Thomas H. Ince filmed his productions at Inceville in Santa Monica, and the westerns made at Inceville between 1911 and 1912 were structured on the single-shot/scene principle. The films that Reginald Barker directed for Thomas Ince placed considerable emphasis on revealing a character's internal journey through the use of flexible camera placement and compositional framing. Cecil B. DeMille is remembered principally as a director of historical Hollywood costume epics from the 1930s and 1940s. Films had to look good, and the establishment of mood through fine photography and lighting was essential to the visual pleasure that was part of movie-going. But audiences were much more interested in the stories, the characters, and the stars than in the subtleties of framing, editing and scene dissection, and the truth is that those aspects of filmmaking passed wholly unnoticed. They were invisible.

Georges Méliès made at least one similar film to An Animated Picture Studio in 1909, called The Mysterious Portrait; it shows Méliès himself sitting to one side of a large picture frame which is empty apart from a black background. His gestures produce a life-size portrait of himself which gradually comes into focus. It then animates, allowing the two Méliès to engage in delighted confrontation: a moving picture in which identification could not be more explicit. Making a detailed assessment of the structural and editing developments in filmmaking during what was perhaps one of the industry's most creative periods is fraught with difficulty. The chapter considers how D. W. Griffith might have edited sections of The Great Train Robbery. Once the notion of codified linkage was established, Griffith was able to build film structures to almost unlimited lengths, eventually stretching the creative possibilities to the limit with Intolerance in 1916.

There can be no doubt that 1913 appears to mark the beginning of a significant change in the way that films began to be structured. D.W. Griffith's editing constructions suggest that he believed that an authorial presence could be retained only if the spectator remained objectively outside the filmic space. The point of view (POV) almost certainly developed from an increasingly confident use of shot/reverse-shot constructions within scenes. Unlike any other kind of shot, POV presents a view that the camera/spectator directly shares with a character in the film, and in that sense the spectator moves into a subjective awareness of the response that the character has to the events that he is observing. Painters during the early part of the twentieth century sought to make their art a directly expressed experience; their paintings sought to distil the essence of what was both seen and known.

The introduction to this collection sets out the key debates to which the chapters speak. It situates both digital data analysis and ethnography as methods which have their own ‘social lives’ and uses this approach to explore the work that methods do within particular projects of description and transformation.

This chapter examines the contribution that G.H. Mead’s conception of the self can make to understanding political subjectivity, and deploys this approach in a case study of urban politics in the UK. Mead argued that the social self is created through relations with other human actors, but that the emergent and impulsive ‘I’ of the self can disrupt, reject and challenge intersubjectively created ‘significant symbols’ that guide and give meaning to actors and society through recognition by both the conveyer and responder, shaping what he called the ‘me’. Mead’s conceptions of the ‘I and me’ of the self, and the role of powerful significant symbols, are deployed in an examination of new forms of city-regional government in England. This case study demonstrates how political agency is partly constructed by broader significant symbols that are utilised in the construction of this new governance arena, and how local actors seek to conform to or contest this new political landscape. The chapter applies Mead’s pragmatism as a counterpoint to dominant academic ideas about the power of neoliberalism and the post-political in understanding these and other developments.

The sanctuary city movement is a transnational human rights-based response to non-status migrants living and working in global cities. In many ways it is an oppositional mode of politics that challenges the exclusive authority of central governments over migration and political membership. Borrowing from critical legal geography, academics speak of the city as a ‘scale’ of urban belonging that can supersede national or international scales. However, clusters of practices, networks, and rationalities of governance are not necessarily confined to one scale. Urban securitisation is an apt example, where national governments cast off constraints of ‘high law’, shifting mechanisms of border control to regional and local scales. Research in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere demonstrates that local police, state authorities and, indeed, non-state actors, participate in the management of the (perceived) risks that non-status migrants pose to state and citizen. In this context, this chapter examines the uneasy relationship between sanctuary and security in Toronto, Canada. It does so by reflecting on the utility of the concepts of jurisdiction and temporality in better understanding how the securitisation of irregular migration has taken hold in the city. Placing this process in historical and jurisdictional context, it explores possible antidotes to urban securitisation.

This last chapter explores the construction of the queer female diasporic body in Randa Jarrar’s debut novel, A Map of Home, and in her short-story collection Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. It is argued that Jarrar constructs it as the simultaneous repository of Palestinian dispossession and of Arab and Islamicate homosexual repression. It analyses how Jarrar’s narrators express shame about their same-sex desire without knowing where it comes from, and it is argued it stems from internalised heteropatriarchal Muslim and Arab cultural values. In the face of Islamicate homophobia, Jarrar offers irreverent queer exegesis which contravenes the heterosexist bias of traditionalist religious interpretation. It is also argued that national maps are forfeited in favour of the mapping of queer subjectivities. The mapping of bodies against the prescription of nation-states helps us consider queer subjectivities in all their diasporic complexity, heeding, specifically, what it means to be queer, Arab, and of Palestinian and Muslim heritage, simultaneously. It is suggested Jarrar’s texts vindicate the queer female Muslim body as needing to claim ownership of itself, over and above inherited narratives of national dispossession and heteropatriarchal violence.

Films invariably come to completion only after considerable creative struggle and because this chapter concerns the processes of change that take place once a film goes into production, the nature of those changes and the extent to which they are commonly resolved during the editing process. Many films begin shooting using a version of the script which is not necessarily considered to be final. During the shoot, there will be rewrites of the script that are intended to improve, clarify, embellish or shorten the dialogue, and rewrites that omit scenes considered inessential and therefore removed to accommodate an overstretched shooting schedule. To give an example of the way that a section of script can be changed and developed before it becomes a scene in the finished film, the chapter uses a fragment from a two-part television drama, Comics, directed by Diarmuid Lawrence from a script by Lynda La Plante.

In this chapter, I make the case for pragmatic readings of social and political life as opposed to those associated with agonism (as developed by Chantal Mouffe and others). Drawing on evidence that demonstrates how the experience of working across difference to re-open a school building in New Orleans both grounded participants’ political commitments and altered them, I argue that agonistic theory is limited by its inattention to the lived experience of negotiating difference and by its assumptions regarding the futility of doing so in non-adversarial ways. In contrast, Deweyan pragmatism offers a useful counterpoint by centralising experience and emphasising the value of learning from engagements across difference. A Deweyan lens trains scholarly attention on the knowledge people create as they work across difference to understand and shape their own circumstances. In so doing, it encourages scholars to grapple with the limitations of their own expertise and points to potentially transformative practices that might otherwise be ignored.

The comedy of Charlie Chaplin uses both dramatic and structural irony as the basis of its humour. The period of filmmaking that spans the ending of the First World War and the coming of sound was one of the most innovative in terms of developing style and form. This chapter first explores some of the fundamental aspects of the silent film in order to provide a context for an examination of the films that were made during this most important and innovative period of filmmaking. The films examined are D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, Victor Sjöström's The Outlaw and His Wife, Benjamin Christensen's Häxan, Hans Janowitz's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and F. W. Murnau's Faust. Increased social stability in Germany encouraged a move away from morbid, psychological expressionist themes of the early 1920s towards a more realist presentational style.

The main difficulty in putting together any kind of historical survey of filmmaking is that a point is quickly reached where decisions have to be made concerning what to put in and what to leave out. Silent film remained free to communicate its meanings liberally because it was unshackled from the 'real-time' demands of synchronous sound. Most of the films, and the dramatised fiction that appears daily on television, use structuring and editing methods. These methods, originating in America, became universally adopted after 1917 and formed the basis of a realist mode of presentation which has been called The Classical Hollywood Cinema. A work that sets out to explore the history, theory and practice of film editing must also be prepared to explain how current practice accommodates to those conventional editing forms that have been historically determined.

The main driving force behind the making of films commercially is the need for the product to attract extremely large audiences and consequently generate substantial profits. The central section of the film is concerned with providing the need or overcoming the unstabilising elements and eventually restoring balance and order. Experiments in psychology provide some interesting and relevant explanations for the way that audiences perceive the edited content of a film. The psychology of perception demonstrates that audiences instinctively strive to construct meaning from what they see. In his book, Theory of Film, German film theoretician and historian Siegfried Kracauer argued that the principal aim of cinema is 'the redemption of physical reality', whereas traditional arts offered perspectives on life transformed by their expressive means, cinema, at its most profound, presented life as it actually is.

Chapter 4 explores how mass media, in the form of daily press, professional journals and television, represented and interpreted contemporary art that was deemed as illegal acts. In consequence, it considers how media discourses intervened and acted in such artistic and legal processes. At the centre of this study are artworks made by three Swedish artists between 1967 and 2009 which were simultaneously considered as both artistic statements and real illegal deeds. These artworks and the ensuing media debates are illuminating examples of how the notion of art is continuously negotiated and interpreted very differently by various agents in diverse contexts. This chapter, therefore, expands its focus beyond the typical agents of the art world such as curators, critics and art historians to include statements and writing by representatives of politics, media, entertainment, law and the general public. Being controversial acts, these artworks were open to multiple interpretations and fed smoothly into the logic of the media system. Accordingly, the artists and their artworks were described as breaking news in the standard vocabulary of the press. In addition, they all elicited extensive media discussions on the definition of art.

This postscript locates the essays collected in The power of pragmatism within the context of ongoing debates about what is distinctive about pragmatism as a living and contested philosophical tradition. It is argued that what is most distinctive about pragmatism is best revealed by attending to some family resemblances with other pragmatically oriented strands of social thought. The case for further developing a small-p pragmatist ethos in social inquiry is made in relation to core commitments: a focus on knowledge as emergent in relation to shared problems, and therefore a thoroughly social phenomenon, one in which issues of giving and receiving reasons is central to determining ‘what is good in the way of belief’. It is suggested that the future development of this ethos requires further attention to the agonistic dimensions of practically oriented styles of reasoning.