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PhD / The influential theorist, David Bordwell, talks about various modes of watching film: the intellectual, the casual, or the obsessive interaction with cinema practiced by the film-buff. This thesis is an attempt to come to terms with film and film culture in a number of ways. It is first an attempt at reinscribing a notion of aesthetics into film studies. This is not an easy task. I argue that film theory is not adequately equipped to discuss film in affective terms, and that instead, it emphasises ways of thinking about film and culture quite removed from the act of film ‘spectating’ – individually, or perhaps even more crucially, collectively. To my mind, film theory increasingly needs to ask: are theorists and the various subjectivities about whom they theorise watching the same films, and in the same way? My experience of film is, as Tara Brabazon writes about her own experience of film, a profoundly emotional one. Film is a stream of quotation in my own life. It is inextricably wrapped up inside memory (and what Hutcheon calls postmodern nostalgia). Film is experience. I would not know how to communicate what Sergio Leone ‘means’ or The Godfather ‘represents’ without engaging what Barbara Kennedy calls the ‘aesthetic impulse.’ In this thesis, I extrapolate from what film means to me to what it might mean to an abstract notion of culture. For this reason, Chapters Three and Four are necessarily abstract and tentatively bring together an analysis of The Matrix franchise and Quentin Tarantino’s brand of metacinema. I focus on an aesthetics of cinema rather than its politics or ideological fabric. This is not to marginalise such studies (which, in any case, this thesis could not do) but to make space for another perspective, another way of considering film, a new way of recuperating affect.

No description available.

No description available.

PhD / The influential theorist, David Bordwell, talks about various modes of watching film: the intellectual, the casual, or the obsessive interaction with cinema practiced by the film-buff. This thesis is an attempt to come to terms with film and film culture in a number of ways. It is first an attempt at reinscribing a notion of aesthetics into film studies. This is not an easy task. I argue that film theory is not adequately equipped to discuss film in affective terms, and that instead, it emphasises ways of thinking about film and culture quite removed from the act of film ‘spectating’ – individually, or perhaps even more crucially, collectively. To my mind, film theory increasingly needs to ask: are theorists and the various subjectivities about whom they theorise watching the same films, and in the same way? My experience of film is, as Tara Brabazon writes about her own experience of film, a profoundly emotional one. Film is a stream of quotation in my own life. It is inextricably wrapped up inside memory (and what Hutcheon calls postmodern nostalgia). Film is experience. I would not know how to communicate what Sergio Leone ‘means’ or The Godfather ‘represents’ without engaging what Barbara Kennedy calls the ‘aesthetic impulse.’ In this thesis, I extrapolate from what film means to me to what it might mean to an abstract notion of culture. For this reason, Chapters Three and Four are necessarily abstract and tentatively bring together an analysis of The Matrix franchise and Quentin Tarantino’s brand of metacinema. I focus on an aesthetics of cinema rather than its politics or ideological fabric. This is not to marginalise such studies (which, in any case, this thesis could not do) but to make space for another perspective, another way of considering film, a new way of recuperating affect.

Bochum, University, Diss., 2004.

En 1967, sous l’influence du jeune cinéma européen, Hollywood accède à son tour à la modernité : le « Vieil Hollywood » laisse place à un « Nouvel Hollywood ». Ce mouvement de renouvellement du cinéma américain, symboliquement inauguré par Bonnie and Clyde d’Arthur Penn et Le lauréat de Mike Nichols, est, explique-t-on, le fait d’une génération nouvelle de cinéastes, parmi lesquels, outre Penn et Nichols, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, William Friedkin,Michael Cimino, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby... Il est aussi le fait d’une génération nouvelle de monteurs, qui, en complicité avec leurs réalisateurs, éprouvèrent de nouvelles formes d’expressivité esthétique et narrative, sans craindre de contrevenir aux règles conventionnelles instituées par leurs aînés ; parfois même en réaction contre ces règles. On peut notamment citer, parmi ces fidèles et précieux collaborateurs, Dede Allen, Walter Murch, Sam O’Steen, Verna Fields, Alan Heim, Paul Hirsch, Robert C. Jones, Richard Marks, ou encore Ralph Rosenblum. Nous veillons à déterminer, dans cette thèse, la part de responsabilité, tant collective qu’individuelle, de cette nouvelle génération de monteurs dans le mouvement de renouvellement esthétique du cinéma américain. Et, au-delà des personnes, d’apprécier ce style de montage néohollywoodien, d’évaluer son importance dans la constitution du style neuf des films américains des années 1970, de même que l’étendue de ses innovations. / In 1967, under the influence of European art films, Hollywood underwent important changes in the course of the 1960s : « Old Hollywood » was taken over by a « New Hollywood ». This process of renewal of American cinema, which has been symbolically launched by Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, is due, it has been said, to the arrival of a new – mostly film-school educated – generation of filmmakers, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma,George Lucas, William Friedkin, Michael Cimino, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Bob Rafelson or Hal Ashby. It is also due to the arrival of a new generation of film editors who did not fear to challenge the doctrine of classical Hollywood editing and break the established rules in order to take a chance and try new ways of telling a story. These films editors are, amongst others, Dede Allen, Walter Murch, Sam O’Steen, Verna Fields, Alan Heim, Paul Hirsch, Robert C. Jones, Richard Marks, or Ralph Rosenblum. Our thesis examines the share of responsability, on both a collective and individual level, of this new generation of film editors in this process of renewal of American cinema in the 1960s and 1970’s. Its goal is, more generally, to determine and appreciate this new editing style, realize its importance and its influence on the Hollywood Renaissance style, as well as the wide range of its innovations.

At the turn of the millennium, cultural and gender commentators were announcing that an apocalypse was under way. Men were changing. Patriarchy was crumbling. Masculinity, in short, was in crisis. Inaugurating a collective of ‘masculinity in crisis movies’, this thesis contends that Hollywood cinema also had its own relationship to the millennial crisis in masculinity. A relationship that was in fact so prevalent and extensive, that it came to the tune of 23 titles all released in the fin de millennium moment. Each film replicating the terms of wider cultural discourse, each with a representational concern with the crisis and the apparent ‘masculine malaise’.The thesis also proposes that a dichotomous structure underpinned this cinema in which two altering identity complexes were voiced. On the one side, a presence that is distinctly feminine, where existential suffering is relieved through consumerism and conformity; whilst the other, which vitally is (re)-presented as the ‘preferred’, offered a deeply masculine, often hyper-sexual, anarchic and more violent presence. This thesis will seek to investigate these representations, whilst attempting to place them in a broader macro sphere of American socio-cultural history and commentary.From visceral male anger spectacles like Fight Club (1999) and American Psycho (2000), to ‘New Man’ white collar bashing in Office Space (1999) and American Beauty (1999), this cinema seemed to be in direct dialogue with a larger, and vitally elegiac, commentary on masculinity-in-crisis.By marking key distinctions and comparisons between ‘masculinity-as-experienced’ in socio-cultural and historical readings and ‘masculinity-as-represented’ in textual approaches to the films and their surrounding paraphernalia, this work engages with both the real and reel at the fin de millennium moment. The thesis demonstrates why the concept of a single, fixed and unified ‘authentic’ definition of masculinity may be untenable, and why perhaps this cinema seemed to struggle to avoid essentialism, irony and self-parody as fragmented characters seemed to offer equally fragmented promises of redemption through ‘traditional’ displays of masculinity.What were the origins of the ‘crisis’, and how far was the crisis an actual or primarily a discursive one? Did this cinema help create or propel the crisis rather than sooth it, and how did the representation of ‘schizophrenic’ or ‘bipolar’ masculinity speak to the crisis and its audiences in general? Why did this section of Hollywood cinema decide to re-present these identities and what, if anything, can we learn from them? This research seeks to provide answers to these questions.

Jack Valenti, then President of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), formally announced the commencement of a new Motion Picture Code and Rating Program on November 1, 1968; a mode of industry self-regulation designed to replace the, by then discredited, Production Code. Despite the Program's intended role in providing freedom of choice, censorship has persisted after 1968. Censorship is defined here as the efforts by some to restrict the viewing options of others, for reasons of personal morality, commercial self-interest or ideological necessity. American moviegoers and other consumers of American cinematic culture have, paradoxically, been freed from choice. The availability of 24/7 porn on cable television and the undoubted explosion of explicit violence in mainstream cinema after 1968 are superficial distractions from the homogenising effects of both the pressure to make movies that can be screened to large predominantly teenage audiences and the pressures not to upset vocal pressure groups. In extending and mapping out the territory of the consumer the industry has, both in the types of movie on offer and in the mode of regulation chosen, effectively curtailed the space for the citizen to ask more demanding questions either about movie content or about the benefits of allowing a small number of media conglomerates to construct the viewing menu. The Program remains in place but its efficacy has been widely questioned. The thesis breaks the development of the Program into three phases organised around Richard Heffner's operation of the Program between 1974 and 1994. In the early years, despite the self-styled liberalism of the New Hollywood renaissance, both ideological and commercial constraints were applied to content. Only after Heffner's arrival in 1974 did the Program begin to function as Valenti had originally envisaged. However, the slow emergence of narrowcasting and the expansion of conglomerate ownership ensured the continuance of commercial self-censorship. These changes found maturation in a third phase of the Program's operation, after 1994. The research considers evidence of commercially motivated self-censorship as well as evidence of politically motivated censorship. The cumulative effect of industry change has been a commodification of entertainment- a denial of any interest other than that of the consumer- and the privatisation of a key part of the process of setting cultural norms. The thesis considers the risks for a functioning democracy posed by the emergence of a global entertainment complex that has an overwhelming economic interest in shaping the 'marketplace of ideas'.