In a Eric Rohmer film, characters project their desires upon what they see. In Rohmer's Die Marquise von O, the Marquise is saved from rape by the Russian Count, her hero, the embodiment of all virtue, before whom she swoons away. In his Le Beau mariage, the young woman, whose lovemaking is interrupted by a phone call from her lover's wife, rejects him in a rage and determines to marry. There is always a reality in Rohmer's films other than the one that the main characters have invented for themselves and that they live. Rohmer works in long takes most of which consist not of action but of dialogue. His characters speak incessantly and it is their dialogue that he films. In the fictions that they construct with their words they become their own heroes and heroines.

Lee Thompson was born in Bristol just before the First World War. By the time Thompson left school his ambition was to be an actor, and he joined Nottingham Repertory, making his debut in Young Woodley in 1931. His first 'association with the cinema' had been as an actor in Carol Reed's solo directorial debut Midshipman Easy made at Ealing Studios in the summer of 1935. Lee Thompson's second significant assignment away from Elstree's scriptwriting department was as a 'dialogue coach'. The Hitchcockian influence emerges clearly in the adaptation that Lee Thompson worked on immediately after his secondment to Jamaica Inn. Unlike No Place For Jennifer, which had been a considerable box office success, Last Holiday fared badly with the critics and struggled to find an audience. Lee Thompson's opportunity to direct came when he received an offer from Hollywood for the film rights to his play Murder Without Crime.

Guillermo del Toro's El laberinto del fauno/Pan's Labyrinth is one of the greatest successes of its decade. This chapter argues that Pan's Labyrinth deserves to be read within a particularly Spanish context. Beginning by raising the question of whether there is a specific kind of horror in the Spanish audiovisual sector, the chapter then makes reference to varied and influential precursors in the field and places Pan's Labyrinth within that context. Particular attention should be paid to Pan's Labyrinth's principal production companies, the transnational specialist film enterprise Tequila Gang and Spanish national TV channel Tele 5, whose Estudios Picasso was at the time the most successful audiovisual producer in Spain. Finally, the chapter finally offers a close textual analysis of Pan's Labyrinth itself, calling attention to the points at which it coincides with and those at which it diverges from the transnational tradition of horror and its unique Spanish variant.

This introduction contextualises the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varagine (also known as Jacobus de Voragine) as a historical figure and author, introducing the history and urban culture of medieval northern Italy as well as the genre of the civic chronicle. It outlines the history of medieval Genoa, an Italian city-state developing in ways that were both typical (in struggling with factional conflict) and atypical (as a hub of international trade). Finally, the introduction provides a short biography of Jacopo, reviews his vast scholarly output, and introduces his Chronicle: its transmission tradition, methodologies, main sources, and chief themes.

This chapter explores the strategic uses to which Patrice Leconte puts comedy, by means of a brief assessment of his early film Les Bronzés, which will then be put into dialogue with what is widely considered Leconte's most serious and 'intellectual' film to date, Ridicule. Characterization is one-dimensional in Les Bronzés and Leconte's other early comedies. Stereotype is one of the primary comic devices used in Les Bronzés. The racial stereotype of thieving black natives, the first with which we are presented, may at first appear to suggest a troubling attitude of racism on the part of the filmmaker. The tableau exemplifies in various ways the humour that characterizes the early comedies of Leconte's career, made in collaboration with the café-théâtre group Le Splendid. Ridicule blends performance techniques lifted from the café-théâtre with a presentation of issues such as the function of language, power and ethics.

Marcel Pagnol's status as the country's most popular playwright put him in an ideal position to denounce talkies, but he took the opposite position, announcing its superiority to both live theatre and silent cinema. Throughout his career as a playwright Pagnol had disliked the inauthenticity of theatrical sets, especially the use of painted canvas scenery to represent outdoor locations. Pagnol's controversial declarations had the effect of a marketing prospectus, attracting contract offers from several studios. Among them was Paramount, which in late April 1930 had opened a massive new production centre in Joinville-le-Pont, located 25 kilometres east of Paris. Marius had initially caught the eye of a Paramount story scout in Paris only days after its premiere in March 1929, but the idea of making a screen adaptation for the American market was rejected because of the play's 'slowness in action, unsatisfactory romance, and unhappy ending'.

Genealogy is most commonly represented through the family tree, as patrilineal and heteronormative understandings of the family unit create a body armoured with patriarchal notions of bloodline, inheritance and property. This discussion of genealogy finds a renewed relevance to contemporary developments in subjective and autobiographical filmmaking, particularly concerning those films which excavate family history at the intersection of private and public realms. This chapter discusses two films, Sandra Kogut's Um Passaporte Hungaro and Albertina Carri's Los rubios, which amply demonstrate family history need not be a linear, essentialising gesture in search of a pure origin. Rather, Um Passaporte Hungaro and Los rubios from Brazil and Argentina respectively, experiment with autobiography in order to discuss identity, memory and history, thus bringing Michel Foucault's genealogical model to fruition with remarkable effect. In demystifying the notion of foundational origins, Kogut and Carri challenge the law of the father which propels classical genealogical quests.

In the films of Griffith, each shot belongs to the unity of the narrative and relates primarily to principles of imitation (mimetic). In the discursive montage characteristic of Eisenstein's films, the linkages between shots are not primarily determined by an internal unity or an interior logic. Dziga Vertov's material is more heterogeneous and more actual than the material of an Eisenstein film. The 'realities' from which the images of Vertov's film come are distinct and different in time and place and in their relation to each other. It is the film that creates relations and in such a manner as to emphasise these differences and construct associations between them like waking, movement, silence, calm, work, leisure. In the slaughter sequence in Strike, despite the differences between what is paralleled the narrative of the workers' strike central to the film is sustained despite ruptures to that narrative.

Leos Carax's overbudget film of 1990, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, has tended in many accounts to be read as an allegory of social exclusion. This chapter proposes that the haste with which the film has been categorised and in certain quarters thereby dismissed, combined with the spectacular budget catastrophe and the myths developed around the on-set events, contributed to a widespread misunderstanding of the film, as well as to a certain blindness among critics as to the merits. It also offers an alternative to straightforwardly symbolic readings of the film by means of situating it within the context of those philosophical and aesthetic debates with which it maintains continuity. Although fireworks served to display a surplus, which is converted into a transient wasteful display of artifice (feux d'artifice), Carax makes the fireworks sequence the centrepiece of the film.

On one level, Karel Reisz can be defined as cinema's Emile Zola, a cultural determinist whose characters are inescapably defined by their background. This 'trap' is all the more profound because the films' milieux are transparently 'real' and stylistically 'neutral' to the point of seeming inevitability. In a pair of interviews during the 1970s, Reisz himself acknowledged a clear line of continuity in his work, he always thought of himself as a cinematic auteur, but stressed that it was a continuity of neither British nor Czech sensibilities. Like many exiles and outsiders, Reisz was able to balance an emotional investment in his adoptive country with the ability to remain critically distanced enough to recognize and then de-familiarize the cultural tropes that make it tick. He was affectionately described by director Stephen Frears as 'The last great man in England'.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers the insistent heterosexuality of most contemporary pornographic citation, exploring a range of texts and films, and taking in the female perspective on the male and the male perspective on the female. It discusses the work of Guillaume Dustan and Erik Remes, whose explicit representations of sexual activity intervene into debates about the place of gay and queer identities in contemporary France, particularly with reference to sexual practice in the light of the AIDS epidemic. The book also considers the possibilities for revolution and reform that have traditionally informed the high-art appropriations of the pornographic and trace their irrevocable collapse in contemporary art. It addresses two female authors whose spectacular success is inseparable from their use of sexually explicit material: Catherine Millet and Virginie Despentes.

This chapter retraces the reception of Petrarch and Petrarchism in early modern England from Wyatt and Surrey to Shakespeare and Drayton via Sidney and Spenser, arguing that poets turned to annotated editions of Petrarch’s works with rich commentaries, so that poetry and poetic commentary became one in the sonnets adapted from Petrarch. Early authors produced a body of English Petrarchism and were imitated by later poets who shaped their own poems as critical commentaries upon the work of their forerunners. Petrarch himself was represented in varied ways, as a master of rhetoric or as religious poet, as an aggressive or a passive lover. Insisting on the social dimension of poetry writing and publishing, and focusing on the readership targeted by each category of poet, this chapter recalls the differences in status and scope between the early Tudor poets, who did not publish their poems themselves, and the later poets, who used their published sonnets to comment on the achievements of their predecessors.