An examination of the role of spies, informers and turncoats in bringing the Cato Street Conspiracy to the attention of the authorities

With Spain's return to democracy and the granting of regional autonomy to the Spanish Basque provinces, a sustained political and cultural conflict has ensued about the right of the latter to be considered an independent nation. Marti-Olivella specifically compares the denial of Basqueness with the denial of gender expressed by female writers and artists. This chapter examines the case of Basque director Ana Diez in the light of this problematic theorisation. Through an examination of two keys films, it seeks to trace the way in which some of her work problematises the equation of home with the Basque Country. It also suggests how Diez as a female director comes to occupy an unmappable space in discussion of Basque cinema, in Rob Stone and Helen Jones's terms. The chapter shows that her films suggest a recurring sense of 'not at home' which finds a parallel in Diez's own film career.

After making Le Chien de Monsieur Michel in 1977 and winning the first prize for it at the Festival de Trouville, Jean-Jacques Beineix decided to stop work as an assistant director and prepare a script with Olivier Mergault whom he had met on set. This was the story of a honeymoon gone wrong, with the newly-weds grounded in Paris by a strike. Diva was released in March 1981. Many reviewers pointed out the newness of Diva's style, which was felt to reflect a contemporary aesthetic. Diva is the only film by Beineix to have solicited considerable scholarly attention. Partly no doubt because of the film's success in the USA, it drew the attention of one of the foremost theorists of the postmodern, Fredric Jameson. He points out that the film marks a turn which corresponds to the accession to power of the left for the first time in thirty-five years.

In 1947, Robert Bresson went to Rome to work on a screenplay of the life of St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, which was never to be filmed. This renewal of his interest in the religious life bore fruit in Journal d'un curé de campagne of 1951, adapted from the celebrated novel by Georges Bernanos. The film was shot and edited on location in the northern French village of Équirre (near Bernanos's birthplace). For the part of the priest, Bresson eliminated all non-believers before selecting Claude Laydu, who spent time meditating in Normandy before filming, wore a real priest's cassock during shooting and underate to achieve a suitably pinched mien. None of the modèles, as it now seems appropriate to call them, of Journal was to go on to a major cinematic career.

This chapter investigates France’s relationship to R2P after it was endorsed by the international community in 2005. It discusses France’s progressive role of norm consolidator, while also analysing how and why France at times endangered the international principle. It also argues that even though there is evidence that R2P began to restrain when and how France could intervene to protect, the influence of the international principle remained limited. In contrast, the domestic norm remained influential and led France to intervene to protect beyond cases defined by the United Nations Security Council as R2P situations, in a way that aimed to fulfil France’s perceived duty while promoting its rank.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows ideas from a range of disciplines - film studies, African cultural studies and, postcolonial studies - in order to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors. It overviews the director's output to date, and the necessary background - personal or national, cultural or political - to enable readers to achieve a better understanding of the director's choice of subject matter, aesthetic or formal strategies, ideological stance. The book offers a particular reading of one or more films to situate African cinema in relation to important critical and theoretical debates. It constitutes a new departure in African film studies, and the need for complex yet accessible approaches to it, which move beyond the purely descriptive while refusing to get bogged down in theoretical jargon.

Étienne-Jules Marey was a Positivist scientist interested in quantity and measurement. His photographs, however (multiple movements in a single image), give an image where time and space overlap and interpenetrate and where nothing is solid or substantive. And to achieve the analytical precision he wanted, Marey eliminated the usual and customary dimensions of the image: its linear one-point depth perspective, its tonal modelling, the volume of its figures, its hierarchy of detail and its implied chronology (Eadwaerd Muybridge's sequences). When Marey was presented with Muybridge's studies of a bird in flight, he was disappointed. Muybridge's locomotion studies were composed of fixed instances within a continuous movement. In Muybridge's photographs, which were, like his other experiments, taken by multiple cameras, the images of the bird lacked precision or clarity. Muybridge produced multiple photographs set out in a series of individual moments, Marey a single photograph of multiple moments.

Consideration of the Cato Street Conspiracy sheds new light of the British and Irish radical traditions, how they are different from one another, but also the similarities between the two from the eighteenth century until the late twentieth century.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book argues that there is more to romantic comedy than meets the eye, that the genre's presence in films is richer, more complex and less ideologically determined than it has generally been taken to be, and that it can often be found in the most unexpected places. It explores the secret life of romantic comedy. The book suggests that our understanding of Out of Sight and Before Sunset and many other movies would benefit from considering them in relation to romantic comedy. It also argues that the history of the genre is formed not only by those films around whose generic ascription there is a critical consensus, but also by more problematic texts like these two, and, further, that it is often films like these that make the genre evolve in more interesting directions.

Jack Clayton was a director of great sensitivity, intelligence and flair. Clayton died of a heart attack in the arms of his wife on 25 February 1995 in a hospital in Sloug. He was a few days short of his seventy-fourth birthday; Haya Clayton believes it was on that same day seventeen years before that Jack suffered his stroke. During pre-production work on The Massacre at Fall Creek, Clayton had become fascinated with American Indian jewellery and began wearing a Navaho bracelet, also buying one for Johnny, his dear neighbour, and insisting on telling him it had 'healing powers'. When he died, it was not only the film fraternity that mourned his passing; there was to be a touching obituary by a friend, Tony Cowan, in the magazine The Racing Pigeon and a Jack Clayton Memorial Cup established in his honour.

This chapter explains that the homophobic dismissal of homosexuality, and its defiant, resistant assertion, sometimes rely on the figure of anality as a kind of shorthand for their arguments about the relationship between desire, productivity, anatomy, futurity, community, and so on. It looks at the work of Guillaume Dustan and Erik Remes in the context of the increased cultural presence of sexually explicit writing. The chapter explores the existential stakes and writing strategies involved in their respective approaches to the identity politics of being a seropositive gay man in Paris at the turn of the twenty-first century. It discusses Guillaume Dustan and Erik Remes writings and other cultural interventions in terms of their deployment of various problematics relating to figures of containment, boundaries, limits, and so on. The chapter begins by setting the general context against which their work needs to be interpreted.

This chapter focuses on the contribution of the English left, particularly in the twentieth century. The English left was a secondary political movement in England throughout the twentieth century. The chapter looks at the contributions of three figures from the English left: R.H. Tawney, John Maynard Keynes and Tony Crosland. If Tawney represents English Christian socialism then Keynes represents the left-Liberalism for most of the twentieth century. Keynes was the foremost economist of the age and his contribution to the English left came in the form of his theory of demand management. This theory is most forcefully presented in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Crosland is the most important English social democrat of the second half of the twentieth century. He provides a very modern attempt to reconcile the moral tradition of Tawney and the material tradition of Keynes.