School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemRational fictions: Hollis Frampton's Magellan and the atlas of film( 2019)This thesis analyses three films by Hollis Frampton (1936-1984): Magellan (1964–1984), Palindrome, (1969), and Zorns Lemma (1970). I argue that Frampton sought to organise knowledge on film by recuperating the atlas—a highly selective tableau of images arranged spatially—as a model to promote film as a form of cultural memory in contrast to history. It begins with an examination of these themes in Frampton’s writing, following his conceptualisation of what he called ‘the infinite film’ and ‘the infinite cinema’ in his 1971 essay “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” and the subsequent essay “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” from 1972. After an analysis of how his unfinished, 36-hour-long film-cycle titled Magellan developed from this model, I argue that Zorns Lemma (1970) can be re-framed as an experiment in “filmnemonics”. This latter film left Frampton unsatisfied, however, due to the way in which it emphasised photography’s subordination to traditional systems of inscription, both alphabetical and numerical, in the highly determined matrix of the film frame. Finally, I argue that Frampton recognised that his earlier film, Palindrome (1969), was the experiment most appropriate for realising the model of the atlas of film. Frampton’s decision to include Palindrome within the Magellan cycle is proof not only of the importance of that film and its significance for understanding the complexity of the long, calendrical film cycle as a whole, but also of his shift to a topological model of film. Central to the thesis is the idea of conflation as a means to link memory with formal attempts at thinking in images, as demonstrated by Frampton’s work, addressing how he strove to accommodate film in its complexity while also providing a path through its infinity.
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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.
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ItemDon't let the future pass you by: iterative dystopias on the postmillennial screen( 2015)In the decade 2001-2010, films which presented spectacular futures dominated the box office. In contrast, Code 46 (2003), 2046 (2004) and Inception (2010) conceived immediately recognisable tomorrows, pessimistic futures firmly rooted in the socio-historical present. Despite their divergent production backgrounds, differing story arcs and disparate aesthetics, this thesis contends that these texts are key, early examples of a new subcycle of films it titles Iterative Dystopia. Using a social science fiction criticism methodology, this thesis conducts an interdisciplinary investigation which draws on science fiction genre analysis, dystopian narrative theory and contemporary sociological concepts to define the formal characteristics of the collection and offers fresh readings of the texts. This thesis finds that Iterative Dystopias are defined by the theme of perpetual liminality, an original concept developed following the work of sociologist Arpad Szakolczai. Iterative Dystopia’s perpetually liminal protagonists trace iterative paths across their narrative arcs, searching for an alternative to the continuous transitions of lives lived in this in-between state. Their goal is personal. They just want a place to call home. In direct contrast to the conventional dystopian protagonist, these characters are seeking their utopia within the familiar. These characters are, however, thwarted in their attempts to find a sense of belonging. Through a close textual analysis, this thesis explores three of the narrative environments in which these characters conduct their quotidian existence: the home, the relationship and the mind; and establishes that Iterative Dystopia’s protagonists are frustrated by paradoxes. They reside in Foucauldian heterotopic places and are uncomfortably exposed in their performance of their everyday. They seek solace in their relationships, but find their communications hampered. Their verbal and haptic exchanges produce multiple, contradictory meanings which this thesis explores through Fritz Senn’s concept of dislocution. They seek refuge in their memories, but their minds are sites of control. Working from Ulrich Beck’s definition, this thesis defines these characters as uncertain and contrasts them with the anxious, alienated protagonist found in the conventional dystopian form. Ultimately, Iterative Dystopias retain a glimmer of hope in the ambiguities that remain as their credits roll. In conclusion, this thesis finds evidence that, far from being limited to films which garnered theatrical release in the postmillennial decade, the Iterative Dystopia subcycle continues beyond the bounds of this study.
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ItemCinema's scatological imagination( 2014)For Georges Bataille, scatology is the "science of shit," and is vitally connected to what he calls "heterology." Located in the intersection between the sacred and profane, and associated with extreme experiential and bodily states, heterology is "the science of what is completely other" (Bataille 1985, 102). For Bataille, there is a critical interchange between and overlap across these liminal "sciences." Central to his understanding of scatology/heterology is the attribution of transformative, powerful properties to that which is traditionally perceived as low, base and filthy: shit – the body's wastes and excesses. While ample space has long since been provided for the discussion of sexuality and perversion in both popular and critical discourses, scatology largely remains a subject of taboo, relegated to the domain of that which is unofficial, illegitimate or other. Associated with the obscene, the infantile, disorder, and aberrance, scatology is at once a subject which elicits disgust and shock, and one which is frequently dismissed as trivial, illegitimate, or even fatuous. As such, with its evocation of both otherness and ubiquity, and its invocation of a multiplicitous scope of extreme responses which range from laughter to horror, the scatological is above all defined by its ambivalence, heterogeneity, and resistance to containment. This ambivalence arises from our responses to excrement in general, to its representation and reception in film, and, correspondingly, its place in the realm of cinema studies, where it has been largely neglected. This thesis takes up for the first time a full-length exploration of the way in which what I have termed a scatological imagination operates in the cinema. Informed by Bataille's twinned ideas of scatology and heterology, and by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel's conceptualisation of what she terms the "anal-sadistic universe" (1985), this thesis explores, in broad terms, the relationship between scatology, divinity, the body, and defiance in film. It examines scatology as both a representational device and as an aesthetic, sensibility or practice which not only underpins much of its onscreen expression and display, but also offers up a powerful lens itself with which to conceptualise relationships between the cinema, experience, bodies, and pleasure. The scope of this analysis centres on three particular cinematic categories or practices: surrealism (focusing especially on the overturning, dehierarchising role of excrement in the films of Luis Buñuel); avant-garde and arthouse cinema (particularly Pier Paolo Pasolini's infamous film Salò); and trash and bad taste cinemas (focusing on the "shit cinema" of trash filmmaker John Waters). I posit this latter category as one whose dissident, marginal status⎯and overriding emphasis on bodily defilement, excess, and heterogeneity⎯lends itself particularly resonantly to scatological concerns and aesthetics. I argue that Waters' project, which presents an aesthetics or even poetics of scatology⎯one which is heavily underpinned by a systematic elevation of the scatological as sublime or divine: a "holy shit"⎯offers up the most radical, mobilising and performative possibilities for the expression of scatological and anal sites. At its most extreme, the scatological imagination centralises and celebrates bodily waste, shit, and "what is completely other." Texts which celebrate the scatological and stress its relationship with the sublime, I contend, ultimately offer up more transgressive, defiant and performative possibilities for the excremental, and therefore ultimately for that which is otherwise degraded, rejected, repressed or marginalised. Across these different cinematic categories, I also examine how the scatological imagination addresses its audience, and how this might differ from earlier displays of the grotesque. Situating the scatological imagination as a vital element of what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) have identified as emerging, displaced forms of carnivalesque practice and exhibition, I argue that the visual language of the cinema provides a particularly powerful and evocative expression of the scatological and the anal. Correspondingly, across my analysis, I also investigate the highly ambivalent and embodied spectatorial experiences which are elicited by scatological modes of address and performance, exploring the ways in which what I term a "scatological gaze" is constructed in these films, and what kinds of pleasures (or displeasures) these might offer the viewer. I also explore the ways in which the highly ambivalent pleasures invoked by such viewing experiences can be conceptualised through a scatological lens. The scatological gaze, I argue, is structured by and in ambivalence.
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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.