As in physics, one faces a three-body problem in film studies. Similarly, neither logic has a general solution. There are bodies on screen as representation, bodies before the screen as audiences, and supposedly film’s body as a quasi-subject that perceives and expresses through the screen. However, no scholarship has addressed the central question of the body’s medium specificity in determining how the story on screen is told in a socio-historical context. Using phenomenology and media studies, Corporeal Modernism: Transnational Body Cinema Since 1968 fills the gap by articulating how the body’s metaphysical and physical conditions are the foundation of narrative cinema. I showcase how the medium specificity of the body is deployed to flesh out social and political conflicts from European political modernism through Asian New Waves to the latest Hollywood digital blockbusters. Corporeal Modernism considers the body as a medium—not as mere representation in cinema—to examine the relationship between the bodies on screen and before the screen. Using phenomenology and media studies, my research illustrates how the body on screen, without manifesting its corporeal qualities, operates as vehicle to deliver a character in narrative. Only when the body of a character is hurt or incapacitated, the audience is made aware of how the body is a formal issue as well. My research demonstrates how cinema presents the body and the world on screen. Corporeal modernism is the technical awareness of the body-image located in the history of cinema.

This dissertation is a rhetorical study of the critical reception of the French film Hiroshima mon amour (1959; dir.: Alain Resnais; screenplay: Marguerite Duras). My main argument is that the themes of love and technology followed a dialectical progression in the critical reception of Hiroshima mon amour. They were important and politically charged in the first essays on the film at the turn of the Sixties. But they lost momentum and became more neutral due to the academization of Film Studies and to the rise of semiology that privileged linguistic abstractions. The return of the themes of love and technology in the Eighties signals the search for renewed forms of commitment. However, this commitment "through abstraction" is also predicated on forgetting. In fact, a different understanding of commitment does not allow remembering that Hiroshima mon amour was also a protest against the first French atomic test in Algeria and its colonial implications. My dissertation examines the limits of what can be said through different paradigms of criticism and commitment through the careful study of the rhetorical situation of each critical act. Jacques Derrida's twin concepts of aimance and of the peut-être guide my research. I examine how we can think Hiroshima mon amour on the background of the paradoxical communities that invented new forms of political participation in postwar France. The early debate on the representation of "mad love" in Resnais' film signaled a concern for the way in which modern technology undermined the binary oppositions between war/peace, civilian/military, and friend/enemy. The paradoxical communities that originated from this realization opened to rhetorical articulations that united people with no communal party membership. Derrida's politics of aimance carries on this reflection on the peut-être by targeting the traditional view that envisions the political as limited to the public sphere and tend to exclude women. By contrast, Hiroshima mon amour empowered women because it tapped into the dark territories of the private in order to show that modern technology had colonized the intimate and daily life. Hence, women critics could acquire a strong political voice from the oppression of the private.

Germaine Dulac's 1928 avant-garde film, La Coquille et le Clergyman, based on a script written by Antonin Artaud, presents the idea of the woman as an object of desire, subjected to the male gaze through the cinematic process. Not only is the lone female character the object of desire of her two male suitors on screen, but she also becomes the object of desire for the presumably male viewer of the film, who has become a silent character in the film. Rather than simply being the spectator, the viewer's own identity becomes entwined with that of the on screen characters. While the idea of the woman as the object of desire subjected to the often male gaze in the cinema has been analyzed by many feminist film theorists, including Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman and Mary Ann Doane, the theories presented center on films directed either by male directors or female directors since the 1970's. Very little has been written about films directed by women in the 1920's, including La Coquille et le Clergyman. By examining Coquille et le Clergyman, I hope to fill in a gap in the discourse of the majority of feminist film theory. This thesis will not only attempt to understand how Germaine Dulac, an early feminist film director, approaches the idea of the female body as an object of desire subjected to the male gaze differently than her male film director counterparts, but will examine how the relationships between the female character and the two male characters differ from other male directed avant-garde films from the 1920's and how these relationships affect spectatorship. By examining La Coquille et le Clergyman, I hope to better understand how Dulac's cinematic interpretation of Artaud's script treats the idea of spectatorship, not only in 1928, but also today.

Decades of horror film research and theorizations have shown us that there is a reason why this particular genre has been an important part of film history from the beginning: namely, the idea that horror both reflects and shapes our historically and culturally specific anxieties. By examining the Final Girl trope in Halloween (the 1978 original versus 2018 version), this paper traces the evolution of female protagonists and whether a more modern film accurately reflects the increasing role of feminism in society, or sticks to traditional conventions of misogyny and male-dominated visual pleasure. Placing the newer film in the context of the #MeToo era, this paper also addresses more contemporary anxieties over trauma, sexual assault and female anger.

In 1900, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, establishing climacteric concepts for psychoanalysis and creating a structure upon which he built the theory and his career. 20 years later, he had entirely revised these concepts that solidified the foundation of psychoanalysis. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud notably theorizes the ‘death drive’ for the first time, a radical but necessary break from the economics of the pleasure principle. Often, the death drive is taken to be the most important contribution of this essay, but I argue that the lasting message to be gleaned from Freud is what he concludes Beyond the Pleasure Principle with: “We must be ready, too, to abandon a path that we have followed for a time, if it seems to be leading to no good end. Only believers, who demand that science shall be a substitute for the catechism they have given up, will blame an investigator for developing or even transforming his views.” In this thesis, I argue that we can develop a necessary Ethic from this way that Freud approached the formation of his work. Drawing on the further developments from Jacques Lacan, I claim that one can take theory of the gaze as an ethical moment: the point at which one is faced with a disruption that they are tasked to carry out “to see where it will lead,” as Freud puts it. Further, I utilize this formation of the Ethic to read the films of Abbas Kiarostami’s “Koker trilogy” to highlight the points at which we can locate the characters, form, and content of these films as realizations of such ethical moments.

This study considers the films and writings of Jorge Sanjinés, an influential Latin American filmmaker and theorist known for the collaborative methods of filmmaking he and the Grupo Ukamau created working with indigenous Andean communities, in light of two interrelated but overlooked aspects of his theory and practice: the extent to which his theories intervened in European debates about politics and cinema during the period 1966-1989 (the release dates for his first and last significant features) and his experiments using cinematic form to create a language capable of communicating an alternative, non-western subjectivity. After reviewing the history of the Grupo Ukamau, including its most significant Bolivian precursors, Jorge Ruiz, Oscar Soria, and the Insituto Cinematográfico Boliviano, as well as the group's theories of spectatorship, form in revolutionary cinema, and the practice of making a cinema with the people, this dissertation turns to three topics key to understanding Sanjinés in a properly transnational context: the importance of Bertolt Brecht's theories for Sanjinés, the sequence shot as the basis for his new cinematic language, and political parallels with other European filmmakers. Like several European political filmmakers of the period who experimented with rhetorical and non-realistic uses of the sequence shot, Sanjinés was more inspired by Brecht's theory of Epic Theater than Italian Neo-realism. Sanjinés adapted these techniques both to communicate with his local indigenous audiences and intervene in European theory, a process described here as dialectical transculturation. To create what he called the "Andean sequence shot," Sanjinés adapted Jean-Luc Godard's dialectical editing of long takes, Miklós Jancsó's portrayals of collective protagonists, and Theo Angelopoulos' use of multiple temporalities within a single shot. The final section explores the parallels among Sanjinés' theory and practice and those of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean Rouch, two European filmmakers contemporaneously engaged in theorizing the representation of alternative subjectivities, at that time a marginal concern in Europe. The affinities between these three filmmakers' theories as well as Sanjinés contribution to European theorizing of cinematic subjectivity have been obscured, it is argued, by the politics of the period.

This study investigated the cinematic representations of women in ‘Climates’ ‘Three Monkeys’ and ‘Once upon a time in Anatolia’ created by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It explored the image of women and the ideologies that affects them in the aforementioned films. For the analysis, semiotics is used and feminist film theory is applied. The findings indicated that the women images are affected by patriarchal ideology. Female characters were portrayed as weak or weakened by men regardless of their representative social group. The results showed similarities to Mulvey’s argument and to Friedan’s definition of feminine mystique. Male gaze dominates the visual pleasures and the female characters showed similar features as described by Mulvey and Friedan.

<p>Impure Cinema: Political Pedagogies in Film and Theory asks what are the ways that the politics of film theory have been conceptualized since the era now known as "70s film theory." In particular, it analyzes the writings on cinema, politics and art by contemporary French philosophers Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière in relation to the influential approaches of Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze and to theories of documentary cinema. I argue that unlike the political modernism of 70s film theory and the post-theory turn of 90s film studies, Badiou and Rancière offer an approach to film theory that neither assumes that all films are political, nor that politics underdetermine theory, but rather suggests that we analyze both theories and films in terms of how they construct connections between cinema and politics. Following Deleuze, I call these connections "pedagogical" not because they transmit knowledge but because they always involve a new kind of connection or relation that seeks to transform habitual ways of seeing, saying or doing. For Badiou and Rancière this is based on a conception of cinema as "impure." Cinema, they argue, is never free of elements from other arts or daily life, but it is this impurity that is the grounds for linking its artistic and political possibilities. I look at various film forms that highlight cinema's impurity, in particular the "actuality" and how it has been reappropriated in various forms of documentary and essayistic practices as a way of giving cinematic form to questions of political equality.</p> / Dissertation

<p>For a brief moment in feminist time, from 1968 to 1974, women's documentaries were influential in the emerging field of feminist film studies and for feminist activism. By the late sixties feminists had identified visual representation within popular culture, film, and the media as one of the central battlegrounds for women's activism. For feminist filmmakers, documentary, with its alleged superlative grip on truth and transparency, seemed to provide an ideal counterpoint to the perceived mis-representation of "real" women in dominant, narrative cinema. Within seventies feminist film theory, however, scholars elaborated a gender-specific take on the ideological critique of realism that disavowed women's documentary films as naïve, unsophisticated, and complicit with the ideologies of patriarchy and capitalism.</p> <p> In this project, I recast realism as an unruly and contradictory set of codes and conventions that generate oppositional and revolutionary political documentaries. In contrast to the dominant anti-realist reception of feminist documentaries in seventies feminist film theory then, I argue that these documentaries contain unacknowledged nuance and neglected visions of the political aspirations (however flawed) of second wave feminism. Key figures in feminist political theory, such as Nancy Fraser and Hannah Arendt, shed light on the political and subjective configurations brought forth in several feminist documentaries, including I Am Somebody (1969), Janie's Janie (1971), The Woman's Film (1971), and Joyce at 34 (1972), and Self-Health (1974), which depend rather on second wave aspirations of collectivity and agency, and the power of self-authorship and experience.</p> / Dissertation

Ever since the birth of the film medium, stories about drugs and addiction have been produced. There is a fascination with the lifestyle, the effects of drugs and the ways in which it can be portrayed on the screen. The thesis starts off by giving an historical context, ranging from the late 19th Century and up until today, describing how the society and the public have treated the subject and how the narrative mirrors these attitudes. The purpose of the thesis is to take a closer look at this recurrent theme. Eleven fictional films produced between the 1980’s and 2000’s have been chosen and psychoanalytical film theory is used to analyze the ways in which the addict is represented; how filmic disgust and the abject makes the characters tread over physical and social boundaries and how the effect of the drug have the character tread over mental boundaries through dreams and hallucinations.