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This research addresses an emerging scholarship examining relations between media, religion, and culture in contemporary society. Whilst it acknowledges the value of this growing body of work, the study is based on a recognition that an overwhelming concern with the contemporary scene has resulted in a neglect of the history responsible for the conditions of the present. Given the prominence of America as both a source and an object of this scholarship, moreover, the particular national context in which the institutions and practices of the US media have developed has been taken for granted somewhat. Oriented towards these perceived lacunae, this thesis examines the interaction between religion and film as an influence upon the development of American culture in the twentieth-century. The dissertation is divided into two main parts. The first of these is devoted to an extended discussion of the scholarly background to the research, and argues that the historical dimension of the interrelationship between religion and film in America is worthy of more attention than it has hitherto received. In particular, it stresses the fundamental importance of religion within the discourse of national identity in the United States, and posits the notion of a non-denominational American civil religion as a useful theoretical tool with which to examine Hollywood as a distinctively 'American' form of cinema. Part Two develops this position through a case study of The Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith, and one of the most famous films of all time. Discussing the picture as a response to a crisis in American Protestantism, the study argues that the race controversy prompted by its Southern viewpoint was, to some extent, a function of Griffith's ambitions to revive the traditional religious bases of U.S. national identity via the medium of film. Furthermore, it suggests that the impact of Birth helped enact a broader transformation of American culture, wherein the cinema became instrumental in sustaining the belief that the United States was a nation uniquely favoured by Providence.

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.

In this dissertation, I bring together film theory, literary criticism, anthropology and psychology to develop a paradigm for the study of teen films that can also be effectively applied to other areas of pop culture studies as well as literary genres. Expanding on Thomas Doherty's discussion of 1950s teen films and Ian Jarvie's study of films as social criticism, I argue that teen films are a discrete genre that appeals to adolescents to the exclusion of other groups. Teen films subvert social mores of the adult world and validate adolescent subculture by reflecting that subculture's values and viewpoints. The locus of this subversion is the means by which teenagers, through the teen films, vicariously experience anxiety-provoking adult subjects such as sexual experimentation and physical violence, particularly the extreme expressions of sex and violence that society labels taboo. Through analyzing the rhetoric of teen lifestyle films, specifically the teen romance and sex farce, I explore how the films offer teens vicarious experience of many adolescent "firsts." In addition, I claim that teen films can effectively appropriate other genres while remaining identifiable as teen films. I discuss hybrid films which combine the teen film with the science fiction genre, specifically Back to the Future and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and the musical genre, specifically Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Dirty Dancing. In my discussion of the slasher film, specifically the Halloween. Friday the 13th. and A Nightmare on Elm Street cycles, I highlight how teen films function as a safe place to explore the taboo. Finally, I discuss the way in which the teen film genre has evolved in the 1990s due in part to shifts in social and economic interests. The teen films of the 1990s include the viewpoints of women, minorities, the handicapped, and homosexuals and question the materialistic ethos of the 1980s films.

This thesis is an account of the events surrounding the passage of the Dallas Motion Picture Classification Ordinance of April 5, 1965. A stalemate between two disputing private factions in the city leads to public policy in the form of a municipal ordinance. Litigation quickly follows, and in the final analysis, a judicial determination temporarily ends the controversy...This investigation reveals that the council did not formulate public policy of its own volition, but only acted as an extension of the private struggle which had lasted for approximately thirty-six months.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2003. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The terminology used in segregationist discourse that South Africa is a combination of 'first world' and 'third world' elements has been appropriated from an international discourse about problems of world-wide socio-economic development. The terms are used to describe the sophisticated metropolitan areas inhabited by highly developed whites and simple, backward, isolated, rural regions occupied by undeveloped or underdeveloped blacks. However, in South Africa this dual world metaphor, which has socio-political implications that have brought great misfortune to blacks, was institutionalised by apartheid, with the consequences that blacks have expressed their resistance in what became known as the 'struggle' against the dualist system. Selected South African and African films whose themes have a bearing on such a socio-economic system are explored in this thesis. A supplementary exploration of films dealing with the theme of the 'struggle', which has become a metaphor for the 'generations of resistance', has been undertaken by means ofa detailed analysis. The interpretation of 'development' in this thesis finds a link betweeen the dualist paradigm, the perpetuation of poverty and the migratory labour system. The peculiar relationship which the 'struggle' has had with the cultures of black people, in which there is a mutual influence between the 'struggle' and the nature of these cultures, is explored in the relevant films. However, this thesis offers no solutions, but exposes a VICIOUS system which IS threatening to gain world ascendency. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die terminologie gebruik in die segregasie-diskoers tot die effek dat Suid-Afrika 'n kombinasie van 'Eerste Wêreld' en 'Derde Wêreld' elemente is, is oorgeneem uit 'n internasionale diskoers wat handeloor wêreld-wye sosio-ekonomiese ontwikkeling. Dié terme word gebruik om die gesofistikeerde metropolitaanse areas bewoon deur hoogsontwikkelde blankes en eenvoudige, agterlike, geïsoleerde, landelike streke beset deur onder- of on-ontwikkelde swartes te beskryf. Maar in Suid-Afrika is hierdie dubbelwêreld metafoor - met die sosio-politiese implikasies daarvan wat tot groot ellende vir swartes aanleiding gegee het - deur Apartheid geïnstitusionaliseer, met die gevolg dat swartes hul weerstand uitgedruk het in wat bekend geword het as die 'struggle' teen dierdie dualistiese sisteem. 'n Keur van films uit Suid-Afrika en die res van Afrika, die tema's waarvan betrekking het op hierdie sosio-ekonomiese sisteem, word ondersoek in hierdie skripsie. 'n Bykomstige ondersoek na films wat handeloor die tematiek van die 'struggle', wat metafories geword het vir die 'generasie van weerstand', is by wyse van 'n meer gedetaileerde analise uitgevoer. Die interpretasie van 'ontwikkeling' in hierdie skripsie ontbloot 'n verband tussen die dualistiese sisteem, die voortsetting van armoede en die sisteem van trekardbeid. Die besonderse manier wat die 'struggle' met die kulture van swart mense verhou, waarin daar 'n wedersydse beïnvloeding tussen die 'struggle' en die aard van die kulture plaasvind, word ondersoek in die relevante films. Hierdie skripsie bied egter geen oplossings nie, maar ontmasker eerder 'n wrede sisteem wat dreig tot wêreld-oorheersing.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Art in Dramatic Arts / My dissertation presents a textual analysis of John Greyson and Jack Lewis's South African film, Proteus (2003), which is based on archival records and plots the never-before-told narrative of an intimacy between two inmates on 16th century Robben Island. Locating this same-sex intimacy in the 1700s Cape Colony has far-reaching implications when considered in relation to the increasingly pervasive twenty-first century discourse which proposes that homosexuality is necessarily 'unAfrican'. The film's social and political commentary is, therefore, significant for how we might think about sexuality, among other subjectivities, in post-apartheid South Africa. By analysing the film's formal and thematic attributes, I demonstrate that the directors' protean approach to filmmaking has queering effects for the linear notion of time and the cohesive conceptualisation of identity that the colonial archive tends to reinforce. I suggest that commonsense notions of time, space, language and identity that structure the archive have allowed for multiple fissures to develop along the trajectory from past to present. As I show, the aforementioned process has almost effaced from official records narratives, such as the one told in Proteus, that would trouble totalising ideas about the intimate orientations of certain individuals. Therefore, I argue that while the record of this same-sex intimacy does appear in the archive, it has been subsumed by other, more dominant, narratives. The film's work, which I replicate in my reading of it, has been to queer this archive by foregrounding what has historically been repressed. In my first chapter, I argue that by enacting what Halberstam (2005) terms a mode of 'queer temporality', Proteus carves out spaces in the archive for alternative renditions of history to come into visibility in ways that demand fluidity and heterogeneity. I propose that the strategic filmic mechanisms employed in Proteus necessarily engender nuanced spectatorial procedures, which call on the spectator to engage reflexively with the film. I continue to argue for the spectator's need to be particularly reflexive throughout the dissertation. My second chapter deals with the filmmakers' strategic use of language in order to present a commentary on the material effects that the acts of 'naming' and 'categorising' have on living bodies. The final chapter explores a critical perspective which has not previously been brought to bear on the film. I examine how Greyson and Lewis construct positions for their main characters from which they may assert their subjectivity - what Mirzoeff (2011) describes as 'the right to look'.

This dissertation examines the representations of Casablanca in Moroccan cinema and their articulation of postcolonial subjectivity since the 1990s. To overcome a deep economic recession and simmering social unrest in the early 1980s, Morocco embarked on a comprehensive programme of structural adjustment policies under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund. Market reforms ushered in novel forms of spatial development and social relations in Moroccan cities over the next decades. In the cultural field, a popular cinema emerged in the early 1990s and has projected the complex structures of everyday life in urban space. The New Urban Cinema (NUC) has anchored national cinema in the everyday life and affective economy of a society in transition. The country’s largest city, Casablanca, is the setting for some of NUC’s most original portrayals of the Moroccan subject under globalisation. Taking space, affect and violence as intertwined sites of film analysis, my research project closely examines the new forms of postcolonial subjectivity that have evolved in Morocco through this cinema. Twenty films are read against the backdrop of neoliberal Casablanca and the social, economic as well as political transformation of Morocco and the world under globalisation. The dissertation combines close textual analysis with a cultural studies perspective, which situates films in their historical contexts of production and reception in Morocco and beyond. Drawing on postcolonial, film and urban studies, my aim is to contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship on cinematic responses to neoliberal globalisation, and to a social history of contemporary Morocco.