Paris is one of the key sites of meaning regarding France's cinematic output. This thesis surveys the contribution German émigré filmmakers made to the French cinema of the 1930s through a series of case studies of their depiction of the nation's capital city. It argues that this contribution was both typical and singular. The émigrés engaged directly with traditions of Parisian representation, but they also played a distinctive role in the important debate over the direction early French sound filmmaking should take. The body of the thesis contains detailed textual analysis of many émigré productions which have hitherto been ignored within film history. It contextualises this analysis with comparative discussion of films made by indigenous professionals and an examination of past and present intertextual aspects of Parisian culture. The thesis moves beyond aesthetic concerns to also consider the political, industrial and social significance of the work of the émigré Filmmakers. The reception of their films is located within a history of the Franco-German relationship as a whole. By drawing widely upon supporting documentation in critical and trade journals of the time, the thesis provides a new history of a crucial transitional point in the development of European film culture.

This thesis explores how contemporary global cinema represents the relationship between humans and nature. Drawing from the philosophy of Georges Bataille, especially his notion of transgression, I argue that certain contemporary films attempt to transgress the limit between human and nonhuman realities. I call these films limit cinema because they operate at the boundary between thought and world: they interrogate the lines between nature and culture and reframe our relationship to aspects of existence in excess of human thought. In taking a film-philosophical approach, I explore not only what philosophy might be able to say about ecological aspects of contemporary film, but also what films can contribute to philosophical discussions of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. To that end, I bring Bataille into conversation with more recent discussions in the humanities that seek less anthropocentric modes of thought, especially film ecocriticism, speculative realism, and other theories associated with the nonhuman turn. I approach the limit between human and nonhuman realities in a number of ways. The films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Ben Wheatley are interpreted in relation to a Bataillean understanding of the sacred, in which nonhuman reality is posited as immanent to this world but beyond human understanding. Two films, Jauja (Lisandro Alonso 2014) and Tectonics (Peter Bo Rappmund 2012), are analysed through the unlikely pairing of speculative realism and apparatus theory; these films demonstrate that the same representational structure can simultaneously implicate us more and less in anthropocentrism. Human subjectivity therefore cannot be cast aside so easily, and I argue that film ecocriticism cannot do without a theory of cinematic subjectivity. I begin to lay out such a theory in relation to Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013) and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), arguing that these films evoke subjectivity as an unstable process of turning inside out. I conclude by considering love as a way of relating to the nonhuman, using Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog 2005) and Konelīne: Our Land Beautiful (Nettie Wild 2016) as examples of cinematic expressions of love for nature. Though I argue that it is finally impossible to see beyond our finite human perspectives, limit cinema pushes against the boundaries of thought and encourages an ethical engagement with perspectives beyond the human.

This thesis identifies and analyses the function of violence in the films of screenwriter-director Pablo Trapero. It does this by examining different understandings of the concept of violence itself — with a particular emphasis placed on Slavoj Žižek’s concept of objective violence — and how it is represented on-screen in Trapero’s films. The work is divided into two parts, each consisting of two chapters. Each of the four chapters focuses on a pair of the director’s films; in each case the first film analysed introduces motifs and themes which the later film then expands upon and intensifies. Part I locates violence within the context of what Althusser defines as the State Apparatus, focusing on the diverse manifestations of the State’s power generally. Further, this section analyses the way in which Trapero’s films demonstrate the State’s manipulation of its subjects through repressive and ideological means for its own benefit. Part II tightens the thesis’s focus, examining Trapero’s representation of one specific ideological apparatus: the family unit. This section approaches different manifestations of the family and, using Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of Oedipal and rhizomatic families, considers the ways in which the family structure itself can be used as both a means of repression and, in certain cases, a means of resistance. This thesis contends that, through his representation of objective violence, Pablo Trapero has emerged as a distinctly political filmmaker. By focusing on several previously under-studied elements of Trapero’s films this thesis highlights the ways in which the director’s work represents present-day concerns about social inequalities and injustice in neoliberal Argentina on-screen. Finally, this work examines how Trapero combines aspects of Argentina’s long tradition of political film with elements of Nuevo Cine Argentino to create a unique political voice.

The construction of suspenseful sequences has been a crucial component for filmmakers to engage the viewer, especially within the thriller and horror genres. This thesis takes a new approach to understanding cinematic suspense by creating a psychophysiological model to measure cinematic suspense and subsequently viewer experience. To date, film scholars and media psychologists have defined the process of suspense in terms of specific story case studies, rather than first independently identifying the components of suspense. Such theories become selective and open to subjective interpretation and have provided misinterpretations of the phenomenon of suspense (Friedrichsen, 1996: 329). Suspense then by existing definitions is not measurable and makes it hard to quantify any discussion of cinematic suspense in relation to viewer experience. Although film scholars and media psychologists recognise that the experience of suspense involves cognition, emotion and physiology, only media psychologists have carried out empirical studies with viewers. Even taking this into consideration there have only been a few psychophysiological studies about the experience of suspense (Kreibig, 2010: 408). Furthermore there is a methodological dilemma, with film scholars preferring a qualitative approach, often via film textual analysis, and media psychologists primarily taking a quantitative approach, analysing data sets using statistical models, which film scholars see as offering little contribution to the complexities of film analysis (Smith, M. 2013). The differences between these methodological approaches raise the question of whether we can gain a greater insight into viewers’ experiences of suspense by drawing elements from both research methods and identifying the most appropriate methods, procedures and techniques to defining cinematic suspense. One strategy for achieving this is to turn to the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) which often uses mixed methods approaches to resolve such interdisciplinary differences, especially in gaining a deeper insight into user/viewer experience of narrative trajectories (Benford et al. 2009). This thesis takes an inter-disciplinary approach that combines film studies, media psychology, HCI and psychophysiology. By drawing from film studies and media psychology it will identify the components of cinematic suspense and create a framework to measure suspense. Taking an HCI experiment approach in designing and analysing the findings of the ‘Terror & Tension’ film experiment, 20 viewers watched 32 short film clips from 8 horror films, dispersed through 4 sub-genres and 4 suspense narrative structures, defined by film scholar Susan Smith: vicarious, direct, shared and composite (Smith, S. 2000). Triangulation was used as a mixed methods approach to capture and analyse three data sets which include: firstly, viewer physiological responses, which were measured in terms of anxiety durability and intensity level by recording viewers’ skin conductance responses (SCRs), a component of electrodermal activity (EDA). The findings were then tested to verify the physiological framework to measure viewer experience of suspense. This led to the development of an EDA model of suspense. Viewer feedback was captured through verbal self-reports, which were recorded after watching each film clip. These physiological responses and feedback were then analysed alongside textual analysis of the film clips in a series of case studies to provide a deeper insight into how cinematic suspense is constructed through narrative elements, cinematography, sound and mise-en-scène. The research findings demonstrate that the EDA model of suspense makes a valuable contribution to film analysis and understanding viewer experience of suspense and offers psychophysiology a new framework to measure suspense in terms of anxiety durability and intensity.

This commentary documents the compositional process of writing film music for the classic expressionist silent film Metropolis (Lang, 1927), using MIDI-based orchestral sound resources. Metropolis was chosen from within other possibilities, such as Battleship Potemkin or Nosferatu, not only due to the belief that the film’s surreal eerie mood and machine-like characters could be represented well by the Second Viennese School’s musical style that I intended to adopt, but also due to a judgment that leitmotivic transformation and use of themes as character links fit into a work so rich with characters’ showing subtle psychological states. I set out to compose an original orchestral score for Metropolis with the idea in mind, that film music should contribute to the audience’s integration with the drama and reinforcement of dramatic tensions by strategically supporting the film’s plot and narrative, and that an agreeable conceptual blending between film and music would be crucial to a successful composition. For this task, a thorough review of the leitmotif and related literature about music semiotics and meanings, together with a brief discussion of the MIDI sampler orchestra, proved to be necessary. Metropolis, a pioneering masterpiece of sci-fi, which contains a gloomy portrait of the futuristic world, encouraged me to experiment with the diverse possibilities not only of the leitmotif, but also of kaleidoscopic sound originating from various combinations of virtual instruments of the MIDI sampler orchestra and ultimately to show my musical process. The document traces the leitmotif as a primary compositional device for thematic manoeuvre in both film composers’ scores and major scholars’ discussions; it also incorporates current scholarly research about music semiotics and meanings, which has guided choices in each stage of my compositional process. I have revealed how I applied such lessons as Ennio Morricone’s microcell technique, Danny Elfman’s transformation approaches to thematic material, Howard Shore’s reflection of meaning onto music, and Ilan Eshkeri’s use of themes as character links to my Metropolis. I organized the main character’s associate themes using microcell and transformation techniques and contextualised them as character links. For instance, I produced tunes for cold-hearted characters, such as Rotwang, robot Maria, and high buildings, with the twelve-tone technique, poignant dissonances through interval-classes 1 and 6, recursive rhythmic patterns, or their combinations; I also adopted two distinct types of an octatonic scale to describe contrasting personalities of the two characters and a chord based on 2nd intervals to express the moment when Rotwang’s evil reaches its zenith. Metropolis serves not only as an artistic repository for numerous symbols, but also as a web of leitmotifs towards musical and filmic unity.

Alfred Döblin’s famous 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz has often been discussed in terms of the appropriation of film poetics by the medium of literature and is said to abound with examples of literary montage. In most post-war discussions of literary montage in Berlin Alexanderplatz, however, the device is regularly understood as an umbrella term for anything of stylistic interest. Deploying 1920s and 1930s literary and film criticism I demonstrate that this regularly leads to anachronisms and terminological over-inflation. I thus offer a historically informed definition of literary montage in precise narratological, stylistic and experiential categories. Montage rests on the identification of intradiegetically unmotivated ready-mades and the perceived experiential similarities between the novel, Soviet montage films, and Dadaist photomontage. The lack of motivation affords the experience of disruption which, I demonstrate, has within the Benjaminian “modernity thesis” too often been extrapolated to characterize all film editing. My analysis shows that contemporary critics regularly discriminated between different types of editing on at least three experiential axes – tempo and dynamism, confusion, and disruption. My proposed definition of literary montage thus also allows me to analyse the novel in terms of the key narratological novelties that literary montage introduces: the global proliferation of heterodiegetic zero-level narrators accompanied with the local elimination of zerolevel narrators altogether. In other words, Döblin accomplishes in literary fiction what holds for film fiction in general – the absence of a narrator held to be fictionally in control of the whole of the text. Conversely, through the use of intertitles and the particular type of voice-over interjections, Fassbinder’s adaptation endeavours to emulate the reciprocal commonplace of literary fiction – the narrator’s continuous presence. Paired with Fassbinder’s film, Jutzi’s adaptation demonstrates how visual and sound film montage both differ from literary montage. Whereas literary montage hinges on disruptive stylistic shifts, film montage rests on disruptive spatio-temporal dislocation.

This thesis explores the youth film genre in Russia and Serbia since the 1990s. Youth film is not only an essential means of tracing changes in cultural perceptions about young people and their lives in the post-communist period, but I argue that the genre serves as a means of representing society as a whole. The youth film genre, as an overarching framework dictated by the age of a film’s protagonists, encompasses and adopts a wide variety of sub-genres. This flexibility in youth film allows for an innovative study of the position of one genre as part of a wider sphere of genre film-making in the post-communist period. In particular, I demonstrate that global genre theory can be used as a means to examine the different genre types that have appeared in the cinema of Russia and Serbia in the post-communist period. The film industries of both nations were required to undergo vast changes in the transition from communism to capitalism, making film genres and audience preferences more significant than before. The films I analyse in this thesis borrow extensively from Hollywood genre types, using deviations and national-cultural references to appeal to their domestic audiences. However, I also contend that genres were an important part of the film industries of the Soviet Union and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and that these genre histories must be considered. My close analyses of six youth films provide the communist and post-communist context for their genre usages, placing them within a wider canon of films from particular genres. This thesis contributes not only to the understanding of the youth film genre and the different ways in which these films are made, but also to knowledge of the use of genres in recent Russian and Serbian cinema as a whole. The chapters of this thesis examine how youth films and youth audiences have become increasingly important to post-communist film industries. I demonstrate that youth film allows directors not only to depict the trials and tribulations of growing up during the transition from communism, but how these youth films often reference the suffering of adults in this period. Young people are situated in a historical limbo, between the communist past and the capitalist future, and as such become a poignant metaphor for the wider experience of transition in these two nations.

This thesis uses a range of recent television and film texts to interrogate postfeminist media formations of masculinity. In particular, this work focuses on increasingly prevalent media narratives that are about producing men as suitable romantic partners for postfeminist women. Arguing that existing literature on postfeminism ignores or trivialises the issue of masculinity, this thesis addresses new cultural formations of masculinity that are linked not only to postfeminist discourse, but also related cultural and economic shifts such as post-industrialisation and the rise of neo-liberal cultural politics. Analysing texts from the mid-1990s to 2012, the work argues that such representations are rife with tensions and contradictions. They represent in part an ungendering of previously feminine arenas (such as the makeover, and the home) yet are also marked by a discourse that requires the reassertion of sexual difference and the maintenance of heteronormativity. As such, the urge towards coupling becomes central to these formations, across the range of texts discussed within this thesis. The thesis argues that postfeminist media representations of masculinity are often characterised by an interplay between dominant, residual and emergent formations. In the makeover show, the mission is to improve a man to satisfy his existing partner (perhaps as preparation for a proposal) or to ready him for entry into the dating market. In the lifestyle show, the advice given on how to manage domestic labour is committed to encouraging harmony between the heterosexual couple. The homebuilding sitcom focuses on the challenges of the transition between youth and the establishment of a family unit: finding the right partner, settling down, building a home, having children. The Hollywood romantic comedy, even in its recent, male-centred incarnations, still presents successful coupling as integral, essential, and inevitable, even if its attitude to the union is sometimes ambivalent. In all of these television and film genres, there is a considerable focus on how men must change in order to become, and stay, "marriageable". This emphasis on coupling is paired with images of singledom as failure, a pathologisation which, this thesis argues, is rapidly becoming ungendered. The example texts' reinforcement of compulsory heterosexuality, their focus on a particular 'life-stage' (the early stages of independent living) and the increased focus on men's private lives means that domestic space and the home become key sites in which these tensions and battles are played out. This thesis examines the central role of the home, its decor, arrangement and labour, as both one of the major negotiations of coupling and as an aesthetic strategy for representing different formations of masculinity and postfeminist dilemmas of masculinity within this group of texts.

The thesis explores the construction of gender in the Hollywood Teen Movie, often perceived as 'the odious norm' of Hollywood cinema with little to warrant serious analysis.[1] Although Timothy Shary's work has done much to promote the genre as an area of academic enquiry, there have been few sustained textual analyses of the Teen Movie. Through close textual analysis of seven representative case studies, this thesis stages an encounter between Butler's work on gender and the Teen Movie. Butler’s theorisation of performativity denaturalises and deconstructs the assumption of heteronormativity, enabling a detailed analysis of the genre's 'sexual coming-of-age narrative'.[2] Further, the textual analyses complicate and augment aspects of her theories. Following a review of the literature on the Teen Movie, and an examination of Butler's oeuvre, the thesis is divided into three sections. Firstly, the prom is explored as a typical narrative conclusion to the School Film. Secondly, the following chapter analyses star performance and film acting in the youth delinquency film. The final chapter examines the genre’s construction of the past in the "nostalgic" teen movie. The original contribution to knowledge is twofold: the thesis significantly expands existing work on the Teen Movie, and uses the depth and range of specific examples from the case studies to complicate Butler's work. Textual analysis of each film’s construction of heteronormativity demonstrates that this normative and mainstream genre offers a more complex and critical presentation of heterosexual norms than previously appreciated. The thesis rethinks the norm by demonstrating the complexity of normative culture, which demonstrates a range of examples that call for a reconsideration of Butler's theorisation of gender norms.

This thesis considers the ways in which the dominated, marked and suffering body (the controlled body) has been represented and employed in recent mainstream cinema. Noting a shift from narratives that depict escape and the alleviation of torment to ones that highlight subjection and endurance, it probes the influences and implications of the change. The project employs an interdisciplinary approach that utilizes discourses from anthropology, art history and cultural studies in conjunction with textual analysis, and consequently attempts to rethink a pleasure in pain outside psychoanalytically informed theories. The thesis argues that diverse images of pain can be usefully understood by examining them as part of a collective negotiation of the relationship we have with our bodies in Western culture, especially in respect of agency and corporeality. Identifying a fascination for activities that fuse concepts of pain and pleasure, in particular sadomasochism, body modification, artwork and extreme sports, the study argues that the controlled body borrows heavily from these sources for its imagery but typically understates the social motivations of masochistic pleasure and assertion of autonomy. The research uncovers a range of narrative strategies that justify depictions of masochism (especially in men) that deflect the implication of pleasurable pain whilst simultaneously formulating it as part of personal identity. It investigates how pain and the closeness to death are used to convey a vitality of existence, and also, through an analysis of the spectacle and the narrative patterns in recent films, offers an appreciation of how the spectator engages with the texts. Furthermore, the iconography of pain and control is shown to be important in our conceptualization of beauty, whilst the personal appropriation of suffering can be interpreted as an affirmative choice. The thesis therefore reveals that, with varying degrees of explicitness, mainstream cinema has broached contemporary anxieties regarding self determination and identity through the representation of the controlled body.