Despite being a central figure of Hollywood’s Classical era, Robert Taylor can now be regarded as a ‘lost’ or forgotten screen star, an interesting paradox when considering his continued success and longevity during his career. This thesis presents the first substantial study of Taylor’s star persona, examining its initial construction and subsequent developments from 1934 to 1969. Considering ideas surrounding gender, ageing and film genre, the thesis draws on existing literature on stardom and masculinity, and examines Taylor’s persona within the histories of both Hollywood’s Classical era and mid-20th century America. This helps to place Taylor within the wider industrial, cultural and social contexts in which he worked. Taylor, I argue, presents the model for the ‘perfect’ star because of his ability to consistently fit the film industry across time. While star studies continues to concentrate on more unusual stars, I feel that it is important to discuss what makes a typical star, the kind which Taylor embodied. This typicality, however, did not prevent him enjoying a long and successful career and he remained a popular leading man for 35 years until his death. The complex paradox of Taylor’s persona remaining consistently recognisable while also developing over time allowed him to seemingly seamlessly fit changes within America and the film industry. Furthermore, as he matured he developed a sense of nostalgia strongly connected with Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’. The findings in this thesis are drawn from extensive viewing of most of Taylor’s films and television appearances and the examination of ephemeral material, including magazine covers and press articles, in order to assess Taylor’s on- and off-screen personas and their development over time. The thesis takes a mostly chronological approach, allowing Taylor’s persona to be placed within specific historical moments. Decade overviews are presented alongside detailed case studies covering key genres Taylor worked in. Through doing this, I not only trace Taylor’s star persona over the entirety of his career, but am able to compare his career trajectory and constructed image to other (similar) male stars working at this time. Contextualising my analysis of Taylor’s star persona further allows me to develop ideas around the concepts of male beauty, men as object of the erotic gaze, white American masculinity, and the (somewhat unusual) longevity of a career initially based on a star’s good looks. Most notably, I identify Taylor’s importance to Hollywood cinema by demonstrating how a star persona like his can ‘fit’ so well, and for so long, that it almost becomes invisible, resulting in the star becoming ‘lost’ or forgotten after their career has ended.

This thesis examines horror films through an application of cultural analysis (primarily the work of Pierre Bourdieu) to selected texts in order to answer critics employing psychoanalytic perspectives to horror. It argues that psychoanalysis misses much of the heart of horror texts through its claims that textual 'meaning' lies within individuals rather than in the society in which horror texts were produced. Bourdieu's hypotheses are applied to films, along with the work of more specific horror analysts such as Mark Jancovich, amending and fusing these approaches in order to question psychoanalytic criticism. The thesis argues that a limited academic canon of texts is employed in the (still relatively rare) analysis of horror, and that such a narrowing of the field is inappropriate and limiting. It argues that the study of extreme and banned material in analysis is constructive academically,accessing underground horror production through an extended focus on horror fan culture, following Robin Wood's assertion that horror aficionados form horror's main body of consumers. Through an examination of how fan culture perceives and defends itself, material previously neglected by academia, though potentially of great interest to cultural analysis (such as the underground and banned films) is analysed alongside canonical texts. The thesis focuses mainly on post-1968 films, and so examines the influence of post-Fordist economics and ideals on the texts that it studies, arguing that at every level these structures construct the subtle fears of horror's audiences, delimited through what texts present as frightening. This is developed alongside a consideration of important historical events and cultural ideals surrounding the production of texts. It is argued that such events exert subtle influences during textual creation, and that they help to exacerbate the audience fears that horror films exploit. It is also argued that, with amendment, auteur theory may be applied to some horror directors, despite the majority of internal textual meanings being generated by a film's cultural frame rather than purely its director. Though, through the horror underground and accepted academic canons many types of horror film are considered, especial attention is given to the Slasher and Possession genres, which, it is argued, oppose directly each other's subtextual, ideological agendas. Analysis of other genres and the texts (both canonical and underground/banned)t hat compose them is present throughout the thesis. Underlying all analysis is a consideration of how the mass (British and U. S) media seeks to demonise horror and its consumers, and how legislation against texts and individuals brings together fans in an alternative culture through the fanzines that they read. It is hoped that through such an approach and emphasis on the non-canonical as well as the canonical, future academic analysis of horror will be more comprehensive in its choice of studied texts. This could occur, I suggest, through an acknowledgement that, following Wood, central to the analysis of horror is an understanding of its aficionados and the culture that they forge for themselves.

This thesis uses close textual analysis to examine formal stylistic characteristics located in films that have, since their initial release, gained a reputation for being bad. It provides a framework that allows badness to be examined without subjectivity, further developing the concept of "objective badness" as proposed by J. Hoberman. The films examined are categorised as "badfilm", a term used to describe films that are identified, distinguished, and potentially valued for their incompetence. These claims of badness implicitly assume the audience can recognise the filmmaker's unintentional failure to achieve conventional standards of goodness. Despite this, consideration of intentionality has only recently been briefly addressed. This thesis expands further on concepts of intentionality, recognising this as being crucial in establishing objective badness. There is a tension within badfilm appreciation between enjoyment and critical acknowledgement of the inherent badness. Attempts to reconcile such conflicting responses vary. Films may be described as "so bad they're good," a problematic term with implications that have only recently been adequately considered. Alternatively, audiences downplay badness, favouring instead an auteur approach or adopting avant-garde principles as a way of understanding the unconventional aesthetic apparent in badfilm. Particularly in fan-based writing, due in part to the established reputations of certain films, responses to badfilm largely take for granted the widespread acceptance of badness. Academic responses frequently focus on reception studies, considering badfilm in terms of cult, and its audience as subculture. Consequently, detailed analysis of the ways in which badness and failure function within the films is still needed. Using American productions (1950-1970) that are already established as part of the badfilm canon, this thesis analyses textual characteristics that have been repeatedly cited as evidence of badness. Post-production sound is considered, as is performance, the use of recycled footage, and editing. The failure of individual elements, their failure to support each other, and the resulting incoherence have a direct impact on the film and its reception. In extreme cases, the failure removes the viewer from the "illusion" of cinema, emphasising the technical and mechanical aspects of film production. Objective badness is revealed through dual recognition of both the attempts to be good and the failure to achieve goodness, resulting in a film that exposes its intentions and dismantles immersive potential through an inherent, often excessive, "consistently inconsistent" incoherence. By approaching badfilm in such a way, badness can be accepted as a valuable and lucrative line of academic enquiry, unrestricted by subjectivity and taste.

In this thesis, I explore the ways in which cinematic representations reconstruct and maintain the symbolic power of the global city. Using London as a paradigmatic example, I situate the research in the 1997- 2007 period, the height of the New Labour era in Britain. I investigate the ways in which London’s symbolic power was produced and maintained during this period, using a sociological-thematic analysis of several London-set films, which I categorised by theme. The analysis, which incorporates elements of discourse and social semiotics, demonstrates how these films, with both negative and positive portrayals of the city space, are central in the construction of London as a symbolically significant global city. I discuss the consequences of this symbolic construction of the city in relation to its global image and indeed the ways in which the city is changing as a result of the blurring boundaries between the cinematic and ‘real’ cities. My analysis shows that ‘Glamorous London’, one of the thematic categories I devised, paints a picture of the city through the lens of class and racial homogeneity, and gender normativity, where the principles of neoliberal capitalism dominate the landscape. ‘Glamorous London’ is an exclusive and exclusionary place in which only certain types of individuals who fit these normative stereotypes, are welcome. At the same time, films which relate to the ‘Multi-Cultural London’ thematic category, provide a more bleak and gritty image of the city, where asylum seekers and economic migrants live ‘cheek by jowl’, struggling to survive in the city’s unforgiving underbelly. My analysis shows that Multi-Cultural London films are equally central in painting a picture of a diverse global city which is dynamic, exciting and full of possibilities. The films in this thematic category show the ‘other side’ of London’s global city identity and, more specifically, the city’s success as a global centre for capitalism and, correlatively, the city’s symbolic power as multi-faceted and full of contradictions. This thesis also provides evidence from non-cinematic media as well as from the city’s evolving landscape, to demonstrate that these cinematic trends have farreaching implications beyond cinema and indeed beyond the time period in which the film analysis is located.

This thesis elucidates current industrial and representational tendencies in South Korean films that depict Asian others. Asian others such as migrant workers, marriage migrants, overseas ethnic Koreans and North Korean defectors have become increasingly important in South Korean filmic discourse and practice since 2003. This thesis examines how contemporary Korean cinema has responded to the multicultural society and how it seeks to articulate Korean nationalism in the globalised era through the appropriation of Asian others. Such films are intertwined with governmental policies of multiculturalism and discourses on globalisation and thus reflect historical formations both inside and outside South Korean cinema. In particular, this thesis places the celebration of multicultural identity in Korean cinema into dialogue with existing debates on nationalism and sub-imperialism. Through case studies of selected films, this thesis investigates the tension between a changing society and emerging sub-imperial perspectives. The specific interest of this thesis lies in the examination of historical, geopolitical and socio-cultural trajectory in the representation of Asian others, since this discursive structure has been formed around Asia and its regional socio-political history. In doing so, this thesis aims to shift the discursive sphere of these films, which is limited to the discussion of multiculturalism and globalisation, to an expanded sphere which embraces historical and regional perspectives.

This thesis analyzes the representation of and affects associated with the five class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual, and entrepreneur in the films of the Chinese director Jia Zhangke. They are the descendents of the five main Confucian class figures, and have also been socially, politically, and culturally significant throughout China’s modern history. The questions that guide this analysis include: How are these figures represented? How do their representations and cinematic tropes operate in the films? What feelings do they evoke? To answer these questions, I engage with scholarship in Chinese sociology and visual culture, Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling,” and theories on film phenomenology and affect. I examine Jia’s entire oeuvre (1994-2013), including his shorts, documentaries, narrative films, and advertisements. In the core chapters, I examine each figure’s socio-historical and cultural contexts, its representation in the films, and the cinematic tropes and feelings that are associated with it. I argue that the Maoist figures are in decline and will soon disappear, while the “new” class figures of intellectual and entrepreneur survive and thrive in the Reform era. Regarding cinematic tropes, I analyze the moving portraits, interviews, and constructions of memory for the figure of the worker; for the peasant, I focus on the POV shot, observation, and the gaze; for the soldier, I discuss the figure’s “absent presence” and its degraded appearance in simulacra; for the intellectual, I examine the voice, the pseudomonologue, and the observatory and exploratory lenses; and for the entrepreneur, I explore the close-up, speed, and film as advertisement. Finally, I examine how these figures produce what Raymond Williams describes as “structures of feeling,” and how these various feelings transition over time – from anxiety over the threat of Reform, to decrying its negative effects, to welcoming its opportunities, to finally demanding solutions to the problems it has caused.

Since the early 1990s, Bollywood has witnessed a significant shift from its traditional ‘formulae’, particularly in terms of formal elements (i.e. narrative, themes, mise-en-scène) in its attempt to reach international audiences. The term Masala, often used to refer to all Bollywood films, has become one of the most popular genres of Bollywood. The ‘angry young man’ era of the 1970s and 1980s has lost its popularity in the last two decades as a self-conscious genre cinema has developed in Bollywood. This change has not only influenced genre conventions but also audience expectations. As a result, genres such as horror and science fiction have gained popularity within India and abroad. Despite changes in form and expectation, the critical discourse on Bollywood has mostly retained its focus on the genres of ‘classical’ Bollywood and its ‘golden era’. These shifts in Bollywood in the new millennium require re-visiting our understanding of this cinema. One of my central arguments is that horror and science fiction have developed through a process of Bollywoodization while the dominant discourse often credits Indianization as the main factor. Bollywoodization, in this case, refers to the transnational cinematic shifts in which genre conventions from other industries are appropriated to a specific Bollywood style. This thesis aims to expand the understanding of genre cinema in Bollywood whilst claiming it as what Tom Ryall has called a ‘cinema of genres’.

This study deals with the influence of film form in fiction in terms of narrative discourse, focusing on issues of genre, narration, temporality, and the imitation of cinematic techniques. It provides a theoretical analysis of different methodologies (intermediality theory, semiotics, narratology, genre theory) which are useful to assess how a cinematic dimension has found a place in literary writing. This research, in particular, puts forth the idea of a 'para-cinematic narrator', a 'flattening of the narrative relief', and a 'para-cinematic narrative contract' as constitutive items of strongly cinematised fiction. These three theoretical items are subsumed in the concept of 'cinematic mode in fiction', which describes a distillation of characteristics of the film form on the written page. This research therefore represents a theoretical attempt to demonstrate how the cinematic component integrates the stylistic and generic traits of novels and short stories relating to different periods, styles and genres of the twentieth century. The proposed theoretical model is tested on a corpus of American, French, and, especially, Italian case studies. The remediation of film that emerges from these texts points to a complex interconnection between cinema and literature which still requires full acknowledgment in literary history.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, the government of the United States of America declared a ‘War on Terror’. This was targeted not only at the ostensible culprits – al-Qaeda - but at ‘terror’ itself. The ‘War on Terror’ acted as a rhetorical ‘metaframe’, which was sufficiently flexible to incorporate a broad array of nominally-related policies, events, phenomena and declarations, from the Iraq war to issues of immigration. The War on Terror is strategically limitless, and therefore incorporates not only actual wars, but potential wars. For example, the bellicose rhetoric towards those countries labelled the ‘Axis of Evil’ or ‘Outposts of Tyranny’ is as much a manifestation of the metaframe as the ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing of Baghdad. As a rhetorical frame, it is created through all of its utterances; its narrative may have been initially scripted by the Bush administration, but it is reified and naturalised by the news media and other commentators, who adopt the frame’s language even when critical of its content. Moreover, film and television texts participate in this process, with fiction-based War on Terror narratives sharing and supporting – co-constituting – the War on Terror discourse’s ‘reality’. This thesis argues that the War on Terror metaframe manifests itself in multiple interconnected narrative forms, and these forms both transcode and affect its politics. I propose a congruency between the frame’s expansiveness and its associational interconnections, and a corresponding cinematic plot-structure I term the Global Network Narrative. Elsewhere, an emphasis on the pressures of clock-time is evoked by the real-time sequential-series 24, while the authenticity and authority implied by the embedded ‘witness’ is shown to be codified and performed in multiple film and television fiction texts. Throughout, additional contextual influences – social, historical, and technological – are introduced where appropriate, so as not to adopt the metaframe’s claims of limitlessness and uniqueness, while efforts are made to address film and television not as mutually exclusive areas of study, but as suggestively responsive to one another.

As posthumanism has developed in the last twenty-five years there has been hesitation in elucidating a robust posthumanist engagement with the body. My thesis redresses this gap in the literature in three intertwined ways. First, it is a critical assessment of posthumanism broadly, focusing on how the body is read in its discourse and how there is a continuation of a humanist telos in terms which revolve around the body. Second, it is a philosophical interrogation, adaptation, and transformation of aspects of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, focusing its reading on Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, with additional material drawn from his works on language, aesthetics, and ontology. Third, it is a critical analysis of four films drawn from that seemingly most posthumanist of genres, science fiction: Cronenberg's eXistenZ, Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Rusnak's The Thirteenth Floor, and Oshii's Ghost in the Shell. Science fiction is the meeting place of popular and critical posthumanist imaginaries as the vast majority of texts on posthumanism (in whatever form) ground their analyses in a science fiction of some kind. By reading posthumanism through the work of Merleau-Ponty I outline a posthumanist ontology of corporeality which both demonstrates the limitations of how posthumanism has done its analyses of the body and elucidates an opening and levelling not adequately considered in posthumanist analyses of the body. Following Merleau-Ponty I argue that there is a ‘belongingness of the body to being and the corporeal relevance of every being’, yet, the body is not the singular purview of the human. There are alternative embodiments and bodies which have been previously overlooked and that all bodies (be they embodied organically, technologically, virtually or otherwise) are corporeal.