A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Art in Dramatic Arts / My dissertation presents a textual analysis of John Greyson and Jack Lewis's South African film, Proteus (2003), which is based on archival records and plots the never-before-told narrative of an intimacy between two inmates on 16th century Robben Island. Locating this same-sex intimacy in the 1700s Cape Colony has far-reaching implications when considered in relation to the increasingly pervasive twenty-first century discourse which proposes that homosexuality is necessarily 'unAfrican'. The film's social and political commentary is, therefore, significant for how we might think about sexuality, among other subjectivities, in post-apartheid South Africa. By analysing the film's formal and thematic attributes, I demonstrate that the directors' protean approach to filmmaking has queering effects for the linear notion of time and the cohesive conceptualisation of identity that the colonial archive tends to reinforce. I suggest that commonsense notions of time, space, language and identity that structure the archive have allowed for multiple fissures to develop along the trajectory from past to present. As I show, the aforementioned process has almost effaced from official records narratives, such as the one told in Proteus, that would trouble totalising ideas about the intimate orientations of certain individuals. Therefore, I argue that while the record of this same-sex intimacy does appear in the archive, it has been subsumed by other, more dominant, narratives. The film's work, which I replicate in my reading of it, has been to queer this archive by foregrounding what has historically been repressed. In my first chapter, I argue that by enacting what Halberstam (2005) terms a mode of 'queer temporality', Proteus carves out spaces in the archive for alternative renditions of history to come into visibility in ways that demand fluidity and heterogeneity. I propose that the strategic filmic mechanisms employed in Proteus necessarily engender nuanced spectatorial procedures, which call on the spectator to engage reflexively with the film. I continue to argue for the spectator's need to be particularly reflexive throughout the dissertation. My second chapter deals with the filmmakers' strategic use of language in order to present a commentary on the material effects that the acts of 'naming' and 'categorising' have on living bodies. The final chapter explores a critical perspective which has not previously been brought to bear on the film. I examine how Greyson and Lewis construct positions for their main characters from which they may assert their subjectivity - what Mirzoeff (2011) describes as 'the right to look'.

In my dissertation, I discuss three of Akın’s feature films: Im Juli (In July, 2000), Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2004), and Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven, 2007) in order to investigate Akın’s filmic visions of Europe. Through close textual readings, I analyze three aspects of his films in particular: the spatial conceptions of Europe (city- and landscapes), the sounds of Europe (music and languages) as well as the display of ethnic minorities and the changing urban demography in Germany and Europe. I argue that Akın employs an “aesthetic of heterogeneity” to portray his filmic Europe as a diverse space, in which multiethnic and multilingual music, people, and sceneries are juxtaposed with regions that often have been perceived historically and politically as distinct and complicated. My first chapter discusses Akın’s conceptions and depictions of European Space in In July. By analyzing city- and landscapes, soundscapes, and dynamic spaces in In July, I argue that Akın provides a dynamic, fluctuating, and interconnected European space, including Eastern Europe and Turkey. In my second chapter, I scrutinize language use and dialogue in Head-On to map out the changing demographics in European urban spaces. Ultimately, I argue that Akın moves beyond Hamid Naficy’s theory of “accented cinema” by including accented languages and dialects for all protagonists, including Western Europeans. Through this linguistic polyphony, multilingualism and a diversity of accents are depicted as integral elements of today’s Europe. In my final chapter, I discuss the sound of Europe as depicted in The Edge of Heaven. Looking particularly at music (and music lyrics) in the film, I argue that Akın’s use of dubbed and remixed music (especially by the artist Shantel) underscores Akın’s filmic challenges to (national) European borders. By foregrounding the mixed styles of music, where an “original” becomes hard to decipher, the director shows, on an aural level, that blurring boundaries and multidirectional movement are the predominant components of today’s Europe. / text

“Cinematic Theatricality” is the combination of conventionally “cinematic” and “theatrical” styles. It occurs on both screen and stage, and in intermedial performances. Despite their entwined histories, cinema and theater often define their aesthetics against each other. This dissertation posits that “cinematic theatricality,” in combining these allegedly “oppositional” aesthetic codes, actually intensifies the effects of both media. It is a dynamic that prompts explorations of relationship between intellectual and affective spectatorship in each medium. My definition of “cinematic theatricality” moves beyond dominant Brechtian conceptions of theatricality in cinema, and incorporates theater and performance scholarship that develops different understandings of theatricality as dynamic and affective. These other definitions of theatricality enable more sympathetic and mutually enhancing dialogues with cinema. I locate this cinematic theatricality in the work of four queer directors—Luchino Visconti, Patrice Chéreau, Werner Schroeter and Ivo van Hove—who were active in both European film and theater from the 1950s to the present. These directors’ works are often dismissed as “excessive” because they go “over-the-top” of realist aesthetic norms. The plenitude arising from the combination of cinematic and theatrical effects produces these aesthetic “excess,” styles of surplus that foreground the links between intellectual and emotional experiences of a medium. Different theatricalities produce different variants of excesses, each of which has its own aims and is rooted in these directors’ theatrical careers and their participation in the Regietheater (Director’s Theater) movement in post-war European theater. Nietzsche’s characterization of the “gestural,” decadentist excesses of Wagner’s theater suggests how editing can theatricalize the norms of cinematic continuity editing, creating simultaneous narcotic absorption in and critical distance from historical narratives. Opera’s tension between mimetic representation and “over-the-top” bodily and vocal expressivity leads to rhythmic, melodramatic relationships between the moving camera and the expressive performing body in the transmission of meaning. The queer traditions of camp theatricality, combining both ironic theatrical references and the sincerity and sensual intensity of performances, tie the signifying and sensorial aspects of cinematic spectatorship. In contemporary theater, screen-to-stage adaptations and productions with video and projection are often dismissed as overblown spectacles, too distracting to be meaningful or valuable. Cinematic theatricality on the stage makes video and projection intentional distractions. It forces the spectator to choose where to (not) look, to experience complex phenomena of intermedial “absence” and “presence,” in ways that challenge the norms and ethics of different mediated modes of showing and not showing. Cinema and theater have long expanded their senses of themselves beyond strict ontological characteristics, and our contemporary mediascape further encourages more dynamic understandings of both the cinematic and the theatrical. Cinematic theatricality, in its doubled entwinings, opens a way to combine formalist with affective readings of each medium, thus providing a richer understanding of each medium’s powers and effects. Cinematic theatricality’s permutations—the decadent, operatic, camp, and spectacular—suggest new ways of taxonomizing the “aesthetic categories” of contemporary intermediality’s ardor for excessive aesthetics, and its embrace of excess as a mode suitable for asking serious questions about history, politics, and identity.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Chinese

This thesis undertakes a study of four films, directed by Arab directors from Palestine, Lebanon, America and the United Arab Emirates, and argues that these works speak back to the negative representation of Arabs in mainstream Hollywood films. It examines the methods these directors have deployed to contribute to a consciousness on a cultural level. These include the films Amreeka (dir. Dabis, 2009: USA, National Geographic Entertainment), Paradise Now (dir. Abu-Assad, 2005: USA, Warner Bros), West Beirut (dir. Doueiri, 1998: Belgium, France, Norway, Lebanon: 38 Production) and City of Life (dir. Mostafa, 2009: UAE: Filmworks). I argue that these films speak back to the representation of Arabs created by Hollywood. In all the films I analyse the representation of the characters, which allows viewers into their frames of reference and makes them relatable. The characters are ordinary people facing the situations of everyday life in various settings. Whether it is the limitation of their geographical location while living under occupation in Palestine as in Amreeka and Paradise Now, emigrating to America and coping with xenophobia as in Amreeka, living in a country exploding as civil war breaks out as in West Beirut, or adjusting to multiculturalism as in City of Life, filmmakers are allowing viewers into the lives of Arabs, representing them in terms of all their successes, failures, vulnerabilities and excesses. They are human beings with the same concerns as all humanity, for peace in their countries, the stability of their societies and the safety of their families. My investigation analyses the films through the theoretical lenses of Stuart Hall’s theory of representation (2012), Edward Said's Orientalism (1997), and decoloniality as advocated by Maldonado-Torres (2014) and Mignolo (2011). A postmodern reading of City of Life is made within Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality (2010), Lyotard’s concept of the grand narrative (1986) and Žižek’s concept of the dematerialisation of real life. A close reading of the films, using the research methods of semiotics and narratology, enables a deconstruction of some obscure elements, such as the embedded meaning in dialogue or the messages implicit in the mise en scène. In the process, cultural contradictions and similarities are explored and uncovered. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

Aiming to make an intervention in both emerging Slow Cinema and classical Trauma Cinema scholarship, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which the post-trauma cinema of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz merges aesthetics of cinematic slowness with narratives of post-trauma in his films Melancholia (2008), Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) and Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012). Diaz has been repeatedly considered as representative of what Jonathan Romney termed in 2004 “Slow Cinema”. The director uses cinematic slowness for an alternative approach to an on-screen representation of post-trauma. Contrary to popular trauma cinema, Diaz’s portrait of individual and collective trauma focuses not on the instantenaeity but on the duration of trauma. In considering trauma as a condition and not as an event, Diaz challenges the standard aesthetical techniques used in contemporary Trauma Cinema, as highlighted by Janet Walker (2001, 2005), Susannah Radstone (2001), Roger Luckhurst (2008) and others. Diaz’s films focus instead on trauma’s latency period, the depletion of a survivor’s resources, and a character’s slow psychological breakdown. Slow Cinema scholarship has so far focused largely on the films’ aesthetics and their alleged opposition to mainstream cinema. Little work has been done in connecting the films’ form to their content. Furthermore, Trauma Cinema scholarship, as trauma films themselves, has been based on the immediate and most radical signs of post-trauma, which are characterised by instantaneity; flashbacks, sudden fears of death and sensorial overstimulation. Following Lutz Koepnick’s argument that slowness offers “intriguing perspectives” (Koepnick, 2014: 191) on how trauma can be represented in art, this thesis seeks to consider the equally important aspects of trauma duration, trauma’s latency period and the slow development of characteristic symptoms. With the present work, I expand on current notions of Trauma Cinema, which places emphasis on speed and the unpredictability of intrusive memories. Furthermore, I aim to broaden the area of Slow Cinema studies, which has so far been largely focused on the films’ respective aesthetics, by bridging form and content of the films under investigation. Rather than seeing Diaz’s slow films in isolation as a phenomenon of Slow Cinema, I seek to connect them to the existing scholarship of Trauma Cinema studies, thereby opening up a reading of his films.