This thesis comparatively and critically examines the connections between Shakespeare and the drama of Samuel Beckett that have been established in British adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays for the stage, screen and page. Beckett’s distinct dramatic style has become an alternative method for the interpretation of such Shakespeare plays as King Lear and Timon of Athens for stage and screen. The first part of this thesis focuses on the assimilation of dramatic elements characteristic of Beckett’s theatre into four productions of King Lear and Timon by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The affinities between Shakespeare and Beckett’s theatre established at the RSC gained significance in relation to wider theatrical contexts. Chapters Three and Four form the second part of this thesis. These chapters examine the various ways in which the Beckettian method employed at the RSC was further explored and used in different media. The Beckettian overtones in Brook’s film of Lear (1971), and Jonathan Miller’s television adaptation of Timon (1981) indicate a strong affiliation between these adaptations and stage traditions associated with the RSC and Beckett’s absurdist theatre. Chapter Four investigates the Beckettian influence in two Hamlet offshoots produced in the 1960s: Charles Marowitz’s Hamlet, and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The intermingling of Beckett’s theatre with Shakespeare’s plays across different media not only reveals distinct modes of engagement with the Shakespearean plays, but also provides a broader understanding of how audiences respond to and interpret diverse methods of adapting Shakespeare.

In this thesis, I demonstrate that the historical, and ideological, trajectories of HIV/AIDS discourses mirror the tensions between the local, global and transnational in my analysis of selected Anglophone Caribbean and South African literature and film. My methodology is adamantly a comparative studies approach as I overview the broader socio-historical narrative of HIV/AIDS whilst concurrently incorporating the idea of texts as always inflected by the wider historical and ideological processes behind transnationalism. I then link the competing histories of HIV/AIDS with textual depictions of HIV/AIDS, Indo-Caribbean histories, black Atlantic histories, and same-sex desire whilst foregrounding the socio-historical backdrop of transnationalism since the colonial period. A central thread running throughout is that transnational dialectics signify both the effects of the past on the present and the importance of comparative analyses for transnational textual engagements. Texts under discussion are the feature film Dancehall Queen by Rick Elgood and Don Letts, the novel The Swinging Bridge by Ramabai Espinet, the documentary film The Darker Side of Black by Isaac Julien, the feature film Children of God by Kareem Mortimer, the novella Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe, and the feature film The World Unseen by Shamim Sarif. Given the concurrent focus in postcolonial/queer around specific regional histories, I pinpoint that the dialectics between local, global and transnational discourses convey more nuanced, yet also more contradictory, textual engagement(s) with HIV/AIDS, transnationalism, sexuality, gender and ethnicity than some of the dominant narrative threads and debates surrounding postcolonial/queer. This point is particularly stressed in light of how many postcolonial/queer discussions readily fix the idea of the local as distinct from the global and the transnational. I thus re-read the contradictory registers of these discourses whilst foregrounding the relationship between these and HIV/AIDS discourses since the 1970s. I concurrently situate ny transnational comparative approach within the broader field of postcolonial/queer theory and approaches.

This dissertation examines the use of motion-picture film by the American Prosecution before and during the 'Trial of the Major War Criminals' at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Germany, 1945-1946. My research is based on never before used material including newly discovered film, official papers, and private letters. I argue that investigating the use of film, more than any other medium, enables us to comprehend the American Prosecution's vision of justice after the Second World War. I focus on three crucial themes: the political, juridical and moral concerns of the American planners and prosecutors. Although much historical scholarship focuses on American designs to 're-educate' Germans, I show that the American planners of Nuremberg felt that the education of Americans was also essential. The trial was designed to draw a distinction between Nazi 'barbarism' and 'Western civilization' and presented an opportunity that Americans used to promote their political values at home as well as abroad. They used film to affirm and showcase - to millions of their fellow citizens - some of the values and methods of liberal democracy. The American planners and prosecutors viewed the Nazi defendants as responsible representatives of the German people and used the controversial doctrine of 'conspiracy' to facilitate the new principle of individual accountability in international law. Additionally, they also proclaimed that planning and waging 'aggressive' war had constituted, years before the Nazis came to power, criminal activity. Yet representing 'conspiracy' and 'aggression' with film graphically exposed the limits of law in dealing with unprecedented injustice. The particular form of spectacle arising from the American use of film at Nuremberg has remained overlooked by scholarship in a variety of relevant fields. The American Prosecution staged a form of morality play with film. The aim, however, was not the redemption of the Nazi defendants; it was, rather, only to condemn and punish them. The Americans confronted the defendants with images of atrocity, as well as images of themselves. This technique functioned as a theatrical device in which onlookers felt that they could examine the defendants for signs (or the absence) of remorse. This spectacle enabled the presentation of a particularly powerful moral case against the defendants and the Nazi ideology they had espoused. This dissertation, therefore, offers a new contribution to our understanding of the visual culture of legal procedure by using an historical case-study of transitional justice after the Second World War.

This thesis brings ecocriticism to Shakespearean performance through an examination of adapted performance worlds. Studying cinematic and theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Tempest, it develops a strategy of ecopoetic analysis: a critical approach to the creation of worlds in the process of adapting a play for performance. This work developed out of my own environmentalism and experience in performing Shakespeare’s works. My goal is to develop a critical strategy for examining performance that utilises the tools of ecological criticism and furthers the fields of performance studies and ecocriticism. Ecocriticism modifies the scientific analyses performed by ecologists for looking at works of art. Beginning with the principal that everything is connected to everything else, ecocritics focus on the interactions between elements of a work, the interactions between the work and the world at large, and between the work and its audience. I examine the cultural context of a work, other landmark works with which it engages intertextually, and the reactions of original audience members, especially journalistic and academic reviewers, in order to ascertain how an individual production adapts a Shakespearean play to a new environment. I found in my analyses that Shakespeare’s works are particularly fertile ground for an ecopoetic analysis. Directors, in their efforts to keep his work relevant to a modern audience, frequently adapt and alter the worlds of Shakespeare’s plays in their productions. My ecopoetic approach to these productions reveals the ways in which the performances engage their audience, providing a better understanding of how to increase participatory spectatorship. I also found that this approach reveals underlying engagements between individual productions and the culture out of which they grew, and that the construction of performance environments is tied to cultural conceptions of the natural world. Finally, I discovered that Shakespeare’s works are an international language for performance, with adapters around the world experimenting with his plays in order to further the effectiveness of theatrical and cinematic production. As such, they are a logical place in which to formulate a new method of performance criticism, one which engages the world of the performance, the context of the production, and the audience that experiences the performance world. This thesis confronts numerous difficulties, including the fact that ecocriticism does not provide a critical apparatus as such, but is a politically-inspired way of viewing works. As such, I develop a more rigourous method of analysis, applying the tools of ecological science (interconnectedness, ecosystems, and adaptation), and the ethos of a modified phenomenology of performance criticism, to the worlds of performances. The crucial confrontation in my work is between nature and culture. I argue that the two are mutually constructing, and that performance occupies a place in which the two meet and interact and is thus the ideal ecosystem in which to investigate the interactions between culture and nature. Our world is endangered, the effects of global climate change and pollution are potentially catastrophic for us all. The issues that we face, the relationship between our human culture and our natural world, are dramatised in the works that I examine. The ecopoetic model of analysis that I develop can be applied to a greater variety of performance works, and this critical methodology is paramount for understanding the world and our place within it.

This thesis examines the spaces of urban-industrial northern England within the context of post-industrial change. This work combines close textual analysis and an interdisciplinary approach, which includes an examination of sociological, economic and political contexts relating to de-industrialisation and the growth of the service economy. The thesis is organised into four chapters, each dealing with a different manifestation of northern space, including ‘The Red-Brick Terraced Street’, ‘The Council Estate’, ‘The Mill and the Mosque’, and ‘The Gentrified North’. I argue that within a range of texts, the representation of northern space reflects the fragmentation that is a key feature of both the post-industrial experience. Furthermore, it is argued that the gendered balance of northern representation has shifted, spatially and generically, back towards a feminine paradigm. Contrary to surface appearances, it is also argued that important elements of traditional hegemonic representations of northern space are seen to persist within the spaces of the new despite the fragmentation that characterises the post-industrial era.

This thesis develops an approach to analysing sound-to-picture and audio-visual semiosis in non-fiction film.

In recent years, more and more Chinese films have been exported abroad. This thesis intends to explore the subtitling of Chinese cinema into English, with Zhang Yimou’s films as a case study. Zhang Yimou is arguably the most critically and internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker, who has experimented with a variety of genres of films. I argue that in the subtitling of his films, there is an obvious adoption of the domestication translation strategy that reduces or even omits Chinese cultural references. I try to discover what cultural categories or perspectives of China are prone to the domestication of translation and have formulated five categories: humour, politeness, dialect, history and songs and the Peking Opera. My methodology is that I compare the source Chinese dialogue lines with the existing English subtitles by providing literal translations of the source lines, and I will also give my alternative translations that tend to retain the source cultural references better. I also speculate that the domestication strategy is frequently employed by subtitlers possibly because the subtitlers assume the source cultural references are difficult for target language subtitle readers to comprehend, even if they are translated into a target language. However, subtitle readers are very likely to understand more than what the dialogue lines and the target language subtitles express, because films are multimodal entities and verbal information is not the only source of information for subtitle readers. The image and the sound are also significant sources of information for subtitle readers who are constantly involved in a dynamic film-watching experience. They are also expected to grasp visual and acoustic information. The complete omission or domestication of source cultural references might also affect their interpretation of the non-verbal cues. I also contemplate that the translation, which frequently domesticates the source culture carried out by a translator who is also a native speaker of the source language, is ‘submissive translation’.

This thesis examines war trauma in film; it is a comparative reading that aims to study the relationship between films made after the First World War in the 1920s and films made during and after the Vietnam War. I use thirteen focus film texts, some which explicitly engage with war and some that do not. This thesis will argue that the production of these particular films was inflected by the collective trauma that the wars produced in American society. There was not, for example, an explicit combat film made for seven years after the First World War and thirteen years after the Vietnam War. This gap, I will argue, is symptomatic of the cultural climate that existed after each war, but can also be understood in terms of the need for temporal space in which to assimilate the traumas of these wars. An engagement with recent debates in Trauma Theory will be utilised to explore this production gap between event and film, and to suggest that trauma exists not only within the narratives of these focus films but also within the production process itself. This thesis contributes significantly to recent debates in Trauma Studies. As it presents film history scholarship, First World War and Vietnam veteran experiences and archive newspaper research as compatible disciplines and uses the lens of trauma theory as a methodological thread and tool of analysis.

This thesis examines the representation of left-wing political violence in Italian and German films from 2000 to 2010 drawing on postmodernism theory, film genre, memory studies and gender theory. It considers filmic texts and paratexts, historiography and political discourses to offer a comparative analysis of the mnemonic dynamics in new millennial Italy and Germany. This thesis looks at why the experience of revolutionary terrorism in the 1970s reappears at the turn of the new millennium in a cluster of fiction films, which innovate and sometimes challenge previous paradigms. It reads this revival in connection with industrial trends and historical events, such as the end of old ideologies, the early release of former terrorists and 9/11. The memory of left-wing terrorism has found new lifeblood in the new millennium because there are ample resonances with contemporary social issues, such as political activism and global fears of international terrorism. Focusing on eight case studies, I argue that the memory of left-wing terrorism unfolds beyond and across temporal and spatial boundaries, reactivated by present-day occurrences and through contacts with other traumatic memories. The notion of ‘interconnected memory’ is fundamentally conceived as a nexus of multiple meanings, the fruit of past recollections, and movements between different socio-historical dimensions and generational memories. Representational strategies and narrative trends are also explored to shed light on crossnational forms of memorialising political violence and its legacy. The first part analyses how postmillennial films deal with the possibility of forgiveness, here interpreted as an approach to normalise the past through narratives of pacification or exclusion. It highlights the figure of the teenager as a metaphor for the changing memory of terrorism, generational conflicts and the implications of 1970s violence for young generations. Moreover, it discusses the depiction of female terrorists and the containment strategies adopted to mitigate the anxiety for terrorist acts perpetrated by violent women. The second part of this thesis is concerned with the risks of forgetting and more precisely on an aesthetic normalisation of the terrorist discourse through popular genres and a more commercial style. It comments on the hyper-authenticity and retro aesthetics in biopics about notorious terrorist groups, and the spectacularisation of violence via the thriller and heritage film genre. It also investigates how contemporary comedies satirise the phenomenon of anarchist revolts and political kidnappings to reflect on present-day social problems.

The focus of my research is Soviet documentary filmmaker, Elizaveta Svilova (1900-75), most commonly remembered, if at all, as the wife and collaborator of acclaimed Soviet film pioneer, Dziga Vertov (1896-1954). Having worked with her husband for many years, Svilova continued her career as an independent director-editor after Vertov fell out of favour with the Central Committee. Employed at the Central Studio for Documentary Film, a state-initiated studio, Svilova’s films were vehicles of rhetoric, mobilised to inform, educate and persuade the masses. She draws on visual symbols familiar to audiences and organises them according to the semiotic theories – namely techniques of dialecticism and linkage – attributed to the Soviet montage school of the 1920s. On-screen credits indicate that, during the period 1939 to 1956, Svilova was the director-editor of over 100 documentaries and newsreel episodes, yet this corpus of films has received very little critical attention. As my thesis aims to demonstrate, the reasons for the lack of attention to Svilova’s films are partly due to her husband’s eminent status – the rules whereby we construct film history have resulted in Svilova’s contribution being absorbed into Vertov’s – and this is related to the long-standing tendency within film criticism to marginalise the female artist. My thesis also touches on issues regarding curatorial and archival policies, and provides an opportunity to rethink early film history and the modes through which historiographic and filmographic knowledge are transmitted.