This thesis examines the relationship of Irish and Scottish literature and film comparatively. The field of adaptation has traditionally centred around classical literary adaptations and the heritage film. Considering the increasing frequency with which contemporary novelists are adapted to film, it comes as a surprise that very little analysis has extended beyond the pages of the general media. Recent Irish and Scottish films in particular have relied upon the popularity of their literary exports in order to boost their indigenous filmmaking ventures. While generally considering the dialogic relationship between the publishing, film and television industries, this thesis specifically focuses on the adaptations of novels and short stories by Irish and Scottish writers from the 1980s to the present day. Part one, focusing on the work of Irish authors, looks at Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal (Pat O’Connor, 1984) and Lamb (Colin Gregg, 1985); Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997); Roddy Doyle’s The Barrytown Trilogy, comprising The Commitments (Alan Parker, 1991), The Snapper (Stephen Frears, 1993) and The Van (Stephen Frears, 1996); and Christy Brown’s My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989). Part two examines the adaptations of Scottish writers, including Christopher Rush’s Venus Peter (Ian Seller, 1990); William McIlvanney’s The Big Man (David Leland, 1990) and Dreaming (Mike Alexander, 1990); Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996); and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002). Rather than carefully consider the fidelity of the translation from page to screen, this study examines the cultural circulation of the texts in alternative media in relation to their adaptive strategies. The novel’s role in representing ‘Irishness’ and ‘Scottishness’ versus and adapted film’s mode of representation is also considered alongside the influence of the director in contrast to the author, in order to reveal all of the contributing components to the development of a national cinema out of a national literature, both key components of a national culture.

The twin topics of interest to this thesis are the figure of the desirous virgin, as she appeared in Hollywood films around the cusp of the 1960s, and Doris Day, during the later evolution of her star persona around the time of Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959). An introductory section looks at important works from star studies and film history. Several texts from stereotype studies are also examined, both sections working to build up a methodology for the explorations of the virgin and Day which follow. Films which seem to constitute part of a distinct mini-cyle, the 'virginity dilemma' film, are then explored in detail, with their shared themes, narratives, characters, and, often, actors, examined. This cycle of films seems crossgeneric, with both comic and melodramatic entries produced. Furthermore, a generically-inspired rubric, dictating the physical performance of the virgin, emerges from comparison of the films. Here the comic virgin displays a buoyant comic body, her unruly kinesis indicative of energies not yet directed into sex. By contrast, the melodramatic virgin is always marked by a stillness and composure which may wax and wane through the film but will reach both its apogée and rupture at the moment when she capitulates to consummation. The final section looks at Doris Day's star persona as it emerged after Pillow Talk attempted to redefine her as a maturely sexual star. Subsequent films pathologized the qualities of maturity and sexuality, resulting in the creation of a coy aged virgin persona. Although actually performed only once, in Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann, 1961), this persona subsumed previous incarnations of the star, eventually leading to the decline of her active career and calcifying to become the dominant lasting memory of Day even now.

This thesis examines the representation of society in British and French cinemas of the 1980s. In this comparative study, the choice of this particular decade was motivated by the coming to power of the Conservative Party in Britain and the Socialist Party in France. Since the two governments adopted 'extreme' policies increasing the strengths and weaknesses traditionally found in their film industries, British cinema struggled even harder while French cinema enjoyed a strong financial support from the state. A significant feature of these two national cinemas in relation to films about society was the predominance of the realist vein in Britain and the comedy genre in France. This generic discrepancy was highly influential in the way the two national cinemas referred to social issues in the 1980s and most scholars have argued that British cinema widely discussed the state of its society whereas, on the whole, French cinema avoided to do so. What this research hopefully demonstrates is that, despite different generic approaches, British and French cinemas equally contributed to depict their contemporary societies. To analyse how these two societies were represented on screen, three main areas are studied thematically: first people in power (public institutions and individuals), second the world of work, and third the family. After a brief summary of social issues in Britain and France in relation with the aforementioned themes, discussions of their filmic representations are based on the films themselves, the textual analysis of films taken as case studies and their critical reception. I will argue that in the 1980s, British cinema offered the overall image of a class-bound society where individuals - living side by side - were unable to escape their social fate. The paradox of this cinema made by a majority of left-wing filmmakers was that ultimately it favoured a rather traditional view of society. By contrast, my research shows that the idea of friendship and solidarity prevailed over economic and social hardship in French cinema. Although this depiction of society was largely consensual, it nevertheless opened the debate for social alternatives.

This thesis analyses representations of autism in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglo-American literature and film. It posits that, while many cultural portrayals of autism are more concerned with perpetuating the stereotypes surrounding the condition than with representing autistic experiences, there is evidence of a small but significant counter-current that is responding to and challenging more reductive representational modes. Each of my chapters examines prevailing narrative tropes that reinforce existing stereotypes of disability (narratives of overcoming, victimhood, dependency), which can be clearly evidenced in contemporary depictions of autism, from Barry Levinson’s Rain Man (1988) to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). In each case, a significant proportion of texts use the generic markers of autistic representation to question and subvert these more established literary and cinematic approaches. The twenty-first century authors discussed in this thesis repurpose and interrogate the prevailing stereotypes of autistic representations, and provide provocative considerations for the study of postmodernism, crime fiction, melodrama and autobiography. This critical crossover and the employment of genre tropes cross-examines the subversive potential of genre fiction and the significance of postmodernism as frameworks for examining depictions of autism. This thesis proposes that this crucial minority of texts embodies a writing forwards out of stereotypes of autistic representations, by both autistic and neurotypical authors, into new, twenty-first century representational patterns.

This thesis charts the trajectory of a strand of film-theoretical optimism in texts by Walter Benjamin (1882-1940), Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) and Alexander Kluge (1932–) from different moments in the twentieth century; the empirical corpus looks to post-reunification German and Austrian cinema to find evidence of this theoretical optimism in contemporary filmmaking practices. The thinkers advocate the leftist-political potential of film to stimulate a critical mode of spectatorship, and are to varying degrees influenced by Brecht and the neo- Marxist politics of the \({Frankfurter Institut für Sozialforschung}\). The objective of this thesis is thus twofold. First, it illustrates the continuing relevance of the following principal strands in the film-theoretical texts of Benjamin, Kracauer and Kluge: the representation of the figure of the worker in the \(Arbeiterfilm\) genre; the possibilities and limits of capturing reality using different modes of realism; the imperative of challenging viewers in order to transform them from ‘consumers’ into collaborators; and, following on from this, notions of shock and distraction, focusing on Benjamin’s concept of the ‘Schockwirkung’. Second, it shows how this diachronic, neo-Marxist approach can continue to illuminate facets of the political in contemporary cinema by German-speaking directors in an age of advanced capitalism and digital reproducibility.

This thesis explores how a series of Hollywood films allegorised the contradictions of American foreign policy between 1999 and 2009. These contradictions are underlined in pictures that use military intervention as a subtext. My argument considers the role of allegory in an array of genres, including war pictures, Westerns, and comic book adaptations. The case studies I analyse allegorise a bipartisan consensus surrounding military intervention. I postulate that this consensus was crystallised in the Kosovo War of 1999 and later became apotheosised in the 2003 Iraq War. I contend that, in pictures as diverse as There Will be Blood (2007) and The Dark Knight (2008), political allegory critiques the bipartisan allure of both neoconservatism and liberal interventionism’s promises of exporting American democracy. Moreover, these narratives examine the ideas of International Relations theorists as diverse as Walter Mead, Walter McDougall, and Joseph Nye. The theories propounded by these authors become embodied in different characterisations, leading to storylines that connote ideological friction and philosophical inconsistency. Consequently, Hollywood cinema during this period highlights a contradiction in American foreign policy, a theme that is further encoded in narrative elements that focus on the strained politics of coalition building and winning hearts and minds.

This thesis addresses new trends in French cinema between 2000 and 2004, in films which have the common motif of a main, protagonist couple whose relationship has subversive potential and may indicate tension, instability, the process of change and transformations in post-2000 French society. The study shows how the chosen films contribute to the ongoing national debate about the following: what it means to speak and to ‘be’ French in post-2000 France, socially, culturally and in relation to how the nation defines itself; how the films project, dramatise and fantasise national identity; and finally, what role the films play in constructing the sense or the image of the French nation in their themes, motifs, and preoccupations with Frenchness. The thesis provides a body of work on gender, ethnicity and sexuality in post-2000 French film which fills a gap in the present literature, as although there are existing gender studies of 1980s’ and 1990s’ French film there is a reworking of film practices (in generic and thematic terms) in the post-2000 unlikely couple group of films which enables comparisons to be made and theoretical frameworks to be suggested, in order to establish parameters against which previous and future periods of this area of French cicnema history can be measured.

This thesis examines the subtitling of films depicting the French banlieue into English. The banlieues are housing estates situated on the outskirts of large towns and cities, and are primarily home to the underprivileged, and immigrants to France or their descendants. The sociolect spoken in the banlieue differs from standard French in terms of grammar, lexicon and pronunciation. Three films released between 2000 and the present day are studied; La squale (Genestal, 2000), L'esquive (Kechiche, 2003) and Divines (Benyamina, 2016). A new integrated methodology is developed, which examines the films within their broader contexts of release, and in light of paratextual material contributing to the context of reception, and to the viewer's understanding of the topic at hand. Directors representing the banlieue on screen generally do so with a view to provoking thought or public discussion in relation to the banlieues. In addition to macro- and micro-contextual analysis of the films and subtitles, the work is underpinned by an examination of the subtitling situation, encompassing the views and experiences of subtitlers working on banlieue film, and technical analysis of the subtitles in terms of readability. Through interviews of professional subtitlers, and close technical analysis of the subtitles, this research is contextualised within the industry, and within current conventions and guidelines. Close analysis of subtitles and the translation solutions they present reveals that some of the socio-political messages presented in the films may not be evident to a non-French speaking viewer of the English-subtitled versions. Although the informal nature of many conversations featuring the langage de banlieue is sometimes clear in the subtitled version, the unique sociolect of the characters is not. In two of the case study films, a dialect-for-dialect approach was adopted, where African American vernacular English was used in the subtitles to demonstrate the use of non-standard language. However, it is argued that ultimately, this dialect-for-dialect approach, combined with cultural similarities between the French banlieue and American street culture, could lead the British Anglophone viewer to negotiate the banlieues and those who live there via their knowledge of American street culture. This could contribute to American cultural hegemony, and does not convey the specificity of France's banlieues as cultural melting pots.

This central premise of this thesis is that Lars von Trier is a political director. Through a detailed formal analysis of five films I proceed to discuss the political implications of form, something that has not been acknowledged by scholarship so far. In this thesis, I employ Brecht as a methodological tool so as to discuss the shift from a dialectical cinema devoted to the production of knowledge effects, to a post-Brechtian one that brings together points of tension that remain unresolved. Chapter 1 proceeds to a historical evaluation of Brecht's reception in film theory and considers the ways that Brecht's theory and practice can address the cinematic and political concerns of the present. The chapter also locates von Trier under the rubric of the post-Brechtian by comparing him to past film practices. Chapter 2 moves to a discussion of von Trier's Europa trilogy and focuses on issues of historical representation. Emphasis is placed on formal elements that challenge the narrative laws of classical cinema. The chapter argues that von Trier follows Brecht's mistrust of a historical representation based on pictorial verisimilitude, without however sharing his forward-looking politics and his view of history as Marxist science. Chapter 3 discusses Dogme 95 and The Idiots (1998). Firstly, the chapter discusses Dogme's combination of a political modernist rhetoric with a realist one and places Dogme's return to the past in a historical context. Secondly, the chapter considers the role of performance as a formal and thematic element in The Idiots. I draw attention to the ways that the camera becomes performative and brings together material of dramaturgical importance with moments that are the product of cinematic contingency. My discussion is very much informed by contemporary post-Brechtian performance and film studies invested in the discussion of ‘corporeal cinema'. Chapter 4 discusses Dogville, a film with obvious references to Brecht. Unlike previous readings, I shift the emphasis from the film's assumed ‘Anti-Americanism' and proceed to a formal analysis that can rethink the film's politics and innovations. While Brecht has been thought to be as a fleeting presence in von Trier's films by most critics, this thesis suggests that our knowledge of von Trier's formal innovations can be deepened and enlivened by discussing them in conjunction with Brecht's theory. By returning to Brecht, we can also rethink the importance of form as the key to a film's politics.

The wager of this thesis is that, firstly, there exists an intrinsic relationship between memory and representation in visual performative media and, secondly, that a referential, Aristotelian conception of memory is made problematic by these same visual media. There are aspects within the ontology of both theatre and film, the specific media examined, which resist the model of representation that this memory constitutes. It is my contention that there is an alternative conception of memory, more appropriate to the difficulties that theatre and film present, which enables another way of understanding these media. This other memory is derived from the distinction in Freud's work between psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics, and as an energetics. I draw upon an 'energetic' conception of memory as the foundation for an energetic approach to theatre and film. In the first chapter I enunciate this distinction in Freud's work, tracing his energetic model from the Project of 1895 to the role of affect in the metapsychological papers, before moving to its elaboration by later psychoanalysts (including André Green, Christopher Bollas and César and Sára Botella). For the second chapter, I relate this psychoanalytic discussion to poststructuralist theory, which Freudian energetics has considerably influenced. This is examined through Jacques Derrida's interpretation of Freud's work on memory, and Jean-François Lyotard's own philosophy of energetics (with which much of my work is in dialogue). The third and fourth chapters turn to theatre and film respectively. Each chapter initially explores the aspects of each medium that complicate the more familiar notion of referential memory as a relevant model of representation. I then establish how these same points of difficulty demonstrate an affinity with an energetic approach, opening the possibility of a new way of thinking theatre and film through memory, and of thinking memory through these visual media. A comparative approach is taken to identify and articulate the distinctiveness of these particular media, through their unique interactions with energetic theory. Looking ahead, this aims to provide the foundation for developing a means of addressing emergent visual media (particularly the videogame), which similarly complicates hermeneutic readings, based upon a study of their most significant antecedents: theatre and film.