A recent pattern has emerged amongst some of the top television production companies in the world – a global investment in a new style of television show format. Food television show formats such as Channel 4’s The Great British Bake Off in the UK and Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen in the US have consistently topped television ratings and attracted millions of viewers in every episode aired in their home counties and abroad. A range of publications argue that there has been a global demand for factual television formats, yet existing literature has focused primarily on dramas, talent shows and game show television format genres. From a production perspective, this thesis aims to respond to these industry changes and the gap in the literature by examining the media branding techniques employed by media managers that have contributed to the development of international food television show formats. It analyzes the distinct challenges and opportunities food television format producers of shows such as Endemol Shine Group’s MasterChef undergo when adapting food formats in international markets. Furthermore, it investigates production decisions around multi-platform strategies. This includes the adaptation of food television show formats onto multi-platform distribution channels such as catch up television like Netflix, Amazon Prime, format brand websites and social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram in order to acquire additional revenue streams. This thesis examines the managerial decisions that have helped aid the cooking show into becoming a successful, global television format. The research findings are based on a mixed-method qualitative approach featuring 15 qualitative interviews with industry experts from major production companies such as Endemol Shine Group and FremantleMedia and celebrity television chefs, such as BBC One’s MasterChef’s Gregg Wallace and former Food Network star, Paula Deen. The outcomes of this research provide an empirical analysis of the complex relationship between new media technologies, food television and the internationalization of global television formats. Furthermore, this thesis provides a snapshot of a specific and current media trend that exists within a wide scope of media industry practices and aims to provide valuable insights and build on existing media management, multi-platform, and media production theory.

The visual culture of Victorian Protestant missionaries is an under-researched area, despite the current interest in art and religion, and the implications of missionary imagery’s legacy in a post-colonial world. Looking specifically at British missionaries to southern Africa, this thesis proposes that visual culture, comprised of art, image, and their corollaries in personal and collective imagination, be recognised as an appropriate framework through which to re-examine a group predominantly associated with the Word. In particular, it argues that visual resources were not only communicated with originating missionary societies and home supporters, but were utilised as tools for evangelism and education, and the development of self-identity for men and women operating far from home. Beginning with a theoretical defence of visual culture as an appropriate and meaningful lens through which to investigate mission, the thesis goes on to consider the formative visual culture of prospective missionaries, identifying how and why evangelical Protestants accessed images. Key themes of landscape and portraiture are identified, and the varied media through which these were encountered investigated, including printed publications, gallery art, domestic ephemera, and ecclesial decorations. A detailed examination of the popular religious periodical The Sunday at Home brings together the exploration of these diverse themes. The second half of the thesis transitions from visual influences on prospective missionaries at home, to the visual culture of foreign missionary practitioners, pivoting on the activity of missionary training. An exploration of training reveals a disconnect between the importance of art and image in popular religious life, and a failure to address adequately their evangelistic applications. Moving into the final sections of the project, art and image re-emerge as significant, though the lack of guidance on their use is shown to have limited their co-ordination and effectiveness. Nevertheless, archive research in the UK, and field research in Malawi and South Africa, yielded sufficient material to demonstrate the particular importance of the landscape genre, and of the magic lantern as a crucial visual medium. Although visual materials were significant in the construction of missionary identity, and were heavily utilised in mission contexts, there was a widespread lack of engagement with, and distrust of, the visual, creating the complex and ambiguous interactions with which this thesis is ultimately concerned.

Contemporary discourse in the field of Memetics offers potential new insights upon the ways and means of producing and curating contemporary Performance beyond the limits of discipline specific Performance taxonomies. Alongside the rise of Internet Culture and the rapid adoption of social media, it is argued that contemporary artistic practice is becoming ‘more fluid, elastic, and dispersed’ (Cornell, 2014: online). Given this circumstance, the researcher acknowledges that notions of disciplinarity, performative agency and materiality remain in a state of flux and in need of reconsideration. Utilising a Practice-as-Research (PaR) framework, and based upon the above context, the researcher initiated an innovative three-phase methodological approach focused on the application of insights drawn from the concept of the ‘Meme’ (Dawkins, 1974) alongside a primarily Deleuze & Guattarian philosophy upon methods of artistic production, and the curation of transdisciplinary performance. The resulting praxis: ‘Rhizo-Memetic Art’ produced three major artworks including the hypertextual assemblage - Corpus 1 (2012-13), produced collaboratively online with users of Twitter and Facebook; the Florilegium: Exhibition (3rd -24th November, 2014): produced and curated alongside an invited group of contributing artists; and Florilegium: Remix (24th April 2015): an intermedial Live Art lecture. Each of these elements plugs into the following exegetic writing, and alongside the documentation of its artefacts (available on the project website), these elements produce the thesis. The outcomes of this PaR are twofold. The first outcome is a new theoretical understanding of the mechanisms of interdisciplinary creative practice emerging out of the synthesis of meme and rhizome. This outcome can be further developed to reveal insights relevant to the production of transdisciplinary performance and archival/curatorial discourses. The second outcome can be identified as the Rhizo-Memetic Artwork itself, or, rather the multiple creative artefacts and actions that combine to produce its assemblage. The implications of this research suggest that the functioning of Rhizo-Memetic Art raises permanent questions about the status of Performance in terms of its materiality and efficacy outside of the limitations of disciplinarity.

Machine Space is an essay film that explores the city of Detroit as a space of movement and circulation. This city is negotiated in the moving image as a palimpsest of maps, spatial metrics and automotive infrastructure; illustrating the material and discursive layers that have constructed this now post-industrial metropolis. This is a city where, in the words of the urban thinker Henri Lefebvre, 'the production of space itself replaces - or, rather, is superimposed upon - the production of things in space.' (Lefebvre 1991, p.62) This practice-as-research doctoral project explores an interface of Lefebvre's 'production of space' with the cinema; as visual artefact, a phenomenological document; and as media exhibited in a screening space. The result is a productive discourse of 'Spatial Cinema'.

Holocaust representation in film has received much academic attention, with a focus on how cinematography and the narrative may assist our memorialisation process. One aspect of film which has received little academic attention, however, is the issue surrounding the musical accompaniments of such films. The musical score often goes unnoticed, but may also contain emotional qualities. It can make an audience laugh, cry or alter their perception of the narrative. The three countries of East, West and reunified Germany have each attempted to engage with the Holocaust, including through the medium of film. They have done so in contrasting ways and to varying degrees of effectiveness. The opposing political, social and cultural environments of East and West Germany outweighed their geographical proximity. Likewise, reunified Germany developed a third, divergent approach to Holocaust engagement. This thesis combines three key existing fields of academia: film music theory, Holocaust representation in film, and German politics, history and culture. Through comparative textual analyses of six film case studies, two each from East, West and reunified Germany, this thesis examines whether there are examples of similarities or inherent, reoccurring musical characteristics which define the Holocaust on screen. Furthermore, the six analyses will be supported by contextual examinations of the respective countries, directors and composers in order to ascertain whether there were political, cultural and/or social considerations which impacted upon the film scores. The original contribution to knowledge to which this thesis lays claim is that it forms the first significant scholarly engagement with not only the film music of German Holocaust cinema specifically, but, on a broader scale, the ongoing theoretical discourse surrounding film music and representation. This new contribution to Holocaust knowledge also extends to a continued development of the understanding of and engagement with the event and its audio-visual representations.

This thesis draws on psychoanalytic theories of trauma to interrogate works produced by Polish photographers after the Second World War. The aim of this thesis is to excavate traces of trauma latently embedded in post-war Polish art photography. By closely analysing a selection of photographs produced between the years 1945 and 1970, I argue that the events of the war cast a shadow over the lives of Polish artists. Rather than looking at photographs which directly visualise these traumatic events, I explore the ways in which these experiences manifest themselves indirectly or obliquely in the art of the period, through abstraction, a tendency towards ‘dark realism,’ and an interest in traces of human presence. Drawing on the photographs of Zbigniew Dłubak, Zdzisław Beksiński, Jerzy Lewczyński, Bronisław Schlabs, Andrzej Różycki, Józef Robakowski and other post-war photographers, I argue that the events of the war were not the only traumas to cast their shadow on the Polish psyche. Between 1945 and 1970, Poland underwent a series of transitions and changes in leadership, population and Party politics. Periods of optimism and leniency oscillated with phases of repression and social unrest. In my analysis, I suggest that multiple traumas can be discerned in these decades. What is at stake in this thesis is the proposition that a photograph can bear imperceptible traces of events that have wounded the psyche, which could not be articulated at the time, but which were made visible at a later date. Photographs made in the post-war years provided a space to belatedly return to encrypted traumas, to relay ideas that could not otherwise be articulated, and to acknowledge events that had been disavowed.

In order to bridge the knowledge gap noted between Western and Chinese approaches to analysis of China’s TV media, this thesis sets out to propose an alternative methodological framework for investigation of the emergence, development and significance of a distinctive television genre categorised as ‘political history TV drama’ (PHTD), produced in Mainland China since the 1980s. Situating the genre in its historical and political contexts of production, I make particular reference to the orchestrating role of the Chinese state, the political re-articulation of Confucian values, and the reinventing of Chinese national identity. The thesis is composed of three parts. Part one includes the literature review of both Chinese and Western genre theory, followed by a discussion of further useful constructs to put in place the theoretical scaffolding for the study. In part two, the historical review concerns the production and political contexts of Chinese TV and TV drama in general. The third part applies this methodological framework to PHTD when contextualised in its Chinese setting, analysing its definitions, conventions, generic and cultural verisimilitudes, and hybridity. The third part is the core of the research, which investigates its rise to maturity, utilising a cultural and discursive account that encompasses: textual analysis; the study of its political and historical contexts; Chinese moral ideology and linguistics. A number of examples and case studies are examined as evidence for my perspective on questions of nationalism and Confucianism embedded in PHTD. The significance of this genre is in its reconstructed portrayal of the revived concept of a ‘patriarchal Confucian society’. Therefore, the thesis sets out the political, social and cultural landscape in which the genre is embedded in recognition of its representation of much more than just repackaged traditional narratives. In turn, this investigation helps to achieve a fuller understanding of the relation between political and intellectual forces, and the key role of nationalism combined with Confucianism in the media strategy of the Chinese authorities up until the first ten years of the 21st century.

This thesis identifies and analyses the function of violence in the films of screenwriter-director Pablo Trapero. It does this by examining different understandings of the concept of violence itself — with a particular emphasis placed on Slavoj Žižek’s concept of objective violence — and how it is represented on-screen in Trapero’s films. The work is divided into two parts, each consisting of two chapters. Each of the four chapters focuses on a pair of the director’s films; in each case the first film analysed introduces motifs and themes which the later film then expands upon and intensifies. Part I locates violence within the context of what Althusser defines as the State Apparatus, focusing on the diverse manifestations of the State’s power generally. Further, this section analyses the way in which Trapero’s films demonstrate the State’s manipulation of its subjects through repressive and ideological means for its own benefit. Part II tightens the thesis’s focus, examining Trapero’s representation of one specific ideological apparatus: the family unit. This section approaches different manifestations of the family and, using Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of Oedipal and rhizomatic families, considers the ways in which the family structure itself can be used as both a means of repression and, in certain cases, a means of resistance. This thesis contends that, through his representation of objective violence, Pablo Trapero has emerged as a distinctly political filmmaker. By focusing on several previously under-studied elements of Trapero’s films this thesis highlights the ways in which the director’s work represents present-day concerns about social inequalities and injustice in neoliberal Argentina on-screen. Finally, this work examines how Trapero combines aspects of Argentina’s long tradition of political film with elements of Nuevo Cine Argentino to create a unique political voice.

This study focused on the creation of new faces by compositing features from donor face photographs together that provide a way to generate new face identities. However, does the act of compositing conceal the identity of the donor faces? Two applications of these created faces require donor face identities to remain concealed: Covert social media profiles provide a way for investigating authorities to survey online criminal activity and, as such, a false online identity, including face image, is required. Compositing features/face parts from various donor face photographs could be used to generate new face identities. Face donor photographs are also used for the ‘texturing’ of facial depictions to reconstruct an image of how a person might appear. This study investigated whether compositing unknown face features onto known familiar faces (celebrities and lecturers) was sufficient to conceal identity in a face recognition task paradigm. A first experiment manipulated individual features to establish a feature saliency hierarchy. The results of this informed the order of feature replacement for the second experiment, where features were replaced in a compound manner to establish how much of a face needs to be replaced to conceal identity. In line with previous literature, the eyes and hair were found to be highly salient, with the eyebrows and nose the least. As expected, the more features that are replaced, the less likely the face was to be recognised. A theoretical criterion point from old to new identity was found for the combined data (celebrity and lecturer) where replacing at least two features resulted in a significant decrease in recognition. Which feature was being replaced was found to have more of an effect during the middle part of feature replacement, around the criterion point, where the eyes were more important to be replaced than the mouth. Celebrities represented a higher level of familiarity and, therefore, may be a more stringent set of results for practical use, but with less power than the combined data to detect changes. This would suggest that at least three features (half the face) need to be replaced before recognition significantly decreases, especially if this includes the more salient features in the upper half of the face. However, once all six features were replaced, identity was not concealed 100% of the time, signifying that feature replacement alone was not sufficient to conceal identity. It is completely possible that residual configural and contrast information was facilitating recognition, and, therefore, it is likely that manipulations, such as these, are also needed in order to conceal identity.

This thesis parts from the premise that avant-garde art collectives produce discourses meant to articulate the opposition to the art/life divide as one that interrelates fields such as aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and even economics. By utilizing a comparative framework, it plays on the complementarity and differences between four 1960s groups that formed very specific organizations directed at challenging society, in one way or another related to the Situationist International: The Situationist Times (France), King Mob Echo (UK), Black Mask and its transformations (US), and S.NOB (Mexico). Through the medium of magazines, they intended to reach a mass audience that in the act of reading and looking at their images and texts would be prompted to discern organizations that undermined the world-system. Thus, the Situationist Times attempted to form a (people’s) movement that in an applied creativity that rejected the metanarrative of progress would be able to realize the malleability of history. King Mob followed a conspiratorial logic with the idea of a dis-organized mass suddenly acting in concert against states. Black Mask and its transformations played with the idea of a war for territory, the occupation of a ‘free zone’ by a community in the midst of a dominated world. Finally, S.NOB’s idiosyncratic anarchism came from an opposition to the totalizing discursive practices of the Mexican Revolution, giving primacy to fragmentation and an anti-organizational bent; while it had no direct relationship to any of the above groups, it shows how their techniques and theories develop out of an engagement with Surrealism and past avant-gardes. S.NOB provides not a counterpoint but a contextual revelation of the limits of these collectives, in the Bataillean sense that opens all of them up to a ‘contamination’ with historicity and thought that treats all of them as equal in scope and importance.