Basque Gothic Cinema (1990-2021): a regionalist challenge to the Spanish model of national cinematic production and cultural identity

The following thesis addresses the upsurge in Gothic cinema emanating from the Autonomous Basque Community, Euskadi, in Northern Spain. Regional film production in the Gothic mode has increased exponentially since 1990, owing to government-funded filmmaking initiatives, legislative recognition and cultural reclamation of the Basque, or Euskaldun, region. Established scholarship often conflates regional output with Spanish cinema, while Basque cinema studies privilege historical dramas, social realism or documentary. This thesis thus fills a critical gap and addresses contemporary Basque Gothic cinema (1990–2021) as a regionalist challenge to the Spanish model of national cinema and identity. I establish Basque Gothic as an expression of transgenerational trauma engendered by a history of statesuppression and socio-political violence. This thesis contextualises, historicises and theorises the rise of Basque Gothic cinema, demonstrating the ongoing past-present dialectic and twenty-first century negotiations of cultural heritage that characterise it. The chapters follow a thematic chronology, with the first chapter exploring concepts of history and memory, the second honing in on ongoing debates about contemporary identity and language, and the third examining the future of Basque screen media in global and digital terms. Specific films and sequences are used to illustrate key theories and ideological connotations, such as La madre muerta (The Dead Mother, Juanma Bajo Ulloa 1993) Hileta (Funeral, Kepa Sojo 2016) and Patria (Homeland, Félix Viscarret and Óscar Pedraza 2020). Films are also presented in clusters to highlight pervasive trends, styles and themes that define a uniquely Basque expression of the Gothic. While the Gothic forms the theoretical foundation of this project, several frameworks (memory studies, folklore studies, historical narrative construction techniques, transnationalism and regionalism) are deployed. I address this regional iteration of the mode as a window into contemporary community perception and projection. Crucial factors in the global projection of regional cultural production are new screen technologies, streaming platforms and social media. A significant number of the texts studied in this thesis accessed global distribution via SVOD (subscriptionvideo- on-demand) services and video-sharing sites such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube and Vimeo. A central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the impact of multinational co-production and distribution on the development of Basque Gothic cinema. This thesis therefore also looks to the future of regional production in the digital era. As regional filmmaking industries increasingly engage with globalised distribution markets, the borders of any culturally occluded region such as Euskadi become more flexible. The fluctuation of regional identity is exciting yet terrifying in its disregard for established cultural categories. This thesis shows that regionalism holds great value for future cultural and film studies endeavours, offering scope to challenge national singularity and delineating the nuances of interstitial cultural identities. Without regionalist approaches, language, folklore, locations, political references and music can be misinterpreted. Therefore, while this project centres a Basque Gothic case study, I further establish a model for the reimagination of critical approaches to global, indeed glocal, screen cultures in the twenty-first century

The Way of Water in Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966) and Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny (2022).

Water plays a crucial role narratively, thematically, and visually in two films which follow young Senegalese female protagonists as they emigrate in search of work and hopes of a “better” life. La noire de…/Black Girl’s (Ousmane Sembène 1966) Diouana travels to Antibes while Nanny’s (Nikyatu Jusu 2022) protagonist Aisha voyages to New York. Each landscape, which provides its respective protagonist with a new home, is characterised by a distinct proximity to bodies of water. This article argues that the literal, imagined and folkloric manifestations of water in both narratives liberate their respective protagonists. Comparing these case studies allows for the assessment of the intersection of genre, folklore, cultural heritage, and gendered storytelling as they are performed in almost identical stories made by a male filmmaker tied to the global decolonisation movement of the 1960s and a female filmmaker who embodies the transgenerational implications of the diasporic self. Water recurs symbolically throughout both films in senses beyond the simply geographical. Water is an ideologically charged force for both characters which alternately encloses and liberates them. The character arc of each woman reaches its emotional climax in bathtubs, water acts as a force which seduces and promises clarity. Ultimately, water-based imagery and the guidance of the infamous water spirit, Mami Wata, facilitates the liberation of each protagonist as they resist the imposition of colonial power dynamics and enslavement

Search for Scalar Diphoton Resonances in the Mass Range 65−60065-600 GeV with the ATLAS Detector in pppp Collision Data at s\sqrt{s} = 8 TeVTeV

A search for scalar particles decaying via narrow resonances into two photons in the mass range 65–600 GeV is performed using $20.3\text{}\text{}{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ of $\sqrt{s}=8\text{}\text{}\mathrm{TeV}$ $pp$ collision data collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The recently discovered Higgs boson is treated as a background. No significant evidence for an additional signal is observed. The results are presented as limits at the 95% confidence level on the production cross section of a scalar boson times branching ratio into two photons, in a fiducial volume where the reconstruction efficiency is approximately independent of the event topology. The upper limits set extend over a considerably wider mass range than previous searches