By the early 1980s, Britain was viewed as a market in which the domestic exhibition sector was in terminal decline, while at the same time being a market in which films from the USA were both popular and dominant. This chapter discusses the development of the multiplex cinemas in Britain from the mid 1980s to the present. The opening of Britain's first multiplex cinema called The Point" in 1985 heralded a new kind of cinema. The building of new cinemas

This chapter examines how the concept of hybridity mediates the post-Revolutionary discourse of indigenismo (indigenism) in its cinematic form. It looks specifically at how malinchismo, which is also figured as a 'positive, valorisation of whiteness,' threatens the 'purity' of an essential Mexican in María Candelaria, Emilio Fernández's most famous indigenist film. This chapter looks at the contradictions of indigenism in Fernández' often cited as exemplary María Candelaria, suggesting that the film's representation of the indígena embodies a hybrid incoherent identity. The chapter also argues that the representation of indigenismo in Maria Candelaria is predicated on a pre-Revolutionary racial ideology that comes not just from a residual European influence but also from Fernandez' borrowings from Hollywood. This chapter also looks at the contradictions of indigenism in Fernández' two other Golden Age indigenist films Maclovia and La perla (The Pearl).

Le Dernier combat is 'an imaginary excursion', says Luc Besson. He came to the idea of making this film when he was wandering around in the boulevard Barbes in Paris, and disied an old film theatre all gutted out, but with cinema seats still hanging off the wall. In Le Cinquieme element, Besson brings together Jean-Paul Gaultier's intellectually transgressive costume design, Moebius-inspired surrealist set designs, and Cinemascope, and digital technology for the computer-generated images of twenty-third-century New York. The challenges around sexuality and gender performativity that Le Cinquieme element puts on display mark the film as contestatory of dominant ideology to a degree, and demarcate it strongly from the earlier Bessonian sci-fi prototype Le Dernier combat. Le Dernier combat is radical through its means of production and its ecological and anti-capitalist positioning.

This chapter deals with the period after 1913, in particular that of the late 1920s of British cinema industry as it was a time of dramatic developments and the establishment of several features of the industry. It is the establishment of the British Board of Film Censors in 1913, and the cinemas in First World War when the government instigated several organizations whose role it was in the first years of the war to produce propaganda targeted at those outside the country. The chapter also discusses the development of large cinema circuits and the development of cinema construction from the small, single-floored and simple buildings into the prototypes of the 'super cinemas' of the 1930s. The War and the associated conflicts in Europe saw the hegemony of Hollywood established and consolidated in the post-war period. The 1920s ended with a momentous technological advance, the development of synchronised sound.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg identifies the paper as an 'advertisement' for anodyne necklaces, a medical panacea of the time. This chapter provides a brief introduction to Lichtenberg, his commentaries of William Hogarth and A Harlot's Progress. Lichtenberg suggests that he has interpreted the images with what he calls, in a laconic notebook entry, 'the hermeneutics of hypochondria'. The chamber pots and enemas that he finds in the images come to be amusing and self-reflective metaphors for the dangers of interpretive excess. The significance of the excretory accoutrements that Lichtenberg projects into Hogarth's prints is that they, like the Umschrift on the advertisement for anodyne necklaces, become allegories for his hermeneutic method. In fact, they become allegorical for the very techniques that conceal and reveal them: chamber pots represent Lichtenberg's structural readings of the prints; and enemas stand for his Cynic principle of transposition.

William Hogarth's approach to art and visual culture was both spontaneous and complex, irreverent and respectful, democratic and critical. One of the most striking characteristics of Hogarth's oeuvre is its constant preoccupation with the representation of the forms of life. Rotund bellies and double chins, emaciated grins and dishevelled hair, rouged cheeks and spotty foreheads combine in his paintings and engravings as a kind of grammar, and constitute one of his most expressive narrative devices. Hogarth, as one of the most prominent skilled practitioners of the genre, was very much aware of the staging involved. An example of the importance of bodies in the search for the beauty of balance is provided by Hogarth's famous pictures, O the Roast Beef of Old England, that rather ferocious depiction of French Ancien Régime mediocrities. Hogarth's main originality was his questioning of art's ambition to 'correct', 'improve' or 'beautify' nature.

Eighteenth-century boxes and books are material proof that printers' waste and newspapers were a generous source of waste paper. Eighteenth-century women's writing appears, like waste paper, to be a tenuous object. More professional collectors were acutely aware of the consumption of waste paper taking place in the shops. This chapter examines the digestion of paper in the period from two angles. The trade and practices related to the sale and disposal of waste paper in England and France can help trace the varying fates of paper once it has been read. The chapter highlights a most corporeal plight: that of hygienic paper, where expression and excrement meet. Paper evidences the movement of commerce in society, the rumblings of its appetites, the contradictory processes of its digestive system, and the passing of matter through the huge body of the 'commonwealth'.

Pierre de Marivaux's parodies follow the burlesque tradition, which is particularly characterised by the traditional procedure of inversion. In Le Télémaque travestiand L'Homère travesti, the use of 'potbelly' and 'paunch', instead of 'belly', provides an example of this inversion. In Le Télémaque travestiand L'Homère travesti, Marivaux makes no effort to hide the embarrassment that the belly may visit upon its owner, and he relates these digestive disturbances to material realities. The belly becomes the material location of desire. By mentioning the digestive problems of certain characters, Marivaux says things that the hypotexts never say, that they have censured. He also restores the material bodies of the epic heroes. Far removed from the image of the athletic bodies of the epic heroes and the muscular abdomens of the ancient warriors, these nouns enable the creation of paunchy, podgy heroes, that is to say, anti-heroes.

This chapter shows that the faecal motif was part of an aesthetic, or even sometimes political, contestation. The first thing to bear in mind is that above all else, eighteenth-century théâtre de société audiences were theatre lovers. Faecal references in théâtre de société seem to have been associated with two distinct forms of enjoyment: the pleasure of recognition and the pleasure of impropriety. Théâtre de société audiences were highly cultured: they would recognise a source text and a specific tragic style. The excremental references were part of a rebellious discourse, and the scatological theatre the sign of the rejection of a state of affairs. The silent aesthetic revolution had ideological implications as N. Rizzoni remarks, and the question of the belly was also associated with the infighting that scatological plays dramatized.

Pierre-Thomas-Nicholas Hurtaut offers a sort of stylistic analysis of the overweening pomposity which epitomizes the scientific discourse of the eighteenth century. Like Hurtaut, Claude-Francois-Xavier Mercier de Compiègne satirises the pompous style, but the caricature is sometimes pushed to the extreme and reveals a criticism of the Enlightenment which is never clearly articulated. In Mercier and Hurtaut it is more than a simple game of parody, acting instead as a pretext for mocking the pretensions of the thinkers of their time: the moralists, philosophers and men of science. Mercier's and Hurtaut's parodic texts formed part of the trend of stigmatising the excesses of the Enlightenment. If the text is a caricature of the scholarly treatises of the time, and a caricature of the Enlightenment more generally, the repeated blasphemies remain ambiguous.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the metaphorical and symbolic connections between the entrails of the body and the bowels of the city or the labyrinthine tunnels of the mine. It unis a seemingly paradoxical scatological pleasure in eighteenth-century drama. The book focuses on Paris to analyse the fundamental connection between the bowels of city and the entrails of the body. It also focuses on drawings, engravings and caricatures which used the bowels, viscera and entrails to articulate political protest, Revolutionary tensions and subversion through scatological aesthetics, or to expose those invisible organs. The book explores human digestion and explains the ways in which the role of the stomach and of the workings of the inner body became pivotal to understanding larger patterns of interrelationship between the organs.