This thesis presents a theory of film representation as a process of organizing relations in order to connote the image's status as a type of representation. It is, thus, a study of film form, the form of its representations. Building from such theoretical sources as Merleau- Ponty and Deleuze, I hope here to use a phenomenological base to build a theory of film semiotics that focuses on the immanent field of film representation, which I will postulate as a structuring of the inter-dependent relationship between the content of representation and the signified source of representation. This relationship is infused through a film text according to various modes of differentiation: between the viewer and viewed, speaker and spoken or what, using principles of phenomenology, I call the problem of subject-object relations. In this study I use this framework of subject-object relations in order to re-conceptualize the problem of film representation and to systematize the fundamental debates in film theory. I will argue that even oppositional theories of film representation can be reconciled through their attempt to understand this immanent field as being organized so as to structure a relationship between the representation and an origin of meaning, or subject-function. This relationship is what I call a system of reference. The filmic subject-function is traditionally located within the camera itself or hi the diegetic subjectivity of a character; I will call these two systems of reference, respectively, objective and subjective representation. And, through a reconstruction of Deleuze's Cinéma project, I will argue that the immanent field of film representation is a constant fluctuation between these two poles, a dialogic circulation of interacting agencies and discourses. This thesis illustrates this fluctuation through a comparative analysis of two French filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard. I will argue that, illustrating similar goals as one finds in the works of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, these two filmmakers radically deconstruct film codes in order to destroy the conventional division between interior and exterior that is imposed by classical notions of subjectivity.

Chan, Yu Kwan. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [108]-120). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in Chinese.

This thesis explores the historical, theoretical and philosophical development of cinematic media as a collective form of technological perception and consciousness. Central to my inquiry is the philosophical notion that with the invention of cinema emerges a cyborg vision, a new modern mechanics of thinking that extends the phenomenological and epistemological experience of human perception and knowledge into hitherto unknown realms of thinking, sensation and being. Drawing on some of the key cultural thinkers and philosophers of the twentieth century, including Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, as well as contemporary philosophers of media such as Jonathan Beller, Sean Cubitt, D.N. Rodowick and Mark B. Hansen, my research into the philosophy of cinema and digital media articulates a branch of media theory that reads the political economy of the moving image through an amalgam of continental philosophy, marxist theory and film studies. Coterminous with the investigation into the philosophical object of cinematic or media consciousness, the thesis also endeavors to map the historical genealogy of the moving image as it evolves from the industrial mechanics of cinematic technologies to the virtual informatics of digital culture. Central to this inquiry is the idea that the history of cinematic and visual media is inextricably connected with the rise, towards the end of the twentieth century, of postmodern consumer culture and the global information society. The transition from a modern industrial economy to a postmodern information economy that reorganises the logic of production according to the 'variables' of scientific knowledge, communication and informational technologies, parallels a metamorphosis in our media consciousness as the representational ontology of cinematic moving image is transformed by the virtual ontology of the digital image. The first part of my thesis looks at the period of industrial cinema, focusing on Soviet constructivism and the films of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. In this section I trace the origins of cinema as a mode of communication for the commodity, examining how the modern cinematic imaginary opens up new economies of vision and sensation for capital. Following this investigation into what Jonathan Beller calls the cinematic mode of production, the second part of my thesis proceeds to investigate how cinematic consciousness is transformed from the industrial to the post-industrial era. Taking Deleuze's historiographical demarcation of cinema into the two regimes of the 'movement-image' and the 'time-image' as a philosophical frame, the second section of my thesis investigates how in the post-war films of the Italian neorealists and Michelengelo Antonioni our cinematic consciousness develops a new way of thinking the ontology of time and space. This analysis leads into my discussion of how in the age of digital special effects and the Hollywood blockbuster, cinematic consciousness is further expanded with the time-consciousness of the 'virtual' as our bodies attempt to accommodate the heightened flows of information that bombard our senses in the interfaces of digital culture.

This thesis examines the fragile perimeter that separates an illusory reality from the supposedly more authentic Real it conceals, which forms a key focus of Slavoj Žižek’s work, and in this thesis I offer a study of the relations between this aspect of Žižek’s work and film theory. In particular, this thesis is an elaboration on and interrogation of Žižek’s employment of the Lacanian notion of the Real in critiques of the inadequacy of 1970s and 1980s film theory and its widespread adoption of a Lacanian model of film-spectator relations. By way of illustration, I consider the microgenre of films released between the years 1998 to 2000 that includes the Matrix trilogy, David Fincher’s Fight Club, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, and Alex Proyas’ Dark City, which are all similarly fascinated by the border between a fake reality and an ostensibly more genuine real. However, I also argue that this cycle of films does more than illustrate a fascination with that which is in excess of signification: this cycle of films equally participates in the reappraisal of this important phase of film theory. This thesis proceeds from a consideration of Žižek’s assertion that Lacanian psychoanalysis is missing from the dominant field of film theory. To assess this claim, I re-examine the era of political modernism. From this it becomes clear that what Žižek is noting is not the total absence of Lacanian psychoanalysis, but, rather, an absence of the version of Lacan to which he is drawn. This thesis considers aspects of the Real that contaminate the form and matter of these films, in addition to the thematic exploration of the shadowy world beyond reality. In pursuing this investigation, this thesis utilises the insights of the deconstructive work of Jacques Derrida, to consider the terms ‘form’, ‘content’ and ‘matter’. These words are ubiquitous in film studies, and I aim to explicate not their final meaning, but the way in which the Real interrupts the very stability of vocabulary used in film studies. I interrogate the concepts of gaze and voice as privileged instances of the way in which the Real can rupture the symbolic in narrative film. Without seeking to reject these aesthetic figures, through critical readings of key theories of embodiment, the grotesque and the abject (such as those of Marks, Shaviro, Sobchack, Bakhtin and Kristeva), I suggest how the body and its representation provides a more sustained motif where the Real leaves its trace in these films. This thesis proposes that it is above all through such representations that these films offer a response to the themes with which politically modernist film theory has been historically concerned. The Edge of the Construct films achieve this in their evocation of an intolerable namelessness at the centre of the human subject and the social world it inhabits. / Thesis(Ph.D.) -- School of Humanities, 2008

La proposition centrale de cette thèse est double. D’une part, il s’agit de jeter les bases d’un modèle historique qui réunirait tous les dispositifs audiovisuels qui associent des images animées à une chanson populaire qui leur est préexistante sous un même paradigme culturel que nous baptiserons « phono-cinématographie ». Celui-ci aurait débuté vers la fin du XIXe siècle, avec l’invention du kinétoscope d’Edison, pour aboutir à nos jours avec l’émergence des vidéos musicales interactives sur Internet. D’autre part, il s’agit de nous interroger sur le rôle a priori central que les Beatles occupent au sein de cette histoire de la chanson populaire mise en image. Notre hypothèse principale est que le vidéoclip, tel qu’il s’est institutionnalisé au début des années 1980 pour ensuite se perpétuer jusque dans les années 2000, n’a rien d’une pratique culturelle (voir même d’un média) figé(e) :bien au contraire, cette pratique/ce média a été l’objet de réélaborations continues tant sur le plan de la production, de la diffusion que de la fonction.<p>Notre approche se situe à cheval sur l’histoire du cinéma, de la musique populaire et de la télévision. En nous appuyant sur certaines propositions théoriques et certains concepts formulés dans le champ des études cinématographiques ainsi que dans le champ des performance studies, nous serons particulièrement attentif aux questions de représentation qui se déploient dans ces différents dispositifs phono-cinématographiques :à savoir, les premiers films chantants (les phono-scènes Gaumont et les Vitaphone shorts), les juke-boxes équipés d’un écran (les Soundies et les Scopitones) et enfin les vidéos musicales télévisées (les films promotionnels et les vidéoclips). / Doctorat en Information et communication / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished