This thesis discusses the use of pop songs in narrative films, with particular attention paid to their role in characterisation. My argument concerns the potential for pop to retain its specificity as a certain type of music whilst it carries out functions normally attributed to a composed score. Many commentators have assumed that, because a song may be known before it is used in a film, its narrative meanings are "pre-packaged". I combine an appreciation of pop music's propensity to come to a film already 'known' with an attempt to demonstrate how individual narratives ask songs to perform different affective roles. It is my contention that pop music's quality of 'knownness' is fundamental to its narrative affect in films, without, however, pre-determining that affect. I argue my case through close textual analysis, discussing the relationship between real-life pop stars' musical personas and the film characters they are asked to play, as well as offering numerous examples of songs without an on-screen performer becoming involved in processes of filmic narration.

This dissertation examines the relationship between the French Communist Party (PCF) and French cinema between 1944 and 1999. The approach adopted is an historical and political one, exploring the context behind the changing relations between the Party and the film industry. Both institutions have played a crucial part in the weaving of the political and cultural fabric of the country throughout the period. For both the PCF and French cinema, the Liberation marked a new beginning and a new relationship with the French state. Looking closely at the French Communist outlets over four key periods - the Liberation and the Cold War, the New Republic, May '68 and the 1990s -, the evolution of the positions of the PCF regarding both film as an industry and film as an art-form is examined with particular emphasis on the links and the differences between the film policy advocated by the PCF and its critical discourse on French cinema. Since 1944 and PCF has kept a close watch on France's film industry, participating, from the Blum-Byrne agreements to the demonstrations against the MAI, in every battle for its defence. The unique blend of State involvement in film matters and professional resilience in the face of foreign competition which defines French cinema today owes much to this Communist involvement. Yet in spite of this continuous support the PCF has not left a strong mark on French cinema either in aesthetic or ideological terms, and the silver screen has hardly ever broadcast the PCF viewpoint. The reluctance shown by some in the Party to acknowledge the concept of auteur as well as the Party's own history serve to explain this absence. Until the 1980s, the PCF's discourse was dominated by the defence of France's national culture, although some Communist critics and auteurs disputed this vision tainted with economism.

This thesis considers the relationship between film and novels that were published by writers from Trinidad and Jamaica between the years 1950 - 1985. Through close textual analysis and by utilising a combination of cinematic and literary theories, the thesis examines the extent to which filmic references have been absorbed into fictional writing and reflects upon the implications for such cultural transformations. The thesis also provides a detailed, historical background to the development of cinema in both islands, with a further analysis of the specific role played by the Hindi film in Trinidad. The interdisciplinary nature of the literary analysis and the detailed historical data contained herein should be considered an original contribution to knowledge within the field of Caribbean studies.

During the 1990s the notion of the heritage film has become a taken for granted category of British cinema. Rather than dispute the merits of particular films that lie within this genre I question the construction of the relation between the idea of heritage and contemporary British film and television. Using the critical literature established by the contending cultural histories that address the rise of heritage in British culture, I highlight other, frequently personal and national engagements with inherited pasts. The concentration upon inheritance lends a greater emphasis to what is passed on from the past and endures in the present. The modes of articulating these inherited pasts are formally distinctive and constructed out of the vocabulary of documentary and fiction. The corpus of texts begins with the apparently radical avant garde film-making of Derek Jannan and moves through the work of the Black Audio Film Collective to the apparently conservative television documentaries of Alan Bennett. These key voices are then situated in relation to the hegemonic definition of heritage and current debates concerning British film and television. The persisting opposition which defined British cinema during the 1980s posits an unofficial cinema characterized by dissent and urban decay against an official cinema represented by the heritage film. My corpus of texts challenges this opposition. The different engagements with inherited pasts take place from different speaking positions and represent a diminishing publicly funded tradition of film and television production. The range of positions from margins to centre reveal that there was a contestation of the cultural sources which are aggregated into the construction of heritage during the 1980s and 1990s.

Since the first General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947, France has insisted that cultural products are different from other traded goods and should be exempted from ongoing liberalisation of international trade – a principle known as the ‘cultural exception’. This exclusion allows France to implement policies in favour of its cultural industries, particularly a highly complex system of quotas and subsidies for the film industry which it maintains is essential to counter US market dominance and maintain cultural diversity. Over the past decade, the launch of video-on-demand services has revolutionised how films are delivered and consumed. Policy-makers have attempted to keep pace with these developments, expanding the scope of French support schemes accordingly. Adopting a mixed methods approach, this thesis analyses cultural diversity in the French film industry in detail, incorporating for the first time both the cinema and video-on-demand sectors and combining qualitative and quantitative data to understand the impact of French policies on diversity. Quantitative analysis reveals strong evidence of diversity in both sectors but that, while digital channels offer greater variety of choice, cinema is more balanced between films of different geographic origins. Employing a consistent approach to policy development in both channels, policy-makers have failed to take into account these and other differences, or to target measures at the emerging threats to diversity in the digital environment – potentially undermining the French defence of the cultural exception on diversity grounds. There is a surprisingly superficial use of the term cultural diversity in trade circles, leading to the conclusion that a more sophisticated approach is needed. Refining French policy in line with empirical data and actively using that evidence to demonstrate policy success will be a necessary part of this more sophisticated approach if France is to successfully defend the cultural exception in future trade negotiations.

This thesis proposes a new analytical perspective to the interplay between the entertaining escapism afforded by spectacular action sequences and the expression of cultural themes in the 2000s-present contemporary superhero film cycle. In the introduction I give a review of the spectacle and narrative debate to explain how current studies on popular action film have tended to primarily focus on the way spectacular displays support narrative progression by driving forward the film plot’s narrative chain of cause-and-effect over time. However, the review then explains that whenever the cultural themes invested in these action film narratives are concerned, there is often an assumption that thematic values only surface intermittently as symbolic motifs at certain moments, and so do not really benefit from this kind of storytelling momentum to the same extent. The introduction then sets up my claim that spectacle not only aids the progression of plot by energising narrative causality and temporal progression, but spectacle also contributes other rhythmically kinetic arcs of narration able to developmentally evolve thematic tales of cultural conflict, which I term as narrativised spectacle. I explain my method as one combining a genre theory framework to uncover the cultural contradictions invested in action narratives alongside a neoformalist analysis of the rhythmic components of physical motion, editing, framing, composition and digital visual effects that express these thematic tensions. Examples are then given to show why contemporary superhero films depend on such kinetic kinds of spectacular rhythm, and provide a key case study to work with. Each chapter finds evidence for my claim by analysing how different kinds of kinetic arc are generated by the audio-visual rhythms of spectacle: able to introduce, challenge, destabilise, conflate, reinstate and eventually reconcile a series of conflicting cultural themes akin to an evolving tale. In the first chapter I explore the physical and spatial spectacle of action sequences. In the second chapter I look at the melodramatic theatrics of performance techniques. In the third chapter I critically interrogate the violent action of the superhero film alongside the themes of masculinity invoked therein. In the final chapter I deal with superheroines. Although these heroines employ these same thematic rhythms as male superheroes, the kinetic arcs are noticeably far more interrupted, due to being burdened with themes of androcentrism. The conclusion then summarises exactly what narrativised spectacle contributes to existing debates on spectacle and narrative, and why it is particularly useful for studying the contemporary superhero-action film.

The musical scores of composer Scott Bradley for the cartoons of the Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer studio form the basis of this dissertation, which uses close observation and analysis to address some of the pertinent technical and cultural issues that have been raised in the literature of musicology and of cartoon studies. Bradley’s collaborations with three sets of directors are discussed separately in order to highlight three academic concerns. An investigation into the various practical necessities and cultural influences on Bradley’s work with directors Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising sets the historical scene at the beginning of the composer’s career. I examine the pervading style of these cartoons and their music in order to reveal some of the personal preoccupations that Bradley’s work would exhibit throughout his life. And I interrogate the general musicological approach to the audiovisual pairing and cartoon scoring practices in order to re-evaluate close synchronization as a variegated technique capable of diverse and nuanced effects. Director Tex Avery and Bradley have independently been considered by various scholars for their adoption of modernist techniques. Their collaboration produced works that challenge the distinction of popular entertainment and modernist art, in a way that is shown to be both multifaceted and difficult to quantify. The position of their cartoons in terms of more frequently recognized modern artforms and its own tradition of slapstick comedy complicate any simple distinction between the two fields. The directorial team of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera produced cartoons that amalgamated some of the techniques learned from the other animators in this study. As well as being the most famous of MGM’s cartoon series, their Tom and Jerry cartoons were the most consistent in terms of style. The comic formula of this series is examined from the relatively new academic area of ‘comic timing’. I explore the possible effect of a constant musical presence on the audience perception of pacing and thereby add a new perspective to an aspect of comedy that has not before been considered with reference to music.

Serious jazz can be found in places where it is least expected, in mainstream Hollywood films. This thesis aims to demonstrate how film composers (such as Henry Mancini, Quincy Jones and Lalo Schifrin) challenged established conventions in the music and film industries between the late 1950s and the late 1970s. During this period, film composers were producing jazz for a global audience; their musical contribution is integral to our current understanding of jazz history. It is by viewing the history of film music through the various ways in which it is received (in music journals, performances, publications, recordings, films) that a new perspective on jazz history will be achieved. Giving focus to individual film scores, using detailed analysis and transcription, this thesis will highlight key moments in history that reveal how important film composers are to the story of jazz. With the study of journalistic and academic publications, it will also show how wider changes in American society were represented by jazz composers in film scores. Considering the history of jazz through the reception of Hollywood film scores enables new ways to define the genre. For instance, by taking into account the future performance life of a composition, this thesis will provide a new perspective on the fundamental characteristics of a jazz composition. These new ways to consider the genre demonstrate why film music should be included within the jazz-historical canon.

Repetition is inherent to cinema. From the complex interweaving of genre cycles and Hollywood stars to the elementary mechanism of film projection (twenty-four times per second): cinema is repetition. It is perhaps little wonder then that psychoanalysis is often thought of as one of the discourses with which to write about film in the 20th century. However, this thesis problematises both cinematic repetition and psychoanalytic film theory, stressing that each is haunted by a spectre: the remake, and the film-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, respectively. Despite its critical opprobrium, I explore the remake not only as a viable object of cinematic scholarship, but one necessary in moving past the impasse of film studies identified by Timothy Corrigan (1991) as ‘historical hysteria’. My research turns to Deleuzian film theory as a counterpart, rather than replacement, of the predominant Lacanian model. This is, however, neither a defence of the remake nor of psychoanalysis, but, rather, an attempt to submit both to a radical reassessment that, as Lacan says, aims at giving you a ‘kick up the arse’ (1998:49). Eschewing the ‘example’ as a remnant of film theory’s current collapse in form, I suggest two ‘case studies’ for consideration, augmented by a cache of film references: (1) Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake (1998) of Alfred Hitchcock’s original Psycho (1960) as a ‘symptom’ of Hollywood’s self-cannibalisation; and (2) George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1993), a Hollywood ‘auto-remake’ of his own Dutch original, Spoorloos (1988), as a ‘fetish’ of Hollywood’s desire in the European ‘Other’. Rather than expose Deleuze to a Lacanian framework I subject the one to a reading of the other in a möbius relation, turning them inside-out, so to speak. Mediating these two thinkers is Slavoj Žižek, a cultural theorist whose own ‘filmosophy’ is revealed from amongst his often frenetic writings. In so doing, I expose a dark underside to Hollywood repetition, one which provides some new tools for understanding the popularity of cinema’s most critically neglected discourse.

In considering the once highly visible and vibrant amateur film club culture of the United Kingdom the 1980s is arguably a pivotal, but controversial, historical decade in accounts of marginal film history. These years witnessed the end of the Scottish International Amateur Film Festival, a perceived sense and feeling of decline in club membership and vitality, and even a displacement of the film medium itself, with the arrival of domestic-level, narrow-video technology in the form of Betamax, VHS and other multifarious magnetic formats. Distinct feelings of loss are evident in amateur film journals of the time, while memories of the era among surviving practitioners are often characterised by senses of watershed and narratives of betrayal and distrust with manufacturers and consumer technology. This thesis through the discovery, analysis, and criticism of original visual and written empirical material will counter such understanding of the 1980s amateur cinema period, by exploring changing nomenclatures, technologies and leisure trends in this era. It will begin to define an increasingly diffuse, ambivalent and problematic narrative of this period, where many assumptions about traditional cinematographic, celluloid technology, the arrival of magnetic recording, and digital editing can be challenged. ‘Common-sense’, popular and individual accounts of this transitory era tend to argue that video was a predominant factor in the overall cultural amnesia that the amateur social world experienced. The critical endeavour of this thesis will be to construct a sophisticated and nuanced narrative of this time that counters and challenges elements of these accounts. Rather than asking what magnetic recording, or video, limited, I will discuss what it inspired and what it promoted in a scene that contrary to popular belief actually flourished, and was invigorated, by the new narrow technology on offer. That there is such discordance between different methodological processes also poses a series of larger meta-historiographical concerns around the primacy of oral history and assumptions of reliability. Questions around the diffusion and dissemination of novel technology into existent specific cultural practices will also be at the forefront of analysis. This project collates amateur film texts (archival and internet-based) and amateur journal material (Movie Maker, Making Better Movies, Videomaker and Amateur Film Maker) in providing an alternative narrative of these developments. Emphasis will be placed on both a specific canon of amateur videos identified within the holdings of the IAC Film and Video Institute Library, and by a collection of interviews with prominent amateur film-makers, whose practice has been permanently shaped by their experience of the transitions in the 1980s. Conjunctural readings of film form, technology, genre, aesthetics, production behaviour, and practice will be developed and illustrated through reference to this canon, with a view to extending the existing historiography of amateur cinema in the UK. Focus will be placed on periodising the amateur’s transitory practice, behaviour and language from the film, to the video, to the digital era, and challenging assumptions of decline, contraction and anachronism. Questions centre on three distinct phases of amateur cinematography and new practice indexed by technological innovation: the obsolescence of film technology in the late-1970s; the impact of early three-way video systems in the 1980s and; the use of computer editing software in the mid-1990s. Considering the prior status and vitality of UK amateur film-making, the thesis will expose a hidden history of amateur film-making post-celluloid, and place considerable emphasis and value on this under-researched and burgeoning area of interdisciplinary scholarship. In conclusion, the thesis will provide an important examination of the transitory stage between film and new digital technologies, and promote further public and academic engagement with this lost leisure community. With a recent focus on digital humanities, the bridge that early narrow-track video technology creates, between amateur cinema's celluloid-past and digital future, remains a significant area for exploration. Three narrative arcs follow, each containing an illustrative micro-historical case study, alongside critical writings on language, behaviour and practice specific to video technology and the magnetic image. These arcs will explore and extrapolate the larger attitudes and values of a social world that underwent technological shifts, not necessarily perceived as positive, or progressive.