School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemMoving through space and time: a genealogy of videogame space( 2014)The perception of videogame space is structured through mediated movement. This thesis is an examination of perception and movement in videogame space, as framed through a genealogy of media. The videogame is an object that is framed by, and constituted through history, and understanding videogame space as perceived by mediated movement requires an engagement with the history of the perception of mediated space more broadly. Therefore, I argue that the videogame’s mediation of movement in space represents a mode of perception within the history of the mediated representation of space. In theorising the videogame’s mediated movement, I use a genealogical approach in order to identify and trace a number of topoi through art history, cinema, and architecture towards the videogame. The genealogy explored in this dissertation is divided across four key topoi of videogame space: the railway, the script, the city, and the wilderness. Together, these four topoi chart a genealogy of the mediated perception of videogame space, and help in me in isolating the videogame as a particular mode of the perception of space across media history. In exploring the relevance of these topoi to the videogame, I perform close analysis on five videogames in this thesis: Half-Life (Valve Corporation, 1998), BioShock Infinite (Irrational, 2013), Assassin’s Creed II (Ubisoft Montreal, 2009), Assassin’s Creed III (Ubisoft Montreal, 2012), and Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar 2010). On the basis of my analysis of the four topoi and their instantiation within the videogames examined, I conclude that for the videogame, perception is made possible by mediated movement in space; that videogame space is structured by player action; that videogame space provides an impossible movement that aims to outdo reality by providing a level of access and action not found in physical space; and finally, that movement in videogame space, and therefore its perception, is also shaped by cultural narratives. Moreover, I conclude that while within the history of mediated representation of space there are numerous modes of perception that have influenced the videogame, the videogame itself forms a distinct mode of perceiving mediated space. Ultimately, I hope for this dissertation to contribute to knowledge both of the videogame and its relationship to, and dialogue with media history. Thus, for this thesis, movement in the videogame is never just movement within a single videogame. It is movement located within time and space, and within various topoi traceable over many media and many centuries.
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ItemMichael Haneke: the intermedial void( 2014)Michael Haneke has achieved international recognition and notoriety with films that stylistically and thematically explore the negative influence of media saturation upon contemporary western society. Hence, a significant, but still largely unexplored, aspect of his work has been the way in which non-filmic media have been directly incorporated into his films in an innovative and productive manner. This thesis examines the way in which video, television, photography, literary voice and other media are introduced into Haneke’s films not only at the representational level, but also as modes of expression which oppose the film medium itself as fundamental perceptual and affective phenomena. Each chapter examines a different intermedial relationship between one or more of Haneke’s films and a non-cinematic medium. The theoretical and thematic repercussions of these relationships are then explored in via close readings of Haneke’s films, with reference to a wide array critical studies of the director, combined with detailed analyses of the nature of these non-cinematic media and their transformations of the film image and of the nature of film spectatorship. The primary theoretical model employed in this project is the emerging concept of intermediality, a meta-discursive approach to media studies that has received a great deal of attention in German and French scholarship and is gaining currency in English-language academia as well. The author’s own approach to intermediality departs from most others, however, in that he does not use the term solely to designate the processes of exchange, communication and appropriation between different forms of contemporary and new media. Instead, it is argued that the theoretical advantage offered by intermediality over other concepts of media is that it also indexes the absolute difference and incommensurability between disparate media forms, an “intermedial void” that is signified especially well in Haneke’s work. In order to account for these differences, the thesis draws upon an array of philosophical and theoretical definitions of media – and cinematic and post-cinematic media in particular – by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Stanley Cavell, Marshall McLuhan, André Bazin, Fredric Jameson, and Jean Baudrillard.
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ItemPicture perfect: Hollywood’s ideal communities and the perils of dream-building( 2013)This study explores the interaction between the depiction of idealised communities in post-World War II filmmaking, and the efforts of urban planners and property developers to actually construct such idealised communities. It examines the ideals of community as depicted in small-town films of the 1940s and suburban sitcoms of the 1950s and explores how these imagined places were an inspiration for post-war suburban development. However, these ideals were also a source of discontent as people grappled with the realities of dispersed, centreless, car-oriented suburbs and found them wanting compared to imagined communities, and the study examines the way in which such anti-suburban sentiment was expressed in popular culture. It examines attempts to respond to this discontent through the creation of new built environments that better reflect media ideals. The attempts by Walt Disney to create such places, first at Disneyland and then in planned communities, are explored. The study then examines the way in which urban planners responded to these influences at the planned communities of Seaside and Celebration. Finally, the study examines the way in which anxiety about the impossibility of imposing a film-like perception of the urban environment has been reflected in films such as The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) and Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998). I argue that the way urban planners have approached the development of cities and towns has been shaped by cultural depictions of the such places, and is frequently “sold” by resorting to cultural ideals, but that the blurring of boundaries between real and imagined places has also spurred a great deal of criticism of urban planners’ approaches.
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ItemUnforgiven: a hermeneutical reading( 2012)This thesis proposes an existential analysis of the ethical dimension of film. Its goal is to illuminate the role of fiction in creating and testing moral worlds. It does so by examining Unforgiven, a Western film by Clint Eastwood. This examination provides the grounded analysis of a specific moral universe, relating it to earlier analyses of the Western genre. In doing so, the thesis stakes a claim for ethical textual analysis as an alternative to formalism and other established approaches to analyzing film. This thesis examines film as an ethically significant art form. It argues that film is a crucial laboratory for ethical discussion in which the lifeworld, and the representation of lifeworld are interdependent. This interdependence creates a locus of ethical obligation requiring ethical consideration. One issue inherent in film as a locus of ethical obligation is Paul Ricoeur’s concept that relations among human beings are symmetrical. This symmetry is intrinsic to the relation between film viewers and the characters in the films they view. For films to have emotional and intellectual meaning, viewers must understand film characters as persons who confront the audience with ethical dilemmas and actions. These characters are important precisely because the ethical dilemmas they face and the actions they take resemble those of viewers who watch a film. In this perspective, films participate in constructing the nomothetic universe of the viewer, enabling the viewer to reflect upon the nomos a film evokes. The viewer experiences film as an ethical and existential text, enabling the viewer to reflect in ways similar to Ricoeur’s description of philosophy as reflection on human existence. The symbolic form of film experience renders the ethical and existential issues of human experience accessible. This permits the viewer to grasp these issues in human concrete terms. Film genres present human experience by representing a lifeworld that permits engagement and reflection. In this thesis, scene-by-scene analysis of the unfolding narrative recapitulates the experience of viewing the film. The temporal experience of viewing emulates Ricoeur’s narrative structure of ethical decision as well as the structure of interpretation. As narrative, Unforgiven creates a world to tell a story. As philosophy, Unforgiven highlights the ethical and existential problems of human responsibility and the status of the subject. As a work of art, Unforgiven creates a surplus of meaning that meets each viewer on a hermeneutical horizon as individual and different as one viewer is from the next.
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ItemBitter brothers: representations of the male misanthrope in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen( 2011)This thesis will explore representations of the male misanthrope in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. Drawing on theories such as Sigmund Freud’s notion of ‘The Uncanny’ and Thomas Schatz’s commentary on integration and order genre tropes in Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System, this thesis will explore how the recurrent figure of the male misanthrope serves a critical function in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. This character type, it will be argued, is used by the Coen brothers to comment upon the nature of masculinity in their narratives, which is universally bitter. It will be put forward that this character emerges from and distinguishes the Coen brothers’ bending and fusing of these conventions of genre that Schatz establishes, across their filmography. It will be argued that the male misanthrope is a consistent and prominent but overlooked character type in the Coens’ cinematic oeuvre. Far from being a stable character though, this thesis will argue that the male misanthrope appears in multiple forms. In the films selected for analysis here, the male misanthrope appears as five character types: the failed lover; the outlaw/flâneur; the authoritarian; the sidekick; and the intellect. Importantly, these representations of the male misanthrope, it will be argued, are socially detached figures. By the same token, these characters could also be described as embodying what Freud calls the uncanny, that is simultaneously “unheimlich” and “heimlich”, or “unhomely” and “homely” (1919). This aspect of the uncanny situates the filmmaking of the Coens as belonging to ‘familiar’ established cinematic codes and conventions while simultaneously taking leave from – or ‘unfamiliarly’ shifting away from – these familiar structures and functions in order to construct their representations of the male misanthrope. They are characters that are created from and emerge out of the fusion of these traditionally opposed genre structures identified by Schatz. The Coen brothers develop these characters in a way that allows each one to resemble ‘everyday life’ figures, such as: the broken hearted; the detached criminal; the egotistical boss; the loyal but annoying friend; and the intellectual. Representations of these seemingly ‘natural’ character types, however, are compromised by the Coens’ non-naturalistic, caricatured approach to genre, narrativity and characterisation. The Coens’ fusing of genre tropes identified by Schatz works to detach the viewer from the Coen brothers’ narratives while suturing the audience into the familiar style that could be more broadly referred to as ‘Coenesque’. The cinema of Joel and Ethan Coen, thus, emerges as a bitter, masculine, cut off world of failed lovers, outlaw/flâneurs, authoritarians, sidekicks and intellects. Their films, however, employ such character types to bend traditional notions of genre as a way of commenting upon masculinity as something that is inherently bitter and subject to change.
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ItemFrom real time to reel time: the films of John Schlesinger: study of the change from objective realism to subjective reality in British cinema in the 1960s( 2011)The 1960s was a period of change for the British cinema, as it was for so much else. The six feature films directed by John Schlesinger in that decade stand as an exemplar of what those changes were. They also demonstrate a fundamental change in the narrative form used by mainstream cinema. Through a close analysis of these films, A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar, Darling, Far From the Madding Crowd, Midnight Cowboy and Sunday Bloody Sunday, this thesis examines the changes as they took hold in mainstream cinema. In effect, the thesis establishes that the principal mode of narrative moved from one based on objective realism in the tradition of the documentary movement to one which took a subjective mode of narrative wherein the image on the screen, and the sounds attached, were not necessarily a record of the external world. The world of memory, the subjective world of the mind, became an integral part of the narrative. As the decade began, the dominating phenomenon of British cinema was a small group of films made in the Northern provinces which were dubbed The British New Wave. Because of the depictions of working class life in these films and a tendency to portray sexual relationships with a hitherto unknown frankness the films appeared at the time to be entirely new. However as this thesis establishes, with hindsight they can now be seen as the last vestige of that form of social realism which had dominated British cinema since the rise of the documentary movement in the 1930s, under the influence of John Grierson. As the thesis points out, the theoretical orthodoxy of such as Bazin, Zavattini, Kracauer and others assumed that such documentary realism was essential to film as a narrative art. The directors of all the films which have been accepted into the canon of the British New Wave had backgrounds in documentary film. The two Schlesinger films of this period, A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963), reflect the documentarist nature of the movement while also revealing the desire to break away from the strictures of realism. The ‘New Wave’ rubric was in fact a commercial ploy initiated by one of the main production companies involved in these films – Woodfall Films. This form of realism was rapidly overtaken by the major cultural phenomenon to appear in Britain in the decade: ‘Swinging London’. The epithet was a pop cultural reference promulgated by the press, but it did indicate a new aesthetic which was some distance from the Griersonian realist mode. These films most often emulated certain stylistic tics learned from the French Nouvelle Vague movement, the original ‘new wave’. The use of jump cuts, such fashionable characters as pop groups, models and their photographers, and a liberal rather than puritan attitude to sex made the films popular with a new, young and affluent audience if not with the critics. No major critical work has been undertaken on the films of this period, and as this thesis reveals, they are usually described as derivative. However the argument in this thesis is that these films are an important nexus between the straight realism of the past and the new, psychological realism that is established by the end of the decade. Schlesinger’s two films of this time are a Julie Christie diptych: Darling (1965) and Far From the Madding Crowd (1967). The former is an archetypal Swinging London film, full of ‘new’ social types and a tendency to disrupt the narrative realism; the latter reveals the use of ‘new’ stars and new music to enhance the historical mode in a new form of historical realism which, as this thesis points out, was adopted by several directors at that time. As the decade drew to an end the films began to take on a darker, more considered tone. The sense of fun gave way to a more internalised form of cinema, one which used non-linear time to investigate the psychology of its characters. Memory and fantasy began to intrude into the realist world of British cinema. The image on the screen could no longer be assumed to be a reliable depiction of reality, but more often was a subjective image drawn from the mind of one of the characters in the film. Gilles Deleuze is the major analyst of the way film changed from ‘movement-image’ to ‘time-image.’ While this thesis does not totally agree with some of his conclusions it does concur essentially with his argument that the language of film, by the end of the 1960s, was able to convey a subjective reality which is quite different from the assumptions of Bazin, Grierson and such. The final two Schlesinger films examined in detail in this thesis, Midnight Cowboy (1969)and Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) reveal that the Griersonian documentary, with it assumption that the camera was an unblinking eye capturing only reality, was no longer the dominant form of narrative in British cinema. Film had become a subjective examination of a non-linear chronology investigating the internal world of its characters, not the external world in which they moved.