This thesis seeks to analyse the ways in which the spoken word is used in two French minority cinemas – cinema de banlieue and gay cinema – between 1990 and 2000, in order to express an engagement with the complex, layered, and fractured identities of France’s citizens in the late twentieth century. This analysis will be conducted through three prisms which correspond to the three central chapters of the thesis: ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. These three areas of analysis were chosen because the particular aspects of individual and collective identity with which they engage embody the three central challenges to contemporary republican values which have emerged in 1990s debates. Each chapter will present a detailed examination of a series of onscreen verbal exchanges drawn from four key films, with supplementary reference to other works from the two genres studied here. These examinations will be placed against the socio-political backdrop of 1990s France in order to highlight their specific relevance to broader ongoing debates regarding the nature of French republicanism as critically interpreted. The first chapter will focus on verbal exchanges through the prism of ethnicity, and specifically on conflictual verbal encounters, as illustrated, in particular, in Hexagone (Chibane, 1994), La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995), Raï (Gilou, 1995), and La Squale (Généstal, 2000). The second chapter will examine constructions of gendered identities in Gazon maudit (Balasko, 1995), Douce maudit (Balasko, 1995), Douce France (Chibane, 1995), Ma 6-T va crack-er (Richet, 1997), and Belle Maman (Aghion, 1999), concentrating on verbal exchanges around parent-child relationships. Analysis in the final central chapter will be conducted through the prism of sexuality, examining onscreen exchanges involving friends and lovers in Pédale douce (Aghion, 1996), Le Ciel, les oiseaux et.. ta mère! (Bensalah, 1999), Le Derrière (Lemercier, 1999), and Drôle de Félix (Ducastel and Martineau, 2000). These chapters will pave the way to an attempt to come to terms with the question: Does the use of the spoken word in gay and banlieue cinema merely reaffirm the identity of separate communities, or does it rather function as a site for construction and reconstruction?

“Brutality” has long been held up by critics to be one of the defining features of the Italian filoni; a body of popular genre film cycles (peplum mythological epics, horror films, giallo thrillers, poliziotteschi crime dramas, westerns and others) released during a frenzied period of film production between the late 1950s and mid 1980s. A disproportionate emphasis on scenes of often extreme violence and spectacle can be traced across all of the cycles, resulting in a habitual “weakening” of narrative and disruption of the filmic continuities fundamental to mainstream cinema. This emphasis and the uneasy pleasures that it provides have led to a distinct ghettoisation of the filoni within English-language film criticism, with historical accounts of Italian cinema ignoring the films completely, dismissing them as “trash” or portraying them as parasitic counterfeits of “authentic” Hollywood genre films. Furthermore, such accounts typically fail to address the question of what it is that makes these films so violent, limiting their descriptions to blanket terms such as “brutal”, “exploitative” and “sadistic”, in the process reaffirming the idea that the filoni are simply not worthy of further study. As a result, the suggestion that the films could provide pleasures which are distinctly different from those established by mainstream cinema remains largely unaddressed. This thesis seeks to reconcile the gap between my own personal engagement with the films and the lack of attention that has been devoted to them within critical Anglo-American discourses. Drawing on the “paracinematic” approach highlighted by Sconce (1995), I seek to demonstrate that it is precisely in the filoni’s often violent deviations from mainstream cinema’s established continuities where their most remarkable features lie, using Thompson’s (1986) concept of “cinematic excess” to illustrate the films’ overwhelming prioritisation of formal elements that exceed the limits of narrative motivation. Using narrative and close textual analysis of a representative body of filoni to identify patterns of violence, spectacle and excess across the films’ structures, I shall also illustrate the benefits of using film theories outwith their original context to shed light on non-mainstream films like the filoni, drawing in particular on the work of musical theorists Altman (1978) and Mellencamp (1977) to identify a “dual focus” in the films between scenes of narrative and more excessive violent “numbers”. Combining my analysis of specific filoni with an examination of representative mainstream films and Anglo-American genre theory, I shall demonstrate that while the regulation of cinematic excess is vital to the narrative pleasures engendered by the latter (suspense, characterisation, drama), in the filoni such pleasures are typically debunked in favour of the more immediate pleasures and curiosities provoked by viewing (and listening to) spectacular and violent acts that threaten the continuities surrounding them. As my analysis chapters will indicate, the filoni are far more productively analysed using theories derived from early cinema: by drawing on Gunning’s (1986) concept of cinematic “attractions” – non-narrative spectacles which exhibit a similar emphasis on the primacy of the image and the pleasures that it provides – I shall illustrate how a central viewing pleasure prioritised by the filoni arises from the frequent revelation of the filmic apparatus during scenes of spectacle and violence, where spatio-temporal continuities are frequently abandoned. By going beyond the blanket generalisations of “brutality” that have resulted in the filoni’s habitual marginalisation within film studies, this thesis shall exemplify a long-overdue “closer” approach to the films that seeks to highlight their distinctive features, study their structures and investigate the specific (dis)continuities and (dis)pleasures that they provide, at the same time exploring the possibilities of exactly what is meant by “violence” in cinema.

This project explores the ways in which film viewers engage with and respond to cinematic constructions of the female serial killer, focusing closely upon the story of Aileen Wuornos, who was executed in 2002 for the murders of seven men. Three key film texts - Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003), Aileen: The Selling of A Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 1992) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 2003) - are used as the basis for this study. Arguing that the psychodynamic complexities of the spectatorial encounter are inadequately theorised by many existing Screen theory and cultural studies accounts, I conduct a series of in-depth free-association narrative/biographical interpretive interviews (Hollway and Jefferson 2000a, Wengraf 2001) with fourteen participants. In doing so, I demonstrate how individuals are psychosocially and biographically motivated to “invest” in the three film texts on both conscious and unconscious levels. Drawing upon object-relations psychoanalysis (and Kleinian theory, in particular), I explore the unconscious anxieties, conflicts and phantasies that also bear significantly upon my participants’ filmic investments. I find that these investments are made meaningful in relation to dominant cultural ideologies and “norms”, but that they are also powerfully informed by participants’ own biographical experiences. This thesis therefore makes a valuable contribution to the field of audience studies, by providing a more nuanced understanding of the film-viewing process.

My thesis is intended as an intellectual opportunity to take what, I argue, are the "dead ends" of work on the history film in a new direction. I examine cinematic representations of the Vietnam War-era America (1964-1974) produced during the "hot" culture wars (1987-1995). I argue that disagreements among historians and commentators concerning the (mis)representation of history on screen are stymied by either an over-emphasis on factual infidelity, or by dismissal of such concerns as irrelevant. In contradistinction to such approaches, I analyse this group of films in the context of a fluid and negotiated cultural memory. I argue that the consumption of popular films becomes part of a vast intertextual mosaic of remembering and forgetting that is constantly redefining, and reimagining, the past. Representations of history in popular film affect the industrial construction of cultural memory, but Hollywood's intertextual relay of promotion and accompanying wider media discourses also contributes to a climate in which film impacts upon collective memory. I analyse the films firmly within the discursive moment of their production (the culture wars), the circulating promotional discourses that accompany them, and the always already circulating notions of their subjects. The introduction outlines my methodological approach and provides an overview of the relationship between the twinned discursive moments. Subsequent chapters focus on representations of returning veterans; representations of the counterculture and the anti-war protest movement; and the subjects foregrounded in the biopics of the period. The fourth chapter examines Forrest Gump as a meta-sixties film and as the fulcrum of my thesis. The final chapter posits that an uplifting version of the sixties has begun to dominate as the most successful type of production in the post-Gump marketplace.

Despite the growing academic attention to film festivals, there has been little critical discourse about such events staged outside the West. This thesis aims to address this gap by providing a social, political and cultural exploration of the Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) in South Korea between 1996 and 2005. The thesis utilises empirical research to reveal how the festival staked out a unique and influential position within a rapidly changing global landscape. Particular attention is paid to the organisersors' use of an Asian regionalisation strategy to promote the festival locally and globally. This study claims that PIFF has gone further than any other film festival in constructing a regional identity and maintaining a strong and mutually beneficial link to its national film industry. Research into PIFF's special relationship with both the national and regional film industries uncovers the previously unexplored roles that film festivals play in film production, in addition to their traditional functions of exhibition and distribution. To place this analysis in context, the thesis examines the politico-economic factors that influenced the establishment of the festival, its programming, the project market (the Pusan Promotion Plan), and its tenth anniversary in 2005. The study argues that analysis of PIFF reveals tensions and negotiations between the "national" and the "transnational" in the wake of economic and cultural globalisation in East Asia. The thesis serves as a case study of how contemporary film festivals adjust their roles and identities to adapt to local, regional and global change.

Since the 1960s strategies of recycling, revision, and reframing have dominated art practice, and are particularly evident in artists’ films since the 1990s. A majority of these films take the classical Hollywood film text as their object of revision, producing a diverse range of interventions that both reproduce and obstruct its governing conventions. This thesis proposes that the imitative tendency in contemporary moving image art constitutes a parodic revision of the classical film text and its attendant assumptions, and is currently a productive site of critique of dominant cinematic forms. Theorist Linda Hutcheon provides an inclusive definition of modern parody as extended repetition with critical difference; an ambivalent combination of conservative and revolutionary drives, a form that necessarily reproduces the very values it simultaneously displaces. Of particular interest is the effect of these parodic acts on Hollywood inscriptions of gender norms. Feminist film theory since the 1970s has argued convincingly that the decorative image of woman is the linchpin of the classical film text. Therefore, any critique of that text accordingly revises her placement; whether or not such a revision is the work’s explicit intention. In place of a complete rejection of narrative cinema and its problematic repetition of reductive stereotypes of gender (and race and class) influential feminist theorists such as Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey have insisted that a counter cinema must engage with both the form and content of the mainstream text. Only by inhabiting the language of that text can its assumption be undermined. Hutcheon defines the challenge to dominant aesthetics produced by such parodic revisions as a complicitous critique, and views parody as a key feminist strategy. Yet, taking into account recent developments in theories of gender, race, and sexuality, this investigation does not exclusively focus on films by women, or by self-proclaimed feminist or queer filmmakers (who might be said to have as their main aim a re-writing of the place of ‘woman’, and therefore ‘man’, in cinema).

Studies of the relationship between British cinema and national identity have tended to focus on the subjects and themes of a select number of films, part of a canon generally agreed to represent the qualities of the British ‘character’. Yet several authors have identified limitations to this approach, and presented a range of theoretical and empirical obstacles to the concept of ‘British cinema’. This problem of provenance has been the mainstay of critical debate about the British film industry since its inception, but in prioritising textual analysis, this interpretation often ignores the additional factors involved in the development of notions of ‘Britishness’. In contrast, this thesis focuses on how the concept of what became known as ‘British cinema’, was created during the early twentieth century, addressing the contextual elements of the cinema experience, and arguing that they were extremely important in determining what ‘British cinema’ would come to represent. Using a range of private papers, government records and marketing materials, I chart the development of the link between ‘British’ cinema and national identity, and the various ways that this concept was presented to the public both in Britain and across the globe. Rather than conceive of this as a definitive form ab initio, I argue that it was a complex process of invention, a myth augmented over time and which was so potent it could accommodate a divergent range of films and filmmakers. Thus, this thesis is not a critique of what British cinema represented, but how it came to represent it.

This thesis examines four films made during two key phases in East German film history in the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s which have earned critical acclaim for their challenge to cultural-political orthodoxy and which I read as national narratives offering political, social, cultural and historical constructions of GDR identity. I argue that narrative representations of gender and sexuality serve in the films as a means towards negotiating between affirmation and critique. My analyses are informed by a wide range of other DEFA films. Chapter One sketches broader political and film-historical contexts. Chapter Two examines the role that gender discourse plays in differentiating East from West in the depiction of the frontier city of Berlin in Gerhard Klein's Berlin-Ecke Schonhauser. Chapter Three focuses on Konrad Wolf’s adaptation of Christa Wolfs novel Der geteilte Himmel. It shows how the film articulates competing views of the GDR, but instrumentalizes the female character ultimately to endorse socialist society in a divided Germany, and expresses her attachment to this new society in terms of a family-type relationship. Chapter Four examines how Frank Vogel's Denk bloss nicht, ich heule seeks to mediate between the 'national' past and present, using a triangular family plot. In Chapter Five, the analysis of Frank Beyer's Spur der Steine centres upon the role of a lone female in the film's reforming exploration of the overwhelmingly male collective, but shows how it leaves the status of sexuality - whether for pleasure or for reproductive ends - unresolved. There has been little in-depth study of the way gender representation relates to constructions of the GDR in films of this period. This study remedies this omission, showing how the film-makers frequently rely upon conservative gender paradigms to manage the contradictions implicit in their project and how the endings of the films increasingly come under strain.

This thesis argues that in order to understand the way in which films work one has to place them into a variety of contexts. As well as those of production, these include the historical and culturally specific moments of their creation and consumption. In order to explore how these contexts impact upon the textual construction of individual and groups of films, and our potential understanding of them, this study offers two contrasting case studies of critically neglected areas: Spanish horror cinema since the late-1960s; and US martial arts films since the late 1980s. The first places a range of horror films into very particular historical moments: the Spain of the Franco regime; the transition to democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and the contemporary, increasingly trans-national, Spanish film industry. Each chapter in this section looks in detail at how the shifts and changes in Spanish society, the critical reception of cinema, and production trends, has impacted upon the texts that have appeared on increasingly international screens. The second case study considers the shifts and changes in the production of US martial arts films. It discusses the problem of defining an area of filmmaking that is more commonly associated with a different filmmaking tradition, in a different national cinema. Each chapter here investigates the ways in which 'martial arts movies' operate in strikingly different production contexts. In particular, it contrasts films made within the US mainstream or Hollywood cinema, and the exploitation world that functions on its fringes. Finally, these case studies suggest that a fuller understanding of these works can only be achieved by utilising a number of approaches, both textual and contextual; creating an approach which Douglas Kellner has described as 'multiperspectival'.

My thesis is an examination of the formal and textual aspects of the long take, principally as used in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles), Ugetsil (1954, Kenji Mizoguchi), and Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky). The thesis begins by defining the long take as a shot of 25 seconds or longer that usually contains one of the following qualities: a sense of completeness or wholeness, 'durational complexity, ' and a 'soft' formal/thematic determinism. This working definition is used as part of a 'philosophical' formal-textual methodological approach to the long take informed by a 'common sense' philosophical understanding of time. An important element of this formal-textual methodology is 'contextual statistical analysis' (CSA) and close, accurate shot description. This 'common sense' philosophical understanding sees time as being expressible by properties that are both outside the self (external time) and by properties that are within the self (internal time). External time becomes the 'measurable' aspects of the long take (duration), which condition and are conditioned by the 'less quantifiable' aspects of a long take's internal time (pertinent formal and textual properties within the shot). Internal and external time combine to express the 'emotional quality' of time in a long take, which I call temporal tonality. By employing this formal-textual methodology to my three case study films, I demonstrate how a dominant use of the long take is an important (though not exclusive) formal component of each film's particular thematic and/or philosophical treatment of time. The long take is also analysed in two other case studies with more general designs: a taxonomy of the long take time and narrative time (Chapter 4), and an analysis of the long take as an expressive narrative agent in popular cinema (Chapter 5). Lastly, the statistical differences concerning long take usage gives rise to an articulation of three long take practices: Dialectical, Synthetic, and Radical. This original observation will lay down a general groundwork for further exploration of long take practice, style, theory, and analysis.