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Throughout the centuries artists have used art to express their identity. Art can be used as a tool to question stereotypes and conventions that shape our societies. Black artists emerging from the Civil Rights movements in America questioned social injustices and prejudiced violence that was targeted towards black people. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was an artist who went against the status quo of a predominantly white art world in America during the 1980s. Basquiat’s art presents a fragmented vision of a colonized” self” in search of reassurance for being a black man and artist during a time when black peoples right where less than equal.Considering recent historic events that has reshaped the conditions and rights that black people and other ethnic minorities hold in American society, it is only suitable to re-read Basquiat’s art all over again through a post-colonial perspective. This is done in order to seek answers to how colonialism and other forms of institutionalized racism has shaped the world. Whose results could prove beneficial for current discourses regarding society’s ethical and racial ethical dilemmas.

The classically idyllic, carefree world of childhood would appear to be diametrically opposed to the horrors of war and world-wide conflict. However, throughout film history, filmmakers have continually turned to the figure of the child as a prism through which to examine the devastation caused by war. This thesis will investigate the representation of childhood experience of the Second World War across six fiction films: Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1947), René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night (1964) and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985). Spanning forty years, I will examine how these films, whilst sharing many thematic and formal concerns, are unquestionably diverse. They are products of specific socio-cultural milieux, but are also important works in the evolution of cinematic style in art cinema. The films can be aligned to various trends such as neorealism (Paisan, Germany Year Zero), Modernism (Ivan’s Childhood, Diamonds of the Night) and Neo-expressionism (Come and See). Structured in four parts – on witness, landscape, loss and play – I will suggest that just filmmakers utilise childhood experience – often fragmented and chaotic in terms of temporality - to reflect the chaos of war. The first part of my study focuses on the child as witness, the child as Deleuzian seer. I draw on the writings of Gilles Deleuze as well as post-Deleuzian interventions of Tyrus Miller and Jaimey Fisher to argue that whilst Deleuze’s characterization of the child figure as passive is somewhat problematic when applied to the neorealist works, it can, however, be more rigorously applied to Come and See, a film in which, I suggest, the child embodies a much purer form of the Deleuzian seer. In the second part of my study, drawing on the work of Martin Lefebvre and Sandro Bernardi amongst others, I discuss the representation of landscape and its relation to the figure of the child. The third part will examine the representation of loss as well as the symbolic quality of water and its links to the maternal with reference to psychoanalytic theory and the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. The fourth and final part also draws on psychoanalysis in examining the role of play in the six films with particular reference to the work of D.W Winnicott and Lenore Terr. My study seeks to contribute to the comparatively under-explored subject of the child in film through close analysis of film aesthetics including mise-en-scène, editing, and film sound.

1 Abstract A monograph on Jan Kotík (1916-2002) introduces both his art and theoretical work, it deals with a historical and cultural context of the now-defunct Czechoslovakia. Kotík's - an artist's, theoretician's, published author's, educator's - artwork enjoys a prominent position in the context of Czech art of the second half of 20th century. An art-historical assessment of artwork was based on Kotik's artwork inventory and on all the documentation on Kotik's life and art work archived in the Documentation Department of the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the CR and in private archives in the CR and Berlin. The study is based on a method of organic combination of biographical data and art-historical data with quotation of Kotik's theoretical texts. An evolution of artist's work is demonstrated chronologically with the context to Czech and world art. The monograph includes chapters: "Father Pravoslav's Art Studio and Study Years", "Art Group 42", "Possibilities of Applied Art", "Painting-Object", "Stay in Berlin", "Returns".

This dissertation thesis deals with the work of three contemporary Czech artists - Josef Bolf, Jakub Špaňhel and Lubomír Typlt. The reason for choosing these three was the fact that all of the artists represent the same generation which entered the art scene in the late 1990s and their canvases can be equally described as expressive, although right at first glance there are noticeable differences in the intervention of the emotional and sense elements which participated in the creation process of the work of art, but also in its content. Contemporary expressive paintings are influenced by the development of art in the second half of the 20th century which is based on the continuous comparing of expressive subjectivity and its negation or intentional application and irony. That is why I decided to illustratively explore the movements which took place in terms of the foreign and Czech scene during the second half of the 20th century in the field of expressive painting. Because the Czech art arose in different conditions, I explored the changes of this phenomenon separately in these geographical areas, but at the same time I carried out a partial analysis of the works and comparisons with the work of the three chosen artists based on these findings. Subsequently, I analysed the work of the chosen...