatalist or possibly both—can she ensure that she still belongs in society. Women possess more complicated identities in classic cinema than history and existing scholarly conversations might suggest. Assessing the figure of the femme fatalist demonstrates that however much we understand about the human condition, we can re-define how we perceive ourselves in relation to a cultural past that continues to shape our contemporary identities.

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