This chapter presents an unpublished interview with Luc Besson, which was recorded in 1999 when Jeanne d'Arc was released. Besson first gives the reasons for making the film about of Joan of Arc, and although while in the process he demystifies the character, he also bolsters others. He also explains that Joan's character of winning at certain times and losing at others is all question of probability. Besson narrates the keystone of the film when the two armies face each other in a field where there are flowers, the viewer is bound to think that they cannot possibly kill each other and a breath of humanity wafts through at that point for a few seconds. According to him, immensity is linked to a character, and the most difficult thing is always to look into the character's soul.

This chapter looks at how classical Mexican cinema has been studied. It begins with a history of cinema in Mexico up to and including the 1940s, including the advent of sound cinema. The chapter examines the state's relationship to popular culture (and particularly cinema) in Mexico in the 1940s in terms of a consolidation of the post-Revolutionary nationalist project. It challenges the film scholarship, local nontextual perspectives, which characterize Mexican cinema as 'underdeveloped' and suggests a means of reading against an approach that continually reasserts subalternity in the face of the colonizing culture (Hollywood). After a survey of US studies of classical Mexican cinema which diverge from Mexican analyses by making space for the 'other' through genre and textual analyses, it concludes by outlining how a textual approach might provide an account of Emilio Fernández' oeuvre as contradictory, non homogeneous and evident of a fissured cultural nationalism.

This chapter brings together inbetweenness, violence, gender and costume, starting from an examination of the development of certain key costumes worn by male characters in Luc Besson's feature films. It explores three points. First, Besson's sartorial system functions to establish simple Oedipal structures. Based on the suit where men are concerned, it is relatively stable, and ultimately conservative in its establishment of gender roles. Second, the diving suit is potentially a site of transformation, but it too is reclaimed for normative purposes. Last, the costume's potential for radical transformation is shifted to the cat-suited androgyne Ruby Rhod of Le Cinquieme element. Male attire in Besson functions as a discourse that critiques patriarchal power, where the suit functions above all, as it does more generally in Western culture, to signify masculine repression, the renunciation of narcissistic display at the service of violent patriarchal law.

From 1943 until 1950, Emilio Fernández was regarded as one of the foremost purveyors of 'Mexicanness,' as one of the most important filmmakers of the Mexican film industry. This chapter highlights some of the key concepts presented in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book explores the contradictions of post-Revolutionary representation as manifested in Fernández' canonical 1940s films: María Candelaria, Víctimas del pecado, Las abandonadas, La perla, Enamorada, Río Escondido, Maclovia and Salón Mexico. It examines transnational influences that shaped Fernández' work. The book acknowledges how the events of the Mexican revolution impacted on the country's film industry and the ideological development of nationalism. It takes note of current tendencies in film studies and postcolonial theory to look for the excesses, instabilities and incoherencies in texts, which challenge such totalizing projects of hegemony or cultural reification as 'cultural nationalism' or ' mexicanidad.'

Chapter 5 discusses how the exhibition environment stimulated new iconographies and meanings in stained glass. Using a number of examples it demonstrates how the stained glass exhibits reflected, and influenced, some of the global political themes of the nineteenth-century exhibitions: nationalism, imperialism, and human variety. This chapter makes an important intervention in stained glass studies by considering, for the first time, the role of stained glass in the formation of racial and ethnic stereotypes to both emphasise human variety and reinforce social hierarchies. It also considers the influence of non-western culture and religions on the development of stained glass.

In a widely cited examination of French culture, Kristin Ross isolates a number of themes that she sees as characterising post-Second World War France in the 1950s and 1960s. These include: the new centrality of the consumer durable; the focus on hygiene; the creation of a new middle-class couple; and the suppression of France's imperial past in favour of the new demographic state. Though the same themes are reiterated in Nikita, indicating the continued relevance of Ross's analysis, the film highlights an issue ignored by Ross, the problem of the single woman and her importance to consumer culture. Nikita, and killer-femmes like her, seemingly invoke a femininity grounded in autonomy and action that refuses the passive role of object-to-be-looked-at associated with consumer culture. This chapter argues that the killer-femme is yet another means of circulating feminine consumer culture at a global level as part of the youth culture movement.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to i a broad range of issues in Luc Besson's films, and to use analytical tools developed in Film Studies during the same period as Besson's work. It shows how Besson uses strategies of production development and marketing promotion that have for many years been recommended by economic experts as the best way of overcoming the crisis of European cinema. Focusing on the relationship between physical environment and personal psychology, the book demonstrates how claustrophobia in Subway's subterranean setting is hijacked and rerouted as an alternative space. It explores the relationship between the 'French' Besson and the 'American' Besson. The book begins with a key article on the cinéma du look for the Revue du cinéma in 1989 by experimental filmmaker and film critic Raphael Bassan.