Filmhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/768442024-03-28T11:20:35Z2024-03-28T11:20:35ZCinematic Verbalists : Dialogue Integration in the Work of Selected Contemporary American Writer-DirectorsO'Meara, Jenniferhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/1065542024-02-26T18:05:18Z2015-01-01T00:00:00ZCinematic Verbalists : Dialogue Integration in the Work of Selected Contemporary American Writer-Directors
O'Meara, Jennifer
This thesis contributes to the study of dialogue in cinema, an area that remains critically under-developed within film studies. In general, scholarly references to speech tend to be made in passing, disregarding dialogue's role in audiences' experience of cinema and the tendency for lines of dialogue to be extracted and repeated. Resistance to speech dates back to the transition from silent film to 'talkies', when dialogue was received as unnecessary to cinema, initially considered to be a distinctly visual medium. Within academic criticism, analyses of dialogue remain few and far between. Dialogue is often paraphrased in summaries of plot or character, ignoring the narrative or aesthetic significance of the wording or delivery. Indeed, excluding analyses of voice-over narration, it is only since Sarah Kozloff's critical reappraisal of speech in Overhearing Film Dialogue (2000) that the subject has begun to receive sustained attention. In addition to Kozloff's focus on generic dialogue, further studies have emerged on dialogue's relationship to genre and cultural representation (ed. Jaeckle, 2013), classical female dialogue (DiBattista, 2001), and the verbal styles of individual filmmakers such as John Cassavetes (Berliner, 1999) and Preston Sturges (McElhaney, 2006).
Embargo End Date: 2022-01-01
2015-01-01T00:00:00ZWhite Cottage / White House : Irish-American masculinities and spaces of home in Hollywood cinema 1930 - 1960Tracy, Anthonyhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/906342019-11-14T18:20:23Z2015-01-01T00:00:00ZWhite Cottage / White House : Irish-American masculinities and spaces of home in Hollywood cinema 1930 - 1960
Tracy, Anthony
This thesis examines constructions of Irish-American masculinity in classical Hollywood cinema's sound era (1930-1960) across five, chronologically-structured 'modes': James Cagney at Warner Bros; the Catholic priest; sport-themed biopics; the post-war urban cop; and the figure of the Irish-American returned to Ireland. I argue for such constructions to be analysed within a critical discourse of whiteness studies so as to move beyond an 'images of' approach which might too narrowly correlate such
representations with the Irish-American historical experience to the exclusion of their
wider cultural and ideological functions. Building on existing 'Whiteness' film
scholarship of Hamilton Carroll, Richard Dyer, Ruth Frankenberg and Diane Negra and
others, I argue that these masculinities function to both reconfigure and reinforce the
cultural centrality and hegemony of white masculinity during historical moments of
crisis and transformation.
2015-01-01T00:00:00ZNarrative and ideology in contemporary Hollywood cinema, 1990-1999Rowland, Neilhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/890652019-07-30T02:15:23Z2004-01-01T00:00:00ZNarrative and ideology in contemporary Hollywood cinema, 1990-1999
Rowland, Neil
The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between ideology and the narrative structure of popular Hollywood cinema in the 1990s, particularly the manner in which a closed narrative structure serves to reproduce the dominant ideology. I also attempt to account for its ongoing popularity with both filmmakers and contemporary, Western(ised) audiences. Primarily, I employ a materialist, deconstructive methodology, drawing my conclusions from a series of 'symptomatic' readings of certain popular films. Chapter One establishes and qualifies the structural identity of the individual act of comprehension and the canonic, three-act Hollywood screenplay, then describes the manner in which their similar (closed) narrative structures serve to affirm certain crucial ontological categories of the prevailing realist epistemology and, thus, to reproduce the dominant ideology; the dominant ideology depends for its moral authority upon certain realist ontological categories, especially those of 'reality' and 'representation'. I continue by theorising why the specific affirmation performed by these closed narrative structures is particularly favourable to the goals of the dominant ideology and also why the closed narrative structure is so popular with certain readers. The ability of the popular 1990s film to perform this affirmation depends upon its readers' ability clearly to recognise the presence, progress and resolution of its closed narrative structure. Chapter Two describes in detail the various narrative strategies employed by these films to assist this recognition; typically by indexing as clearly as possible the roles of the hero and villain, the opposing champions in a conflict the resolution of which typically coincides with the closure of the narrative. Chapter Three discusses the manner in which the ostensible content of the popular 1990s film further orients readers to the closed narrative structure by invoking only familiar, ideologically-sanctioned discourses to produce a textual transparency that allows a more unmediated access to its progress and resolution. Chapter Four attempts to situate the popular 1990s film within its social, political, economic and ideological context. It asks in what ways (if at all) the popular films of the 1990s constitute a distinct mode of film practice. I conclude that these films are not particularly distinct but rather represent a continuation of certain 'blockbuster' industrial principles established in the mid-1970s (and consolidated during the 1980s), principles, I argue, that actually result in a more reactionary film. I then attempt to justify the critical value of establishing this continuity (based on the necessarily reactionary quality of these films) by demonstrating the central and determining importance in these films of their main ideological/reactionary function (performed, as I have already noted, by the closed narrative structure). To do this, I show that the ostensible content of these films is highly fractured and contradictory as a direct result of the greater (ideological) importance of satisfying the narrative prerogatives of the closed narrative structure over the secondary, almost incidental prerogatives of the content. Chapter Five rounds off my discussion of the contemporary commercial cinema by examining possible alternatives to the dominant strategies outlined in the preceding chapters. It also investigates the possibility of a viable political cinema operating within the mainstream, a 'progressive realist cinema' that accepts for purely practical reasons its status as commodity, making certain necessary concessions to the dominant institutions of Hollywood, at the same time that it attempts to disrupt or problematise their ideological underpinnings. The chapter concludes with a detailed examination of certain alternative narrative strategies deployed in a range of contemporary progressive realist films.
2004-01-01T00:00:00ZProfane love, the heartening story and sublation : the dialectical image in filmO'Kelly, Conorhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/804502017-06-28T02:11:23Z2015-01-01T00:00:00ZProfane love, the heartening story and sublation : the dialectical image in film
O'Kelly, Conor
This thesis develops an understanding of the application of Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image. Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image is examined through the comparison of avant-garde and realist film productions and considered through his writing on aesthetics, literature and history. Methods and theories of the sifting of historical debris, second nature, montage, allegory, profane illumination, sublation, experience and the literary, are explored and utilised for the purpose of the identification of the dialectical image in what Benjamin called heartening film. The effectiveness ot this method in deconstructing historical myth and establishing Benjamin’s sense of a now-time is considered.
2015-01-01T00:00:00Z