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<p>Knut Erik Jensen’s oeuvre is often described from a typical Norwegian point of view. The corpus of films studied is restricted to his documentary production and to the breakthrough of Stella Polaris in 1993. But as I discovered Knut Erik Jensen through his posterior fiction films, I had to focus on this under esteemed production, even if I remain convinced that the dichotomy between the documentary and fiction films is not very pertinent. As Passing Darkness had blurred my reading of Gilles Deleuze’s books dedicated to cinema, I started to focus on both this film and Deleuze’s philosophical approach. I linked then Knut Erik Jensen’s films to other filmmakers who in my sense had the same concerns.</p><p>As history is first a matter of geography, I based the reflection on the works by Alain Resnais, Jean-Daniel Pollet and the texts by Jean Epstein. But as the study went on, I realized that a classical study could not validate Jensen’s aesthetic as the alchemical concerns of both Jean Epstein, Edgar Morin or Gilles Deleuze were dealing with either a source or a result. Living at the era of the networks and influenced by some seminars in France regarding the figure and the networks inside the image, I focused on the philosopher stone in order to find an alternative to the crystal image and other postulates. Using some previous knowledge regarding the alchemy, I used the cycle of the azoth in the sea, one of the main characters in Jensen’s aesthetic as being a way to consider the loss of the source and of the result. Instead of opposing time, space and then a questioning of the space/time continuum, I refuted the organic regime (which has been dead for about forty years in film) to focus on the mineral one (through the crystal image and other reflections) and the gaseous one (the development of the transparitions).</p>

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This thesis is a study of key broadcasting magazines published in the United Kingdom prior to the Second World War. At its centre is the premise that the relationship between broadcasting and the magazine industry evolving around it was symbiotic in nature. The relationship was complex because the broadcasters provided much of the material for the magazines to publish and therefore could potentially use this as a tool for influence and publicity, as they sought to stimulate the demand for their output in the British public. However, the magazines were the mediators of the flow of communication. Their editorial content not only provided a critical commentary on material broadcast but also represented a direct conduit between the readers/audience and the broadcasters by providing a forum for the readers/audience to publish their views. Exploring the history of early broadcasting from the perspective of this material reveals the interdependency between the radio stations/broadcasters, the magazines and ultimately, how they connected to the readers/audience. While there have been other partial studies of broadcasting magazines, particularly the Radio Times, these have not assessed the magazine against other contemporary magazines, nor have they placed the magazine within a broadcasting history context. This study not only considers the magazines against the background of the growing broadcasting industry, it also explores what wireless meant to its first audience. This was a crucial element for understanding how the public responded to the developments which were taking place in the 1930s, when commercial enterprises encroached on the BBC’s monopoly and attempted to poach its listeners.

<p> Autobiographical memory is an elusive and ephemeral experience to try and articulate or analyze. It is dynamic, interpretive, and subject to influence. It is malleable and inevitably colored by the variety of beliefs and values held by individuals and which change over the course of a life. With these considerations in mind, is it possible that our own autobiographical memories are ideological? It doesn&rsquo;t seem a stretch to presume our autobiographical memories are imbued with and surrounded by ideas of racism, sexism, classism, patriarchy, privilege and other ideologies of power; topics like these may be encoded into our personal, interior memories and thus deserve to be scrutinized there. The problem is locating, assessing, and then analyzing ideology within the ephemeral, interiorized, and extremely subjective medium of personal memory. As an attempt to solve this problem, this study examines ideology in cinematic depictions of autobiographical memory.</p><p> By analyzing eleven films that include visual depictions of memory, it seems that autobiographical memory and ideology intersect in specific ways. 1. Such memories are not only composed of varying degrees of fact and fiction, but that they are also, in many circumstances, ideological constructions. 2. Autobiographical memories can be ideological not only in the content of the memory but in how autobiographical memory is presumed to operate. 3. In these ways, memories are surrounded by and vulnerable to competing ideologies. It is my hope that this study allows for a continuing conversation about ideology in autobiographical memory as well as how ideologies are affected by perceptions about the nature of remembering, forgetting, and sharing memories.</p>

There are two things that most people know about the ‘video nasties.’ The first is that prior to 1984 the video industry was completely unregulated and the absence of any regulation allowed a space for immoral and disreputable elements of the businesses to thrive. The second is that a series of public complaints about the advertising used to promote the ‘video nasties’ triggered a moral panic that led to introduction of the Video Recordings Act in 1984. Neither of these statements is entirely true, but both have allowed a popular history to persist that continues to hold the independent distributor directly accountable for the events that led to a scheme of government sanctioned censorship that continues to this day. Through exploring the marketing and distribution of the ‘video nasties’, this thesis will challenge this established history and will contextualise the ‘video nasties’ within the emerging landscape of the wider home video industry. Moving beyond the explicitly social readings that have dominated these histories and that have positioned them as an explicitly British concern, this study offers a reading that considers the ‘video nasties’ as part of, and not separate from, a broader global film industry and wider industrial practice. This will be accomplished over three sections. In the first section I will detail the established social history before reconsidering the accuracy of this narrative when it is considered alongside a previously neglected economic and technological history. This context will provide the foundation for the rest of the thesis, providing a basis that reconceptualises the ‘video nasties’ both historically and as part of wider film markets. In the second section I will return to the claims made against the promotional strategies of the early distributors and historicise this type of promotion, tracing a lineage to the ballyhoo of William Castle and the early promotions of P.T Barnum. This will provide context for a study that considers the marketing and branding of both the films and the companies that produced them, following the market through Video, DVD and Blu-ray. The final section documents the evolution of both the product and the marketplace, considering how theoretical constructs arising from film studies can help us understand the marketplace of the ‘video nasties’. The thesis is a revisionist history that reconsiders the birth of the independent video industry in the United Kingdom through the films and distributors that were marginalised and castigated.

This thesis explores the links between ideology, stardom, nationality and the everyday. It argues that as France underwent rapid economic expansion and technical modernisation in the 1950s, everyday life was subsequently rendered `unfamiliar' whilst simultaneously retaining its banal quotidian nature or `familiarity' - i.e. it became `uncanny'. It thus became an object of intense critical inquiry and there was also a resulting object-fetishisation within mass culture. The introductory chapter argues that in a climate of urbanisation, a new `leisure' culture and the explosion of the mass media (women's magazines, news and picture magazines such as L'Express and Paris-Match, American cinema, the launch of Cahiers du cinema, the beginnings of television) the American female star became newly visible in this `uncanny' everyday existence. Her fetishised body thus became a privileged space for expressing the processes of Americanisation and modernisation in France. Each empirical chapter takes an aspect of how modernity effects the body (cleanliness, spatial positioning, clothing) and then explores in detail the different ways these attributes were inflected in representations of the female American star in France and her French equivalent. My thesis thus engages with the ways in which cinematic representation effects the experience of and behaviour within everyday life, and how cultural discourses regulate both the individual and that national body. It closely examines Edgar Morin's writings on the mass media and also uses established theorists such as Henri Lefebvre in a new cinematic context. It also challenges the ways in which star studies generally concentrates on the star in their own culture in order to address stardom as an international phenomenon. It concludes that the presence of the female American star in France enabled the ideological management of the contradictory construction of femininity at this time.

Since the inception of film production in Brazil, women have been involved in all capacities including directing, acting and a variety of other roles behind the camera. During the 1990s and into the new millennium (a period sometimes termed the Retomada or re-birth of Brazilian cinema), there has been a large increase in films which feature notable female characters in prominent narrative positions and in the number of women directors successfully making their feature-length debut. Despite this, critical attention to such characters and directors, beyond a merely descriptive or numerical focus, is lacking and the established class-oriented social tradition remains the dominant language in criticism. With a view to addressing this relative critical neglect, as well as inadequacies in still embryonic studies, this study suggests new critical approaches relevant to the specificity of women’s experience in Brazil and analyses the representation of female characters in five representative films of the Retomada period. The study further aligns its predominant focus on female characters with the socio-political critical orientation that has established certain films as important cultural markers in Brazil, for example Deus e o Diabo na terra do sol /Black God, White Devil and Cidade de Deus/City of God. For this purpose, it again departs from the traditional emphasis on class and brings, rather, the specificity of the women’s movement in Brazil to bear. In order to critically assess how these specific contextual developments are reflected in the films analysed, it further distances itself from mainstream gender criticism in film and advances the use of the construct of agency, bridging Paul Smith’s notion of subject dis-cerning and Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration. It also opens perspectives for future work by briefly engaging with the subject of female directors.