This thesis examines the ways in which heterosexuality is rendered in the Hollywood genre where its existence is most privileged: musicals of the studio era (c. 1930 - c. 1960). In this popular film category, heterosexuality is expressed in a framework of "boy-meets-girl" amatory coupling that is remarkably amplified and insistent. In analysis that is at once sympathetic and critical of the subject matter, I show that heterosexuality in the Hollywood musical is constructed in a way that is far from monolithic. On the contrary, I find that there are in fact varieties of heterosexual identity that exist in the genre, and that they are most succinctly revealed through romantic engagement. Yet heterosexuality is depicted along divergent formulations owing to contrasting relational aims and assumptions. Building on Richard Dyer's 1993 essay, "'I Seem to Find the Happiness I Seek': Heterosexuality and Dance in the Musical," I will discuss how the basis of these separate models is traceable to different approaches related to power distributions between men and women. These processes, in turn, arise from different notions concerning masculinity and femininity. In this way, a mix of gender expressions inhabit the Hollywood musical leading to an assortment of heterosexual models. Textually these models become visible not only through an analysis of characterization and the position of the man and woman within the narrative, but in the camera work, all aspects of the mise-en-scene, and most cogently, in the arrangement of the central heterosexual couple in the song-and-dance sequences. For my examination of heterosexuality in the Hollywood musical, I will concentrate on the work of two of its greatest auteurs: Fred Astaire (star) and Vincente Minnelli (director). The impact each man made on this genre is hard to overestimate. In terms of methodology I divide my analysis between these two artists, and ascertain what model(s) of heterosexual identity are communicated by them. Then after establishing what design(s) of heterosexual life each one suggests (for Astaire I analyse Top Hat [1935] as well as Carefree [1938] and The Sky's the Limit [1943], while for Minnelli I look at Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and The Pirate [1948]), I conclude this thesis by examining their most acclaimed joint effort (The Band Wagon [1953]) to discern what, if any, change one might have had on the other. A phenomenon tied to the US musical (whether stage or screen) is that although it is the most heterosexual of genres, it is also one traditionally both crafted and appreciated by gay men. Though it does not fall within the scope of this thesis, it is worth speculating for future work if Astaire's heterosexuality and Minnelli's homosexuality had any significant bearing on the way they represented the standard boy meets-girl plot device upon which the Hollywood musical relies.

The thesis represents an attempt to bring together theoretical and empirical work on (grotesque/excremental) humour. The first two sections are consequently concerned with the history and theorisation of the grotesque/excremental and with the prevalent ways of analysing the comedic. It was decided that a 'history' of Monty Python would constitute too long a digression, and so only a brief account of Terry Gilliam's links with the grotesque is included. Two further section then deal with some of the research on the comedic which has been done and with audience research methodologies. It is worth noting a shift which took place in the course of work on this thesis, from a concern with highly individuated responses (reflecting the centrality of psychoanalytic explications of the comedic) to an eventual decision to concentrate on a 'readerresponse' approach. The rationale for this shift is discussed in Section 5, and briefly in Section 6. The empirical heart of the research is, then, an analysis of a transcript of six hours of taped interviews/discussions about responses to Monty Python's Meaning of Life. These are supplemented by the results of Humour Appreciation Tests and Mood Adjective Check Lists administered under standard conditions to the respondents watching the film. While there can be no question of 'proof', particularly in a field in which psychoanalytic mechanisms are arguably crucial, results of the empirical study indicate that the humour of Meaning of Life functions to reduce anxiety, and that the mechanism by which this occurs conforms to a Freudian repression model. Over and above this, however, - the work of David Morley and Janice Radway is worth evoking here - the detailed account of audience response also furnishes data for further enquiry about how and why 'real' respondents do or do not find grotesque and excremental humour 'funny'.

French writings on British cinema have tended, and continue, to be dominated by one single figure. Director Francois Truffaut's famous dismissal of British cinema has become a standard reference. The systematic repetition of his critique has worked to produce an official story that has become emblematic of the French perspective on British cinema. Yet to date the subject has received little scholarly attention beyond Truffaut. This study documents in depth the French reception of British cinema in the post-war period and relies extensively on the use of archives and research into primary sources including unpublished historical documents and the use of oral sources. These are supplemented by secondary materials such as survey histories of cinema, national film histories, anthologies of film criticism and biographies of film critics and film journals. The thesis is divided into four chapters that relate to four distinct historical periods from the immediate post-war years up to the late 1990s. In each of the chapters I relocate critical texts and ideas within the historical conjuncture from which they have emerged. In the process, the thesis uncovers positive readings of British cinema and thus redresses the historiography that has characterised the representation of the French perspective as uniformly negative. The central argument of this thesis centres on an examination of critical writings as inverted discourses on French cinema. Considering contemporary reviews as a prism through which the identity of French cinema may be articulated or refracted, I show that the discourses of auteurism and realism have played a key role in the debates around cinema and thus in the critical construction of British cinema. I conclude that the French reception of British cinema must be understood as an articulation of anxieties, concerns and struggles around the identity of French cinema itself.

The claim providing the starting point for this thesis is that most narrative films are in an overtly dramatic, melodramatic or comic idiom. These modes seem most adept at tapping the visually expressive potentialities of the art and satisfying the needs of the audience: the narratives of most films are structured around either confrontation, or colourful events, or crisis, or periods of significant change, and they are expressed in a demonstrative visual style. This thesis is interested in the way a few films uncover profundity by structuring narrative around a range of life experiences unavailable to the melodramatic mode as it has developed in world cinema; life experiences based in the everyday, that is in the routine or repetitive, in the apparently banal or mundane, the uneventful. The first part of the thesis discusses the nature of the achievement of these undramatic films which address the everyday: how they help us to understand the medium of film, its possibilities, and how they enhance our ways of viewing and appreciating narratives. This section also focuses on the work of Stanley Cavell, exploring the links between the everyday, film melodrama, and scepticism. The second half of the thesis looks at the specific achievements of four films. Here, the thesis continues the expressive tradition of film scholarship which analyses the communication of meaning through the construction of mise-en-scene, exploring how the themes, ideas, and happenings of a film are served by their stylistic strategies, while further highlighting how such strategies may reveal significant possibilities of the medium. In doing so it follows the approach of writers such as Stanley Cavell, V. F. Perkins and George M. Wilson whilst redirecting this tradition by applying it to less obviously expressive films.

This dissertation examines the representations and metaphoric functions of food and eating in a wide range of European and American films. It purports to present an original approach to film historiography and to the study of film aesthetics. The first chapter, "Food and National Identity in the Cinema," addresses the specific case of food as a conveyor of national identity in French film. Analysis in this chapter is founded on recent critical debates on nationhood and national cinemas. The first part of the chapter examines French films of the pre-war period, whenu food and eating were especially used to convey consensus and harmony. The second part deals with the post-war period, when food started to clearly signify the deterioration of communal, familial and national structures and traditions. The second chapter, "Film, Food and the Feminine," traces mainstream and avant-garde representations of women as both cooks and eaters from the pre-feminist (i.e. up to about 1969-1970) to the post-feminist periods. Analysis is based on feminist cultural criticism of the contradictory messages sent to women about food and eating. Depictions in the pre-feminist period contained eating and cooking women within very limited and stereotypical cinematic spaces. The post-feminist period has seen a diversification of the possible ways of presenting women together with food, especially in films made by female directors. Chapter Three, "Alimentary Delinquency in the Cinema," deals with the distinctly post-classical phenomenon of films that feature acts of cannibalism, coprophagy and other aberrant eating practices. Eased on theories of the "carnivalesque" in film, the first part of the chapter offers an analysis of the specific areas of film production in which alimentary delinquency is prominent: the low forms of the horror film, counter cinema, and contemporary art films. The final section examines alimentary delinquency as a form of corporal spectacle which has the capacity to provoke physical reactions in the spectator's own body. The Conclusion considers recent international "food films" to see how they crystallise and amplify many of the issues raised in this study.

This thesis attempts to broaden the critical boundaries within which the films of Chantal Akerman have been discussed. First, it extends analysis from Akerman's 70s to her 80s and 90s films. Second, it argues that as well as her gender and aesthetic identities, Akerman's Belgian and Jewish identities should be acknowledged. Finally, it suggests that each of these four identities: woman, independent film-maker, Belgian and Jewish allow her a position of marginality, figured in her films through the trope of 'displacement'. The structure of the thesis is two-fold: it extends discussion of Akerman's cinema to films not previously considered, and through this extension engages with contemporary issues in film and cultural theory such as female authorship, independent and national, and marginal cinemas. Chapter one `Woman' and chapter two `Independent' extend the reading of gender and sexuality and formal and aesthetic innovation in Akerman's cinema. In the first chapter this is done through consideration of the films Golden Eighties (1986) and Nuit et jour (1990), while in the second her short films, video work and work for television are examined. My third and fourth chapters offer areas of Akerman's work which have not previously been studied. Chapter three, `Belgian', considers the significance of Akerman's nationality for her film-making while engaging with theories around national cinema. It examines the possibility of a `Belgian national cinema' and the intersections which arise between this and Akerman's cinema, especially around Toute une nuit (1982). Finally, in my fourth chapter, `Jewish', I use Histoires d'Amerigue (1989) and D'Est (1993) to argue that Akerman's is a `wandering' cinema, in which she is constantly examining the homelessness and displacement that her Jewishness engenders.

This thesis is an investigation into the working practices of Odin Teatret. It focuses on the making of the latest group performance, Kaosmos, made between 1992-1993. The thesis extracts certain transmissible principles of practice from the process of Kaosmos. These principles are concerned with the director's work on performance. The work of the actor is therefore only referred in order to illuminate or explain this. The thesis covers all areas of creative work involved in making performance: the director's instructions, the actors' actions, the texts, music, songs, sound, set, lighting, costumes and props. This is the first study of the work of Eugenio Barba that follows his process of making a performance from inception to finish, and, from this, extracts principles of practice. This is not just a theoretical or historical document, but one that can hopefully contribute to the working practices of other directors. The method of investigation was primarily practical. I was assigned the role of assistant director on Kaosmos. This gave me a daily insight into the working practice of Odin Teatret in rehearsal. The thesis documents this process through practical analysis and extracts from my work diary. It concludes with a performance-text of Kaosmos, the basis of which I created during the process as a working document for Barba and the actors. The thesis is divided into two main parts: the first part gives the theoretical background to the working practices to be documented later in the thesis. The second part shows how these theories of practice were actually implemented in rehearsal. The aspects here perceived as being central to the making of performance are: 1) the ability to begin work on a performance at a stage before meanings, characters and narratives have been established and 2) the use of montage as the main structural dynamic in the creation of performance. The intention of the thesis is not to draw any hard-and-fast conclusions. This would endanger the creative nature of the practice it documents and turn the information here offered into a handbook of rules. The intention is rather to allow the information to inspire and inform other practitioners, without creating any definition of how this should occur. It is of upmost importance that each artist interpret and use what is here written in their own individual manner. All the quotes are given in their language of publication, all translations contained in the text are by myself.

This thesis analyses the 'rape-revenge' films of the post- 1970 period. Against the tendency of existing work in this area to categorize rape-revenge as a sub-genre of horror, I argue that rape-revenge is better understood as a narrative structure which, on meeting the discourses of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, has produced an historically specific, but generically diverse cycle of films. I suggest, therefore, that the rape-revenge cycle might usefully be read as one of the key ways in which Hollywood has attempted to make sense of feminism and the changing shape of heterosexual femininity in the post-1970 period. Using a model of cultural analysis influenced by Gramsci's theory of hegemony, I argue that it is in the struggle between the feminist stories the rape-revenge structure attempts to tell and the feminine stories embedded in the genres over which it has been mapped that common-sense understandings of feminism are produced. Initial consideration is given to the ideological effects of various generic deployments of the rape-revenge structure in the pre-1970 period. Subsequent chapters explore the ways in which post-1970 deployments of the structure negotiate and rework the 'mass cultural fictions of femininity' inscribed in the genres over which they have been mapped, and the understandings of feminism these negotiations have produced. The ways in which extra-textual material such as reviews contribute to the construction of these understandings is also explored. Additional consideration is given to the increasing influence of post-modern aesthetics on Hollywood film, the emergence of the New Right during the 1980s and the characterization of this period as one of post-feminism or backlash. In identifying the rape-revenge cycle as one of the key sites through which the meanings of feminism are constructed and negotiated, I suggest that the most politically expedient form feminist film theory can take today is not one which attempts to separate feminist film from mainstream film, the political from the popular, but one which attempts to theorize the relationship between feminism and film, the political and the popular.

The thesis deals with two central issues: a) the construction of a framework for the study of film acting which places performance in a cultural context b) the cultural significance of Method acting during the 1950s with specific reference to American cinema of the period The first chapter considers the ways in which the voice and body in film acting are made meaningful in the context of beliefs about acting and personal identity. The chapter also proposes ways for situating the practical activity of film acting in a context of cultural production. The remaining chapters study the cultural significance of Method acting through separate analyses of the Method technique, style, representation of gender, and image of star performance. Readings of the Method technique and style are placed in the context of a `culture of personality', in which the significance of the Method was produced in the ways that acting signified beliefs about personal identity. The discussion of the Method style is then developed in the analysis of the ways in which the style was used in film melodramas to represent the gendered anxieties of the rebel hero. Finally, Marlon Brando's image and performances are studied for how the actor personified the meaning of the Method. Together, technique, style, gender representation, and stardom, are studied as various aspects of what is called the Method discourse.

Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998) is a video work made up of visual and verbal quotations of hundreds of images and sounds from film history. But rather than simply telling (hi)stories of cinema, Godard makes a case for cinema as a tool for performing the work of history. This is partly because the film image, by virtue of always recording more of the real than was anticipated or intended, necessarily has history itself inscribed within its very fabric. It is also because montage, as the art of combining discrete elements in new ways in order to produce original forms, can be seen as a machine for realising historical thought. This thesis examines these ideas by discussing Godard's account of the role of cinema in the Second World War, and by analysing some of his recent work as examples of historical montage which attempt to criticise our current political climate through comparison with earlier eras. After a first chapter which sets out Godard's argument through an extensive commentary of Histoire(s) 1A and B, a second chapter discusses Godard's depiction of the invention of cinema and traces a complex argument about technology and historical responsibility around the key metaphorical figure of the train. Chapter 3 explores the ways in which Godard's historical approach to cinema allows him to maintain a critical discourse with regard to the geopolitical realities of late twentieth-century Europe (Germany, the Balkans), but also to the communications and business empires that have developed over the past few decades. A final chapter offers a detailed consideration of the nature of Godard's cinematic quotation and seeks to explicate the apocalyptic rhetoric of his late work. Aside from Histoire(s) du cinema, films discussed include Nouvelle Vague (1990), Allemagne neuf zero (1991), For Ever Mozart (1996) and Eloge de l'amour (2001).