This chapter aims to suggest some of the ways in which A Mighty Heart's lineaments mark it unmistakably as a Michael Winterbottom film. First, it strikes one at once as yet another foray into politically dangerous territory. In this respect, it reminds one of Welcome to Sarajevo, which found drama in the war-torn Balkan states of the former Yugoslavia. There is a further echo of Welcome to Sarajevo in that its protagonist is again a journalist attempting to monitor this volatility, the while preserving a core of integrity, though A Mighty Heart has less of the conventional excitement of the man-in-a-fraught-situation than the earlier film. What Winterbottom offers in A Mighty Heart is, then, a species of literary adaptation, yoked to techniques of documentary drama with an overriding social awareness - and perhaps for the first time, in the sheer physicality and emotional rigour of Jolie's performance, a star vehicle.

Leti Volpp begins her response to Ayelet Shachar’s lead essay by observing that the “shifting border,” while unsettling, is not entirely new. To support this assertion, she points to the examples of embassies, churches, and colonial territories as historical exceptions to the Westphalian model of coterminous territory and jurisdiction. Nonetheless, she commends Shachar for pushing thinking forward along multiple dimensions, providing a synthetic approach that will help direct future conversation. The rest of Volpp’s response is divided into two sections. In the first of these, she focuses on Shachar’s discussion of the “shifting border in action” and her analysis of state techniques that both “bleed” the border inward and stretch it out, in order to parse what might be distinctive about these politico-legal phenomena. Volpp then turns to Shachar’s two normative proposals. The first of these is to constrain the shifting border by ensuring that the human rights and constitutional provisions that govern executive power apply regardless of where border control activities are exercised. The second is to delink access to territory and asylum claims. Volpp is sympathetic to these suggestions, but remains skeptical at Shachar’s hope of eliciting greater state responsibility through affording extraterritorial protection. Nonetheless, she praises Shachar’s rich description and provocative normative framework, which provide a conceptual road map for navigating the unsettling legal topography of the shifting border.

This introduction considers the issue of how much weight to give to autobiographical passages in the work of a sixteenth-century poet. Brink alludes to the expectation of his early patrons that Spenser would take holy orders and become a churchman and expresses scepticism about the idea that Spenser ever had an ambition to become a court poet.

For the first twenty-three years of his career, J. Lee Thompson's film-making activities were confined to England. The nearest he came to an overseas location was visiting J. B. Priestley on the Isle of Wight. Given the popularity of the genre during the 1950s, it is surprising that it took until 1957 for J. Lee Thompson to make a war film. Sea of Sand has a small platoon with a mission, feuding officers, battle scenes, a largely unquestioning commitment to the war, and a faceless enemy interested only in the destruction of the film's protagonists. North West Frontier opened at Rank's flagship Odeon in Leicester Square, London, to a chorus of approval from the popular press which saw it as a worthy successor to The Bridge on the River Kwai. Manchester Guardian gives '"fair do's" all round' in the classic liberal manner, while acknowledging the untenable nature of imperialism.

Although Marcel Carné's final films did not receive the critical acclaim or box-office success of his earlier cinema, they remain interesting as late manifestations of the core concerns that define his work across the decades. Les Assassins de I'ordre, one of Carné's most politically engaged films, fits within the fashionable genre of the political thriller. It also draws upon a number of his familiar themes, particularly through its exploration of the oppressive forces that exist within society. While the majority of Carné's films conclude in bleak and pessimistic ways, La Merveilleuse Visite possesses an optimistic, uplifting finale, indeed, arguably the most positive ending to any of his films. Carné's presentation of the basilica emphasises the building's formal beauty and exquisite craftsmanship, establishing a parallel with his own perfectionism and the importance he placed, throughout his career, on the nuances of his craft.

In the 1950s, 'family entertainment' was still the cinema's core business, and it was inevitable that a promising new director would be pressed into the service of the mass market for insubstantial comedy and undemanding music. It was time for J. Lee Thompson to pay his dues to light entertainment. The themes of confinement and liberation, elaborated by a discourse of moral dilemma, are worked through the contemporary preoccupations of British social life, just as they are in his more serious films. Thompson's films contain post-war housing problems and the spread of new social mores (For Better, For Worse); the impact of foreign cultural forms on the British way of life (As Long As They're Happy); the megalomania of media tycoons and the dangers of materialism (An Alligator Named Daisy); and the erosion of small-scale modes of entertainment and the sense of community they engender (The Good Companions).

This chapter explores what happens to national cinemas and visual representation under a global mode of economic and cultural production which Arjun Appadurai has conceptualised as 'a disjunctive order'. It focuses on the cinema of Isabel Coixet (focusing on her film The Secret Life of Words) , a Catalan-born filmmaker whose work provides an excellent case study for testing the impact of transnational economic and symbolic structures on the modern notion of national cinema as well as on filmic representation. The chapter maps Coixet's filmography to determine both the thematisation of gender discourse and the overlap between different national and transnational regimes. It examines her film The Secret Life of Words in two different contexts: the specific political theme addressed and the external conditions of production, marketing, distribution, exhibition and critical reception. The chapter also looks at the representational strategies used to visually construct the gendered displacement of subjectivity.

The concept of child pornography is equally abhorrent, equally emotive, and furthermore subject to stringent laws; its stigma in society is such that few would openly admit to a desire to see or read such material. The question of infantile sexuality has recently provoked in France a whole range of fictional and life writing texts that explore the troubled, damaged past of the central protagonist, subject to bewildering abuse and still seeking some form of redemption or reconciliation, the works of Christine Angot offering something of a paradigm here. This chapter shows how the narrative of child abuse is so fascinating, as it can be seen to symbolise the cross-over point, from infantile eroticism to adult eroticism. It seems that the difference between the sexuality of adults and that of children is perpetually underemphasised, and that it is indeed from their confusion that authentic abuse results.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's film theory is a sustained opposition to what he called naturalism, a phenomenon that he principally identified with Italian neo-realism. His theory was based on, in his own words, a heretical understanding of semiotics. The notion and practices of the shot sequence were crucial for Pasolini's formulations. The shot sequence, likened to the infinitude of reality needed to be ruptured in order to make reality significant, to make it conscious, to articulate it. The shot sequence as practised in actual films, in the concrete utterances of cinema, is never infinite but part of a system of differential shots. Articulation could only be achieved by montage, by a cutting into the undifferentiated cinema that he likened, not only to reality, but to an infinite shot sequence, a metaphor for the filmic writing of reality.

Brian Moore's début novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, was published in 1955 to immediate acclaim. When screenwriter Peter Nelson acquired the rights of Judith Hearne in 1982, he had talked to Shirley MacLaine about doing it, with Mike Nichols directing. Jack Clayton tried to option the screen rights for the book in 1961, 1964, 1970 and 1973. Clayton sent a copy of Nelson's screenplay to Moore for comments. Judith Hearne is arguably Clayton's finest and most completely realised film since The Pumpkin Eater. The release of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne turned out to be something of a disaster. It was prémiered in Los Angeles in the Christmas week of 1987 in order to qualify for Oscar consideration. Like John Huston, Clayton is a tender chronicler of the courageous spiritual processes of lowly people whose hopes are defeated by destiny but who nevertheless endure.