Although teen film is littered with tales of young women coming of age, the messages presented in most of these films follow a formula centered on a patriarchal nuclear family ideal, which leads to damaging perceptions regarding gender roles in teenage society. There is the main traditional model of stay at home mother with a father in the role of the breadwinner; the rise of rape culture; and the glass ceiling in the workplace. The young females consuming a mass amount of this media then reflect negatively on themselves. The research following this conundrum was broken into two parts: the production of a film looking to remedy the many problems of female representation in teen media and then monitoring the reaction to said film against its target audience: young females between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. The purpose of this thesis is to explore what makes females within the teenage demographic react to certain kinds of media. If they react negatively or positively towards a media representation of themselves, to what extent does this affect the participants' activity in their daily lives? Therefore, through a process of screening three short films focused on teen issues - including the one made by myself for this study - and then conducting a survey focusing on questions regarding the participants' feelings towards the subject matter, their hopes for themselves, and teen media in general, there was an ability to gauge how deeply teen media affects the modern teenager.

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This dissertation is a historical and theoretical study of a number of discourses examining colour and cinema during the period 1909 to 1935 (trade press, film reviews, publications on film technology, manuals, catalogues and theoretical texts from the era). In this study, colour in cinema is considered as producing a number of aesthetic and representational questions which are contextualised historically; problems and qualities specifically associated with colour film are examined in terms of an interrelationship between historical, technical, industrial, and stylistic factors, as well as specific contemporary conceptions of cinema. The first chapter examines notions concerning the technical, material, as well as perceptual, origins of colour in cinema, and questions concerning indexicality, iconicity, and colour reproduction, through focusing on the relationship between the photographic colour process Kinemacolor, as well as other similar processes, and the established non-photographic colour methods during the early 1910s, with an in-depth analysis of the Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects, published in 1912. The second chapter examines notions concerning the stylistic, formal and narrative functions of colour in cinema, featuring a survey of the recurring comparisons between colour and sound, found in the writing of film history, in discourses concerning early Technicolor sound films, film technology, experimental films and experiments on synaesthesia during the 1920s, as well as Eisenstein’s notions of the functions of colour in sound film montage. The third chapter examines the question of colour and meaning in cinema through considering the relationship between colours and objects in colour film images (polychrome and monochrome, photographic and non-photographic) during the time frame of this study.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

The submitted thesis is titled Representations of Femininity in Quentin Tarantino's Movies and it focuses on the process of femininity construction in six selected movies both written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. The aim of this study is to identify how Tarantino operates the notions of conventional femininity and traditional female gender roles. Furthermore, it investigates to what extent his films either support or subvert stereotypical gender identities. In relation to the research issues the key concepts are defined by the theoretical part of this work. In particular it describes the theory of social and media construction of reality, gender as construct, film as a part of patriarchal structure or feminist perspectives related to the film production. This same part also offers basic information about Quentin Tarantino's personality and his film works in general. In order to answer the research questions the thesis employs a qualitative method of critical discourse analysis which functions as a helpful tool while reconstructing the image of femininity set by media. Moreover, the selected method serves to reveal latent meanings applied by film as a form of media to affect both behavioural and cognitive individual characteristics. Keywords Femininity, gender, construct, stereotype,...

In this dissertation, I bring together film theory, literary criticism, anthropology and psychology to develop a paradigm for the study of teen films that can also be effectively applied to other areas of pop culture studies as well as literary genres. Expanding on Thomas Doherty's discussion of 1950s teen films and Ian Jarvie's study of films as social criticism, I argue that teen films are a discrete genre that appeals to adolescents to the exclusion of other groups. Teen films subvert social mores of the adult world and validate adolescent subculture by reflecting that subculture's values and viewpoints. The locus of this subversion is the means by which teenagers, through the teen films, vicariously experience anxiety-provoking adult subjects such as sexual experimentation and physical violence, particularly the extreme expressions of sex and violence that society labels taboo. Through analyzing the rhetoric of teen lifestyle films, specifically the teen romance and sex farce, I explore how the films offer teens vicarious experience of many adolescent "firsts." In addition, I claim that teen films can effectively appropriate other genres while remaining identifiable as teen films. I discuss hybrid films which combine the teen film with the science fiction genre, specifically Back to the Future and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and the musical genre, specifically Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Dirty Dancing. In my discussion of the slasher film, specifically the Halloween. Friday the 13th. and A Nightmare on Elm Street cycles, I highlight how teen films function as a safe place to explore the taboo. Finally, I discuss the way in which the teen film genre has evolved in the 1990s due in part to shifts in social and economic interests. The teen films of the 1990s include the viewpoints of women, minorities, the handicapped, and homosexuals and question the materialistic ethos of the 1980s films.

This thesis examines the fragile perimeter that separates an illusory reality from the supposedly more authentic Real it conceals, which forms a key focus of Slavoj Žižek’s work, and in this thesis I offer a study of the relations between this aspect of Žižek’s work and film theory. In particular, this thesis is an elaboration on and interrogation of Žižek’s employment of the Lacanian notion of the Real in critiques of the inadequacy of 1970s and 1980s film theory and its widespread adoption of a Lacanian model of film-spectator relations. By way of illustration, I consider the microgenre of films released between the years 1998 to 2000 that includes the Matrix trilogy, David Fincher’s Fight Club, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, and Alex Proyas’ Dark City, which are all similarly fascinated by the border between a fake reality and an ostensibly more genuine real. However, I also argue that this cycle of films does more than illustrate a fascination with that which is in excess of signification: this cycle of films equally participates in the reappraisal of this important phase of film theory. This thesis proceeds from a consideration of Žižek’s assertion that Lacanian psychoanalysis is missing from the dominant field of film theory. To assess this claim, I re-examine the era of political modernism. From this it becomes clear that what Žižek is noting is not the total absence of Lacanian psychoanalysis, but, rather, an absence of the version of Lacan to which he is drawn. This thesis considers aspects of the Real that contaminate the form and matter of these films, in addition to the thematic exploration of the shadowy world beyond reality. In pursuing this investigation, this thesis utilises the insights of the deconstructive work of Jacques Derrida, to consider the terms ‘form’, ‘content’ and ‘matter’. These words are ubiquitous in film studies, and I aim to explicate not their final meaning, but the way in which the Real interrupts the very stability of vocabulary used in film studies. I interrogate the concepts of gaze and voice as privileged instances of the way in which the Real can rupture the symbolic in narrative film. Without seeking to reject these aesthetic figures, through critical readings of key theories of embodiment, the grotesque and the abject (such as those of Marks, Shaviro, Sobchack, Bakhtin and Kristeva), I suggest how the body and its representation provides a more sustained motif where the Real leaves its trace in these films. This thesis proposes that it is above all through such representations that these films offer a response to the themes with which politically modernist film theory has been historically concerned. The Edge of the Construct films achieve this in their evocation of an intolerable namelessness at the centre of the human subject and the social world it inhabits. / Thesis(Ph.D.) -- School of Humanities, 2008

The dissertation deals with two different subjects: on the one hand the interrelations of narrative prose fiction and narrative fiction film, on the other hand fictional narration and intermediality as such. The first part discusses the concepts of medium and intermediality, and presents some general theoretical models. Of special importance is the three level structure of fictional representations: sign vehicle, meaning and fictional content. The second part focuses on the qualities of the sign vehicle, and on different kinds of meaning and fictional content. The sign vehicle of language and literature is digital, and consists of replicas of types. The film medium is analogue, the cinematic sign is a copy. The conventionality of literary fictions is primary, i. e. literary meaning depends on the conventions of language. The conventionality of film narratives is secondary, mediated by non-conventional meaning. The second part also deals with specific, general, generic, concrete and abstract meaning, and discusses the concepts of metaphor, symbol and expression. Part three focuses on iconic and index relations, i. e. relations of similarity and contiguity, of the fictional representation. Cinematic narratives are characterized by primary iconicity, i. e. all meaning and fictional content are dependent on the iconic relation between the poles of the representation. The iconicity of prose fiction is, by contrast, secondary, mediated by conventional sign relations. Also abductive and performative, fictional and non-fictional indexical signs, and different kinds of implications and lacunas are discussed. Part four deals with the concepts of fictionality and narrative perspective, such as the fictional stance, the narrator and focalization. Four different notions of fictionality are scrutinized and brought together, and narrative perspective is described and analyzed in terms of two different game fictions: epic games and perceptual games. Depending on the semiotic resources, the possibilities and limits of prose fiction and fiction film described in the first three parts of the dissertation, fictional games are shown to be more or less rich and realistic.