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The kiss has played a large role in filmic narrative in American Cinema since the medium’s beginning. Yet, mainstream cinematic representation of romance between African Americans has been limited. Just prior to cinema’s Classical age, Hollywood self-regulators (i.e. the Studio Relations Committee) determined that white actors were not likely to want to see black actors kissing. There was no prohibition on kissing, Black or otherwise. However, there was a restriction on displays of black-white “sex relations” (i.e. miscegenation), instituted by the president of the Motion Pictures Directors and Distributors of America, Will Hays, and within his 1926 list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls.” Notwithstanding, major Hollywood studios limited the “romantic” depictions of Black characters in Classical Hollywood to instances of infidelity, licentiousness, and even violence in films made between 1929 and 1941—and even these depictions were few and far in between. While Black sexuality was focused on far less often than white sexuality, Black sexuality was predominantly depicted as deviant behavior harmful to American society. Still, Black sexuality was used to help define, contrast, identify, and aid not only concerns about white sexuality’s function in the American society, but was systemically utilized to help solve societal concerns about class, gender, and race, all the while working to uphold depictions of whiteness as a standard to strive toward in terms of behavior and values.

This project examines the industrial and aesthetic changes that the West German film industry underwent during the final two decades of the 20th century through a case study of the distribution and production practices of German film distributor and producer Bernd Eichinger (1949-2011) and his company, Neue Constantin Film. Some scholars have called Eichinger a "prophet of neoliberalism" and have identified the 1980s and 1990s as a turn away from a state-sponsored, auteur filmmaker-driven New German Cinema to a market-based "Cinema of Consensus." This study challenges this view on two grounds. First, this study argues that the German film industry evolved from a purely market-based industry in the postwar period to a dual economy of market-based distribution and exhibition sectors and a subsidy-based production sector — an evolution that started in the 1970s and continued well into the 1990s. At first highly critical of the subsidy system, Eichinger responded by reshaping the operations of his company, Neue Constantin Film, around market-based principles, but ultimately learned to profit from the availability of public funding for his own film productions.Second, this study observes that German cinema increasingly came under the influence of American cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. This study challenges traditional notions of “cultural imperialism” by arguing that Eichinger and Neue Constantin Film (along with other German film professionals) were active facilitators in the expansion of the American film industry through financing and releasing American films in Germany. Moreover, conceptualizing cinema as an "event," Eichinger appropriated certain principles from American high-concept cinema for his own productions, incorporating spectacle and spectatorial pleasure in films such as Die Unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story, W. Petersen, 1984), Bin ich sch�n? (Am I Beautiful, D. D�rrie, 1998), and Der Campus (The Campus, S. Wortmann, 1998).Drawing on archival records and interviews with industry professionals, this study illustrates how the German film industry appropriated certain production and distribution practices and aesthetic influences from American cinema at this important juncture in film history and absorbed them into a uniquely German model of a dual economy that is still prevalent today.

In the 1960s and 1970s California was simultaneously at the forefront of the American adult film industry and a central stage for queer organizing and struggle. However, the links between queer history and adult film history extend beyond geographic proximity. In this period, the adult film industry embraced lucrative, but sexually illicit content that positioned it and its films as “deviant” from the postwar norms of heterosexual consumer culture. Queer “deviance” formed the connective tissue between this industry and its perceived obscenity both because sex in public was an illicit matter and because queer audiences, spaces, and content contributed significantly to the economic viability of the adult film industry in these decades. Despite adult-oriented motion pictures’ origins in the profit motives of exploitation cinema, queer-oriented industry practices, whether intentionally or not, facilitated forms of public queer visibility. Moving beyond representational approaches to adult film, this study’s examination of production, distribution, and exhibition foregrounds modes of censorship that range from business restrictions on market availability to law enforcement’s stringent policing of exhibition spaces under legal regimes such as obscenity. A heteronormative lens of legal rhetoric and enforcement sutured a perceived triad of obscenity, queerness, and contaminated public space onto the adult film industry and its patrons. Ultimately, the regulation and policing of California’s adult media industries in the 1960s and 1970s negatively impacted the niche media, spaces, and consumption sites that had energized the formation of marginal, queer audiences in this crucial period of film history.

"The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research of Animal Life" analyzes the films made to document animal experiments in behavioral psychology laboratories during the early- to mid-twentieth century. It argues that this largely ignored cinematic history reveals a dynamic field of behaviorist looking, where the distinctions between nature and culture were inscribed into animal images, generating concepts that broadly shaped the politics of immigration, labor relations, educational practice and gender identity, well beyond the walls of the lab. Its chapters focus on the films made by Robert Yerkes in the 1930s at the first experimental primate colonies in North America; the rat films made to simulate human society at Yale University in the 1940s; and the promotional films made by B.F. Skinner to sell the U.S. Military on his design for a pigeon-guided missile during World War II. "The Celluloid Specimen" was produced through a hybrid methodology, bringing together archival films and documents, primary source materials from film history and science history, as well as the theories of film studies, science and technology studies, critical animal studies, and critical race studies. It concludes that filming animal research was a pivotal practice for generating the psychosocial definitions of species, race, identity, and culture that continue to shape our contemporary political and scientific discourses.

This thesis argues that composed film music can serve a political function in the cinema. Antoine Duhamel’s film scores for Jean-Luc Godard’s films Pierrot le fou (1965) and Weekend (1967) serves a political purpose as misdirection and subterfuge to avoid censorship, and as a highlight to gesture sonically towards political issues without words. This study uses Nicholas Cook’s notion of contestation to explain how divergent musical styles from high European modernism to French chanson can function counter than their normative uses. Historical events such as the Algerian War, French post-war economic growth and consumption, and trends in musical aesthetics are considered alongside with Duhamel’s scores and Godard’s films. The consideration of world history and musical aesthetics in film music studies expands on works by Gorbman, Chion, McMahon, Brown, and Silverman and speaks to the current gap in methodology on treating film and film music as an open text influenced by national and global affairs. This work also explores how aspects of music composition such as dissonance and instrumentation can speak to larger issues of nationalism, sexual politics, and capitalism.

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATIONAllegories of Industry and the Limits of Reflexivity in Hollywood, 1992-2006ByErik WatschkeDoctor of Philosophy in Visual StudiesUniversity of California, Irvine, 2014Professor Catherine L. Benamou, ChairThis dissertation examines technological and paradigmatic changes to the American Film Industry of the last twenty-five years through the lens of popular modes and methods of reflexivity, as manifested in selected film texts. I argue for the historical importance of this period, referred to as "The New New Hollywood," in transforming issues of labor, authorship, and audience within United States-based film production. This entails an analysis of the way that discourses are narrated within Hollywood films themselves, along with the rhetoric of trade organizations, film critics, and film studios. I do this through a series of case studies of films and their promotional materials. In the first three chapters respectively, I analyze Richard Attenborough's Chaplin (1992) for its employment of literal reflexivity in the biopic genre, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) for its metaphorical reflexivity concerning digital imaging, and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996) as an independent-blockbuster whose sound allegories comment on transnational filmmaking. In the last two chapters, I analyze Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2002) as a film-à-clef that literally dramatizes screenwriting conventions, and finally, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006), whose allegorical reflexivity centers on the current state of cinematic illusionism. Ultimately, I consider how these films and the rhetoric surrounding them alternatively represent and mystify debates concerning independent and blockbuster film forms, photochemical and digital technologies, and the work of narrative feature filmmaking. The broader goal of this study is to historicize recent Hollywood forms that arise between the early 1990s and mid-2000s, and suggest that the development of new, specific definitions of "Hollywood" and "filmmaker" are necessary to an understanding of contemporary globalized media industries. This is due to three key historical shifts that characterize the period: changes in ancillary marketing strategies, transformation of formal and narrative structures, and the digitization of the technical processes of cinema.

Author(s): Freibert, Finley | Abstract: The merchandising of Bettie Page since the mid-20th century has evinced her diverse cultural associations at a variety of historical moments. Yet from a contemporary standpoint, the historical narratives prompted in the licensing of her name and image flatten her past into a palatable emblem of 1950s pin-up culture. In this article, I interrogate the ways Page’s image has been mobilized since the 1950s. I propose a cultural biography of Bettie Page attuned to her queer communitarian circulation in order to counter the nostalgic sanitation of her image since the 1990s.