This thesis examines the different ways the cinemas of Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard adapted literary and artistic motifs characteristic of the nineteenth-century romantic and realist traditions, from the 1960s to the 1980s. The selection of these four directors is based on their early and formative commitment to the politique des auteurs, a film criticism trend that was significantly indebted to central aesthetic precepts of the realist and naturalist novels. The profound social changes of the 1960s led directors, artists and writers to question long-accepted ideas about representation and authorship. The left-wing culture in France, which envisioned art and political protest as an inseparable whole, extensively criticised the nineteenth-century discourse on the realist novel as the outward revelation of the author's inner life. As a result, critics rapidly considered the politique des auteurs and, by extension, the universalist and openly westerncentric premises of the Nouvelle Vague as unpersuasive and dismissible. This thesis acknowledges that the relation these directors maintained with nineteenth-century thought has been overshadowed by scholarship on their individual careers, a research tendency that consolidates the notion of rupture and discontinuity between Rohmer, Rivette, Truffaut and Godard's filmographies. However, each one of them commonly returned to nineteenth-century sourcing and imagery in the post-1968 period through adaptations and transpositions of Heinrich von Kleist, Honoré de Balzac, Adèle Hugo, Prosper Mérimée and so on. As the first work to regroup this 'gang of four' in the aftermath of Rohmer's forced resignation in Cahiers du cinéma, this thesis argues that their approaches to the nineteenth-century cultural legacy should be assessed as distinct forms of reaffirming, revising, challenging and commenting on their former vision of cinema as a novelistic space, able to manifest the essence of sheer appearances. As the chapters will demonstrate, their engagements with nineteenth-century art and literature are complex. They are, on the one hand, inflected by their personal responses to the politicisation of the 1960s and 1970s French film culture and, on the other hand, informed by their individual understanding of the role of nineteenth-century narratives and aesthetic patterns within the framework of modern filmmaking. The introduction chapter lays the theoretical foundations of the Nouvelle Vague's early engagements with notions of romanticism and realism and, in light of the existing scholarship, establishes the aims and methodology of this thesis. Chapter two examines Rohmer's cinematic transposition of Balzac's rhetorical realism and analyses the paradoxes and modernist potential of the director's neoclassical film aesthetics in Die Marquise von O ... (1976). Chapter three explores the ways Rivette turns the Balzacian myths of Icarus and Pygmalion into more immediate accounts on his contemporaries' struggle for unalienated and totalising works of art through Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991). Chapter four analyses Truffaut's long series of engagements with nineteenth-century imagery and explores the reasons why L'enfant sauvage (1970), Les deux anglaises et le continent (1971), L'histoire d'Adèle H. (1975) and La chambre verte (1978) coincided with his growing conservatism. Chapter five develops Godard's relationship with the romantic legacy through the case-studies of Passion (1982) and Prénom Carmen (1983) - films which allude to Charles Baudelaire's entangled notions of spleen and the ideal and give an unprecedented attention to the aesthetics of chiaroscuro. The conclusion chapter establishes points of convergences and contrasts between the four directors through a comparative account that also addresses the ways in which their individual stands towards the romantic and realist legacies have evolved.

This study investigates the complex operation of realism in the representational make-up of animated films of the Aardman studio. It focuses on ten early films made in a three-dimensional clay/puppet medium. All the films are based on ‘real’ soundtracks, gathered via secretly recorded conversations of ordinary people in everyday situations or by direct interview. The key argument is that these stop-motion films show a hybrid composition of realist strategies and approaches, in terms of their adaptation of realist aesthetics as well as their subject matter. It is argued that their aesthetic make-up is associated with, or copied, from certain modes of live-action documentary film such as observational style and interviews. The thesis contends that realism in these films is of a complex nature. It studies and illustrates different aspects of realism in the corpus, with particular emphasis on three films chosen for specific case study.

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This practice-based research examines the developments in site-specific art since 1960's. Its purpose is to critically explore the influence of patronage and the role of the artist on practices within this field and it has been achieved by adopting a binary strategy, which combines "research into art" with "research through art." (Frayling 1993:5). This has involved the construction of an individually tailored methodological framework consisting of a textual examination of historical case-studies conducted in conjunction with the organisation and running of practical projects (the BT/Cellnet Farnham Library Garden & Picnic projects). Devised both as site-specific ventures and as case-studies, these projects broadly encompass three distinctive historical modes of site-specific art - Formal/Object-based, Community-based and Performative - which have successively emerged to predominance over the past fifty years or therabouts. The aim was to produce empirical comparisons in order to reflexively investigate the ways in which patronage, coupled with the role played by the artist impacted on the form and content of site-specific art.

This thesis finds inspiration in practitioner academics such as Craig and Meyerhold, and is conceived as a practice-informed research degree, consisting of a written element and a practical element that draw on and inspire each other. That there is value in both practising and analysing an art form is argued, and ‘case studies’ are made of practitioner/theorists at either end of the genealogy traced in the research: both those at the beginning of the 20th century and those at the beginning of the 21st. A case is made for judging the work of artists such as Robert Lepage, Robert Wilson, Complicité, and Faulty Optic as exemplars of contemporary Visual Theatre practice, combining and being inspired by the twin modes of puppetness and the cinematic. Alongside case studies of these practitioners sits analysis of the practical element of the thesis: a work-inprogress piece of auteur-led Visual Theatre practice that questions and illuminates the written component of the thesis.

The research aims to provide an alternative working methodology from the perspective of a contemporary Chinese artist, not a calligrapher, to answer the research question: how does one create new works of calligraphy an art so burdened with historical tradition? This is practice based research; the designed pattern of study aims to test and to exemplify the relationship, and also most importantly based on the nature of the investigation and practical necessity, the strategy of the research project is implemented in a dialectical construction as the title of the thesis suggests.

The thesis traces the history of the film poem as a concern and formal strategy within artists' film traditions over the last one hundred years. Via a theoretical framework (that includes Russian Formalist literary poetics, experminetal film studies, critical theory and linguistics) the investigation reveals and explicates what connects the ways different practitioners have synthesised the two terms "film" and "poem" and discusses the relevance of the "film poem" as a combinative term within a contemporary art context.