Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 284-287). / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / v, 287 leaves, bound 29 cm

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.

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This study examines the traditional claim that in 1903, while an employee of the Edison Manufacturing Company, Edwin Stanton Porter discovered the principle of editing construction which made possible the fictional motion picture narrative. It will show that Edison studio policy in the period would have discouraged such an achievement and that the crucial first step in the elaboration of the early film narrative was the development of a compositional aesthetic derived from the staged or 'fake' newsreel. Based on that aesthetic between 1904 and 1907 film directors including Edwin Porter turned out a short-lived, tableau-action narrator-dependent story film in actuality style that became the basis of the nickelodeon boom dating from 1906. The social and industrial pressures engendered by that success led to the fragmentation of the complete action tableau and the displacement of the tableau narrative by a shot-dependent, autonomous narrative constrained by the formal features of actuality composition. The final chapter analyzes a leading example, the 1907 emergence of parallel editing in the production of one-reel screen tales of last-minute rescue.

This dissertation provides a cultural history of the first North American film archive, the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), established in 1935. It asks a seemingly simple question: How was it that small, popular, debased, ephemeral objects like films came to be treated as precious, complex and valuable historical objects? It therefore explores how ideas about archiving (seeing and saving films) intersect with practices of collection and exhibition, by mapping the evolution of key institutional discourses and cultural trends from the birth of the medium to the Film Library. It considers links between the archive and longstanding concepts in film culture---utopianism, cinematic knowledge and art. It attends to the more specific convergence of interests---public and private, national and international---which impacted on the Film Library's institutional shape and on the debates in which it was embroiled. This dissertation shows that despite the Film Library's home within an institution of modern art, film's archival value was associated more with the urgency of recovering a history that had been lost and less with an art that had been neglected. This contention is further supported by an examination of the Film Library's first circulating film programs and their public reception. This dissertation postulates that the library's development of an unprecedented and broad acquisition policy as well as an active exhibition program made it more than a mere reflection of the uniquely historical and modern attributes of the cinema: a meeting of aesthetic ferment, technology, commercialism, propaganda, popularity and information. It concludes that the library was an important intervention into these discourses marking with institutional certainty the contested nature of film as a cultural object as well as the ongoing project to understand it.

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This study will focus on Quentin Tarantino's three most recent films: Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), and Death Proof (2007). These works are significant, in that they present a marked departure from the director's earlier films. Specifically, they offer portrayals of resourceful and powerful female protagonists, in stark contrast to the frequently neglected and marginalized women of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). Buttressed by a mixture of psychoanalytic feminist and postmodern theories, I will perform a careful textual analysis of these latest films. In particular, I intend to uncover the ways in which Tarantino's films support and/or subvert traditionally oppressive conceptions of gender. / by Marc R. Fedderman. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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.