School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 5 of 5
-
ItemRituals of girlhood: fairy tales on the teen screen( 2015)The research question that this dissertation asks is: can contemporary teen screen media include representations of adolescent girls who oppose their subordinate, objectified position within adult patriarchal culture, and how do these expressions of opposition manifest onscreen? I explore this question through an analysis of postmodern screen texts that hybridise the fairy tale with the contemporary teen screen genre because this contemporary trend in fairy tale revision produces new, more empowered representations of the feminine rite-of-passage. In this thesis, I compare fairy tale narratives that once privileged patriarchal authority – particularly the versions written by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen – with contemporary teen screen revisions that produce new representations of fairy tale heroines who confront and challenge this very authority. To identify moments of feminine adolescent resistance and noncompliance on the teen screen, I chart the phase of liminality in the rite-of-passage narrative. While there has been some theorisation of liminality on the teen screen, not enough work has been done on how liminality provides a space for heroines to articulate alternative feminine adolescent voices and identities. This dissertation redeploys Victor Turner’s work on liminality for a feminist agenda. I use this theory as a way to not only locate instances of dislocation and fissures in the dominant system that regulates girlhood, but to also discover how the limits of this system can be made malleable in the liminal zone. Additionally, I explore the political potential of liminality by investigating whether this unsettling of limits can create social change for the heroines beyond the liminal phase in their post-liminal return to conventional culture. This dissertation makes an original contribution to knowledge by arguing for the feminist potential of these moments because they represent a rupture in the status quo, and in the resistant space of this gap, a new screen language of feminine adolescence articulates the girl as a powerful subject who is agentically doing girlhood.
-
ItemThe witch, the Virgin Mary, and the antipodean, cinematic figurations of the body( 2015)Adopting the figural model of film analysis outlined by Nicole Brenez in her reading of early film theorist Jean Epstein, this thesis develops articulations of the early modern Witch, the Virgin Mary, and the antipodean as cinematic figures. These three figures are developed as cinematic as they reproduce the image of the body by automatic means, and as they respectively figure what is between the real and the illusory, sound and image, and the body and its other. These figurations are related to how film theory has utilised the unconscious to distinguish the lived body of the spectator from the illusory body on screen, and respectively taken to question the theory of the male gaze, the perceived dominance of the image over sound, and the theory of alienation or auto-genesis.
-
ItemMontage Vietnam: documentary aesthetics and the dialectic of popular radicalism( 2014)This thesis is the first in-depth study of the politics of exposition in explicitly political, populist documentary, taking as case studies three pivotal documentaries of the Vietnam era - Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig (1968), Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds (1973) and The Newsreel Film Collective’s Summer 68 (1969). Three different aesthetic approaches are linked by the filmmakers’ desire to undermine dominant representations of ‘the television war’ whilst consciously avoiding relegation to the art-house for fear of ‘preaching to the choir’. As such, the desire to reach as wide an audience as possible is continually offset by the politics of visual pleasure and documentary realism. This thesis offers an examination of how these tensions play out, termed here the dialectic of popular radicalism. These films’ political aesthetic can be mapped by examining their dialectical relationship to both mainstream entertainment and news services, as well as European modernism. This map will use the mechanics of each film’s metalanguage as its defining structure. Through a recalibration of Comolli and Narboni’s influential ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ (1969) - via the varied lenses of documentary, genre and Soviet film theory - a politicised understanding of Keith Beattie’s ‘documentary display’ will be produced. It is my contention that the dialectic between popular and radical sensibilities manifests in varying degrees of visibility of each film’s metalanguage, or textual ‘voice’, to use Bill Nichols’ 1981 formulation. This visibility is at the heart of these films’ political aesthetic. Solidifying Nichols’ conception of voice as the metalanguage of the popular political documentary provides a concrete means of understanding documentary realism in relation to rhetoric: rather than looking through documentary’s window onto the world, it draws focus onto the window itself. Taking lessons from Marxist aesthetic and film theory as well as the works themselves, this thesis encourages an antagonistic approach to traditional structures of representation in documentary, while taking into account the dynamic nature of aesthetic radicalism and the need for rhetorical intelligibility. If accepting cinema as a continuously evolving textual system necessitates the abandonment of static notions of classicism, it follows that we must also jettison those regarding documentary progressivity.
-
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.
-
ItemTheoretrical avant-gardes and avant-garde theories: toward the sociology of an academic art culture( 2010)Beginning not with the question "What is avant-garde film?" but instead "How is it that this question has come to be asked in the university and who can legitimately ask it?" the theme of this study is the symbolic production over the last four decades of avant-garde cinema, to be understood here both as a specialised field of position-takings and a socio-occupational identity. Such a task is necessarily too large in scope to complete in a single study so I have here limited myself to definitions and symbolic productions of avant-garde film circulated by social agents (artists, critics and theorists) within higher education for the most part in Britain over the preceding four decades, where in any case, this form has found its strongest affiliations and where the relay of position-takings has been most restive. Drawing on the research of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault on correspondences between artistic or cultural taxonomies and social class stratifications, on the importance of education in the whole process of cultural reproduction, and on the genealogy of ideas, discourses, and professions, this thesis situates the study and teaching of the avant-garde both at the core of the origins of film studies in higher education and as a central and inextricable component of the discourse of film theory. Following this hypothesis, a gradual institutional fusion is traced from the mid 1960s to the 1970s of two currents - the artistic, theoretical avant-garde and the avant-garde, quasi-artistic theorists - which are customarily historicised as separate instances and which, although fading from the higher education agenda from the early 1980s onwards, are argued to provide long-enduring institutional identities and broadly inclusive discursive constituents. I have also broadened this study of symbolic production to include a review of a whole array of pedagogic consequences and results of the original grouping of art education and media studies under the same institutional, discursive, and occupational sign.