This thesis examines the representations of surveillance in mainstream cinema. Using ideology critique it will show how filmic illustrations of monitoring depoliticize the relationship between surveillance and structural relations of power.In order to provide a foundation for this inquiry, a political economy critique of surveillance will be undertaken in four areas. Focusing on the workplace, consumer surveillance, urban policing and intelligence gathering, this thesis will contextualise surveillance as historically relevant and intimately connected with modern constructs such as the nation-state, military power and capitalist economic organisation. In recent years, the role of surveillance has been intensified in response to the challenges posed by globalization, the restructuring of capitalism in the 1980's and 90's and the declining legitimacy of nation-state governments. These developments are both aided by, and in turn promote, pervasive networks of surveillance. Driven by risk management and other forms of economic reasoning as organisational logic, developments in information communication technologies accelerate surveillance capabilities rendering them more invasive and intense. In this way, surveillance can be conceived of as complicit with prevailing relations of power on a macro, sociological level.In order to show how mainstream cinematic representations of surveillance ideologically obscure this relationship, this thesis begins with an overview of 30 popular films. It then moves to a comparison of four recent Hollywood portrayals of surveillance with the four areas of political economy critique identified above. This analysis will reveal that these films have a tendency to focus on sentimental themes such as individual heroism, antagonist versus protagonist struggles and romantic subplots, in a way which deflects attention from collective experience with surveillance webs. More pertinently, the narrative structures of these films feature dichotomies between malevolent and benevolent monitoring, aligning legitimate and benign surveillance with the state. At the same time, the accompanying imagery of surveillance devices fetishizes monitoring, deterministically glorifying technology as a powerful and omniscient force. The overall effect is to depoliticize monitoring as a natural part of the fabric of everyday life.

No description available.

This thesis examines the representations of surveillance in mainstream cinema. Using ideology critique it will show how filmic illustrations of monitoring depoliticize the relationship between surveillance and structural relations of power.In order to provide a foundation for this inquiry, a political economy critique of surveillance will be undertaken in four areas. Focusing on the workplace, consumer surveillance, urban policing and intelligence gathering, this thesis will contextualise surveillance as historically relevant and intimately connected with modern constructs such as the nation-state, military power and capitalist economic organisation. In recent years, the role of surveillance has been intensified in response to the challenges posed by globalization, the restructuring of capitalism in the 1980's and 90's and the declining legitimacy of nation-state governments. These developments are both aided by, and in turn promote, pervasive networks of surveillance. Driven by risk management and other forms of economic reasoning as organisational logic, developments in information communication technologies accelerate surveillance capabilities rendering them more invasive and intense. In this way, surveillance can be conceived of as complicit with prevailing relations of power on a macro, sociological level.In order to show how mainstream cinematic representations of surveillance ideologically obscure this relationship, this thesis begins with an overview of 30 popular films. It then moves to a comparison of four recent Hollywood portrayals of surveillance with the four areas of political economy critique identified above. This analysis will reveal that these films have a tendency to focus on sentimental themes such as individual heroism, antagonist versus protagonist struggles and romantic subplots, in a way which deflects attention from collective experience with surveillance webs. More pertinently, the narrative structures of these films feature dichotomies between malevolent and benevolent monitoring, aligning legitimate and benign surveillance with the state. At the same time, the accompanying imagery of surveillance devices fetishizes monitoring, deterministically glorifying technology as a powerful and omniscient force. The overall effect is to depoliticize monitoring as a natural part of the fabric of everyday life.

No description available.

This thesis is an interdisciplinary study that traces the commerce-art-politics nexus of Hong Kong cinema since the new millennium, through investigating the current young generation of film workers who joined the industry as it gradually entered an era marked by the domination of Hong Kong/Mainland co-productions. It reveals the filmmaking ideologies of emerging filmmakers from both within and beyond their film texts, and uncovers the artistic and ideological discrepancies between this young generation and their predecessors - the established generation who contributed to the glory days of Hong Kong cinema during its economic boom. By tracing the studies of national cinema and transnational cinema in the last three decades, I debunk the national/transnational antagonism with the case of the post-2000 Hong Kong cinema. It does not only prove that the binary is far more complicated than one being superseded by the other, or them coexisting with each other, but rather evolving into each other from a historical perspective. In this vein, the current Hong Kong cinema has split into two: a transnational cinema represented by the established generation of filmmakers; and a national cinema that is driven by the emerging generation who struggle for better preservation of Hong Kong local culture and their own cultural identities. Furthermore, this thesis scrutinizes the working and material conditions of these young film practitioners, in which employment and economic opportunity are primarily derived from co-productions and mainland productions. It expands the discussion over the concept of precarity and argues that the Hong Kong case demonstrates two extra dimensions of labour precarity: an excessive reliance on an external market (i.e. mainland market), and the workers' dissenting political attitudes towards a politically sensitive regime, namely mainland China under the ruling of the Communist Party. Lastly, developments in Hong Kong film policy since the handover are examined. As its longstanding managing philosophy of "minimal intervention" has largely remained unchanged in Hong Kong, the government has turned from a "laissez-faire" approach to what Mark Purcell terms an "aidez-faire" approach in the local film industry, yet it still failed to meet the industry's expectations of creating a holistic film policy. Nevertheless, film policy in the post-handover era had an undeniable impact in terms of cultivating young filmmakers. To research the topic, 47 in-depth interviews were conducted. These first-hand interviews, combined with data gathered from multiple resources, as well as a text analysis of the 107 films made by young directors between 2000 and 2018, form the factual basis of this thesis. Employing a Hong Kong/Mainland Film dynamics perspective, this study aims to fill a gap in the academic study of Hong Kong cinema, which has paid scant attention to the material conditions and artistic visions of craft labour in the industry, and especially of the young generation of filmmakers who are facing the decline of a once prosperous but currently diminishing local film industry.

No description available.

Aiming to make an intervention in critical theory, film-philosophy and British Cinema scholarship, this thesis investigates what a marriage of Lacanian and Badiouian theories of the subject can bring to the study of the radical British feature film of 1968: films which in differing ways represent the political and intellectual debates current in the culture. The question of what can be learnt through an analysis situated within theories of the subject has not been addressed within British Cinema studies. Psychoanalytic film theory in its previous incarnations utilised a section of Lacan's thought in order to focus on the ways in which the spectator was placed into a subject position by the unseen workings of the apparatus. Furthermore, the limited amount of Badiouian film scholarship is concerned with whether films can be thought philosophically. A fuller use of Lacan with Badiou as a hermeneutic model to address films from a specific period and context creates a new interpretive model on the porous boundary between critical theory and film-philosophy. This thesis utilises Lacan's categories of the Imaginary, Symbolic and, predominantly, the Real alongside the Badiouian Event to interrogate the ways in which Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (Karel Reisz, 1966), Privilege (Peter Watkins, 1967), Herostratus (Don Levy, 1967), Performance (Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg, 1970) and if ... (Lindsay Anderson, 1968) represent the radical subject of 1968, in order to argue for the efficacy of ideological critique, to think politically about cinema, and advocate the continuing resonance of the period in contemporary praxis.

No description available.

This thesis addresses a set of transformations in the symbolic construction of America, as reflected by a number of films released during what is commonly referred to as the post 9/11 period. Following a rich debate in the field of American literary studies, the study investigates the self-image of the nation as projected by four representative films of the decade. Throughout the chapters, the central hypothesis of the thesis is that the cultural symbology of the nation, its symbolic map, continues to act as a territorialising force within the diegetic universes of the texts. In so doing, the meta-narrative of America stands in opposition to a deterritorialising tendency that - as a body of recent critical scholarship attests - inform the post 9/11 context, a tendency borne out of a new, shared awareness of historical violence within the national community. As it displaces codified social boundaries, and established links between individual and communities, such deterritorialising rhetoric threaten the symbolic coherence of the world. The conflict between long-standing symbologies of the nation and the impact of a new cultural milieu thus emerges in the cinema as a representational impasse, whose different textual outcomes are addressed in the main chapters of this thesis. In order to investigate the interplay of different symbolic maps, the present study focuses on four spatial signifiers - the house, the village, the city and the land - and derives its methodological tools from a body of scholarship largely comprised within the so-called 'spatial turn'. The terms of this theoretical engagement are specified in the first part the thesis, while the conclusion expands on the direction of the research, and connects the study to other related disciplinary discourses, both in Film studies and American studies.

Argentine literature at the close of the twentieth century is characterized by a marked interest in the themes of dictatorship, marginality, and exile. Given the shifting of public and private spaces in the country's recent history, a "sinister" space has appeared in the collective subconscious, where all that was negated, prohibited and repressed is now (re)surfacing with tremendous energy in a constant probing into the collective memory effectuated from still present traumas without closure. / The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse the "social tics" which flourish in various art forms, as well as in the underpinnings of Argentine society, and come from the fact that collective suffering has created a defined present which controls the past, and, inevitably, influences the future. In turn, certain themes thus emerge from subjective and fragmented spaces of enunciation where memory plays a crucial role. / In order to do this, I concentrate here on alternative cultural productions to the official propaganda produced during and after the period of dictatorship, paying special attention to women's narratives and testimonies or memoirs of repression. Finally, I undertake an analysis of certain selected cinematographic productions which, like the contemporary literature analysed here, also form part of the movement that demonstrates the need to question Argentine reality---present and past---by foregrounding collective and individual memory in opposition to the generalized trend of amnesia/anaesthesia to point up the very real danger inherent in such "historic amnesia." Taken together, these works reveal the existence of a past that must be recaptured and redeemed, but which, given the existence of the negated and silenced "sinister" space in contemporary reality, forms only a small part of Argentine history still under construction.