Seven Great Film Studies PhD Theses from the University of Edinburgh

Framegrab from Jeux interdits/Forbidden Games (René Clément, 1952)

The classically idyllic, carefree world of childhood would appear to be diametrically opposed to the horrors of war and world-wide conflict. However, throughout film history, filmmakers have continually turned to the figure of the child as a prism through which to examine the devastation caused by war.
This thesis will investigate the representation of childhood experience of the Second World War across six fiction films: Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1947), René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night (1964) and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985). [Pasquale Iannone, Childhood and the Second World War in the European fiction film PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2011: 11; hyperlinks added by FSFF]

Film Studies For Free went a-hunting at the research repository at the University of Edinburgh and found that seven great full-text PhD theses have been archived there.

Each of these works of original research has a huge amount to offer any student of cinema, and so it's really great that their authors and their university have made them publicly available online.

FSFF hopes its readers will join it in saluting them!

• Bruns, Christina, Contemporary German documentary cinema (1999 – 2007): the rural represented, the regional defamiliarised and Heimat revived PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2010
• Iannone, Pasquale, Childhood and the Second World War in the European fiction film PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2011
• Makrygiannakis, Evangelos, Films of Theo Angelopoulos: a voyage in time PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009
• Russell, Michael, Soviet montage cinema as propaganda and political rhetoric PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009
• Salzberg, Ana Beyond the looking glass: the narcissistic woman reflected and embodied in classic Hollywood film 2010
• Valcke, Jennifer, Static films and moving pictures: montage in avant-garde photography and film PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009
• Yam, Chi-Keung, Study of popular Hong Kong cinema from 2001 to 2004 as resource for a contextual approach to expressions of christian faith in the public realm after the reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2008