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.

Little is known about Jean-Luc Godard's early life and, although the first authoritative biography of the director was published very recently, the details of his youth remain somewhat sketchy. Godard began to study anthropology at the Sorbonne, but dropped out, and the subsequent decade of his life was spent drifting between various occupations. Along with other critics at Cahiers du cinéma, Godard's writing on film in the 1950s played an important role in shaping the canon of great film directors that would influence the development of both French and anglophone film studies. The questionable nature of some of the tales surrounding the director's youth is reflected in Godard's own admission that he amused himself by making up stories which would subsequently be reported as true in the press. Godard was a particularly sensitive commentator on the new American cinema, two of his finest articles being devoted to Hitchcock.

Catherine Deneuve cinematic queerness has often emerged from on-screen evocations of a wide range of 'perverse', paradoxical or blank heterosexualities. In 1983 Deneuve's lesbian moments on film reach their peak of exposure with a vampire film The Hunger in which she plays Miriam, last in an ancient race of apparently immortal vampires, able to bestow the gift of several centuries of youth to her chosen partners. This chapter considers exactly why directors gravitate towards Deneuve when trying to evoke or represent forms of female homosexual activity on film. It also considers exactly what such directors actually make Deneuve do and mean once they have her performing these particular forms of lesbian relation. Belle de jour provides a useful point of entry into understanding lesbian sadomasochist cinema's potential for the demystification of the Deneuvian persona.

Decolonisation in Indonesia was a repudiation of two pasts, indigenous and foreign. Nationalists rejected Dutch governance where political power was lodged in the Netherlands. They also rejected the pre-colonial pattern of myriad principalities headed by hereditary families. In its first years, Indonesia dissolved the three hundred or so principalities that had coexisted within the colonial state, allowing only two sultanates to survive. The framers of Indonesia's first and subsequent constitutions did not resolve the question of whether government should inherit the historic role of the archipelago’s sultans as enforcers of Islamic law, or leave religious observance to each Muslim’s conscience. Today, some descendants of royal families have resumed the use of the title of sultan. The central government understands them as symbols of the diverse ethnic cultures within the nation-state, but it has crushed separatist movements, whether based on ethnic particularity or Islam. It has also banned organisations, such as Jemaah Islamiyah and Hizbut Tahrir, that champion universal Islamic government under a caliph. The Republic of Indonesia stands for a nation-state whose borders are those of the Netherlands East Indies. The chapter argues that the legacy of colonialism is one state, not many.

The Introduction elucidates Chartism and its cultural world while suggesting how the presence of dramatic performance shifts our understanding of the movement. Arising at a moment when a sizeable minority of all men and women could not read or write, Chartism relied on a style of politics and politically inflected art which bridged the divide between literate and illiterate participants. The introduction also explores the question of political violence and the role of women in politics as reflected in Chartist drama. Finally, it contextualises Chartist performance in terms of the history of early Victorian theatre, which underwent significant changes in the 1840s. In 1843, the century-old Licensing Act was rescinded, allowing all theatres to perform the ‘legitimate’ genres of tragedy and comedy. Leading up to this event, theatrical categories provoked heated political disputes from the 1820s to the 1840s as non-patent theatres sought to protest and circumvent the prohibition on the performance of tragedy and comedy. In a cultural context that associated the theatre monopoly with franchise restrictions, John Watkins’s verse tragedy about the Newport rising refashioned ‘legitimate’ drama for subversive ends while Chartist performances of Shakespeare staked a claim for cultural as well as political democracy.