From the first post-war trials to the recent libel trial in the London High Court brought by Holocaust denier David Irving against Penguin Books and American academic Deborah Lipstadt the real-life courtroom has provided more than a legal judgment in respect of the Holocaust. As legal scholar Lawrence Douglas has shown in The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (2001), this formal, institutionalised and controlled setting has also been the forum for an increasingly nuanced, often intentionally pedagogic, examination of the Holocaust. After nearly sixty years of trials there is a corpus of judicial proceedings that chronicles not only society's desire for justice but also the changing understanding of the Holocaust, how it is remembered and how that memory is to be safeguarded. Analogous to this sequence of trials, American film has consistently utilised the law and the dialectic of the courtroom in its own attempts to represent, understand and explain the horror of the Holocaust, hi this thesis I provide a cultural history of these films (a generic term that encompasses both cinema releases and television movies/miniseries) to examine how the depiction, pertinence and understanding of the Holocaust in American life have altered since the 1940s. It is a thesis grounded in the tension between film and history as it explores how the fictive courtroom has represented the real-life trials as well as the Holocaust. This explores how the cinema has used different strategies of representation to bear witness in the cinematic courtroom to an event which is said to defy representation. In conclusion it argues that the courtroom is a setting with its limitations in respect of Holocaust representation, but it is these very limitations which are the reason for the courtroom genre's continued appeal.

This thesis presents an examination of the giallo films of Dario Argento from his directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) to The Stendhal Syndrome' (1996). In opposition to the dominant psychoanalytical approaches to the horror film generally and Argento's giallo specifically, this thesis argues that the giallo, both textually and meta-textually, actively resists oedipalisation. Taking up from Deleuze's contention in Cinema 1: The Movement Image that the cinematic-image can be consider the equivalent to a philosophical concept, I suggest that Argento's giallo are examples of what Deleuze calls cinema of the "time-image": provoked and extended "philosophical" acts of imagining the world which opens up a theoretical space of thinking differently about questions of gender and genre in horror film, which takes us beyond the fixed images of thought offered by traditional psychoanalytical and feminist paradigms of horror. In the opening chapters of this thesis, I argue that the cinematic-image has to be thought "historically", and that it is only be understanding the emergence of the "giallo" in the 1960s within the wider picture of Italian national cinema, that we can understand Argento's films as specific cultural expressions of thought, which are not reducible to paradigms based upon analyses of the more puritan and fixed American horror film (via Mulvey et all). In my subsequent discussion of Argento's "Diva" trilogy, I consider an assemblage of Deleuzian becoming and poststructuralist feminist thought (Kristeva I Cixous I Irigaray) as a mechanism through which to explore the increasingly feminised and feminist spaces of his later work. This thesis concludes by assessing Argento's critical and creative legacy in films such as Toshiharu Ikeda's Evil Dead Trap (1988) and Cindy Sherman's Office Killer (1997). In these terms, a Deleuzian "approach", enables a set of readings, which open up the texts to a more productive consideration of their appeal, in a way which other more traditional approaches do not, and cannot, account for. The close textual and historical analysis demanded by Deleuze is both a reconsideration of the [feminist] politics of Argento's work, and a response to criticisms of misogynism.

This thesis analyses the formation of images and representations of Japan in British films of the 1950s. Japan's image changed drastically during and after World War II, as knowledge of Japan's maltreatment of prisoners of war (POWs) became known. The thesis considers four films and the novels or scripts from which they were made: The Wind Cannot Read (both David Lean's and Ralph Thomas's version), A Town Like Alice, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and The Camp on Blood Island. This study shows how film became a venue for expressing untold experiences and the battle over 'proper' representations of both the POWs themselves and the Japanese Army. Japan's side is more sympathetically addressed in Lean's work; those critical of the country are represented in Alice. A film that led to greater intervention related to Japan's point of view was Kwai, aspects of which were extended, and others overturned, in a subsequent horror film (Blood Island). As further argued here, Japan as an (ex) enemy often assumes a feminine or demonised form in these texts, and sometimes blurs with the Nazi image. Generally, the West portrays the 'Other' as hostile male or available female, while Japanese women in Thomas's Wind are frequently presented as insensitive. This thesis further reveals that Japan's envoys endeavoured to present the country as a trustworthy state before the United Nations in an attempt to inhibit the circulation of negative images, while Britain, in the process of reconfiguring rapidly changing relations to its colonies and ex-colonies, tried to present itself as a new Empire with its Commonwealth. These studies of representations of Japan are examined in the context of oral histories of those who lived in the POW camps, showing how each experience interacts with the ways Japan, as the (former) captors, was represented.

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The thesis contends that there is a dominant strand of thinking driving the prevailing metanarrative of American global hegemony. This strand, constructed here as Ameritocracy, taps into three interconnected and fundamental principles concerning the nature of America: that American values are universal, terminal and providential. However, this notion of American universality is contradicted by a troubling parochialism, one that reveals religious, racial and cultural particularities generated from American identity, and from the mythic, providential origin story of America. The thesis expands on the theory of Ameritocracy, its historical derivation and theoretical antecedents, and its application within the soft power realm of Hollywood film. Ameritocracy finds its apotheosis in the popular blockbuster films of the unipolar era. The global aspirations of the blockbuster conflate with the universality of the medium, and thereby function as the perfect conduit for expounding the presumed universality of the American nation, promoting and proselytising on behalf of American primacy, using Ameritocratic arguments to legitimise and normalise U.S. hegemony. Analysis of blockbuster texts reveals that the notions of universality they embed are often partial and particular, featuring an obfuscation of definitions, between ideals and interests, between ends and means, and between the universal and the American.

This thesis is an exploration of the tomboy figure across a range of literary and cinematic texts from the nineteenth century to the present day. The tomboy may seem to be a familiar cultural archetype, but my study also examines lesser-known, often marginalised aspects of the figure, with the intention of bringing to light new dimensions of tomboys and what they signify. Reaching beyond well-known stories, I have looked at tomboy representations outside the Eurocentric and North American versions, bringing in examples from the Caribbean, South America, Asia, and from within the postcolonial diaspora. Exploring these various hidden tomboy histories has meant engaging with work on how the tomboy figure might ask us to rethink settled notions of childhood gender identity, of the queer child, and the very concept of childhood itself as a queer temporality. Moving from a study of Wuthering Heights and nineteenth century children's fiction, I consider more recent tomboys in a small number of international films (drawing here on concepts of embodiment, materiality and the sensuous experience of cinema) before investigating how tomboy figures relate to questions of ethnic subjectivity in novels by Jamaica Kincaid and Catherine Johnson. By covering such a wide range of historical periods, genres and texts, the aim is to trace the complexities of the tomboy, a child figure that has always had strong connotations of gender transformation and gender rebellion, and is often associated with a playful and empowering otherness while conversely carrying with it the suggestion of reaffirming patriarchal, binary gender identities.

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) is remembered as one of Russia's most influential and celebrated filmmakers. Over the course of his career he released seven feature films: Ivan’s Childhood (1962); Andrei Rublev (1966, USSR release 1971); Solaris (1972); Mirror (1975); Stalker (1979); Nostalghia (1983); and The Sacrifice (1986). Drawing on a history of post-war Soviet cinema, this thesis brings his films into contact with the concepts outlined in Gilles Deleuze’s two radical books on film: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Deleuze's Cinema books provide a system of classifications – what he calls a taxonomy or geology – of cinematic images. While their primary focus is on Western-European and American cinema, this thesis re-conceives Deleuze’s approach to film outside of that narrow context. My approach is informed by the specific historical, cultural, and industrial contexts of Tarkovsky's films, establishing the first sustained encounter between Deleuze and post-war Soviet cinema. In doing so, I offer a fresh perspective on Deleuze’s cinema concepts by re-conceiving the division between his 'movement-image' and 'time-image' in the context of the post-war Thaw, the development of the Soviet space programme, Stagnation, and the escalation of nuclear threat following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

This thesis considers images of the falling body after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, starting with Associated Press photographer Richard Drew’s photograph of a person falling to their death from the north tower of the World Trade Center. From this specific photograph, this thesis follows various intersecting lines in what I am calling a meshwork of falling-body images. Consequently, each chapter encounters a wide range of examples of falling: from literature to films, personal websites to digital content, and immersive technologies to artworks. Rather than connecting these instances like nodes, this thesis is more concerned with exploring lines of relation and the way the image moves along these lines. This thesis will argue that the falling-body image offers an alternative topology of the attacks: as enmeshed in the unfolding lines of life of web users, artists, directors and writers alike. In this way, this thesis outlines the ways we have lived with the image of falling, and the event itself, and how we continue to experience its unfolding consequences.