The so-called 'British New Wave', of which Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is exemplary, emerged less out of the documentary roots of Free Cinema than in response to the burgeoning world of proletarian drama and literature. Of crucial importance for Reisz (and subsequently, Lindsay Anderson, whose first feature was an adaptation of This Sporting Life) was the work of younger, second generation kitchen sink novelists such as Alan Sillitoe and David Storey who were just starting to emerge as important regional voices from the Midlands and Northern England. The film sets up a clear tension between Arthur's and Reisz's conflicting points-of-view, the former represented by Albert Finney's brash, physical stature, the latter expressed through formal style, allowing Reisz to foreground his character's perspective while at the same time showing it to be yet another example of 'received wisdom' doing its insidious work.

Most often films are thought of as representing something. In Jean Renoir's films this is neither issue nor intention. What artifice and masquerade display is the reality they deny and what the reality of the film reveals is the theatre and artifice of the rules. He places his characters in a dramatic or comic situation and then follows and observes them (with his camera) rather than constructing them (with his editing). Renoir approaches reality through the openness of his theatricality. The fictionality and theatricality in Renoir's films belong to the changes initiated by the coming of sound. All of Renoir's films concern escape, fleeing, not exactly from society, though that typifies them often (Boudu sauvé de l'eau, La Carosse d'or) , but from unnatural constraints (La Grande illusion, French Cancan) . It is the spontaneity of the one and the rigidity of the other that keeps things going in his films.

Robert Bresson's first film, Affaires publiques, is in many ways as unBressonian a work as could be imagined. Jean Sémolué describes Les Anges du péché as 'Bresson avant Bresson. Mais c'est aussi déjà Bresson'. Les Anges du péché contains a number of elements from the world of more conventional cinema that were to become progressively rarer in Bresson's work. Les Anges du péché is set in a convent run by the Sisters of Bethany, a Dominican order founded in 1867 to welcome women newly released from prison. Bresson from Journal onwards works to all intents and purposes outside genre, with the exception of those parts of Pickpocket and the inserts in Le Diable probablement that are close to the documentary. The country priest, Michel in Pickpocket, Jacques in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne all display evident masochistic qualities.

This chapter considers the films that Jean Renoir directed during his first decade as a film-maker. They are categorised into two groups: the silent films and those that followed the introduction of sound. The chapter begins with Renoir's two silent films: Charleston, evoking colonial themes, and Le Bled celebrating the centenary of the colonisation of Algeria. La Fille de Veau combines an entirely conventional melodramatic narrative with avant-gardist visual effects. Renoir's early sound films were literary adaptations. The chapter explains the adaptations of boulevard comedies all of which stage the collision between a disruptive character and a constraining social frame. It then looks at Madame Bovary and La Chienne both of which show the destruction of a self-deluding individual by a corrupt society. The chapter also looks at La Nuit du carrefour and Toni, two films that stage the collision of tradition and modernity while foregrounding migration and xenophobia.

This chapter describes the model of aesthetic realism developed by the Hungarian theorist György Lukács, and sets out the parameters of a Lukácsian theory of cinematic realism. It discusses one of the most trenchant criticisms levelled against Lukács: that the model of realism is umbilically associated with a particular form of literature: the nineteenth-century realist novel. As a consequence of this concentrated focus, the chapter dismisses some of the most vital artistic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth the nineteenth-century realist tradition and examines the two central aspects of Lukács's theory: the notion of alienation and the model of the intensive totality. Lukács's writings on cinematic realism are also considered and contradicted for the type of naturalist/impressionist realism.

Un instante en la vida ajena/A Glimpse of Other Lives, directed by José Luis López-Linares as an 80-minute documentary, chronicles the cosmopolitan modernity of the Catalan upper classes. The Madronita Andreu film also invites the spectator to reflect at the direct evidence of the Civil War and postwar hardship and repression. Documentary cinema in Spain, nearly dormant during the years of the Franco dictatorship when non-fiction filmmaking fell under the control of the organism created to produce the official newsreel, the NO-DO, has seen a rebirth that has accelerated since the year 2000. Any analysis of A Glimpse must take into account the growing attention being paid to domestic cinema as a genre. While no doubt falling short of the profound sense of historical irony generated by the work of Péter Forgács, A Glimpse also carries its own melancholy awareness of the mortality of individuals and nations.

Jacopo da Varagine’s prologue to his Chronicle of the city of Genoa explains his reasons for undertaking the work and provides a summary of the work’s contents.

This chapter provides a brief context of non-white ethnic minority communities in relation to the debates about national identity and belonging. It discusses the key political developments under New Labour that have raised questions about the national affiliation of such minority communities. The chapter focuses on the national identity of Muslim communities, using empirical evidence to suggest more general realities about the possibility of shared and inclusive national identity/ies. It also focuses on the 7/7 London bombings of 2005 and subsequent terror plots that have suggested a profound antipathy to national identity amongst some young Muslims. The chapter draws on the understandings of Britishness and Englishness held by young Muslims in the context of wider debates over cohesion, segregation and racial tension. It suggests that, potentially, conversations on Englishness can truly be focused on belonging to place and space, rather than 'race'.

Robert Bresson's first colour films are his first true adaptations from Dostoevsky. The short stories, or more accurately novellas, from which they are taken are from opposite ends of Dostoevsky's career: A Gentle Creature, adapted in 1969 as Une femme douce, was published in 1876, after the great novels and only four years before the end of Dostoevsky's life, while White Nights, on which Quatre nuits d'un rêveur is based, is from 1848. White Nights had also been filmed in 1957 by the Italian director Luchino Visconti, whose filmic style is very far removed from Bresson's. The ending of Pickpocket might suggest otherwise, but that of Une femme douce is all too congruent with the grimness of that view. The lead roles in Une femme douce are taken by Dominique Sanda and Guy Frangin, a painter Bresson had met at an exhibition.

Despite modest financial return, Michael Winterbottom's films have been well received, critically. Virtually none of his films has been given a critical thumbs-down; equally, though, none has been a major box-office hit. His current standing in British film production is high. His latest release at time of writing, A Mighty Heart, has won golden opinions at the Cannes Film Festival and there has been talk of Oscar nomination for its star, Angelina Jolie. When he has made road movies, they have been spiked with terminal pain in each of Butterfly Kiss, In This World and The Road to Guantdnamo, and in the latter two at least, crossed with a documentary aesthetic that would seem to preclude the easy outcome of an upbeat ending. And the latter certainly also eludes his noir thriller, I Want You, and indeed most of his films.