This thesis is an inquiry into the emergence, development and eventual transmutation of the 'virtual reality' (VR) subgenre. I critically intervene in discourse on cinema, digital media, phenomenology and science fiction (SF) to explore how these films refract and enact Hollywood cinema‘s engagement with digital media and imaging technologies. Given that these films are about bodily immersive mediated experiences, I argue, their reflexive displays of special effects technologies are far from anti- or contra-narrative, as certain analyses imply.

My emphasis on the imbrication of narrative and spectacle motivates a critical questioning of further, often interrelated and mutually sustaining dichotomies between body and mind, cognition and affect, cinema and digital media, real and virtual, reflection and immersion. Via close textual analysis with a phenomenological leaning, I explore how these films variously disrupt such binaries. As both old and new media produce and address differently mediated publics, they adopt, adapt and assimilate the narrative-aesthetic modalities of other (digital) media, negotiating their impacts upon our phenomenological relations to the world and to cinema. Through reflexive allusions to their increasingly mediated extradiegetic contexts, they function to uphold cinema‘s ability both to present innovative technological spectacle and to represent contemporary experiential realities.

I explore how earlier VR films Tron and The Lawnmower Man aesthetically and conceptually 'map' VR, and how Strange Days and The Matrix ambivalently explore the implications of intensified and widespread virtual experience in radically different ways. I characterise Avatar and Source Code as 'Post-VR' cinema, in which formerly upheld dichotomies – particularly between 'real' and 'virtual' – prove untenably anachronistic. I ultimately maintain the value of an approach to popular cinema which apprehends genre, context and convergence, while advocating sustained and detailed close analysis as a means of grasping cinema‘s narrative-aesthetic functions in the digital age.

In this thesis I propose that the representation of the prison is an untapped and valuable resource for non-traditional representations of the queered male, homo-sex and sexualities. I draw together texts on prison and sexuality from the 1800s to the 2000s in order to discuss the representation of prison in light of what it adds to a wider historical understanding of sexuality. The thesis is broadly chronological in form, analysing academic and theoretical texts in context alongside popular cultural representations.
I reassess the ways in which sexuality is viewed and understood over time, and place homosexuality within the framework of wider male sexuality as represented in the prison. I theorise a re-imagining of homosexuality within normative male sexuality and I challenge the concept of ‘situational sex’ through the complex issues behind understandings of sex in prison.
My research methodology includes close textual analysis of representations of prison in literature, film and television alongside academic and theoretical texts on sexuality, gender and queer theory. Each chapter focuses on specific cultural texts, including Against the
Law (1957), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) Short Eyes (1977), Scum (1977, 1979) and Oz (1997-2003). By drawing the representations and the theories together I am able to provide a re-reading of the texts within a recognition of sexual fluidity and the reclassification of heterosexual
males and gender hierarchies.
In my research I argue that the representation of sex in prison re-writes sexuality and contributes to a reading of the queering potential of the cultural representation of prison. With this method I challenge conventional understandings of sexuality as well as perceptions of how
male sexuality is viewed in popular culture. I argue that the cultural representation of the prison is a site of queer potentiality in form, idea and context and is a means to re-imagine male sexuality.

Organised around contemporary themes of political relevance, with experts in the field serving as invited theme editors, this companion provides an unusually engaged overview of the field of contemporary documentary studies as it intersects with the pressing issues of the day. Contributors to this volume include: Nora Alter, Mieke Bal, Dierdre Boyle, Elizabeth Cowie, Susana de Sousa Dias, Rosa-Linda Fregoso, Jane Gaines, Bishnupraya Ghosh, Jeffrey Skoller, Janet Walker, and Brian Winston.

Invited to represent the area of first person film studies in this “state of the field” compendium collection, "First Person Political" carves out new territory by defining ‘the political’ in first person film. Originally first person documentary was viewed with suspicion not only for its subjective stance, in direct opposition to the purported objectivity of the documentary, but also for its personal character, undrestood initially as an apolitical or even reactionary position. This essay argues otherwise, by using intriguing examples both historical and contemporary that demonstrate that although first person filmmaking can indeed by self indulgent, there are many cases in which the self is invoked as a subsitute or representative of larger collectivities and indeed political struggles.

This 35mm, 14 minute film addresses Plato’s concept of forms (‘eidos’) from the Timaeus. The research aims to mobilise Plato’s ‘eidos’ using the creative possibilities offered by the mise-en-scène; cinematography, music, performance and design while reflexively acknowledging the limits of film language to grasp form or essence