I explore the sensuous, kinaesthetic experience and analysis of screen dance and the interconnectivity between our bodies, film, and heightened embodied sensibility. This physicality creates a dialogue between the rich diversity of screen dance genres under consideration, thereby avoiding hierarchical classifications. It also focuses attention on more abstract cinematic qualities, investigating how cinematic technique (as well as thematic content) generates emotional impact; allowing for the enjoyment of film as a material and sensual medium. However, since our senses have been trained according to the regulatory controls within our socio-historical/cultural contexts, equal attention is given to the ideology of representation, and to the links between embodiment, identities, meanings, and broader relations of inequality. I am particularly interested in how dance and film can function politically, both expressing and disrupting norms and ideologies. But I am also interested in how the presence of dance (and/or choreographed movement) can enhance a film's agency and its ability to cross time and space, “touching” the viewer and thereby working to transform historical objectification into embodied interaction. I combine a phenomenological lived-body experience of viewing with the epistemological functions that characterise it, using my own somatically felt body as a methodological starting point and a creative practice, and theoretical text-based and socio-historical contextual analyses. This balance between lived-experience and critical discussion is used to explore chapters on the deconstruction of national, cultural, and gendered identity through Flamenco dance and film; dance and physical disability; and avant-garde feminist screendance. A final chapter brings these key themes together by investigating how (psychiatric) disability, feminism, and national identity are treated in a contemporary Hollywood dance film. Whilst embodied perception is never “innocent” and always shaped, I show how the movement of affect and emotion between the film and viewer's body can constitute an ethical experience, encouraging progressive and self-reflexive political and ideological engagement.

This thesis discusses the intersection of subjectivity and the liminal in contemporary literary and filmic texts. In discussion of eight texts, the thesis weighs the dual meaning of “liminal subjectivities” – the liminal space between subjectivities, and the condition of subjectivity as it negotiates the liminal. It aims to explore how liminality manifests in manners both universal and specific to the literary or filmic form, in the embodiments of characters, and the rhythms and poetics of the text. It considers the liminal a privileged trope of destabilised subjectivity, a space of suspension and potentiality, and explores how the liminal functions as an interface between haecceity and otherness; whether it binds together or holds apart; if it is a space between oppositional states or a continuum of specific sites of intensity. The eight texts discussed are The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo (W. G. Sebald), Sputnik Sweetheart, Kafka on the Shore, and After Dark (Haruki Murakami), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry), My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant). The work of Sebald and Gondry is considered in translation from the original German and Japanese. The thesis considers both literary and filmic texts to contrast the salient modalities of subjectivity that each form constructs. Each chapter considers how liminality manifests at the surface of the text, how a liminal agency operates to interrupt, destabilise, and displace subjectivity in the spaces between languages, genre, form, voice, states of consciousness, word and image, facticity and fictionality, and cinematic and literary tropes and modes. The discussion explores how this is reflected and expanded upon within the text, in liminal embodiments, intensities, and motifs, such as the hypnagogic, rites of passage, the uncanny, home, the vespertine, night, metamorphosis, carnival, as well as issues of space – the non-place, the extraterritorial, and nomadic space.

This thesis examines the work of Greek postmodern filmmaker Nikos Nikolaidis with a specific focus on female representation. I examine Nikolaidis as an auteur and I trace elements throughout his oeuvre that contribute to the formation of his authorial signature. Nikolaidis’s work is autobiographical and highly political. Nikolaidis’s cinema does not abide by the traditional theories of ‘Greekness’, and his main influences are American cinema, and specifically for film noir, rock ‘n’ roll culture and his antiauthoritarian ideology. All these elements are combined together within his work through the use of pastiche. I examine Nikolaidis’s work according to Richard Dyer’s notion of pastiche. Through pastiche he expresses nostalgia for rock ‘n’ roll culture and film noir, but also he expresses his concern for the future. Nikolaidis pastiches a selection of film genres and specific films in order to appropriate the elements that interest him. His pastiche work shows that the filmmaker addresses cineliterate audiences that would ideally understand his dialogue with the different genres and films he pastiches. With regards to female representation in Nikolaidis’s films, women are given leading roles, exhibit varying degrees of agency, and are presented as stronger and more powerful than men. However, their representations remain paradoxical, complex and misogynistic. While on the one hand, women are portrayed as powerful, independent, and able to subvert patriarchy, on the other hand, they are often used as props, rendering their representation inconsistent and problematic. Nikolaidis differentiates and juxtaposes two types of women throughout his work: the powerful women versus the unimportant women. Those who do not conform to the powerful female characteristics are characterised within the second category. Since Nikolaidis was highly influenced by film noir, his female protagonists pastiche the classic film noir figure of the femme fatale.

In this dissertation I focus on the cultural transformations and renewal apparent in the films of Godard, Resnais, Varda and Tati in the period 1954-1968. I contend that the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962) – also known as the Algerian War of Independence – contributed to eroding the myth of Résistancialisme and engendered, especially in the generation young enough to be drafted, an initially confused but nevertheless sincere quest for a cause or a Revolution to believe in. This is depicted in the films of Godard, Resnais and Vautier chosen for study here. I also maintain that the aforementioned quest and related cultural, societal and ideological transformations contributed to the events of May 1968. While May 68 is generally considered to have been unforeseen, it was, with hindsight, clearly foreshadowed in the films I have chosen to study. During this period it was not only Algerians but also women who were engaged in a struggle for equality and civil rights, not least of all the right to corporal freedom through fair and legal access to contraception and abortion. Momentous changes in laws governing women and their social status was achieved through sustained challenges to dominant power structures and ideology: therefore, I complement the aforementioned theses by deploying sexual-linguistics and Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva’s challenges to Lacanian psychoanalysis in an analysis of Varda’s films to portray these transformations and argue that women are not excluded from the Logos, but rather can be considered to be the very point of origin of the symbolic order and language itself. Moving towards May 68, I conclude by applying Bakhtin’s theories on the role of laughter and Rabelaisian carnival to four of Jacques Tati’s films of this era, which, I argue, offer representations of a growing collective folk movement and are redolent with the symbolism of historic renewal, therefore also pointing forward to the solidarity and rebellion that typified May 68. Finally, I conclude that the films included in my dissertation, when considered together, have the distinct advantage of portraying an insight into the many momentous cultural and societal transformations taking place in a chapter of modern French history more commonly described as ‘quiet’.

This thesis provides a critical account of contemporary female sports films. The research presented here is interdisciplinary in nature as it is situated in relation to (feminist) discourses around women and/in sport as well as women and/in cinema. Taking into account the embodied, discursive and psychic dimensions of identity and subjectivity, I investigate the ‘troubling’ implications of female athleticism within cinematic representation. Focusing on fictional, feature-length films, I provide insight as to the wider generic contexts in which depictions of female athleticism take place (i.e., the (male) sports film, the action cinema, melodrama and the musical). I explore the kinds of (heroic) narratives constructed around athletic female protagonists as well as the significance of the display of athletic female bodies ‘in action’. This allows me to provide insights as to the identities and subject positions (re-)constituted and privileged by these films. I additionally discuss the ways in which depictions of the athletic female body and its active physicality complicate (conceptualisations of) cinematic spectatorship. The film analyses are underpinned by a concern about female spectatorship in particular – about the relationship between the female spectator and the athletic female bodies on screen – and about the pleasures and anxieties cinematic depictions of female athleticism might provide.

The thesis is a qualitative account of the much neglected issues of the bottom-up, and interconnected organization of the Cross-Industry Network (CIN) phenomena within the Audiovisual Sector (AVS). The aims are achieved by exploring the why and how of the independent screen content producers in developing CIN during the production process. By conceptualizing the CIN phenomenon as a Complex Adaptive System (CAS), I used its theories as analogies to analyze the multi-case and multi-level studies conducted at two scenarios of independent TV production sector in the UK/ the developed, and the independent film production sector in Taiwan/the developing. My research produced the following four conclusions. 1. From Top-Down Industry Disintegration to Bottom-up Production Reconfiguration The industrial disintegration of the media industry has resulted in the reconfiguration of content production networks and intense self-adaptation of creative producers who are facing multi-directional connections within the CIN during their production process. Such adaptation reveals tensions between the producers’ self-perception as ‘independent’ and ‘creative’ producers and their networking decisions and actions. 2. From Managing the Creative Project to Managing the Creative and Commercial Venture The evolution of the CIN in the creative and media production is not entirely top-down/linear/serial, but more accurately, bottom-up/ non-linear/parallel. These internal self-organizing dynamics enable the production network to radiate outwardly, which induces trade-offs between and beyond commercial and creative priorities. 3. From Distribution-led Value System to Production-led Microcosm The production process has evolved its own diverse CIN, involving different types of relationships, a higher degree of complexity and structural tensions inherent in the value-creating system. Such production-led networking functions are the most fundamental source for developing broader CIN and the economic return for creative producers. 4. From Network Adaptation to Complex Adaptive System The networking activities of independent and creative producers radiate and interact outwards to connect and affect all levels of the network, resulting in unexpected directions and complex collaborations. In particular, the elements of multi-directional adaptation and tensions of the involved network actors have an important impact on the emergence and organization of the network. The main contributions of the research are firstly to have taken a bottom-up analysis by integrating the micro-level organizational complexity of the independent production into the theorizing about the AVS; and secondly, to have placed the intangible values and real practice of creative producers at the centre of the network study.

The relationship between television institutions and film in Britain has a complex history, influenced by profound changes in both industries over time. The involvement of public service broadcasters (PSBs) in British cinema has been a regularly-acknowledged, but under-examined phenomenon. There is a dearth of up-to-date scholarship dealing with the relationship, particularly as it unfolded over the turbulent decades of the 1990s and 2000s. This thesis updates and expands the existing field on the relationship between British television and film cultures. It does so by examining the ways in which PSBs have been involved in film culture, as producers, distributors and exhibitors. It also discusses the significant changes to this relationship wrought by the coming into dominance of digital technologies, and the responses of the PSBs to digitalisation. The body of the thesis is separated into two parts. Part One examines the relationship between television and film at the end of the analogue era, ending roughly in 2002. The first chapter explores the historical background to television films in Britain, discussing the semantic turn from describing single dramas shown on television as ‘plays’ and ‘films’. The second chapter outlines three case studies which explore the relationship between television and distribution. The third chapter discusses the industrial relationship between film and television, and the distinct discourses of ‘quality’ applied to each form. The second part of the thesis discusses the effects of digital technologies on the PSB’s role as producer, distributor and exhibitor of films. Chapter Four explores the position of the PSB as patron of low-budget, digital production schemes. In Chapter Five, the opening night and subsequent decade of broadcasting on the FilmFour digital television channel is analysed. Chapter Six takes as its subject the online film output of the BBC, particularly via its iPlayer platform, and its short film distribution network, the BBC Film Network.

This thesis examines creative industries policy in film and television in Scotland. It explores the impact that different approaches to creative industries policy have on creative practice in two media industries, BBC Scotland and Scottish Screen, and reflects on how each of these bodies articulates its role as a „national‟ institution. BBC Scotland is the Scottish branch of the UK‟s largest public service broadcaster, while Scottish Screen exists on a far smaller scale, to serve the screen industries in Scotland. The thesis examines the role of BBC Scotland in sustaining the creative economy and contributing to the cultural life of Scotland. The study of Scottish Screen examines a key early aim of the agency, that of establishing a national film studio. The work investigates the connections between UK and Scottish levels of creative industries policy in light of the debates over the future of public service broadcasting and the Scottish Executive‟s cultural policy framework. The study outlines how ideas of cultural creativity and its economic significance have developed, charts how these ideas have affected policy debate, and explores the extent to which devolution has affected film and television policy. By mapping the historical, sociological and political terrain, the research analyses the specificity of Scotland within the UK context and explores areas in which ideas of „the national‟ become problematic. In order to investigate how policy has impacted on the production of creative goods, a further three case studies are explored. These are the feature film Red Road (Arnold, 2006), an independent production company called The Comedy Unit, and a BBC Scotland television series, River City (BBC, 2002-date). The work concludes with an examination of the impact of contemporary policy developments, including the establishment of Creative Scotland and the Scottish Broadcasting Commission.

This study is an investigation into the shifts in ways of knowing which have been subsumed under the label of postmodernism. More specifically, it is concerned to relate theories of Postmodernism to the construction of film as an object of knowledge and to feminism's place in a Modernist/postmodernist divide. Chapter One offers an examination of competing readings of the nature of aesthetic Modernism drawing primarily upon debates on Modernist epistemological legitimation advanced by Jurgen Habermas and Jean-Franicois Lyotard. Chapter Two utilizes Lyotard's notion of Modernism as knowledge legitimated by the grands recits of speculation and emancipation to propose a understanding of the conceptual parameters of avant-garde film Modernism. Chapter Three examines Lyotard's view that postmodernism is acondition of cultural 'incredulity towards metanarratives' by introducing feminist interventions into avant-garde Modernism: it is argued that feminist deconstructionist film plays a crucial role in delegitimating film practices brought under the metanarrative of speculation by challenging the non-gendered mode of spectatorial knowledge claimed for them. Chapter Four extends postmodernist critiques of 'totalizing' discourses to the grand recit of liberty, and advances the view that feminist deconstructiorism, and related psychoanalytical theories of female subjectivity/spectatorship, are in turn delegitimated for instrumentalizing and homogenizing the feminist 'social bond'. Chapter Five considers Lyotard's propositions for a fragmentation of Modernist models of the 'social bond' in relation to his proposal for a theory of resistance defined in terms of 'dissensual paralogy'. Within the context of cultural and technological shifts in contemporary image-culture, the usefulness of a theory of postmodernism which remains embedded within Modernist epistemological differentiations is questioned. A proposal for a theory of film postmodernism which dispenses with the avantgarde/mass culture binary is suggested as a prerequisite for clearing a theoretical space for a politics of resistance which is not founded on instrumentalized and homogeneous spectators. Chapter Six extends this to consider how postmodernist notions of the dissolution of the 'self' and the fragmentation of 'social bond' relate to feminist emancipatory claims. A parallel to the theoretical 'loss' of Modernist foundationalisms; is offered by drawing on black and lesbian perspectives on film spectatorship to argue for theories of film meaning which reflect a multiplicity of modes of spectatorial positioning. The study concludes with an assessment of feminism's place in critiques of totalizing discourses and argues for local contextual rather than metanarrative validations of film as critical discourse.

This thesis sets out to investigate the relationship between the ‘classical apocalypse’ and the contemporary apocalypse as portrayed by the films A Clockwork Orange (1971), Apocalypse Now (1979) and Crash (1995). The ‘classical apocalypse’ is a literary genre which supplies a rich and vivid imagery where the image takes precedence over the narrative. At the centre of the ‘classical apocalypse’ is the image, and this thesis explores it the imagery of apocalypse can be translated from its traditional literary form to the visual form of film. The apocalypse is a revealing of that which has been concealed and which lies in the future of humankind at the end of time. In the postmodern era with the absence of meaning, apocalypse and God, the apocalypse has become a nihilistic repetition and the revealing has become feared since it might be a revealing of nothing. These contemporary depictions of the end, I would argue, help the apocalypse to come into its own in a postmodern setting, and the medium of film offers a possibility to further emphasise the visuality and potent imagery of the end, expressing the concerns of the apocalypse fully. As such they provide a ‘sense of an ending’ and an apocalyptic sentiment which is an unnerving and evasive as the ‘classical apocalypse’. These films revisit as well as revamp and rehearse the imagery of the Biblical apocalypse, becoming a-theological statements if not on the Bible, on the state of society and the apocalypse.