This thesis examines representations of gender in the Italian giallo, a short-lived but tremendously popular, lucrative and prolific body of films in the murder-mystery thriller tradition that enjoyed their heyday in the early-to-mid 1970s. Traditionally, both academic and populist responses to these films have focused on the output of a small number of maverick directors that have been elevated critically above their peers. Conversely, this thesis aligns itself with a more recent trend towards eschewing auteurist readings in favour of examining the giallo as a broad ‘filone’ (cycle) defined by shared iconography, narrative conventions and underlying anxieties. Building on the typological approach of this body of literature, I place the gialli within the historical context of their initial production and release, relating the anxieties they exhibit in their depiction of gender and sexuality to the seismic sociocultural changes that occurred during this period. Drawing on the methodologies employed in criticism of the American film noir movement of the 1940s and 1950s, I explore the gialli not as straightforward allegories of real world events but rather as discursive texts that engage in a refracted form with contemporary sociocultural concerns. As its central hypothesis, this thesis asserts the giallo uses the generic conventions of the ‘whodunit’ thriller to negotiate a crisis of norms in which traditional notions of masculinity and femininity have been destabilised. In exploring the ways in which this crisis manifests itself across a corpus of sixty films, I adopt the unique approach of restructuring the giallo into two distinct subcategories – ‘M-gialli’, focusing on male protagonists, and ‘F-gialli’, focusing on their female counterparts – and examining the differing ways in which they negotiate the same anxieties about gender and modern sociocultural transformation, and the differing solutions (or lack thereof) that they propose. I also examine the portrayal of gender/sexual minorities, children and teenagers as further articulations of concerns relating to the transformation of society. I argue that the gialli are characterised by a marked sense of ambivalence towards the upheavals of this period, precluding these films from being straightforwardly pigeonholed as either reactionary or progressive in their overriding ideology. This manifests itself in a plethora of uncertainties and contradictions in their narratives, mise en scène and the portrayal of the aforementioned characters, and an inability to provide credible solutions to the problems posed by the changing face of society. This thesis moves criticism of the giallo beyond merely describing its conventions to actively explaining them, and highlights the value in reading popular filmic movements as articulations of the prevalent anxieties, attitudes and worldviews of their era.

Through an engagement with Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the cinema, this thesis explores how the notion of labyrinthine time is represented differently in movement- and time-images. Part I contrasts the different types of subject that are created in the narratives of the two types of image. This begins with an exploration of the philosophical conceptions of time behind the two images and the subjects they create. Chapter two focuses on the role of memory in the creation of these subjects, drawing on the works of Henri Bergson, and using films by Hitchcock and Fellini. The third chapter delves into the recent re-emergence of the debate over spectator positioning, and questions what Deleuze can offer this field. Here the thesis most comprehensively negotiates its place within the field of film studies, through its interaction with psychoanalytical theories of the subject, and the debate over what exactly constitutes suture. Part II focuses on the movement-image. In particular it explores characters' attempts to perform their present identities differently, by falsifying their past and taking a new direction through the labyrinth of time. Chapters four and five analyse the way in which this performativity is represented in, Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run, The Talented Mr Ripley and Memento. These recent films are seen to draw a broad distinction between female performativity, which is sanctioned, but only for a brief while, and male performativity, which is represented as getting away with murder. Movement-images are thus found to uphold a very traditional gender binary, by reterritorializing the labyrinth's subversive potential into a legitimizing straight line and its marginalized, labyrinthine other. This is a conclusion that had already been suggested in chapter three.

This thesis centres upon variously detailed analyses of the early fictional films of director Martin Scorsese, ranging from the student short film What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963) to the big-budget production New York, New York (1977). Through this, the thesis seeks to enact an intervention in the debate surrounding film authorship. Informed by a broadly poststructuralist position, the thesis recasts authorship as a discourse that exists in a particular, mutually inflecting relation with a text's other constituting elements. While the analysis of specific films traces the stylistic and thematic consistencies that inform Scorsese's authorial discourse, the latter's specific articulations are read in relation to the texts' institutional, industrial, and historical determination. That the texts studied were made within a variety of filmmaking practices - student production, exploitation cinema, independent filmmaking, major studio finance and distribution - enables consideration of authorship within different contexts of production. Crossing this, the thesis charts the genesis, institutional appropriation, and consequent rejection of New Hollywood Cinema, a phase of filmmaking of which Scorsese's early work is paradigmatic. The thesis is organized on a chapter per film or production situation basis. The introduction outlines its theoretical underpinning. The conclusion briefly contextualizes the films which Scorsese has directed since New York, New York. The thesis concludes that authorial analysis remains a valid critical practice, but also one which needs to be located in relation to other determining factors.

This thesis is an examination of British films which discuss and propose the reconstruction of the built enviromnent. It concentrates on the period 1939-51 but also looks at those films made during the inter-war period. It examines how and why the films were produced, and how they present the issues of reconstruction. The particular aims are to see what the films might tell us about the relationship between planners, architects, politicians and the ordinary people - the people who would be the beneficiaries of reconstruction. Secondly, to ascertain what impact the films had on popular attitudes to town planning and building. The main findings are that the films were considered a very important way of communicating with the general public and that they were specifically designed to widen the debate and the process of reconstruction beyond the professionals to ordinary citizens. However, despite these noble and sincere aims the films had only limited effect in achieving this. As a result of studying the production and distribution of the films one has also a better understanding of the relationship between film-makers and the government propaganda agencies to which they were contracted. The most important conclusion from this aspect of the research is that they were highly constrained in the kind of films on reconstruction they could make despite their efforts to produce radical work. Finally the Central Office of Information films of the post-war period show that the Labour Government was similarly committed to involving and informing the people in the new world that they planned to build.

In writing this thesis I have tried to get beneath the clichés of disability imagery to reveal the social constructions, through cinematic processes, of images of physical impairment as disability. The thesis must be seen in the context of other writers who have done similar work on other marginalised groups within our society that are regularly portrayed on the cinema screen: gays, blacks, women and, to a lesser extent, the working-class. The construction of school of writers, using representation theory, who have over the last two decades revealed that which had previously been taken for granted - the ideological and cultural influences on and of imagery that have an impact upon the lived lives of those represented - have been my guiding influence. The Social Model of disability theory has been used as my primary methodological framework and analytical approach. In the introduction I provide an outline of Disability Theory — i.e., the Medical Model and the Social Model of disability - and define the theoretical framework within which the thesis has been written to make the thesis comprehensible in the wider context of the social construction of 'disability'. In the literature review of disability imagery writing (Chapter One), I include writing that is journalistic rather than academic to redress the general scarcity of writing on disabling images. In this thesis, the cinematic techniques that construct impairment as disability, i.e., pathologise impairment as Other(ness), are identified. I explore three specific areas of cinema and culture in Chapters Two, Three and Four of the thesis: the use, or non-use, of stereotypes; the representation of the family in relation to disability, and finally, the use of the abnormal body to pathologise impairment.

This thesis begins with the question of how a more comprehensive comparative poetics of cinema might be formulated - one that depends not on essentialised notions of culture accentuated by binary divisions but one that would need to take into consideration the multiple agencies and subjectivities that impact the cultural production, and reading, of a film. The formulation of a constructive comparative poetics is necessary when building a case for the film's cultural translatability, especially in the face of the proliferation of cinema that is being increasingly identified as 'transnational.' The case is made by analysing examples of transnational Chinese cinemas as exemplified by the films of three directors, Zhang Yimou, Wong Kar-wai and Ang Lee, between 1991 and 2002. In each of these examples, I explore how the films negotiate the various cultural and national boundaries they invariably cross as they enter into the global circulation of film and media products. Whilst I analyse the films in the contexts of the political and social histories of the various Chinese territories from which they appear to originate, I do not claim that they are merely products of those histories. The films are also products of economic and business networks, individual aesthetic choices on the part of the filmmakers, and a complex matrix of tastes and preferences exercised by their audiences, which may not necessarily be nationally or culturally demarcated. These elements constitute the boundaries of the notion of film cultures, the exploration of which I argue is a more productive approach than the more limited notion of ethnological cultures in the cultural analysis of cinema.

This thesis is located at the intersection of three dynamic fields: African screen media, documentary studies, and women’s filmmaking. It analyses a corpus of fifteen films by Francophone sub-Saharan African women filmmakers, ranging from 1975 to 2009, within the framework of documentary theory. This study departs from the contextual approach to African women’s documentary, which has been predominant among scholarship and criticism thus far, in favour of a focus on the films as texts. The popular models developed for the study of documentary film by Western scholars are applied to African women’s documentaries in order to explore their innovative and stimulating practices; to determine the degree to which such models are fully adequate or, instead, are challenged, subverted, or exceeded by this new context of application; and to address the films’ wider implications regarding the documentary medium. Chapter One outlines the theoretical framework underpinning the thesis and engages with existing methodologies and conventions in documentary theory. Chapter Two considers women-centred committed documentary, analyses the ways in which these films uncover overlooked spaces and individuals, provide and promote new spaces for the enunciation of women’s subjectivity and ‘herstories’, and counter hegemonic stereotypical perceptions of African women. Chapter Three addresses recent works of autobiography, considers the filmmaking impulses and practices involved in filming the self, and points to the emergence of a filmmaking form situated on the boundary between ethnography and autobiography. Chapter Four explores the filmmakers’ ethnographic practices, considering their specificities in the light of pre-existing conventions within ethnographic filmmaking to emphasise the films’ formal and political reflexivity. The fifth and final chapter analyses a selection of works of docufiction, demonstrating their striking singularities and arguing for the significance of films that blur the boundaries between fiction and fact and thus push the borders of the real. The overall aim of the thesis is, therefore, to show the overlooked diversity of documentary voices and to demonstrate that the practice of documentary by women from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa is both formally innovative and reflexive, and politically challenging.

This thesis develops an approach to analyse how film soundtracks are used to signify characters’ subjective experiences of altered states that may distort or exceed their ordinary experience of reality through dreams, memories, intoxication, etc. Its aim is to contribute to critical audio-visual literacy by using Van Leeuwen’s sound semiotic theory (1999) in conjunction with film sound theory in order to investigate how characters’ subjective experiences of particular states of mind (dreams, memories and flashbacks, intoxication, terror and insanity) are signified in narrative fiction cinema by the soundtrack. Its central questions are: 1. How are sound and music used to signify characters’ subjective experiences and what makes these uses of sound apt signifiers for signifying these states of mind? 2. Is it possible to investigate this issue using a multidisciplinary approach that combines film theory and sound semiotics? This study focuses on how characters’ subjective experiences of altered states are signified by eliminating either atmosphere or realistic sound effects or by the mixture of reality and unreality (e.g. intoxication where voiceovers and music are used to signify characters’ subjective experiences). It will explore how sound semiotics and film sound theory can be used to understand how soundtracks are used to signify filmic characters’ subjective experiences of altered states as well as investigating the most appropriate terminologies and transcription methods that may be used for this purpose. It will also discuss how film directors, such as Hitchcock, have created innovative solutions for conveying subjective modality in cinema.

The Doppelganger is a celebrated motif of German silent cinema that has been seen by art and literary historians as a filmic descendant of German Romanticism, and by psychoanalysts as a concretisation of human beings' fears regarding their own potentially fragmentary nature and mortality. This research builds on such interpretations by suggesting that - in the case of German cinema before World War One, at least - the Doppelganger can be read as a signifier of modernity as it was experienced by members of various social groupings. Returning to primary sources, some 203 films are identified that featured a Doppelganger and were released in Germany between 1895 and 1914. This corpus is broken down both by genre (into detective films, comedies and art films), and in terms of the polarities of identity about which the figure of the Doppelganger is constructed (high yersus low class, female versus male, and black versus white). From here, individual chapters address the Doppelganger as a fantastic representation of shifting class, gender, sexual and ethnic identities in Wilhelmine society. Each chapter draws in particular on contemporary sources relating to the various frames of identity under discussion, and suggests possible readings available to Wilhelmine spectators of the Doppelganger in individual films and genres. In this way, meaning is located at the intersection of the filmic text and contemporary discourse, and the 'Doppelganger film' can be regarded as a conduit for exploring issues of shifting identity within modernity, with particular regard to perceived new identities constructed 'between' supposedly stable binary oppositions of class, gender, and so on. These include the 'new woman' (perceived as a female incursion into the male sphere), the nouveau riche (moving between low and high class identity), the 'sexual intermediate' (constructed between male and female sexuality), and so forth.

The thesis examines the extent the means and the degree to which the American and the Vatican's common cultural ideology was expressed in the film industry of post-war Italy (1945-1960). Through a comparative approach of current theories developed on ideology and an analysis of official documents from the Vatican and the United States Department of State, the thesis investigates the decisive role that American production companies played in the development of the Italian film industry and their links to the Vatican. This analysis evaluates how the Italian production and distribution industries satisfied the American political and economic interests. American political and cultural ideology of the post-1945 era, is compared with the Roman Catholic ideology in order to assess how close their cultural propaganda was. This is followed by studies of the roles played by key individuals, such as Giulio Andreotti and institutions such as ANICA and A.G.I.S. involved in formulating the policies and regulations that affected the production and distribution of American and Italian films in the post-1945 era, as well as the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in this process. The case studies, which make up the remaining part of the dissertation, illustrate the relationship with the theoretical issues raised in its first part and their ramifications in the relationship between the Catholics and Italian and America cinema. The operation of the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico combined with box-office returns allows for the creation of a new analytical technique to be applied, one that has not been utilized in previous studies of Neorealist films and Italian popular cinema. It makes it possible to highlight the cross-currents that existed across different cinematic genres and styles of those American and Italian post-war movies, which were under the Catholic Church's sphere of activity.