This thesis investigates various forms of historical reassessment in contemporary American cinema (2005-2013), with a particular emphasis on the role that digital technologies play in re-framing, re-negotiating, and re-vivifying historical figures and events. The focus of this work concerns questions relating to cinema’s relationship with history, and how this has been achieved through changing narratives and film aesthetics. It uses critical analysis to propose that a new range of practices and tools have been utilised to address and challenge conventions of specific historical genres, such as the historical epic, the gangster film, and the biopic. The complex and ambiguous notions of historical narrative and experience, together with continued discourses concerning representation, verisimilitude and accountability, make recent historical cinema particularly suitable for demonstrating this. The Review of Literature addresses three major areas through which this thesis has been conceived and conducted: historiography, historical cinema, and film technologies. It considers a broad range of literature in order to acknowledge some of the wider contexts that will be employed in the discussion of the historical film, and establishes the more specific conditions under which my analysis takes place. The main section of the thesis is divided into three chapters, each of which examining a particular sub-genre of the historical film. Chapter One introduces some of the key issues surrounding historical cinema, discussing the conventions of the historical epic in order to frame our understanding of issues of spectacularity and subjectivity in the genre. I use The New World and Che as case studies to examine the differing practical, aesthetic and narrative approaches to the historical epic, considering the implication of technology in terms of style, approach and implication. Chapter Two deals with the gangster film, using Public Enemies to consider issues of immediacy and immersion within the genre. I also compare modern iterations of the gangster film with its classical, revisionist and retro antecedents, making extensive comparisons with Bonnie and Clyde. Similarly, in my study of the biographical film in Chapter Three, I use Citizen Kane as a contrast to the modern form of the “unconventional” biopic embodied by The Social Network. This genre is considered in light of its aesthetic approaches, generic deviations and developments, the public-private dynamic, and the notion of the American Dream. The thesis concludes with an overview of the aesthetic and narrative approaches studied in this work, and draws attention to the contemporary shift in filmmaking practices and technologies. Given the isolated period of study, I propose ways in which the study could be extended in generic, transmedial and methodological terms, as well as acknowledging the importance of the historical film at the levels of expression, representation, and discourse.

This thesis examines the representation of the American president in fictional films and television programmes, as well as documentary film and photography. It engages broadly with the subject’s entire history, but focuses particularly on the past two decades (1992-2012). Its primary method is close textual analysis, departing from pre-existing studies that are largely preoccupied with questions of verisimilitude and historical accuracy. The construction of the cinematic and televisual presidencies requires a simultaneous negotiation of the ‘real’ political/historical record, and the desire to reproduce and reinforce the representational genealogies inherited from cinema and television’s own histories (not necessarily all explicitly ‘political’). My research has found the presidency to be overwhelmingly reliant upon mythological discourses about American national identity, and traditional conceptions of masculinity. How these constructions impact upon the representation of the president in relation to the contexts from which the films and programmes emerge is of crucial importance. The conception of the presidency has undergone enormous change since the early 1990s. The end of the Cold War, the increased scrutiny of the mass media, 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’, and the economic crisis, have either challenged or reinforced the notion that the president is an omnipotent force, able to bend the world to his will. The strategies cinema and television have employed to address these changes is of crucial significance to this thesis. This thesis will establish the manner in which techniques of mainstream film and television production – genre, visual style, iconography, and narrative – have impacted upon the reinforcement or critique of the presidential myth. As the presidency has suffered relative decline in a more diffuse geopolitical environment, this thesis demonstrates the extent to which the myth of the presidency has required the intervention of mainstream cinema and television to ensure its preservation.

This thesis analyzes a series of films that, in different ways, seek to represent the last Argentine dictatorship. The possibility of interpreting the thematic and formal recurrences of the films as a defining characteristic of a specific genre is posed as a first hypothesis. The second hypothesis postulates the possibility of relating certain aesthetic and rhetorical changes of the series to certain socio-political processes. After presenting a general overview of some of the various forms in which the relationship between cinema and society has been theorized before, the work proposes the instance of enunciation as a principle of articulation between textual and social systems, analysing the subjects involved in each of these levels and the relationship that can be established between them. The apparatus of enunciation (between textual figures), which can be related to the reading contract (between social subjects) can also be associated with the notion of genre. In this context, the thesis explores the possibility of a redefinition of cinematographic genres from the perspective of the Semiotics of Passions. Having established in the previous chapters the theoretical and methodological basis, the second part of the work consists of the analysis of the enunciation in the films of the corpus, in order to establish the main characteristics of the reading contract proposed to the spectator. The analysis starts with the consideration of the genre known in television as "docudrama", paying particular attention to the relationship between what is filmed and the "real", that this genre seeks to establish. This is followed by the partial conclusions of the analysis of the totality of films included in the corpus. A first systematisation of the general characteristics of the films considered allows for a definition of a new genre which we termed "documelodrama".

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This thesis analyses Chilean documentary films and videos of the post-dictatorial era from the restoration of democracy in 1990 until 2011, focusing on the audiovisual treatment of contested memories of the dictatorship and its legacies. The main argument is that documentary performs a trajectory of a revelation of bodies, oscillating between – at times intersecting with – the bodies of 'direct victims' and the film's body itself. Such an itinerary is deeply intertwined with Chile's own democratic transition. The study aims to transcend Chilean documentary's self-evident testimonial value and restrictive readings of the films as works about trauma, as these eclectic artistic reactions to the military coup present a broad range of affective responses. It establishes connections and disjunctions between different generations of documentarians and heightens the visibility of a number of under-researched productions. To unpack these heterogeneous documentary responses and their aesthetic features, close textual analysis of selected sequences from an extensive corpus is performed. This thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach informed by the 'haptic turn' in film studies, trauma and memory studies, cultural studies, history and gender. After examining the strategies deployed to reveal the past and its atrocious images, the study reassesses the cinematic homecomings of exilic directors as key precedents of the current rise of first person documentary. The ensuing evaluation of younger directors' productions indicates that whereas childhood memories are mobilised to explore the (im)possibilities of recalling a past only tangentially experienced, a nostalgic approach to the 1980s seeks to claim an active role in the redemocratisation process. Two recent cases featuring rather disturbing voices (of a former agent of repression and of Pinochet’s supporters) shed further light on the transformations experienced both by non-fiction and Chile itself. This thesis thus illustrates a documentary shift from articulating a 'cinema of the affected' to a 'cinema of affect'.

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This thesis seeks to determine how representations of dyadic teen homosocial bonds and relationships in film lend themselves to queer possibilities. Looking at teens in film across genre, certain types of dyadic homosocial relationships emerge: the best friendship, the antagonistic teen girl friendship, the boys friendship within a wider homosocial milieu, and friendships which fit these types but include gay and lesbian characters. I ground the research by establishing a record of the films released theatrically in the UK between 2000 and 2009 with teens as primary characters, and develop a qualitative and textual analysis of dyadic homosocial relationship types which illuminates their queer possibilities as well as the modes of denial and compensation which may accompany the threat those queer possibilities represent. As it investigates the policing of gender and heterosexual norms in teen homosocial relationships in key texts such as Aquamarine (Allen 2006), Superbad (Mottola 2007), Thirteen (Hardwicke 2003), The Covenant (Harlin 2006), Evil (Håfström 2003), and My Summer of Love (Pawlikowski 2004), the research here expands teen film studies, and applies queer reading practices to an often under-analysed segment of film. It also contributes to gender studies, as the findings here point to the ways that boys continue to be tied to physicality, violence, and athleticism, while girls continue to be tied to mirrors, masquerade, and manipulation. The move to include a variety of genres allows a consideration of how genre-specific tools of analysis, such as those developed in relation to the teen film genre or to dyadic homosocial relationship films such as the buddy film and female friendship film, can be productively mobilised across genres. Issues such as denial of homosocial desire through displacement, triangulated relationships, and passing heterosexual foils link these films to the history of films about homoerotic homosocial friendships. I argue here that queer possibilities are present in a wide variety of otherwise heteronormative films. My arguments centre on structures of desire and denial within homosocial friendships, as well as to the similarities between the heteronormative representations of homosocial desire and those present in specifically gay and lesbian narratives. The ways that these emerge are gender and age specific. By bringing out the denied and repressed homoerotic desires in these films, I demonstrate their existence in various forms. The thesis demonstrates that, in keeping with dyadic homosocial relationships between adult characters, in representations of dyadic homosocial bonds, the boundaries between homosocial/homosexual remains fluid in friendships between teen girls while it is much more rigidly separated in friendships between teen boys, primarily through homophobia, even in films containing gay and lesbian main characters.

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