This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the second part of this book. The book explores the concepts of exile and the uncanny, or unheimlich, and thus in turn implicitly the concept of home, in relation to Basque cinema. It suggests that the notion of home and of Basque motherland carry potentially different resonances for female directors. According to Edward Said, culture is inextricably and inherently linked to the manifestations of conflicts. As a mass medium, cinema becomes a means of representing cultural conflicts as a way of self-consciously or unconsciously reinforcing those social and ideological antagonisms, vicissitudes and turbulences. Cinema also mediates individual and collective experiences and discourses or reflects upon these processes in order to propose and to imagine alternative symbolic systems that may potentially contribute to political change and social transformation.

This chapter presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the book. In dissecting a lifetime of ambiguity, the book has shown that there are few critical certainties when it comes to Louis Malle. This is the most fascinating quality of Mallean cinema. Malle's childhood experience of January 1944, the founding trauma, its working-through in the eventual completion of Au revoir les enfants, provides one coherent and important way to debate the director and his work. There is Malle the 1950s playboy celebrity, the soixante-huitard activist, the Frenchman at home in the USA, the professional cinéaste, producer, and documentarist. Classical realism, surrealism and cinéma direct continue to be a powerful combination that defies simplistic aesthetic classification. In filming Au revoir les enfants he systematically asserted a defence of artistic liberty against unthinking authoritarianism. Mallean film was also a journey of repeated reinvention.

Pilar Miró's Gary Cooper, que estás en los cielos (Gary Cooper Who Art in Heaven) has long been regarded as one of the key films of Spain's transition to democracy. Unlike her previous films, Gary Cooper is firmly grounded in the contemporary social reality of Spanish women in the workplace during the transition to democracy. This chapter looks at a crucial aspect of the film that has been largely overlooked: its complex and contradictory engagement with pathos. It shows that the affective structure of Miro's film is a particularly revealing framework for exploring the ways in which female citizenship and identity were renegotiated during the transition. The chapter explores the ways in which pathos can be read as a political strategy in the film, paying particular attention to its relationship with the body, silence, music and the crucial role of the stardom of Gary Cooper.

Lucrecia Martel's La ciénaga represents family and social disintegration, which is caused in part by the failure of communication or emotional dysfunction and annihilation, in the context of the decadent world of the traditional rural Argentine society, through the use of what could be defined as a subjective realistic cinematic style. By establishing a connection, or by working at the intersection, between Martel's cinematic practice and Bracha Ettinger's groundbreaking theoretical propositions, this chapter explores how La ciénaga offers a representational and critical alternative to an orthodox feminist political project, which remains confined to the subject of women's rights, bodies, histories and oppressions, in the form of an identity-based representational mode of politics. Martel's cinematic style produces bodily sensations that may be divorced from any referents, thereby affecting our senses and forcing us to react to the film on a corporeal, bodily, perceptual and affective level.

This chapter analyses three contemporary Cuban women filmmakers in whose work direct and indirect conversations with Sara Gomez are seen. Sandra Gómez, Susana Barriga, and Gloria Rolando work at the intersection of cultural citizenship, diaspora, revolutionary legacy and globalisation, and they do so through what is called 'deterritorialised intimacies'. These intimacies are afforded by their documentary practices of decolonised ethnography: a set of aesthetic and ethical documentary strategies that are expressive of historical and emotional geographies of belonging and non-belonging for the filmmaker, subject and audience. The chapter turns to Ariella Azoulay's work The Civil Contract of Photography in order to understand the publicity of contemporary documentary subjects in Cuba and how this intersects with the legacy of gendered citizenship practices. It considers a different formation of citizenship practice, one which builds a 'space of relations between the governed' a virtual territory of citizenship action, recognition, care and affection.

This chapter discusses Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona in the context of the strangeness of the mix of cultural vagueness and the use of two nationally highly specific actors, Penèlope Cruz and Javier Bardem. It examines the roles played by them in maintaining (or, sometimes, not) the fine, ironic balance between critiquing and colluding in North-American cinema's representation of European cities. It is shown that this positioning at a point of ideological ambivalence echoes the patterns of sexual politics in which their characters are enmeshed. The incidental curiosity of Bardem and Cruz playing in English, mainly, but on home territory, combines with the ambivalent status of Barcelona as Catalan capital and rival cultural capital of Spain. The film places its actors, at least contingently, and through the magnifying sheet-glass of wry reflexivity, in the frame of the romantic comedy.

Contemporary editorial work on Shakes-peares Sonnets has tended to focus on the individual poem to the detriment of the collection as a whole, favouring ingenious close reading and shaping the understanding of the poem as the emanation of a lyric voice. On the contrary, a holistic approach to the Sonnets as a unique continuous poem reveals the consistencies of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and systematicities that constitute a ‘grammar’, seen here as a rhythmic, rather than just syntactic, notion. Punctuation, for instance, has been modelled on the conventions of modern prose in modern editions, while early modern punctuation was rhythmical rather than logical. The study of the uses of ‘have’ and of ‘this’ demonstrates that some recurring patterns, the rhythmic gestures of the Quarto, can be identified in the Sonnets. It is at least partly because of editorial practices that such work is needed: while Donne’s texts are known for their rhythmical oddities, Shakespeare’s Sonnets have been treated in a way that erases their rhythmical virtuosity and the way their ‘strangeness’ affects the English language.

The decade preceding the EU referendum saw intensifying debate on the nature of Englishness, shaped by an anxiety about the loss of national and cultural identity. Links between nationalism and shared perceptions of history are well-documented, and recent years have seen a popular turn to imagined national pasts, one frequently visited period being the reign of Henry VIII. In order to explore the intersection of historical fiction and contemporary English identity, this chapter reads two novels with a Tudor setting, published in 2014 and 2015 by the best-selling author Philippa Gregory. The texts are found to be expressions of England’s ‘postcolonial melancholia’ (Gilroy, 2004). Ostensibly concerned with the ruptures of Henry’s reign, they are preoccupied with change and loss, lamenting the loss of privilege and portraying the emerging modernity as an invading force that threatens ancient birth-right. A picture of English grievance emerges which sheds some light on the visions of a prelapsarian England that help to shape the contemporary nation as it searches for a sovereignty it imagines itself to have lost.

In the documentary L'Univers enchanté de Jacques Demy/The World of Jacques Demy, Catherine Deneuve paid the filmmaker an actress's greatest compliment when she described him as 'the charming prince who woke Sleeping Beauty'. Deneuve's fairy-tale metaphor also pays homage to Demy's own playful description of his filmmaking style. Cinéma en-chanté: the pun communicates on several levels. Demy's cinema has the rare quality of appealing to adults and to children, to cinephiles and the general public alike. In these early Demy films, enchantment communicated just as subtly the unsettling nature of the screen image that was beginning to take shape for Deneuve. Demy's Donkey Skin is arguably an equal source of the tale's iconic status in France today, and largely because of Deneuve. Against Donkey Skin's sets, Deneuve's costuming establishes the narrative trajectory of this psychedelic dream, an imposed dream that necessarily becomes her own.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with a consideration of the origins and influences that have shaped Mathieu Kassovitz's development as a director, but also the cultural context within which he emerges as a filmmaker. It argues that his particular brand of popular cinema is entirely consistent with the tastes and consumption practices of youth audiences in France. The chapter focuses on Métisse and La Haine, which use the arena of popular culture as a space of 'constant contestation', in which the discourses and modes of representation employed by hegemony in relation to issues such as race, ethnicity, youth and exclusion are actively challenged. It examines the American influences evident in all of Kassovitz's films to date as a director and explores the continuity and difference between his films as actor and director.