Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1980. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 18). / by Julia Barco. / M.S.

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This thesis examines the representation of home movies in UK and US feature fiction films released between 1939-2013. For the purposes of the thesis home movies are defined as a subset of amateur (i.e. non-professional) film concerned with the representation of home and family and intended for domestic consumption. Home movies are further distinguished from home video and domestic productions recorded digitally referring specifically to films shot on, or connoting, small-gauge film. Drawing on James Moran’s notion of the ‘imaginary medium’ (There’s No Place Like Home Video, 2002) and the scholarship on the Imaginary in media, this thesis advances the concept of the ‘home movie imagination’ to describe the way in which cinema constructs home movies in the process of representation. Using textual analysis, this thesis identifies a series of shifts in cinematic depictions of home movies. Accordingly, each case study chapter focuses on a selection of examples which best exemplify these transitions and continuing trends. Placing cinematic home movies in the context of the histories of amateur film and small-gauge technology, this thesis demonstrates that home movies in fiction films should not be perceived as a reflection on developments of the technology, but studied specifically as fictional stylisations. The first chapter explores the emergence of home movies as a motif in feature fiction films, interrogating the technology’s pervasive association with wealth and spectacle in films released between 1939-1949. The second elaborates on these concerns, observing an incongruity between cinema’s continued affiliation of home movies with affluence and the developments in the social history of amateur filmmaking following the Second World War. Chapter Three looks at films released between 1964-1980, investigating the dual role of home movies deployed as sentimental reminders of lost familial cohesion and a tool to challenge the family ideal. Chapter Four focuses on the adaptations of Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon (1981) — Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986), Red Dragon (Brett Ratner, 2002) — charting the impact which the advent of home video had on the representation of cinematic home movies. Home movie obsolescence is explored further in Chapter Five which interrogates the transition of home movies from an aim to memory (prop) to texture of memory (aesthetic). The final chapter focuses on the depiction of home movies in Super 8 (2011) and Frankenweenie (2012), investigating the nostalgia which they express towards the materiality of small-gauge technology. This thesis argues that home movies in feature fiction film constitute a unique, and widely overlooked, object of study. As films-within-films they frequently function as a self-reflexive device, a tool for filmmakers to reflect on their art. However, they are also specifically a domestic technology, focusing an inquiry into the role which media and mediation play in the cinematic construction of family narratives. Exploring the ways in which cinema constructs home movies in the process of representation the home movie imagination offers an innovative approach for studying the depiction of domestic moving image technologies, one which recognises their character as stylisations and responds to their historical variability.

This thesis investigates the cultural economy of film distribution set against the backdrop of Philippine independent cinema. Considered as the business centre of filmmaking, film distribution is typically studied from an economic perspective and traditionally falls outside the remit of film studies. However, the role that economics play in filmmaking cannot be regarded as an exclusive object or subject in the field of business and economics and not of the arts, since film is both a cultural good and economic commodity. As such, this thesis offers a more balanced viewpoint by taking on a humanities perspective in analysing and understanding the complex interplay of culture and economics as applied to Philippine cinema. The project also provides an Asian context to a generally western-dominated approach to the study of film distribution and thereby contributes to the (now) growing literature on distribution studies situated in the larger area of film studies. This thesis employs in-depth interview and case study analysis in addressing the central issue of how the independent sector struggles to access the various film distribution platforms in an attempt to sustain itself. The first chapter positions my research in the field, surveys existing scholarship on independent cinema and film distribution, and sets up the theoretical grounding of this thesis on the cultural economy framework. The second chapter fleshes out the notion of independence in filmmaking and contextualises the study by outlining the historical development of Philippine independent cinema. The third chapter analyses the interaction between mainstream and independent cinema and the current shifting movements happening between the two sectors. The next four chapters examine the film distribution and exhibition practices in the Philippines and how these affect the relationship of the mainstream and independent sectors and address the sustainability issue of the independents. Chapter Four lays out the conceptual framework of film distribution and exhibition as intermediary spaces and maps out a historical landscape of film distribution and exhibition in the Philippines. This is followed by an overview of the film distribution economy spectrum, namely, formal, semi-formal, and informal. Chapter Five explores the formality of the traditional platforms of theatrical and non-theatrical distribution method, while Chapter Six discusses the formality of the emerging distribution and exhibition platforms that utilise new media technologies. Both chapters present the challenges that independent filmmakers face in passing through the layers of gatekeepers in order to bring the film to its audience. Chapter Seven sets out a clearer definition of the semi-formal distribution economy and cites different self-distribution methods to illustrate and support my claim. This chapter also looks into the informal distribution method of piracy and its constructive effects on independent filmmaking. It also explains how technology is changing the role of the audience from being a passive consumer to an active producer to a dynamic distributor. Lastly, Chapter Eight probes into the identity of the Philippine film industry and the role of the state, their implications on cultural or film policy development, and how these elements impact the overall state of Philippine cinema.

In this thesis I explore the contemporary American multi-protagonist film’s use of contingency and representation of the American Imaginary. The multi-protagonist film is a film form of increasing significance that moves away from the classical narrative cinema’s reliance on a psychologically motivated goal-oriented character and causally coherent narrative, and favours instead a formation of several lead characters and contingency as a way to create coherence in the narrative world. I exemplify why contingency should be understood in these films to mean the opposite of necessity and not simply standing for accidentality. Although accidentality has an important role in the multi-protagonist film, as the thesis highlights and the current scholarship rightly recognises, I explore the way in which accidents can bring forth a larger sense that the given order could have been otherwise. The American Imaginary is understood as a cinematic depiction of a complex intellectual and material framework informing the characters’ worldview. My focus is not on arguing how the American Imaginary presents itself in the society of the United States, instead I explore the way in which the chosen films represent and interrogate a set of ideas and values that they depict as specific to the U.S. With that being said, the films can also be argued to be empirical examples of social constructions of the U.S. I engage with the subject via close textual analysis of three multi-protagonist films – Thirteen Conversations about One Thing (Sprecher, 2001), Killing Them Softly (Dominik, 2012), and The Big Short (McKay, 2015). The films are chosen above all based on their deep interest in both contingency and the American Imaginary. While Thirteen Conversations and The Big Short are representative of the form and could be argued to be close to the generic core of the multi-protagonist film because they treat all their lead characters equally, Killing Them Softly is a less obvious example because it seems to favour one character over the others. Yet, the film is chosen because I see it as representing a tension common to all multi-protagonist films – a struggle of striking a balance between treating all characters equally and to some extent following the norms of the classical narrative cinema, which, among other devices, applies psychological complexity for creating coherence in the story-world. I make use of the thinking of Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek to highlight the chosen multi-protagonist films’ similarity to contemporary continental philosophy. The philosophers are chosen based on what I illustrate to be a “family resemblance” between some of the authors’ main ideas and the chosen films. I will explore how Rancière’s understanding of equality, its connection to contingency, and his thinking on the aesthetic regimes of art offer a way to rethink the central tension of the multi-protagonist film – that between the form’s interest in contingency and its own rigid structure. Žižek’s psychoanalytical thinking of the Real, the unsymbolisable, and its relation to ideology as the latter’s main structuring principle, can be seen to create a close parallel with the chosen multi-protagonist films’ profound interest in the contingent nature of all social structures. As such, the thesis departs from much of the current writing on the multi-protagonist film by demonstrating that the form’s interest in contingency is not restricted to an easy way of connecting the various lead characters nor is it simply a method through which the film form is aiming to reflect the increasing complexity of modern society. Rather, I show the example multi-protagonist films to be exploring contemporary American society with a particular emphasis on capitalism and neoliberalisation, understood by the films as a social process where business and financial logic comes to inform the most various aspects of life. Instead of recognising the contemporary American multi-protagonist film as only adapting to the rapidly transforming society, the film form is shown to actively contribute to a changing understanding of America and its role on the global stage.

This thesis examines the cinema of Jacques Demy through a variety of queer and feminist lenses. It aims to investigate and politicise Demy’s marginalisation in French film culture, and place his cinema in its social and cinematic context in a way that few previous studies have done. Demy’s films trouble hierarchies of cultural value and binary oppositions, and they often include multiple cultural registers and modes of address, and draw from diverse cinematic traditions. In order to account for the films’ hybridity, the thesis uses several methodologies. It performs close analysis on ten of Demy’s thirteen feature films, in order to make arguments informed by theoretical frameworks such as camp, feminist writing on the women’s film, and recent queer theory on failure. Through an engagement with the contemporary reception of Demy’s films, the thesis also investigates the reasons for his marginalisation. The case study of Demy’s cinema is thereby used to challenge and complicate the canons and narratives of French cinema, with the understanding that canon formation reflects the values of dominant groups. The first chapter outlines where the thesis fits in a fairly sparse body of scholarly writing about Demy, and highlights key theoretical and methodological texts. Next, the thesis turns to Demy’s place in the French New Wave canon. This chapter analyses Lola (1961), La Luxure (1962) and La Baie des Anges (1963), and draws out issues of genre and address. Chapter three, on Demy’s ‘failed’ films, acknowledges that most of Demy’s films were critical and box-office failures. It analyses two of these films, Model Shop (1968) and Parking (1985). Chapter four, on camp, uncovers the political project of Demy’s camp aesthetics, by reading Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) and L’Evénement le plus important depuis que l’homme a marché sur la lune (1973) through the lens of camp. Finally, chapter five argues that Demy’s use of Hollywood genres place these films in a specific and historicised emotional register. The case studies in this chapter are the sung melodramas Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Une chambre en ville (1982), and the musical Trois places pour le 26 (1988). This thesis is among the first scholarly works to consistently approach Demy as a queer filmmaker, informed by extensive archival research into his films’ reception. It therefore represents a significant contribution to an emerging body of work on a heretofore neglected filmmaker.

This thesis argues for the centrality of kinaesthesia to the narrative structures and modes of address of contemporary serial television drama. Scholarly and popular accounts of ‘quality’ television privilege audiovisual aesthetics, valuing these programmes for the ways they seemingly depart from established televisual form. In objection to this dominant scholarly narrative, this thesis explores how these programmes can be theorised through their shared use of a kinaesthetic reading strategy, in which the movement and spatial dynamics of the body are fundamental for the construction of narrative meaning, emotional impact, and political engagement. The first chapter of this thesis considers what kinaesthesia has to offer our existing theories of televisual storytelling, aesthetics, and engagement, through a review of the critical literature. The following three chapters each focus on a different thematic element of the kinaesthetics of serial television drama. The second chapter discusses Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–) and Lost (NBC, 2004-2010) as examples of the ‘vast narrative’: massive, sprawling stories often explicitly concerned with journeys and mobility, which appeal to kinaesthesia as a means of making their vast storyworlds coherent. The third chapter considers how television dramas both reiterate and resist the normative elements of kinaesthesia, focusing on the embodied politics of gender identity and desire in Outlander (Starz, 2014–) and Transparent (Amazon, 2014–). The final chapter questions how kinaesthesia functions as a mode of empathetic engagement with television, and the extent to which contemporary serial dramas such as Hannibal (NBC, 2013-2015) and Sense8 (Netflix, 2015-2017) present it as a transformative mode of relating to other people. The thesis is invested in presenting kinaesthesia as a productive method for the analysis of television, in which attention to the embodied dynamics of narrative and engagement has much to offer our understanding of screen media, the embodied politics of identity, and the evaluative frameworks of television scholarship. Television has always been a medium defined and experienced through metaphors of mobility, a property that persists in the ways in which serial dramas exploit the storytelling potential of the moving body. By offering kinaesthesia as framework for understanding how serial television speaks to its audience, this thesis proposes a method that is attuned to both the storytelling strategies of these highly contemporary texts, and to the broader theoretical and evaluative history of the medium itself.

This thesis maps out and analyses images of queer masculinities in recent Irish cinema to investigate what forms of queerness are enabled through their intersections with national specificity. In recent years images of non-normative masculinities have become increasingly visible in Irish cinema. These images can be seen as resulting from economic, political and social changes taking place in Ireland and globally, as well as the Irish Film Board’s (IFB) revised mandate in 1993 of encouraging indigenous filmmakers to cater to international audiences and more mainstream appeal. Yet while non-normative masculinity, and specifically non-normative male sexuality, is becoming more visible on Irish screens, the on-screen subject is frequently evacuated of his sexuality to function as allegory for the Irish nation. Using non-normative sexuality as allegory risks reinforcing heteronormative power structures and prevents any sustained critical engagement with representations of sexual desire in Irish society. In this thesis I offer a more rigorous critical engagement with the sexual politics and socio-cultural conditions that have determined the shape and evolution of these representations, while also interrogating the relationship between on-screen visibility and progressive sexual politics. Irish identity has historically been delimited by Ireland’s complex colonial history with Britain and its struggle for independence, which have shaped Ireland’s national narrative and privileged political and sectarian identities over other forms of identification. Nationalist and Catholic discourses in Ireland have promoted rigidly defined gender identities and sexual norms to reinforce a dominant patriarchal and heteronormative order, and to maintain the perceived stability and political hegemony of the nation. In this thesis I use a queer analytic approach to explore the conflicted and often contradictory relationship between ‘national’ and ‘queer’, positing identity as fluid, historically contingent and discursively constructed, and locating identities in-between gender and sexual binaries. This thesis focuses on eleven Irish films released between 1984 and 2007. I use close textual analysis that foregrounds space to examine how the queer Irish male subject negotiates his identity in relation to his surroundings, and how specific social and spatial sites reinforce dominant norms and heterosexual privilege through the construction, regulation and policing of queer identities, communities and cultures. By examining the ways in which films represent social and sexual marginality through the use of space, and how relations of power and difference shape and are reproduced through social discourses and spatial practices, I am able to offer a fuller understanding of these representations, and the ideologies and norms that underpin them, as well as provide insights into a variety of different forces that shape how these representations are framed.

My doctoral research analyses contemporary North American romantic films and the meanings brought to and made from them by socially and economically diverse audiences in London. It does so in the context of a historicised and ideologically alert account of connections between biological, psychoanalytic, anthropological and sociological theorisations of romantic love and its screen depictions. In particular, my audience-led textual analysis of discourses of Euro-American romantic love is driven by an engagement with three claims: First, that neoliberal or late-capitalist individualism has engendered a ‘crisis of romantic love’ which has reshaped the social and personal promises of coupledom and intimacy. Second, that popular film, the prime contemporary medium of representation for romance, cynically portrays this supposed crisis in an effort to capitalise on audience fears; and third, that audiences of these films experience the ‘crisis’, fashioning their romantic identities and practices in its shadow. Methodologically, the study involved a reflexive and recursive textual analysis of five North American films: Blue Valentine, (500) Days of Summer, Don Jon, Her, and Once. Using these films, I carried out 36 group interviews with (87) inhabitants of the multicultural Borough of Hackney, in East London, the results of which then fed into and informed my readings of the films. Subsequent thematic coding of group interviews revealed overlapping areas pertinent to the project: Technology, class, gender and coupledom. Findings include the suggestion that both romantic films and their audiences in Western Europe are currently adapting strategies, practices and ideas of romantic love and relationships to a new environment of precarious intimacy, technological mediation, and anxiety over economic, professional and personal stability. My analysis concludes that while intersections of class, race and gender continue to inflect audience experience and meaning-making, the current romantic environment that audiences are navigating - and that romantic films purportedly represent - is indeed markedly different from that of the last century. However, claims about the crisis of romantic love are not only greatly exaggerated, but usually also erroneously conflate the pain, anxiety and frailty of contemporary relationships and intimacy with a narcissistic, ego-centric definition of love as a form of consumption.

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