The thesis explored the theoretical implications of the African Revolution through an examination of its radical cinematic inventions. My research investigated points where the cinema screen became a site of radical gathering and ambitions of cinema emerged that expressed a revolutionary desire. The thesis mapped out a relational geography between different late liberation struggles of the 1970s and 1980s produced by cinema in the networks of connections lived out and constructed through radical drives. The exploration of aesthetics of liberation is the point of departure to investigate how screens, as urban surfaces of projection and reflection, appearance and masking, emerge from the world and have material and psychical effects in the world.

Paris magazine and its derivatives - Paris Sex Appeal, Pages Folles, Pour lire à deux and Scandale - were published in France from 1931 to around 1939. Academic studies of nudes, candid humanist photographs and pin ups with artistic overtones were juxtaposed in these monthly illustrated magazines. Used by surrealist artists for their collages, they associate photographs by the greatest artists of the time (Brassaï, Kertesz, Man Ray, Germaine Krull) and the works of less famous photographers (Jean Moral,Pierre Boucher, Roger Schall, Nora Dumas ...). Forming a genre yet untapped by historians, these magazines feature both a real taste for erotic fantasies and a remarkable sophistication in composition and conception. They are to be inscribed in the context of the interwar years which they reflect through a bawdy style, audacious and multifaceted aesthetics - from kitsch to modernism - and a permeability to technological reproducibility. This project proposes to draw a panorama of the 1930s and of its underside through the study of a material which is at the crossroads of the history of photography, ideas of the body and the question of artistic appropriation. The magazines are to be dissected as indicative of the ambivalent emancipation of the 'modern woman', a photographic and graphic modernity but also of a colonial unconscious surfacing in a racist fascination for a pseudo (Far)-East. Claiming that the magazines are watched as much as read, I analyse the magazine's formal 'desire' for cinema as a guarantee of glamour and as a decisive element of its layout's plasticity. Nudes, landscapes and urban sceneries are linked or dissociated as the reader leafs through it, the poetic flicker of its images relating to the mechanics of editing. Cinema's influence is also to be found in the magazine's special relationship to the night as a site of criminal and sexual transgressions where the prostitute stands as a key figure of the city's margins. Dealing with the return of the repressed expressed in the collective imaginary transpiring through this kind of publication, I research the different types of interrelations established between texts and images as well as the bad taste which is integral to its saucy descriptions of sex scene. An analysis of its plain and clichéd literature sheds light on its relation to vulgarity and its depiction of the reading woman, an iconographic motif through which it equates female reading with masturbation. The magazine's margins and side issues - including small ads, advertisements and photographic contests organised every month to elect the most beautiful readers -, are given a special status within the thesis as as many 'finds' which allow for a more intimate and subjective interpretation of this archive. The plastic attractiveness of these magazines makes it indispensable to show them in an exhibition which is the visual continuation of the written thesis. The 'gesture of exhibiting' these publications is integral to the research process as it will allow me to reimagine an archive and keep it alive.

This PhD thesis addresses an artistic research practice based on the ontology and phenomenology of the photographic image. Part I presents a series of photographs entitled Midnight in Mumbai, and Part II considers the act of photographing by examining the phenomenological aspect of photography arising directly from my artistic practice. By looking into the prehistory of photography, foregrounding the early developments of the nascent medium, I first consider notions of photography before the medium’s actual materialisation in the 1830s; these emerged alongside the latent desire to see the world as a picture ‘true to nature’ which predominated in literary fiction and experimental scientific texts. It informs us about how the medium was initially understood, discussed and defined, and offers a valuable insight into the ontology of the illuminated image (‘Photography before Photography’). Expanding upon André Bazin’s essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, I consider the discourse of the early history of the medium to be vital in informing the ontological questions developed in the thesis. Taking photography’s early history as a point of departure, my research looks into the possible manifestations of thinking photographically, and asks whether we can only photograph what we know already. This relationship of the photographic image to the world frames my enquiry into the domain of photography. I talk about my photographic work by answering the questions: Can I only see what I name? (‘Naming’) How do I learn how to look? (‘Echo’) and Where can I find the photographic picture? (‘Doubt’). The title of the thesis refers to the speculative history of the medium and to my own photographic work. Like the nineteenth-century photographers who tried to photograph the spirit of a human being, my photographs aim to allude to what might not be apparent by evoking a vision of seeing things that are invisible. The expression ‘via fotografia’ is used as a method of making phenomena visible photographically. As a medium based on reality that can reflect the world, however visible or invisible that might be, photography continuously questions our perception of such reality (‘Picturing Thoughts’). Do we photograph what we see, or what we think and imagine? This is not to suggest that the acts of photographing and thinking are the same, but rather to propose that they are not separate from each other. Photographs, in that sense, are not experienced in terms of their appearance, but in terms of their continuous appearing.

Memories Made in Seeing considers the relationship between memory and film through examining what is its cultural and experiential effect, how it can show and write memory and History. Four post-war films - Muriel, or the Time of a Return (Resnais, 1963), (nostalgia) (Frampton, 1971), Level Five (Marker, 1996) and Memento (Nolan, 2000) – that are complex manifestations of thought in practice, which trace and examine film’s ability to distinctly embody and produce memory, and are part of a dialogue in form and time. To contextualise and consider memory’s effect, it is charted from the advent of film (the nineteenth century’s ‘memory crisis’, the founding and understanding of modern memory, the related ideas of Proust, Bergson and Freud), through the twentieth century (the development of a more subjective reckoning, the seeming impossibility of memory (and understanding) that followed World War II’s trauma), till its millennial disposition (multi-various considerations, the inception of prosthetic memory, the seeming need for nostalgia). The case studies’ varied forms and alignments consider the tension between the demands of narrative resolution and the mutable and open-ended nature of memory, and how different film practices seek to utilize and appraise its perceived function, relevance and production. These films are also a record of viewing experiences, which influence one another and create a narrative of personal engagement that forms and substantiates recollection. To examine this conceptual process further I contend the tension between narrative (something fixed by duration and intention) and memory’s imperatives (formal and personal) form an axis of experimentation and exploration and this correspondence is central to comprehending the ways in which films represent and invoke forms of subjective and cultural recollection. I propose that film’s unique and associative account of memory’s evolving resonances becomes a series of palimpsests, which emphasize that the experience of film is an act of re-writing and recollection and misrecollection. This context tethers the subject, is the point of initiation, and explores how memories, which are made when seen, are mutable, historical and present, essential.

This thesis examines the work of New Zealand artist Darcy Lange (1946-2005) who,trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art (1968-71), subsequently developed a socially engaged video practice, making remarkable studies of people at work that drew from social documentary traditions, structuralist videomaking and conceptual art. My research into his oeuvre draws on intertwined artistic, theoretical, historical and cultural discourses from the period in which he was active, particularly those concerned with realism and representation, reflexivity and video feedback, the document and documentary, the dialogic and participation, art and society, and social activism. Starting with his last sculptural ‘environment’ Irish Road Workers (1971) and ending with the series Work Studies in Schools (1976-77), labour was the sole subject of Lange’s oeuvre for much of the 1970s. In his words, his aim was “to convey the image of work as work, as an occupation, as an activity, as creativity and as a time consumer”. He engaged in comprehensive studies of people at work in industrial, farming and teaching contexts across Britain, New Zealand and Spain. A commitment to realism guided his works in the early 1970s, evident in his adherence to an observational practice reduced to its bare essentials. Using photography, film and video (at times simultaneously), he portrayed workers performing their tasks, and cast workplaces, schools and mines as complex societal mechanisms engaged in the production and reproduction of class identity. Work Studies in Schools introduced a radical shift in his practice, influenced by current epistemological and philosophical concerns about the politics of representation that recognised representation (and its making of meaning) as contingent and dependent on context. Rather than engage in the examination of the image’s process of signification through structuralism and semiotics, Lange grounded his analysis in human experience and opted for the dialogic possibilities of camera lens media. Focusing on pedagogical practices in the classroom, Lange explored the implications of video for teaching and learning, inviting his subjects to speak through their own analysis of their experiences of work and class. In enabling a situation where the social exchange between teacher and pupils could be observed and analysed collectively, Lange turned a closed process of exchange into something more open that could be mutually redefined and transformed. In so doing, his images of people at work sought to confer agency, in an effort to realise his expressed ‘socialist aspirations’. Lange’s political awareness grew in a decade of intense politicisation in the United Kingdom. In New Zealand, the 1970s saw the beginning of the so-called ‘Maori Renaissance’. Lange joined the efforts of fellow activists and documentarians there to raise awareness and support for the land claims by the Maori indigenous people and, working in collaboration with Maori activist and photographer John Miller, produced the Maori Land Project (1977-1980). It was in the Netherlands where he further developed the ideas and aspirations behind this project, collaborating with René Coelho, founder of Montevideo in Amsterdam, and Leonard Henny, professor at the Sociological Institute’s Centre for International Development Education in Utrecht. Theoretical debates about cultural difference of the period framed this project, driven also by Lange’s desire to further extend social agency with his videomaking. An activist impulse also lay behind his political multimedia musical performances People of the World (1983-84) and Aire del Mar (1988-94). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lange’s turn to video was not to engage in conceptual activities or as a deconstructive exercise. I argue that he was drawn to video (film and photography) for its experiential and dialogical nature and capabilities, as “a way to get closer to people” and leave the isolation of a studio practice. He was driven by a desire to seek out a social purpose to artistic activity while avoiding the dogmatic political advocacy of his community art contemporaries.

This thesis examines experimental film and video in 1980s Britain through a critical reassessment, mapping histories of these practices in relation to critical writing of the period. This historiographical analysis utilises material contained in The British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, part of the Museum at Central Saint Martins (UAL). Close analysis of a number of selected film and video works created within the artistic, activist and experimental communities active at the time both develops the thesis’ function as a new account of the period and provides a critical means of surveying historiography within the field of artists’ moving image. This study establishes the voice as a key theme in relation to both constructed narratives in historiographical writing and in works from this time. Employment of oral, primary source accounts frames analyses of voices in preexisting written histories and acts as a means to explore aural strategies and components within film and video works. Initial analyses of ‘historical recovery’ before, during and after the 1980s is followed by first considering how stories are recounted by voices, before investigating works that responded to events at the time and exemplified the struggles of voices during this significant period in British history. Focus on the voice frames a critical exploration of lexicons related to ghosts which appears later in the thesis. Jacques Derrida’s lecture and publication Specters of Marx (1994) is referenced to develop discussion of ghosting in relation to myths and historical sources in analysis of Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983), in which Derrida muses on ghosts and recording. An exploration of recording technologies and media informs a critique of writing history in order to reflect upon British film and video of the 1980s. It identifies a cacophony of voices – political, critical, activist and artistic – as characteristic of the times and a key element in the composition of the works and historical accounts of the moving image.

The film Red Line and accompanying thesis revisit the Documentary Torre Bela (1975) by Thomas Harlan and its memory, reflecting upon the role cinema played in revolutionary process in Portugal in 1975 and its enduring significance to the collective memory of this event.

The fundamental conceptualisation of what animation actually is has been changing in the face of material change to production and distribution methods since the introduction of digital technology. This re-conceptualisation has been contributed to by increasing artistic and academic interest in the field, such as the emergence of Animation Studies, a relatively new branch of academic enquiry that is establishing itself as a discipline. This research (documentation of live events and thesis) examines animation in the context of performance, rather than in terms of technology or material process. Its scope is neither to cover all possible types of animation nor to put forward a new ‘catch-all’ definition of animation, but rather to examine the site of performance in character animation and to propose animation as a form of performance. In elaborating this argument, each chapter is structured around the framing device of animation as a message that is encoded and produced, delivered and played back, then received and decoded. The PhD includes a portfolio of projects undertaken as part of the research process on which the text critically reflects. Due to their site-specific approach, these live events are documented through video and still images. The work represents an intertwining, interdisciplinary, post-animation praxis where theory and practice inform one another and test relationships between animation and performance to problematise a binary opposition between that which is live as opposed to that which is animated. It is contextualised by a review of historical practice and interviews with key contemporary practitioners whose work combines animation with an intermedial mixture of interaction design, fine art, dance and theatre.