In the interval between his retirement from filmmaking in 1955 and his death in 1974, Marcel Pagnol solidified his status as a French national icon by reinventing himself yet again in two new modes of storytelling. Pagnol's work returned to the big screen for the first time in over a decade thanks to Daniel Auteuil's remake of La Fille du puisatier. In a larger cultural perspective, the strong renewal of interest in Pagnol over the past two decades can be appreciated as a reaction against the perceived dilution of French national identity in the middle of intensifying globalisation and the creation of a supranational European Union (EU). The purge of social conflict and performance of consensus that characterises nearly all of Pagnol's films has served as a kind of screen onto which French spectators can project their desire to reaffirm the traditional bonds of family, community, and nation.

The Whales of August (1987) is a film that focuses on the relationship between two widowed Sisters, Libby and Sarah. Mr. Maranov is a former Russian aristocrat who needs a new place to live in. Libby, whose blindness has made her dependent upon Sarah, senses a potential rival for her sister's attentions and thus refuses to accept Mr. Maranov moving in with them. This chapter discusses the pre- and post-production of the film, its publicity and distribution and reviewer's reactions on the film.

If movement was the feature of film that set it apart from photography and painting, then it was the key factor in the development of the tourism industry, and in the transportation revolution inaugurated by the invention of the automobile and the airplane. This chapter examines several of Georges Méliès's voyage films, which suggested that the developing technologies of motion that were bringing people closer together did not put an end to the social. Made in 1902, Le Voyage dans la lune was the film that first brought Méliès international fame, and it is the film that is the most widely recognized of Melies's works. In Méliès's voyage films, the old world is shown in confrontation with the new; the inevitable collisions depicted in these films. The smashing of cars into buildings, the crash landings of airbuses and rocket ships, suggest the collision of different cultural traditions and collective identities.

This chapter explores the work of French philosopher Abdennour Bidar. Via his publications, scholarly articles and media interventions, Bidar attempts to sketch out the contours of what he calls a twenty-first century Muslim existentialism. Muslim existentialism emerges from what Bidar calls un islam sans soumission. Islam or Islamic belief without submission is premised on a profound desire for freedom of conscience, expression and dissent. Prior to his work on the notion of Islam without submission, Bidar also developed the term self Islam with reference to European citizens of Muslim heritage, the majority of whom choose to define their own diverse relationships to Islam on their own terms. Bidar’s approach can be described as a project of cultural translation, whereby he can be regarded as a cultural mediator who seeks to productively confront non-Western and Western concepts of religion, spirituality, modernity and humanism. His work, which places him at the intersections of the academic world, the media and the political arena, makes him a particularly interesting figure through which to investigate the circulation of narratives concerning French Muslims and their diverse relationships to secularism.

Catherine Millet and Virginie Despentes are, then, essentially concerned with the distance between their work and the world around it; this chapter seeks to show that the work of both is defined by the difficulties entailed in regulating this distance. For Millet's text also owes its success to the highly contemporary aesthetic drama it plays out - a drama all about contact and distance. Throughout her memoir, Millet consistently valorises distinction: her concern is to maintain a kind of separation, hierarchical and exclusive, both within the worlds of sexual exchange she describes, and between herself as author and her fleshly reader. There is an interesting dynamic at work here, as Millet maintains a sharp separation between her sexual activity within the swinging world and the rest of her life, including other instances of sexual activity.

Patrice Leconte was born in Paris on 12 November 1947 but spent his entire childhood in Tours. During the year of preparation for the concours he enjoyed rich pedagogical experiences, including visiting lectures by canonical names of French cinema such as Jean-Claude Carrière, and he relished the hands-on approach to the study of cinematography. For many film critics and cinemagoers, Leconte's corpus divides neatly between the comic films of his 'apprenticeship', such as those made in collaboration with the Splendid company, and his mature, 'serious' output, usually thought to begin with Tandem in 1986. As even a brief survey of his career and filmography to date can illustrate, Leconte's films tend to fall outside of recognized categories and genres in French film, such as the post-'68 political film, the noir thriller and the heritage movie, even as they flirt with, acknowledge or gesture towards them.

This chapter looks at the trends in national identity in England. It focuses on two particular potential sources of resentment identified by those critics, the continued ability of Scottish MPs to vote on English laws, and the distribution of public spending across the UK. Most people would apparently prefer England to be governed from Westminster, albeit with less interference from Scottish MPs, even though they recognise and accept the wish of other parts of the UK to enjoy some form of devolution. For many of its unionist critics, England was potentially the Achilles' heel in Labour's plans, eventually implemented in 1999, to extend the devolution to Scotland and Wales. The chapter assesses whether the attitudes of people in England towards the way in which they are governed have changed. It also focuses on the role that adherence to an English national identity plays in the uncovered patterns.

The election outcomes of a given national political system are frequently rendered inconsequential through the strategic interventions of the Troika and other agencies of transnational governance. Populist responses to austerity and related measures can be understood as ultimately futile attempts to compensate for the erosion of effective mediation between citizens and the state. More specifically, social democratic parties and trade unions can no longer mediate in the ways they could do so in the recent past. The implication is that going forward, new representative institutions will be needed to play the crucial role of complementing the formal mechanisms of democratic statehood. Like most other forms of state, liberal democracy attempts to politically constitute society. But liberal democracy does this as the closest known equivalent to what would be a functionally differentiated state without need of a governing functional differentiation party. Far from being the culminating point in a movement towards ‘the end of history’, the liberal democratic state of law was and remains a transitional state with vast potential to evolve in new directions.

This chapter analyses the various radical left international initiatives prior to the birth of the EL in 2004.We discuss how deep divisions between ‘sovereigntists’ (who looked to the nation-state as a defence of the welfare state and of redistributive social justice) and ‘Left Europeanists’ (who believed that the crisis of socialism required a pan-European and ultimately a global strategic response by the radical left and that ‘national roads to socialism’ were no longer either adequate or even viable in the face of capitalist globalisation) hampered and delayed the emergence of the EL. From the ashes of ‘traditional’ communist forms of multi-party ‘co-operation’ – the various Internationals and attempts at Moscow- or Beijing-dominated meetings of communist parties – a kaleidoscope of differing initiatives eventually emerged. We discuss some of the most important. We show how dissatisfaction with these initiatives lay behind the determination of some of the most significant European radical left parties to take the initiative that resulted in the creation of the EL in 2004. We discuss the differing motivations of some of the parties that joined the EL at the outset and the initial steps that the EL took.

This chapter articulates the ideas which have led to the name 'Michael Winterbottom' being associated with a particular body of work. It focuses on the factors which tend to dissipate the idea of Winterbottom as the single source of a world view and style, and to relocate his films within a constellation of directors, films and national cinemas. Winterbottom has used a consistent creative team and a stable of actors. His name has become synonymous with an oeuvre that skips across genres and styles, often exhibiting connections with a host of filmic influences. Winterbottom's own words here provide some indication of a context for 9 Songs. The chapter seeks some methods to deal with the notion of authorship in relation to Winterbottom, to understand his work better in relation to traditional notions of authorship.

Part ten deals with the spiritual and ecclesiastical governance of the city of Genoa. Chapter one explains Genoa’s elevation to a bishopric in late antiquity, while chapter two explains its elevation to an archbishopric in the twelfth century.