French feminism contains a diversity of positions on the family as on other issues. Since the beginning of her success as a filmmaker with Trois hommes et un couffin, Coline Serreau has often said in interviews that she considered family and children as a key aspect of society and of life overall. In order to confront men with parenthood, Serreau puts the unwilling men in the position of fathers. This idea of performing gender roles is quite obvious in the film. The influence of women's actions and concerns regarding motherhood and family after May '68 are to be found in Serreau's films made in the 1970s. By the time she directed her first fiction film, the mood had changed and utopia prevailed. It is true to say that Serreau's films closely followed, and sometimes preceded, major social and sexual changes in France during the 1980s and 1990s.

Regarded universally as a classic of Spanish arthouse cinema, El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive has attracted a wealth of critical attention which has focused on political, historical, psychological and formal aspects of Víctor Erice's co-authored film-text. Although many have explored the manifold intertextuality of The Spirit of the Beehive, no one has identified the literary and film versions of To Kill a Mockingbird as intertexts of Erice's film. This chapter shows that a number of commonalities can be established between To Kill a Mockingbird and The Spirit of the Beehive, starting at the levels of narrative composition and genre and crystallising in a number of musical and visual motifs of which the most significant by far is the figure of the monster. It also suggests a strong family resemblance between The Spirit of the Beehive and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Marion Vernoux's family background triggered a fascination with performance and mise en scène that was not dependent initially on the medium of film. The performative nature of identity and desire and a decisively pernicious mismatch between fantasy and reality are expanded in Vernoux's film which provides a re-examination of a classic trope of romantic discourse, that of the couple who overcome socio-cultural barriers or taboos to be together. Rien à faire centres on a couple from different socio-economic backgrounds who meet and embark on an affair as an indirect consequence of their shared joblessness. From the emphatic sisterhood of the end of Personne ne m'aime to the hesitant neighbourliness and class solidarity of the closing scene of Rien à faire, these films use popular genre to explore the precariousness of relationships between the individual and the collective, between self and other.

L'Outrage aux mots claims that pornography, particularly in its most intellectual framings, is not there simply to titillate but that it has a political purpose, a revolutionary aim. L'informe provides a pertinent example of Bataille's fascination for the power of transgression, and of the link that transgression effects between pornographic material and subversive forms of discourse. One of the most startlingly 'disenchanted' pieces of contemporary art, and one that explicitly links pornography and revolution, is Bertrand Bonello's film, Le Pornographe. The image, both in Bonello's cinematic work, and more problematically in La Jeune Femme et la pornographie, offers itself most readily as the site/sight of the hyperreal. The textual exploration of photography as agent of the hyperreal and source of radical abjection is again the focal point of Valérie Tordjman's sickly tale of pornography, murder and hysteria, La Pornographie de l'âme.

This chapter examines Lindsay Anderson's reflections on his own authorship and his observations on the ‘auteur theory’. It discusses Anderson's collaborative work with David Sherwin in scriptwriting and his references on the importance of editing and music. The chapter also describes Anderson's experiences in Hollywood and the promotional strategies he employed for his films.

The chapter investigates whether, how and why France continued to play a central role in human protection in the second half of the 1990s and whether its conception and practice of human protection impacted – and was impacted by – humanitarian intervention and the increasing international contestation it face. In order to do this, it investigates the norm contestation faced by humanitarian intervention – and more specifically, the role played by France in deepening this contestation – along with the challenges faced by France during its participation to United Nations interventions undertaken for humanitarian purposes. It argues that despite this challenging context, the various executives did not promote a normative rollback, and emphasises the role played by France’s domestic norm of human protection. It then explains that in order to fulfil France’s perceived duty to protect without endangering its rank, and to address some domestic and international constraints, however, France’s practice of human protection evolved considerably and contributed greatly to the reinforcement of the global trend of delegating humanitarian intervention to multilateral organisations and adopting more robust strategies in the field. The last section illustrates these changes by continuing the case study of France’s involvement in former Yugoslavia and, more specifically, by focusing on its interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.

This chapter looks at the roles, lives and ambitions of the ministers of the princely states of the South Asian subcontinent. Highly educated, sharp and very well remunerated, the Indian dewans, as these ministers were called, formed a part of the political elite during British colonialism. Many were knighted, and they played a crucial role in governance, negotiating local pressures within the princely states while demonstrating administrative efficiency to the British. By the end of the First World War, with the growing participation of the Indian princes in the British Empire, the ministers’ role and responsibilities expanded to include representing the Indian princes at international forums, such as the League of Nations, the Imperial Conferences and the Round Table Conferences. The chapter looks at the many roles these men played, from representing their people, the princes and finally, the British Empire, as well as the tensions between these demands.

In this reflective autobiographical piece, the UK-based Gibraltarian novelist M.G. Sanchez describes a verbal assault he suffered in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and then goes on to remember other occasions in the past when his British-Gibraltarian identity was similarly impugned. Drawing on his experiences in the UK, Gibraltar and mainland Europe, he suggests that the Brexit mindset existed years and even decades before Brexit itself, its spirit of divisiveness and rebellion fanned all along by the populism of the right-wing press and the nativist prejudices of a large number of Britons. By way of conclusion, Sanchez states that what most surprised him about the Brexit referendum was not that the UK voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, but that almost half of the population voted to remain. His own experiences, he says, had convinced him that the Leave campaign was going to win by an even bigger margin.

This chapter investigates the representations of Sarawak under its White Rajas as a model of imperial benevolence, and examines how the ideals of the Brooke raj were conveyed through the centenary festivities which were held in September 1941. Following a brief overview of the history of Sarawak, of Brooke rule and the place of rituals in empire, the chapter explores the events of the centenary week, the popular culture expressed at bazaars and competitions, parades, performances and speeches, and analyses how each reveals the crafting of Brooke rule. It also examines the fundamental changes afoot as a new constitution granting greater self-government was introduced during the centenary celebrations. The chapter demonstrates that by studying how the centenary was celebrated, we gain insights into a territory at the edge of Britain’s formal empire as well as the Brooke dynasty’s self-fashioning of rule in Sarawak.

The work of Ana Mariscal marks an event in the history of Spanish cinema. This chapter argues that consideration of Mariscal, the filmmaker, generates a philosophical tension between repetition - both in the sense of what is inherited and what is mechanically reproduced, the very basis of film itself - and her singularity as a female director. According to the critic, Andrew Sarris, Mariscal's work is indeed distinguished by a particular and highly recognisable style, and signature is that distinctive feature of a filmmaker's work, the identifying stylistic flourish of the cineaste. Jacques Derrida, in a context somewhat removed from film theory, argues that a signature is an elusive mark of absence. According to him, for the attachment to the source to occur, the absolute singularity of the event of the signature must be retained: the pure reproducibility of a pure event.

The Trial of Robert Emmet concerns the arrest and execution of the revolutionary who led the abortive Dublin rising of 1803. Emmet was widely eulogised as a Romantic martyr and commemorated in poetry by Shelley, Southey, George Moore, and, later, W. B. Yeats. Staged three dozen times, The Trial of Robert Emmet participated in Chartist debates about political violence and promulgated support for Irish nationalism and the dissolution of the Act of Union. As no play text is extant (nor was ever published), the volume utilises widely popular prose editions of the trial. The Trial of Robert Emmet is notable as radical theatre for the way it turns from an earlier tradition of trial parodies. Rather than lampooning state ceremonies and the officers who carry them out, Robert Emmet recreates the majesty and terror of a treason trial. Chartist productions helped make Emmet’s address from the dock one of the most famous speeches in Irish political history and inaugurated a long tradition of dramatisations of Emmet’s life by such playwrights as Dion Boucicault and Denis Johnston.

Sin dejar huella, the 2000 film of acclaimed Mexican director María Novaro, revolves around the concept of the portable border and problematises the frontier condition in the story of two Mexican women. The film presents the US-Mexico border as a gendered space: from the start the female body in Novaro's text is framed by the border condition, one in which women are in constant danger of being violated, exploited, and harassed. Sin dejar huella speaks of the construction of female identities in Mexico today through the particular story of the two female protagonists, as well as the destruction of the natural resources of the nation and the establishment of a global economic order that is changing Mexico forever. The film's journey means for the two protagonists the intercultural encounter between two different female subjects and two distinct ways of life.