Even within the contradictory conditions of film making in South Africa, Darrell James Roodt is a contradictory figure. This chapter explores and attempts to understand some of the contradictions which Roodt and his films embody. It examines the 'powerful tendency' of Roodt being seen as embodying the white dominance of the film industry in South Africa. The overwhelming historical and political presence in the development of filmmaking in South Africa is the apartheid state, but no other South African director has responded to that fact in the same way or to the same extent as Roodt. Roodt's anti-apartheid films clearly belong in the tradition of African films of anticolonial struggle, but could be seen as simultaneously constituting a 'special type' within that tradition as they work towards the belated emergence of a South African postcolonialism.

This chapter surveys previous biographies by Alexander Grosart (1882–84), Alexander Judson (1945), and Andrew Hadfield (2012), re-examining the evidence concerning Spenser’s lineage and concludes that we know only that he was born in 1554. His father’s name and occupation are unknown – although conjectures that he was a journeyman merchant tailor have found their way into reference works. From an important manuscript source, the ‘Nowell Account Book’, Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS A.6.50, we know that Spenser was the protégé of a circle of London clergymen, who expected him to take holy orders. This important documentary source details funds distributed from the estate of Robert Nowell, Attorney of the Queen’s Court of Wards, and brother of Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s. Spenser’s name does not appear in the admission records for Merchant Taylors’ School. We know that he attended Merchant Taylors’ School only because of bequests he received in the ‘Nowell Account Book’.

This chapter elaborates on the impact of the Anglo-Irish Agreement and how the Irish worked in Belfast to create closer ties with the British by monitoring and assessing policing and justice issues and raising questions about possible discrimination and anti-equality activities.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with a brief overview of Catherine Deneuve's career, followed by a critical survey of the field of theoretical star studies, highlighting its potential and limitations for European, and particularly French, film scholarship. It argues the need for the single-star case study as a model for understanding the multiple signifying elements of transnational stardom. From the outset, Deneuve was engaged in provocative screen roles that highlighted questions of female sexual identity. Her first role, at the age of 13, was a brief appearance as a schoolgirl in André Hunebelle's Collégiennes/The Twilight Girls (1956). Deneuve's first serious success came with her role in Jacques Demy's contemporary musical fable, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg/ The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

This chapter demonstrates the validity of Alain Bergala's assertion regarding the thematic and aesthetic parallels between Jean-Luc Godard's four films: Sauve qui peut, Passion, Prénom Carmen, and Je vous salue Marie which were made between 1979 and 1984. In the films of the early eighties, Godard is seeking nothing less than a new way of seeing, a way of looking afresh at those things (bodies, nature) and those activities (love, work) that are at once most familiar and most profoundly unknown. If love and work are connected, as Godard repeatedly insists, it is perhaps because love - whether physical or spiritual love - involves renouncing possession, which ultimately amounts to renouncing the self. By the same token, the work of art - which is a labour of love - if it is truly to become art, must involve a similar renunciation, a dispossession.

The overwhelming majority of the examples mentioned in theorisations of contemporary romantic comedy are not only generically more or less 'pure' but also commercial films. However, there has also been life for the genre outside the mainstream. This chapter argues that the variety of narrative and ideological approaches to intimate matters articulated by the genre of romantic comedy in recent years may be, at least in part, attributed to the growing impact of independent cinema on the mainstream and the subsequent all-but-complete absorption of the former by the latter. It suggests some of the possible directions that the genre's secret life might take in the twenty-first century. Before Sunset makes abundant use of the genre's conventions but has not been primarily seen as a romantic comedy, probably because of its allegiance to the aesthetic forms and conventions of independent cinema.