This thesis investigates the persistence of blackface in Hollywood's early sound era 1927-1953. It establishes the extensive and complex nature of this persistence against previous historical accounts of its decline after the introduction of sound. Specifically this thesis considers the overlooked phenomenon of co-presence where blackface was juxtaposed with the increased visibility of African-Americans in Hollywood film. It argues that the primary historical significance of the persistence of blackface lies in its involvement in, and exposure of, the formal stereotyping of African Americans in film. The thesis is founded on research which identified 124 blackface films and on viewings of 75 of these films. Primarily the argument is advanced on the basis of close textual analysis. In addition to its theoretical engagement with key positions on blackface and related areas the thesis also makes use of secondary sources in order to establish the historical context behind its persistence in film. Principle areas discussed include the formal practices used to racially mark African Americans in film, co-presence in the films of Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, and blackface and the racial containment of African-American vernacular dance and music. This thesis contributes to an understanding of the place of blackface in Hollywood history by setting down what is, to the best of its author's knowledge, the most extensive account to date of its persistence in the early sound era. In doing so it brings new material to the debates on the 'nature' of blackface and argues that current attempts to revise understandings of its racial bias may be misguided. In conclusion this thesis finds that the case study of co-presence indicates that one explanation for the longevity of Hollywood's African-American stereotypes lies in the sheer density of their textual construction.

This is a study of Soviet montage cinema and the British documentary movement of the 1930s which brings together two usually divergent methodologies: postcolonial theory and "new" film history. The first chapter develops new insights into Eisenstein's October and Vertov's The Man With the Movie Camera, The second analyses two less well-known Vertov films, One Sixth of the Earth and Three Songs of Lenin, from the perspective of postcolonial theory, The third considers Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia and traces its reception in both the Soviet Union and England. The fourth and fifth chapters expand general issues and themes raised by the first two, and pursue specific questions raised by the third. These final chapters resituate the work of the British documentary movement in relation to the culture of British imperialism. This shift of focus entails the analysis of the production and contemporary critical reception of a number of films which have been marginalised in most retrospective historical accounts of the movement. By recontextualising these two groups of films, this study attempts to demonstrate how their various representations of the non-Western world are intertwined with and necessarily involve considering other issues, such as: periodisation within film history; the "influence" of Soviet montage on the British documentary movement; the construction of authorship; the division between "high" and "low" culture; the relationship between politics and film aesthetics; the postcolonial challenge to Marxism; cinematic internationalism. The first two chapters also integrate an ongoing critique of certain trends within post-1968 film theory and criticism, which developed in close association with a retrieval and revaluation of Soviet montage cinema and Soviet avant-garde culture of the 1920s, One of the aims of this thesis is to question some of the assumptions of this work, whilst at the same time demonstrating that historical research, even as it attempts to reconstruct former contexts, need not consign its objects of study to the past, but can be used instead to raise questions relevant to the present. In this respect, the thesis tries to remain closer to the spirit of post-1968 than does much of the more recent, "new" historical research into Soviet cinema and the British documentary movement, to which it is nevertheless greatly indebted.

This study offers a cultural studies reading of race, gender and nation as represented in three thematic sub-genres of contemporary German film production. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that each of these thematic sub-genres offers a unique insight into the cultural construction of a distinct, yet problematic and porous umbrella identity enjoying a particular cultural currency in post-Wall Germany. It should be noted that, in this respect, this study represents a move away from these traditional diachronic analyses of German film, which attempt a snapshot of an entire history filmic production, towards a more clearly delineated, synchronic analysis of a single contemporary moment – namely, the 1990s. The first of these thematic sub-genres concerns the ambiguous romantic narratives of the sexually autonomous yet avowedly post-feminist New German Comedy women. As a significant sub-genre of the popular New German Comedy film of the early 1990s, these films embody a clear structural reliance on the narrative norms of a classic, mainstream cinema. In contrast, the cinematic representations East(ern) Germany, past and present, incorporate a myriad of generic forms and registers in their explorations of the meaning of reunification for eastern German populations, from up-beat comic road movies to psycho-allegorical tales of internal disquiet. The third area of this study concerns itself with the representation of Turkish-German populations in 1990s German cinema. As eclectic as the cinematic representations of the East, the work of these Turkish-German filmmakers appears to offer a troubling cinematic trajectory from abused and exploited first generation Gastarbeiter to self-assured and recalcitrant street-tough Kanaksta.

In conclusion, we have seen how defining the national language has changed since late 1980s, and the cyborgian and hybridised language use have become more clearer than ever and enable the construction of individual, rather than collective, subjectivity. Secondly, the popular memories expressed in film forms are transformed onto cultural memories that organise and re-invigorate the discourse of Taiwanese subjectivity. Thirdly, due to historical bearing, the self-conflicting territorial sovereignty discourse of Republic of China in Taiwan make itself more and more difficult to define Taiwan's national identity. We also find Taiwan's cultural policy is interwoven with economic and political policies, and a slower pace might evolve when Taiwan confront the issues of national and cultural identity today.

The thesis analyses representations of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ and dominant postapartheid themes in South African films between 1987 and 2014. The term South African films or cinema is used to encompass films that are co-produced between South Africa and other nations, as well as films that may find their South African articulation only in content and narrative composition. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ scholarship, the thesis sets out to explore whether a new structure of feeling can be identified in post-apartheid films. The thesis also engages trauma in the post-apartheid films about the ‘Rainbow Nation’. In being able to identify how new South African films show and grapple with post-apartheid identities as ‘acting out’, ‘working through’ and ‘making sense’ of the past, the thesis concludes that post-apartheid films are in some ways critical of the past and in other ways, hopeful for the future. However, the more the country settles into its new national identities, the more variations are present in filmic representations and the more possibilities exist for seeing the complexities of post-apartheid cinema. The thesis is divided into three sections and follows a thematic approach as well as a form of periodisation that has not been used in previous scholarship about South African cinema. Section One considers the moment before the end of apartheid in the films A Dry White Season (Euzhan Palcy, 1989), Cry Freedom (Richard Attenborough, 1987) and Mapantsula (Oliver Schmitz, 1988). Section Two is constituted of two chapters which focus on the representations of the end of apartheid, trauma, guilt and ‘acting out’ seen in the films Red Dust (Tom Hooper, 2004), In My Country (John Boorman, 2004), Forgiveness (Ian Gabriel, 2004), Zulu Love Letter (Ramadan Suleman, 2004), Disgrace (Steve Jacobs, 2008) and Skoonheid (Oliver Hermanus, 2011). Section Three explores the possibility of a new structure of feeling through analysis of the representations of youth identities and coming to terms with the past in Hijack Stories (Oliver Schmitz, 2001), Tsotsi (Gavin Hood, 2005) and Disgrace (Steve Jacobs, 2008). In the final chapter, the films Disgrace (Steve Jacobs, 2008), Fanie Fourie’s Lobola (Henk Pretorius, 2013) and Elelwani (Ntshavheni wa Luruli, 2012) are analysed to show how traditions and rituals are fashioned as important, unexpected vehicles, through which to navigate emergent post-apartheid South Africa and its identities.

This thesis examines cultural policy for film in Scotland, from 1997 to 2010. It explores the extent to which the industry is shaped by film policy strategies and through the agency of public funding bodies. It reflects on how Scottish Screen, Scotland’s former screen agency, articulated its role as a national institution concerned with both commercial and cultural remits, with the conflicting interests of different industry groups. The study examines how the agency developed funding schemes to fulfil policy directives during a tumultuous period in Scottish cultural policy history, following the establishment of the Scottish Parliament with the Scotland Act 1998 and preceding the Independence Referendum Act 2013. In order to investigate how policy has shaped the development of a national film industry, a further two case studies are explored. These are Tartan Shorts, Scotland’s former flagship short film scheme, and the Audience Development Fund, Scotland’s first project based film exhibition scheme. The first study explores the planning, implementation and evaluation of the scheme as part of the agency’s talent development strategy. The outcomes of this study show the potential impact of funding methods aimed at developing and retaining Scottish filmmaking talent. Thereafter, the Scottish exhibition sector is discussed; a formerly unexplored field within film policy discussions and academic debate. It outlines Scottish Screen’s legacy to current film exhibition funding practices and the practical mechanisms the agency utilised to foster Scottish audiences. By mapping the historical and political terrain, the research analyses the specificity of Scotland within the UK context and explores areas in which short-term, context-driven policies become problematic. The work concludes by presenting the advantages and issues caused by film funding practices, advocating what is needed for the film industry in Scotland today with suggestions for long-term and cohesive policy development.

This thesis examines the films made by Jean-Luc Godard, both alone and in collaboration with others, between 1967 and 1972. Whereas previous accounts have characterised these films as a relatively unified phase of Godard’s career, both thematically and formally, I argue that they can best be understood not as one consistent project but as the exploration of a number of different approaches to political cinema, and as a dynamic interaction between a highly idiosyncratic filmmaker and a changing political and cultural landscape before, during and after the events of May 1968. Working within the framework of a historical poetics of cinema, the thesis weaves together three main strands. Firstly, it studies the themes and subject matter that the films address. Many of these derive from the ideas and actions of various Maoist groups, whose opposition to official communism could be understood as paralleling Godard’s cinematic innovations, but the films also refer to debates about the form and function of political art that were current in this period. Secondly, the thesis analyses the ways in which this referential material is shaped by the films’ formal and stylistic practices. Godard uses a number of organisational principles to structure his work at both the local and global levels, and the interplay of these formal systems, sometimes complementing, sometimes conflicting with one another, produces a wide range of effects that both support and transform the films’ political meanings. Thirdly, the thesis considers some proximate sources of the aesthetic practices of Godard and his collaborators. While many of these films revise and repurpose devices from Godard’s previous work, they also draw on techniques originated by earlier filmmakers, most notably the theory and practice of the Soviet director Dziga Vertov. Making reference to a range of original documents, some of them translated into English for the first time, this thesis offers a detailed and comprehensive account of a portion of Godard’s career that has been neglected in recent years, with a methodological approach that enables it to shed new light on a diverse and challenging group of films.

This thesis examines Slow Cinema, a stylistic trend within contemporary art cinema, although one with a longer pre-history. Its distinguishing characteristics pertain ultimately to narration: the films, minimalistic by design, retard narrative pace and elide causality. Specifically, its aesthetic features include a mannered use of the long take and a resolute emphasis on dead time; devices fostering a mode of narration that initially appears baffling, cryptic and genuinely incomprehensible and offers, above all, an extended experience of duration on screen. This contemporary current emerges from a historical genealogy of modernist art films that for decades distended cinematic temporality and, furthermore, from the critical and institutional debates that attended to it. This thesis, therefore, investigates Slow Cinema in its two remarkable aspects: firstly, as an aesthetic practice, focusing on the formal aspects of the films and their function in attaining a contemplative and ruminative mode of spectatorship; and, secondly, as a historical critical tradition and the concomitant institutional context of the films’ mode of exhibition, production and reception. As the first sustained work to treat Slow Cinema both as an aesthetic mode and as a critical discourse with historical roots and a Janus-faced disposition in the age of digital technologies, this thesis argues that the Slow Cinema phenomenon can best be understood via an investigation of an aesthetic experience based on nostalgia, absurd humour and boredom, key concepts that will be explored in respective case studies. My original contribution to knowledge is, therefore, a comprehensive account of a global current of cultural practice that offers a radical and at times paradoxical reconsideration of our emotional attachment and intellectual engagement with moving images. The introduction chapter begins with a discussion of the Slow Cinema debate and then establishes the aims of the thesis, its theoretical framework and elaborates on the adopted methodologies, namely formal analysis and aesthetic historiography. Chapter 2 examines Béla Tarr in light of the evolution of the long take and attributes Tarr’s use of this aesthetic device as a nostalgic revision of modernist art cinema. Chapter 3 explores the films of Tsai Ming-liang, which embrace incongruous aesthetic features, envision an absurdist view of life, create humour through duration and are situated within the minimalist trends of the international film festival circuit. Chapter 4 focuses on Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose films emerge from the aftermath of the collapse of a domestic film industry and intervene into its historical heritage by adopting fundamental features of boredom as well as transforming its idleness into an aesthetically rewarding experience. The conclusion chapter incorporates the case studies by stressing the role of Slow Cinema within the complex negotiations taking place between indigenous filmmaking practices and the demands of global art cinema audiences as well as the circulation of art films through networks of film festivals and their respective funding bodies.

This thesis explores how selected contemporary U.S. and Chilean films and television shows depict political torture, in relation to visual documentation of factual cases. The films explore the uneasy complicity in seeing or watching torture, which concerns both the spectacle of cinema, the nature of torture as well as the position of the audience or witness. Casting a wider net on the definition of torture, I suggest that these media products can help broaden our comprehension of the event torture, in its collective and emotional dimension, its long-term social effects as well as its links to other cultural concepts. Moving beyond dominant and limiting frameworks based on representation and identification, this thesis integrates affect, film and media theory with textual analysis. Some of these films and television shows offer a public and emotional space to explore subject positions crucial to acknowledge a sense of social pain, often missing in official accounts. These films’ heterogeneous aesthetic responses speak to a similar set of epistemological and ontological queries, which are fundamentally related to the truth claims of images. In its inherent need for an ethical stand and trust in documented truth, torture offers a research axis to discuss current anxieties regarding the reliability of visual evidence, coinciding with a historical moment that interrogates (moving) images’ powers and reliability to document the real. Ethical questions regarding documentation are reconfigured in epistemological terms. If vision is problematic as means of verification, how do the films pursue authenticity, and what kind of truth do they offer? Responding to current interventions regarding the nature of the cinematic medium, the films propose a new poetics of the real that does not rely primarily on visual evidence. I argue that in a situation of contested, censored or plainly missing documentation, these films produce a “cine-poetic archive,” images that highlight both their constructedness and their roots in the historical real. In this way, the films help understand something fundamental about how we relate to our current reality through our images.

This thesis investigates the employment of the transforming body in contemporary television and film investigating how these particular media operate as models of instruction and guidance in a political manner. The transforming body is examined within a framework constructed upon specific key theories that include: Foucault’s sociological and political analysis of the manipulation of the body; Kristeva’s exploration of the abject body and contemporary anthropological studies of the body’s meaning and function in Western culture. These theories are used to execute in-depth analysis of particular case studies that demonstrate how management of the transforming body in the text performs as the most fundamental unit of social control. The concept of ‘governance’ as the dispersal of political responsibility from institutions of authority down to the individual, are therefore revealed at work in contemporary reality TV and documentary. The first chapter of the thesis places the case studies in their theoretical context in order to comprehend how popular TV texts reveal the mechanisms of social control despite a facade of trivial entertainment. These are then placed in their historical, industrial, cultural and political context in order to appreciate how their form and function have altered over time and also to understand why the media, and more specifically TV and film, are used as instruments of dispersal and enforcement. The second chapter interrogates the reality TV text The Swan (Galen Productions, Living TV, 2006 – 2009), which demonstrates the use of plastic surgery and body modification as a form of manipulation that is predominantly aimed at women. The reaction of feminism, examined in its own historical and political context, reveals its struggle to come to terms with and reinterpret the concept of cosmetic procedures as ‘empowering’ women rather than suppressing their freedom. Associated with this is the analysis of how cinematic genre conventions are employed by reality TV as persuasive devices thereby exposing the ideological apparatus of governance at work. The third chapter looks at the notion of the ethical body, as used in reality TV and documentary, as a model of instruction and guidance to convince the mass audience of correct and moral behaviour. The two case studies compare and contrast the use of the ideologically bound transforming body in Supersize vs. Superskinny (Remarkable Television, Channel 4, UK, 2007-) and the politically active one in Supersize Me (Morgan Spurlock, Kathbur Pictures, 2007) that also emphasise the difference in intention and social weight between reality TV and documentary. The fourth chapter incorporates the significance of fashion and its impact on the contemporary body. How to Look Good Naked (Maverick Television, Channel 4, 2008 -) appears to allow women the freedom to enjoy fashion without the restrictions of ideal images. The concept of the carnivalesque body present in the programme expresses it as universal and communal and so undermines the isolating and self-centred ‘projects of the self’ that are promoted in the other texts. Examination of the use of the transforming body in these TV and film texts form a comprehensive and thorough interpretation of how it operates as an instructional guide on how to look and live and therefore as an agent of governance, previously unavailable in other academic work.