This chapter begins with a discussion of Dominique Cabrera's first short film L'Air d'aimer, made in 1985. The central cumulative elements of Cabrera's documentary film making reach a self-reflexive peak in her autobiographical film made in 1997. Demain et encore demain continues a search for a notion of collective happiness, interrogates the links between the personal and the political and explores further the ethics of the documentary process through the adoption of the first-person form. Documentary aesthetics and a continuing interest in the relationship between place and identity inform Cabrera's first feature-length fiction film L'Autre côté de la mer. A series of films that she made on the impact of changes to the physical urban environment provide further evidence of the centrality in all her work of an insistence upon the recognition of the social as personal to all and the importance of a projected bonheur collectif or collective happiness.

The mini-narratives of Takeshi Kitano are arbitrary and necessary: arbitrary, because there is no evident connection between the images in a given narrative; necessary, because once the images are grouped there appears to be a connection (causation, linearity). The secret power of Kitano's mini-narratives are in the opacity and immobility of his photographs like his rigid face, then the outburst, the sudden violence, the turning, that comes apparently from nowhere, from the other side, like a Rossellinian miracle, and that makes time rush backwards into the present. The force and energy of Kitano's images were opportunities for the filmmakers who had been invited by Cahiers du cinéma to play Kitano's game. In Kitano's film Violent Cop, the images are as if deframed, denied perspective, without borders or centre.

Part four describes Genoa’s conversion to Christianity in late antiquity. This part has three chapters: chapter one introduces Roman polytheism (‘idolatry’ or ‘paganism’); chapter two claims that Genoa was the first city in Italy, or one of the first, to be converted to Christianity. Chapter three uses logic to make the same claim.

This chapter discusses two films, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window and Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, and attempts to move beyond the borders of comedy. It examines what happens when romantic comedy is combined with a non-comic genre such as the thriller. The chapter suggests ways in which the analysis of the proximity between apparently incompatible genres can alter our perception of films and our interpretation of the cultural discourses which they articulate. The chapter looks at Rear Window, as a text in which this genre interacts with another one producing relevant consequences for our understanding of the film. The film's romance story is introduced as a threat, a dark shadow in the protagonist's life. The pessimism of the ideological discourses, the aggressiveness and precariousness of humour in Crimes and Misdemeanors and the distance between the social space and the comic space separate the film from romantic comedy.

The interlude on Edmund Spenser’s (lack of) afterlife in print forms a ‘bridge’ between Chapters 3 and 4. Surprisingly, considering the fact that his status as one of the most eminent poets of his time was undisputed, Spenser’s death in 1599 did not prompt many reactions in print, perhaps as a result of his long absence in Ireland. It begins by examining the few known commemorative poems for Spenser by John Weever, Nicholas Breton and Francis Thynne, and then proceeds to chart the emergence of a ‘Life’ of Spenser in the biographical compilations of the seventeenth century, culminating in a prefatory life published with the 1679 edition of his Works (the earlier Lownes editions, which contained the ‘Mutability Cantos’ had lacked a similar preface). Rather than merely checking them for factual errors, however (of which there are plenty), it focuses on the ways in which the different accounts use and adapt anecdotes about Spenser. The interlude argues that while they are very unlikely to be true, those anecdotes have a narrative and structural function within the lives and thus reveal the biographical compilers’ attempts retrospectively to make sense of the life of a poet who had died several decades before.

Chapter 2 examines the theoretical, practical, and historical incongruities between presupposed mediated unity, on the one hand, and the sociological reality of functional differentiation, on the other. It is explained that there is a widespread inclination amongst expert theorists and the lay public alike to imagine political authority as having a pyramidal structure culminating in the state. The factual differentiation of social-systemic operations stands in stark contrast with prevailing normative conceptions of constituent power based on the mediated unity of citizens and the state. When the sociological fact of functional differentiation does happen to be recognised by scholars, they frequently accept the currently existing hegemonic model of functional differentiation as somehow natural or inevitable. This tendency manifests itself when supposed experts casually assume that privatisation and outsourcing are efficient responses to the need to respect the differentiation of economic, political, and legal social systems. The dynamics of politicisation and democratisation need to be reconsidered without relying on casual assumptions about mediated unity, ethnic unity, national unity, constituent power, or popular sovereignty.

Part twelve presents an annalistic narrative of Genoese history from 1133 to 1297. It is divided into eight chapters; each chapter describes a single archbishop of Genoa (including Jacopo himself, part 12.8) and narrates city and world events during his tenure.

Patrice Leconte appears to the world as a Janus-faced figure. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores Leconte's use of comedy as a strategy for negotiating and navigating the subject's passage through the world. It examines Leconte's representations of masculinity in relation to the rich and under-explored concept of the 'masculine masquerade', a term taken from psychoanalytic theory. The book also examines the criticism often levelled at Leconte's cinema that it is excessively fetishistic and reveals a bias of misogyny. It focuses on Leconte's most recent films, La Fille sur lepont, La Veuve de Saint-Pierre, Felix et Lola and Rue des plaisirs, which have in common a focus on unconventional relationships between men and women.