Screened stages: Representations of theatre within cinema

This dissertation explores representations of theatre within cinema. Although critical literature has analyzed cinema's relationship to theatre and the adaptation of plays to the screen, my project is devoted specifically to theorizing the variety of stages that appear within cinema. I begin with the question: Why has so much been written in dramatic criticism about the play-within-the-play while hardly anything has been theorized about the phenomenon of the stage-within-the-film? What does it mean to put a stage within a film? Early chapters trace the development of the trick films of Georges Melies and magic shows, cinematic vaudeville of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, representations of the circus and "freak" show onscreen as well as the musicals of Busby Berkeley, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Gene Kelly. Films such as Stage Fright (1950), All About Eve (1950), and Sunset Blvd. (1950) are also explored. Later chapters examine the work of Sophie Fiennes, Slavoj Zizek and David Lynch.;The primary questions of the dissertation include: (1) How do representations of theatre within cinema operate as differing forms of excess upon the screen? (2) How might the relationship between live performance and the filmic representations of performance be theorized in relationship to the ontological differences between theatre and cinema? (3) How have representations of stages within film changed through changing technologies and what does this suggest about the historical relationship between cinema and theatre---the ways in which their histories have depended upon and incorporated one another?;I ground the study in a chronological look at the changing role of the stage in film beginning in early silent films and concluding with cinema at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This organization not only provides a strong base for examining the varieties of stage representations onscreen, but also serves to highlight evolving theoretical implications that are manifest at different historical periods within cinema and theatre history.;Through analysis of theatrical representations in the work of several fictional films that specifically puncture and disrupt cinematic narrative and continuity, I raise questions that explore the ontology of theatre and cinema. The collision between images of presence and absence contained in representations of theatre within cinema offers an important theoretical grounding to explore the relationship between cinema and theatre, particularly as psychoanalytic discourse has theorized the registers of the Imaginary and the Real. Moments in film that mirror the performer/spectator relationship have important implications to questions of theatrical presence that are both longed for and replaced by the past. I suggest that the relationship between presence and resistance-to-presence that the continual return of the stage on screen makes manifest raises fundamental questions about the nature of the relationship between theatre and cinema. The unknowing repetition of the past masked as presence, I argue, enacts an essentially traumatic relationship to the Real (particularly as explored in the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, Peggy Phelan, Roland Barthes, Laura Mulvey, Samuel Weber, and Slavoj Zizek) that has profound theoretical implications in the study of both theatre and film.;This study seems particularly relevant considering the theatre scholar's ever-expanding ability to view performance through film, video, or digital recordings. The ability to endlessly view, pause, rewind, and edit archival material has changed the critical enterprise of studying theatre and the production of theatre itself. The theoretical implications of writing about performance at a time when the theatrical event is easily recorded and disseminated requires that the field of theatre studies actively engage with the ontology of the recorded image. With these contemporary issues in mind, this dissertation adds to the needed critical dialogue between theatre and cinema studies.