The Senegalese director and novelist Ousmane Sembene began his film career in the early 1960s, and is often hailed as 'the father of African cinema' for his role in the development of filmmaking on the continent. The strength of Sembene's political convictions has been a central factor in critical assessments of his work, this chapter focuses on defining the precise nature of his political vision. It examines various aspects of Sembene's filmmaking practice, beginning with an assessment of aspects of his film style that have been relatively neglected. Sembene often uses the conclusion of his films not to provide a sense of narrative closure but rather to suggest that the film itself is only the beginning of a process of reflection that should continue long after the film has ended. The examples from Sembene's work illustrate that political filmmaking is not necessarily the reductive process described by critics.

This chapter asks and answers the question of why Ireland was attractive to Englishmen, particularly those, like Spenser, who were intrigued by adventure and had few, if any, prospects in England. The combination of Latin debates on Roman colonization and the lurid report of Captain Thomas Smith, a patron of Gabriel Harvey’s, being boiled and fed to dogs sparked interest in Ireland. For Spenser, his appointment as secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, was a preferment, an extraordinary opportunity for a twenty-five-year-old poet. In the sixteenth century, Ireland resembled the England of the Wars of the Roses, and it promised medieval glamour as well as remarkable opportunities for social advancement to those, like Spenser, who traded sixteenth-century England for Ireland.

There was an experimental, writer-oriented focus in Joseph Losey's later work, opening the way for collaborations on a more equal footing. This found Losey increasingly willing to push conventional narrative beyond the exigencies of the realist action-image to a more radically modernist appreciation of ambivalence and discontinuity. Perhaps the most underrated of these 'writerly' collaborations are the four films that Losey made with the West Indian screenwriter Evan Jones in the early 1960s: The Damned, Eve, King and Country, and Modesty Blaise. What specifically unites these films is not simply Jones's reiteration of Losey's habitual concerns with impulse and dislocated time, but his exploration of the cynical collusion between naturalism's two outward symptoms. These are: masochism and the institutional dystopia that exploits and exacerbates it. The Damned is a vastly over-determined tragedy, pushing the dystopic malevolence of the state-machine to its ultimate extreme.

Lindsay Anderson referred to O Lucky Man! as his auteur production. This chapter discusses the film's principal themes, Anderson's authorial input, the film's publicity and release in North America and the critical reception of the film.

Part two deals with the era in which Genoa was first built. This part has three chapters: the first discusses the era in which the city was founded; the second details the era in which it was expanded; and the third describes how Genoa was destroyed by the Carthaginians but rebuilt by the Romans, and in what era that occurred.

This chapter presents some key concepts discussed in the book. Louis Malle's films are a body of work that most film critics around the world recognise as being one of the most productive in post-war international cinema, including as it does triumphs such as Ascenseur pour l'échafaud; Le Feu follet; Lacombe Lucien; Atlantic City USA; and Au revoir les enfants. Malle's work attracted intense public controversy. Viewed in historical retrospect, Malle is a director who was consistently in the eye of the storm. This chapter highlights four turbulent periods that mark out the career: the New Wave; May '68; the 1970s; and finally Malle's experience of filmmaking in the USA and his return to work on selected projects in France (1978-95). The historical and cultural analysis positions Malle in relation to the dominant social and cultural forces of his times in the two countries in which he worked.

Marguerite Duras's aim was to transcend the limitations of both literature and cinema by creating what M. Borgomano has called an écriture filmique. The most innovative and enduring of Duras's techniques in the cinema is desynchronisation and, in particular, her use of the voix off. She employed it in several of her films such as India Song, Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta desert, Césarée and Le Navire Night. Perhaps the most fundamental impulse which underscores Duras's writing and her films is precisely the desire to overcome divisions and oppositions. Through her reading of the texts, she lends her voice to the protagonists' stories or even to the protagonists themselves. Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne) and its sequel Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver), both made in 1979, trace a young Jewish woman's search for her identity and her origins, as she attempts to reconnect with her parents who died in a concentration camp.

Jean Renoir is widely seen as the greatest French director and one of the major figures of world cinema. Hence, he has become a plum prize for critics (especially French ones) to fight over. This chapter deals with Renoir and his leftist critics and the auterists. His challenge to critics of the left comes from his move in and out of commitment. He is a challenge to auteurists because of his commitment and his many changes of direction. Cahiers was a polemical journal, and the Cahiers critics were far from uniform in their general outlook or their specific response to Renoir. If left-wing criticism of Renoir has been indelibly marked by a reaction to the auteurism of Cahiers, then subsequent auterist analyses have had to respond to the Renoir of the left. The chapter lingers on the rich and challenging existential auteurism of Serceau before exploring essentialist auteurism.

In her response to Ayelet Shachar, Chimène I. Keitner argues that Shachar’s lead essay is as important for what it does not address as for what it does. Shachar identifies a number of strategies increasingly used by states to control immigration, but offering a critique of these strategies does not get us very far toward understanding, or attempting to alleviate, the structural and other factors that contribute to their adoption. As Keitner observes, “the shifting border is a symptom, not the disease.” Citing the proliferation of academic work on the subject, she asserts that the core problem is not a lack of conceptual tools, as Shachar thinks, but a lack of political will. In the rest of her response, Keitner traces the regulatory shift from location to identity that lies at the heart of Shachar’s account. She then canvasses some of the persistent obstacles to states’ acceptance of constraints on their ability to regulate entry by non-nationals. Finally, she suggests that governance models of migration regulation might ultimately be better suited than advocacy models to addressing contemporary challenges of global human protection. Keitner concludes by arguing that we do not lack visions of what solutions could look like; what we lack are effective strategies to combat the political mobilization of xenophobia, and programs to alleviate the deep and growing inequality within and between societies that drives destination states to implement restrictive measures to begin with.

Several Shakespearean sonnets first appeared in Love’s Labour’s Lost, before being published in The Passionate Pilgrim (1598), a collection printed by William Jaggard, raising the issue of their transgeneric circulation. Love’s Labour’s Lost presents sonnet writing as a sterile and artificial activity, but on stage the poems could work as metadramatic tools, and their mock confessional tone as a parody of Shakespeare’s own art. In The Passionate Pilgrim, some of the poems were modified as they were repurposed, which concealed their initial parodic intent. When Heywood later complained that Jaggard had pilfered his work in an epistle at the end of his Apology for Actors, he alluded to Shakespeare. By doing so, he promoted his own work by reminding readers of its presence in The Passionate Pilgrim and by aligning himself with his more famous elder, whose name Jaggard erased from the front page of the next edition of The Passionate Pilgrim. Such an attention-grabbing strategy benefited Shakespeare as well as Heywood and Jaggard himself, who used the puzzlement of potential readers as a marketing device. What has often been dubbed piracy might therefore rather be an extremely cunning commercial strategy.

For all the risks that the young Catherine Deneuve took with her star image, her roles from the early 1980s constructed a new kind of maturity and coherence that chimed with both her age and her screen longevity. François Truffaut's Occupation drama, Le Dernier Metro launches this period in Deneuve's career. The principal heritage roles taken by Deneuve in a twelve-year period were as Marion Steiner with Depardieu in Truffaut's occupation drama Le Dernier Métro, and as the colonial landowner Eliane Devries, the lead part in Régis Wargnier's ambitious saga of Asian decolonisation Indochine. The chapter shows that the reading of Deneuve as national heroine that these films promote is inseparable from the actress's extra-cinematic public image in France. Deneuve was identified as the new face of Marianne in 1985, and was a popular choice for both politicians and the public.