BURA Collection:http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/86992024-03-29T05:00:27Z2024-03-29T05:00:27ZDracula on film: A psychohistoricist studyWalden, Steven Jhttp://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/243782022-03-31T02:00:38Z2022-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: Dracula on film: A psychohistoricist study
Authors: Walden, Steven J
Abstract: This thesis examines selected iterations of Dracula in order to investigate the psychohistoricist
cultural resonance of the character as established and continually reaffirmed by the film cycles
that he inhabits. Dracula’s continued pervasion of Western culture is argued to be due to the
intersectionality of the intrinsic (psychological and emotive) responses of and extrinsic
(historical resonances and sociocultural milieu) cues affecting viewers. The critical analysis of
film in this thesis is based on psychohistoricism as a conflated analytical paradigm drawing
upon the dynamic between historicism and psychoanalysis as applied to film. Historicism as
posited in this context assumes that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material
practices within which filmic texts circulate inseparably, and that no discourse within that
network (imaginative or archival) gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable
human nature. The intention is not to locate the film cycles of the Dracula canon as directly
causal or symptomatic of contemporaneous sociocultural shifts, or the psychological tensions
that underpin them, but to view them as reflective of the liminal spatial interplay between filmas-
art, the psychosocial milieu, the concomitant evolution of psychoanalysis, and
historiography via a process of inductive thematic content analysis. Dracula is a resilient and
recurrent cultural property that has inhabited the roles of hero, anti-hero and villain, and is
idolised, loved, vilified and hated, as a multifaceted perennial narrative focus. Dracula’s
cinematic cycles can be argued to be a cultural barometer, reflecting the culture we create and
recreate.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2022-01-01T00:00:00ZThe transposition of third meaning discourse from analogue to digital cinemaStone, Ian P.http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/240382022-02-01T03:00:38Z2022-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: The transposition of third meaning discourse from analogue to digital cinema
Authors: Stone, Ian P.
Abstract: A consistent theme in Roland Barthes writing was his interest in, yet resistance to, the image. Exemplary of this is the Third meaning essay, published in the July 1970 issue of Cahiers Du Cinema. The essay uses film stills including from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible to articulate political aesthetic neither confined to the intentionality of the author, or limited to affectual reception. This research proposes a taxonomy of political aesthetics based on the Third meaning essay and Barthes’ other theoretical film essays. The Third meaning is a site of resistance where the image is irreducible to the surety of signification; it unlocks a panoply of meanings, undermining the univocity of bourgeois ideology and instead proposing heterogenous engagement with neo-Marxist and postcolonial politics. The research argues three distinct movements of Third meaning: Soviet Russia 1920-45; France 1960-1980 and international digital Third meaning c.2000-present. Key Third meaning practitioners are identified beyond Barthes’ nominees, including Jean Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Göran Olsson. These filmmakers work in the interstices between fiction and documentary, between scepticism of the contemporary and its embrace; between impassioned support and constructive criticism of social movements and their representation. Using Barthes’ methodology, the research argues that Third meanings third act takes place in the digital age. Ability to cheaply produce and widely disseminate digital film make it efficacious for the spread of Third meaning’s political aesthetic. The research advances digital Third meaning as a necessary ideological confrontation within the contemporary image: the decisive Kairos moment. Digital Third meaning is proposed as having more theoretical cogence than Deleuze’s virtual image, which falls short of articulating a consistent political response to contemporary conditions. In particular the valency of the Third meaning aesthetic in general lies in its versality across time periods, culture and conveyances of media.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2022-01-01T00:00:00ZReturning to Roissy: female submission and masochism in story of o and its adaptationsTaylor-Harman, Sarahhttp://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/213012020-07-30T02:01:41Z2020-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: Returning to Roissy: female submission and masochism in story of o and its adaptations
Authors: Taylor-Harman, Sarah
Abstract: This thesis examines the construction of female sexuality under patriarchy through masochism and submission. Amongst its original contributions is the examination of: the first female authored BDSM novel Story of O (1954), its paratexts A Slave’s Revolt (1954), A Girl In Love (1969), and Story of O Part Two (1969), and adaptations Histoire d’O (1974) and The Training of Madison Young (2007), as case study. This includes close readings of the texts, as well as original research into their production, publication and distribution, and reception. This analysis is undertaken through a queer, feminist post-structuralist framework. Utilising both textual analysis and discourse analysis as its methods, the texts’ representations of gender and sexuality are thus explored in this frame as both the constructions of a complex nexus of continual productivity and intertextuality, and the product of, and producer of multiple discursive frameworks.
This thesis thus posits that these texts are marked by a destabilising plurality and multiplicity of readings which shift in accordance to who is speaking, when, and why. This research therefore argues through its analysis of Story of O as case study, that female sexuality is constructed under patriarchy through a complex web of competing discourses that in their collective univocal assertions of a fixed ‘truth’, destabilise each other. The work offers a unique contribution to feminism, queer theory, post-structuralism, literary theory, pornography studies, film studies, and adaptation studies.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2020-01-01T00:00:00ZThe stranger left no card: a critical analysis of Wendy Toye’s work as a woman director in British cinema and televisionQureshi, Iram Kamranhttp://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/210792024-03-14T13:39:34Z2020-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: The stranger left no card: a critical analysis of Wendy Toye’s work as a woman director in British cinema and television
Authors: Qureshi, Iram Kamran
Abstract: This thesis represents the first sustained analysis of the career of pioneering British woman film-maker Wendy Toye, exploring what her work reveals about women’s contribution to 1950s British cinema. Drawing on new archival documents released as part of a collection of Toye’s personal papers, my study provides an historical account of Toye’s screen work from 1952 to 1982. Using these primary sources and a textual analysis of Toye’s film and television productions, I examine three aspects of her career; firstly, the development of her visual aesthetic; secondly, how gender has informed her work; and thirdly, what her career reveals about the production context for women in the 1950s British film industry. I argue that Toye’s films have been unjustly neglected from histories of British cinema, and that over a thirty-year career she developed a distinctive aesthetic that deserves greater critical attention. I show how by labelling her style as ‘balletic’, previous authors have inadvertently gendered her work as ‘feminine’, which has in turn contributed to the neglect of her output in histories of British cinema. While not an explicitly feminist film-maker, I demonstrate how her work also provides a consistent critique of established gender roles, establishing her as a more radical director than has been previously acknowledged. In so doing, this thesis builds on recent studies of British women directors to raise important questions about how researchers can critically assess these film-makers in future, without resorting to accounts that unintentionally fall prey to traditional stereotypes and further entrench the omission of these women from British film history.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2020-01-01T00:00:00Z