This thesis addresses temporal experience in moving image from the perspective of artists’ film and video and asks: "if material qualities are implicated in memory as pastness, how can this be made apperceptible using art practice?” The study contributes to the understanding of temporal and material experience in contemporary art practice, finding that materiality is entwined with pastness dynamically. In disrupting anticipated temporal and material flow, conflicting temporalities are exposed as present and apperception made possible. The moving image is a growing part of visual culture and with increasing access to both current and historical material there is a vast reserve to draw from. Early film and its reception, in particular the Rough Sea film, is a pivotal component in this research both as a means to consider how experiences of moving image materiality were shaped but also as reference points for later experimental approaches to making and viewing. Reflexive spectatorial and archival research is interwoven with critical, theoretical and philosophical review. The active viewer of structural/materialist discourse is recuperated as a basis for a contemporary critical position on materiality and moving image spectatorship. Selected works by artist-filmmakers are analysed as forms of practice research that inform the investigation. Material qualities such as interval and colour are examined as familiar and habitual aspects of moving image with involvement in senses of past. The limitations of isolating them are addressed through the two works. One, a video work created from appropriated archival film footage of sea questions temporality sequentially within the spatial mnemonics of the cinema. The other, a multi-screen film and video installation, explores temporality in a non- cinematic space through the concurrent and disruptive. Both works show that experience of the material conditions of moving image has significance in memory and are therefore crucial to an examination of pastness.

An increasing number of filmmaking projects borrow approaches from open source programming methodologies in the practical process of film production. The potential benefits of open filmmaking include fast development times, customizable storytelling, less-biased reportage and a rich learning environment for future filmmakers, among others. There has been very little academic study about the challenges of this approach and the opportunities it affords for distributed filmmaking. This thesis explores the possibility of incorporating open source programming methodologies into the practice of distributed filmmaking. It develops a number of emergent policies and procedures that relate to this practice, and tests them out using an interactive website called “Swarm TV”. This online environment acts as a prototype for these policies and procedures, as well as functioning as a probe, testing their effectiveness in the filmmaking projects. Data is collected from the website and has been used from a number of projects over the last nine years, to reflect on how these emergent policies and procedures affect the dynamics of a filmmaking community. From the context of open source programming, the digital revolution has emphasized three main characteristics that are significant in open source methodologies: Openness, Non-hierarchy & Collaboration. These concepts are explored in this thesis to define guidelines for distributed filmmaking projects where open source methodologies are implemented. Analysis of the effectiveness of these policies and procedures is provided for filmmaking projects using Swarm TV, and conclusions are developed focused on the effectiveness of open source approaches to filmmaking projects in distributed communities. The practical research in this thesis demonstrates the extent to which open source methodologies are effective for the filmmaking process, and also, identifies the emergent policies and procedures that might facilitate distributed filmmaking in an online environment.

This study examines the film adaptations of six English novels; Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Tess, Jude, A Room with a View and A Passage to India. Through textual analysis of both the films and the original novels it demonstrates that many of the changes which occur in the transition between media are explicable in terms of differences between film and literary genres. Most previous writing on adaptation has tended to explain such changes as a consequence of film and literature having different signifying or expressive capacities. Whilst this study does not argue that literary styles and devices have necessary or inevitable equivalents in film form, it does propose that filmmakers can find satisfying and comprehensible correlatives for written idioms, and that differences between novels and their adaptations are not therefore always best understood as arising from failures in the mechanics of translation. In its consideration of what each film alters and omits this study finds compelling evidence that they are reshaped in particularly genre-related ways. This takes the form both of alterations that place an adaptation more comfortably in a particular fihn genre than the original story materials might allow, and changes which diminish or elide the operation of a literary genre to which the original novel belongs or relates. Sense and Sensibility, Emma and A Room with a View are discussed in terms of how they become romantic comedies, while the Hardy adaptations are the occasion of most of the original melodrama being omitted. Other genres and modes which pose problems and questions in adaptation - including tragedy, the didactic and the modern - are also examined. Additionally, this study will consider the political contexts and conditions of production of the novels and their adaptations as well as examining the extent to which the films may be said to be authored.

Posthumanism is a contested term, seen by some as leading towards a merging of human bodies and technology and by others, more critically, as a renewal of the ethical debate regarding human exceptionalism. Through a study of this critical approach and its potential relation to expanded cinema, a set of propositions is formulated. New knowledge emerges through the application of these propositions towards the expression of critical posthumanism. By looking at formal, conceptual and methodological underpinnings, existing tendencies in expanded cinema are analysed and reviewed. Firstly, aided by Timothy Morton's 'ambient poetics', environmental orientations in artist film and expanded cinema are investigated. Secondly, conceptual ideas 'beyond the human' in this field are discussed. Finally, the environmental footprint of moving image production is considered. Central to this investigation is the desire to change prevailing narratives regarding nature and environment. Instead of regarding environment as a subject outside the cultural domain, environmental immanence and shared consciousness are regarded as central cultural values within a productive posthuman debate. This theoretical approach is set in motion through a practice-based project in which organic processes are applied to generate images on discarded and outdated 35mm film. By using plants, mud and salt in conjunction with alternative photochemistry, images are 'grown' on motion picture film. Moreover, digital images are gathered using a camera extension that allows a point of view beyond the human. Background and foreground are reversed in order to reveal the prominence of natural elements in an urban setting. These images are used in a performative or spatial context that places the viewer within the work. By bringing together theory and practice a conclusion emerges, opening up further possibilities to develop and apply the newly found knowledge, not only in expanded cinema but also to other fields.

This practice-based PhD has at its core six short films, made by and featuring the author (Dean Kelland), which take as their inspiration certain male characters from TV sitcoms from the 1950s-1970s. Those characters are: Tony Hancock (Hancock’s Half- Hour, 1956-59, BBC1 UK); Harold Steptoe (Steptoe and Son, 1962-65, BBC1 UK); and the two “Likely Lads”, Bob Ferris and Terry Collier, (Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?, 1973-74, BBC1 UK). The research is an investigation into the construction of masculine gender stereotypes, explored through a process of a performance-led visual arts practice that incorporates the use of interdisciplinary approaches. This interdisciplinarity is aligned to Lisa Lattuca’s definition of “informed disciplinarity” as being “informed by concepts or theories from another discipline or relying upon methods from other disciplines.” (History of Intellectual Culture, 2003). Disciplines and fields include: comedy studies, performance art studies, television studies, gender studies and cultural studies. The selected sitcom examples were hugely popular and influential in the eras in which they were first broadcast, a period in post-war British history when constructions of class were changing. The PhD provides analysis of: location; both geographical (the parts of the UK in which the programmes were set) and in terms of domestic setting; class-derived identity (including distinctions of taste); and sociologically/historically based perspectives. In my performance-led practice, I create scenarios that have emanated from the research, focusing on specific scenes from the programmes (identified for their relevance to the research questions). I then re-purpose these scenes in order to show them in a new light, specifically by inhabiting the characters utilising traditional acting methodologies combined with performance art techniques. Each mimetic repetition exposes the blurring of one identity into another, and so interrogates the intersubjective identifications between actor, projected character and audience, mobilized through “performing masculinity”. Drawing on my own memories, and the sense of nostalgia that has been created by my exposure to these (repeated) programmes, I ask new questions about subjective experience within fine art practice (in other words, how the modes of such practice have been used to address the relationship between 7 the body, the external world and self-representation). Often this involves “rupturing” the meaning of the programmes, and revealing what might loosely be termed the horror beneath the comedy. The resulting dialogue between historical source material and contemporary artwork creates a critical interrogation of culturally constructed gendered stereotypes within a specific television entertainment genre. The research journey is carefully logged (sketchbooks, digital portfolio) and analysed (written thesis) in accordance with a reflective, practice-based, methodology.

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The transfer of an artistic work from the literary medium to the filmic medium presents technical, personal, social and political factors for consideration which are capable of revealing important information about the times in which both the literary work and the film work were created. In a Russian context, where both literature and film have played roles of central cultural importance, the study of this interaction can be particularly fruitful. The first chapter of this dissertation considers the theoretical aspects of adaptation, namely fidelity to the original work and questions of metaphor and narrative structure. After examining these issues in a general context, Chapter 1 then views them in the light of specific stages of Russian cinematic history. The remaining chapters of this dissertation consider selected post-revolutionary Soviet and Russian filmic adaptations of the works of Nikolai Gogol', Fedor Dostoevskii and Anton Chekhov in chronological order. Analysis of both text and film is undertaken in order to demonstrate the complexity of literary and extra-literary factors involved in adaptation. The works of Gogol' have provided film makers with the challenge of finding "adequate" filmic equivalents to this writer's narrative devices, particularly his use of skaz [oral folk narration]. Dostoevskii's works have proven to be a stumbling block for film makers, both in terms of their ideological acceptability, and their exploration of complex psychological and religious issues. The adaptations of Chekhov's works have provided cinema with diverse subject matter that reflects the various stages and developments of Russian cinematic history, from pure fabula borrowing to an emphasis on mood and atmosphere. The interdisciplinary approach of this dissertation strives to show both the on-going relevancy of nineteenth-century Russian literature to modern culture, and the cinema's ability to present vastly differing interpretive possibilities of the literary cano

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to test assumptions made about characteristics of nontheatrical film and video works that were thought to contribute to the frequency with which the works were purchased. This study proposed and tested three variables for which relationships to the sales success of nontheatrical film and video works were hypothesized, as well as four variables about which no hypotheses were forwarded. Nineteen film and video distribution organizations contributed unit sales data for the period 1982-1987 on 151 works copyrighted between 1982 and 1984. These data were analyzed for relationships between sales totals and 1) curricular significance of the works' subjects, 2) relevance to general reading interest in the works' subjects, 3) intensity of competition faced by the works, 4) the works' Dewey classifications as compared to the composition of typical K-12 school library book collections, 5) the series or non-series status of the works, 6) the media format(s) in which the works were available for purchase and 7) the sources of the works' production financing. Analyses of correlation and association were performed and no significant relationships were found between sales and curricular significance of the works' subjects, or their relevance to general reading interest. Some evidence was presented to suggest a significant association between the intensity of competition faced by a work and its eventual sales. None of the hypotheses about these variables was supported. However, the four remaining variables were found to be significant, or to approach significance, as correlates or associates of sales success. The best predictor of sales for works intended for the K-12 school market was the work's Dewey Decimal classification. Other important findings included associations between high sales and intense product competition, between high sales and non-series status, between high sales and availability for purchase in 16mm film and between high sales and works that had been financed by the distribution organization.

This thesis is a critical reflection on Vision Machine's North Sumatran film project, articulating a cinema practice that seeks to address a genocide that has barely been investigated. The primary footage comprises extensive interviews, re-enactments and dramatisations of the various practices and procedures that constituted the core of the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide in Sumatra's plantation belt. The participants in these dramatisations and enactments are, for the most part, death squad leaders and members who participated in the killing. This data, comprising over 100 hours of video, constitute revelatory primary research into the history and operation of the Indonesian genocide. This research forms the historical context for the project, and is therefore summarised in the thesis. The reflection on the epistemological, cultural and historical status of these re-enactments constitutes the basis for the core argument of this thesis. To this day, in North Sumatra, the genocidaires remain largely in power. This fact transforms our film project into a unique laboratory for exploring the cultural politics of film, media and history within a context of victory and impunity. Specifically, the project examines the ways in which historical narrative - inevitably told by victors - becomes an instrument of terror within a spectral economy of terror. This project is both an intervention into this economy, as well as an analysis of its mechanisms and protocols. As such, the thesis comprises both completed films, extracts from works-in-progress and this writing, and lies at the intersection of the disparate fields of cinema studies, Indonesian area studies, trauma studies and film practice. This thesis proposes a theory of performativity, spectrality and genres of historical performance; specifically, it is argues that spectres are performatively conjured as the obscene to any symbolic performance - including both historical acts as well as their rehearsal and restaging in re-enactment, testimony, or dramatisation; such spectres constitute a power that may be claimed by the performer. This power interacts with actual structures of power, as well as processes that seek to record, circulate or excavate such historical performances, including our filmmaking process. In the case of this film project, perpetrators are lured by the apparatus of filmmaking into naming names and revealing routines of mass murder hitherto obscene to official histories, and they do so through dramatisations and re-enactments manifestly conditioned by the codes of film and television genres. This latter point reveals the complex ways in which remembrance is always already well-rehearsed, scripted and generic. Thus does the research excavate (by catalysing) perpetrators' performative use of film genres to conjure as a spectral force that which must remain obscene to the codes of genre. And thus does the research excavate (by miming) the way genre fashions historical narratives into instruments of terror. As perpetrators of the genocide name names and reveal secrets, the process by which they seek to claim and manifest their spectral power is short-circuited by the filmmaking process, which condenses a miasmic spectral into specific ghosts. By shorting one circuit, the filmmaking closes another through which the process of remembrance, working through and redemption may begin for survivors. From this emerges an understanding of both the filmmaking process and its products (i.e., the completed films) as filmic interventions into a spectral economy of terror. This thesis describes a film practice that is necessarily a social practice, at once producing works and doing work. Building on models of collective filmmaking developed by Jean Rouch and George Stoney, we incorporate experimental production techniques including spirit possession, re-narration, infiltration, and genre-based fiction filmmaking in order to define a new model for film production that the author has termed "archaeological performance". Moving beyond the interview-based approaches of Lanzmann and Ophüls, archaeological performance suggests a hybrid and interventionist form of cinema adequate to addressing a history whose very incoherence has served as an instrument of terror.