Lacombe Lucien has sharply divided audiences in their views of Louis Malle. The film had to be unmasked for what it was: a bourgeois manipulation of the historical record that normalised the banality of fascism and concealed the heroism and complexity of the class struggle. However, for fellow director Joseph Losey, Malle's work was a masterpiece of the cinematic arts. This chapter analyses how Lacombe Lucien works as a film, and discusses its core rhetorical devices and what they mean today. Important comparisons are made with the equivalently ambiguous rhetorical strategies deployed by Malle in Pretty Baby. The aesthetic patterns in Lacombe Lucien fall squarely into the wider mode rétro fashion in literature, art and cinema that developed in western Europe during the late 1960s. The chapter discusses Malle's second American film, Atlantic City USA, which is a film that subtly re-enforces Malle's status as a memorial activist.

This final chapter of this book presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of the book. The work of Marguerite Duras, both in literature and in film, distinguishes itself by its oblique, elusive quality which evokes her protagonists' inner landscape instead of dwelling on the appearances of the external world. While Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover presumably owes its popularity partly to the fact that it conforms to the dominant codes of representation, it undermines the cinematographic writing of Duras's own films and their emphasis on verbal and vocal as well as visual forms of expression. Her other films, however, have retained their magical timeless quality as the breathtaking beauty of the images in Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne) or in Le Navire Night merge with the haunting echoes of her voices and her music to create an unusually powerful viewing experience.

The Mauritanian director Med Hondo is acknowledged as one of the great postcolonial chroniclers of the lives of the unrecognised and unrepresented masses in the various waves of the African diaspora, but his own life and its relevance for his filmmaking is less acknowledged. Hondo's first foray into cultural production was in the theatre, rather than cinema, once he had reached his self-declared goal as migrant and moved from Marseilles to Paris. In terms of his approach to filmmaking, whether stylistic, generic, technical or thematic, Hondo is nothing if not a migrant, a man of the diaspora. This chapter aims to examine the Fanonian elements in the film, and thereby to offer one 'meaning' or way of understanding this supposedly impenetrable text. It examines Hondo's early classic Soleil O, where the relationship is both more substantial and more reciprocal than anything implied in Ngugi's image of footnotes.

The United Kingdom has exhibited a parliamentary system of government, but one premised essentially on English political dominance and English constitutional norms. The issue of the numbers to be returned to Westminster was overshadowed by the Irish uprising and Unionist determination to preserve Ulster as part of the United Kingdom. Attempts have been made to find an answer to the 'English question' and, given the reality of devolved assemblies, to improve co-operation between the legislatures of the United Kingdom. For electoral success, the Labour Party relies normally on success in Scotland to deliver a parliamentary majority. The nature of the parties involved has changed but the fundamentals of what Giovanni Sartori termed 'two-partism' have characterised the English system and, for much of the twentieth century, extended to the rest of Great Britain.

This chapter delineates major historical changes in the role that Europe has played in domestic discourse on the territorial order of the United Kingdom. It is argued that Europe has a uniform effect neither on this discourse nor on the territorial order itself. Instead, the impact of references to Europe is contingent upon both the state of the European project and the historical domestic context at a particular time. The EU and the European integration project have opened windows of opportunity for political actors in Britain to introduce and advocate particular constitutional notions and models. The Brexit process, as the most recent such window, may very well provide an unmissable opportunity for those who want to break up an already highly fragile United Kingdom.

Marcel Pagnol's rural melodramas moved him closer to writing directly for the screen by drawing inspiration from literary sources rather than transposing pre-existing plays. While his first cycle of rural films, Jofroi, Angèle, and Regain, were largely faithful adaptations of texts by popular Provençal writer Jean Giono, in each case they incorporated elements specific to Pagnol, especially performative speech and comedy, that made the work inimitably his own. In addition to winning over reviewers who had previously dismissed Pagnol's work as canned theatre, these films occupied a unique place within the style known as poetic realism and appealed strongly to Depression-era spectators as an antidote to France's perceived cultural decadence. In late 1936 Pagnol took his aesthetic of ethnographic melodrama to new heights by adapting Giono's novel Regain, an elemental parable of civilisation-from-savagery in which an isolated man and woman come together to rebuild a crumbling rural village.

Bereavement after IP5 turned Jean-Jacques Beineix away from feature filmmaking, despite several propositions from American producers, Alien Resurrection and The Avengers among them. During 1999 Beineix worked to raise money for his long-standing project, the comic vampire film based on Marc Behm's novel. However, a new feature film was planned, as alluded to by Beineix in the foreword to this volume, Mortel Transfert, based on a novel of the same name by Jean-Pierre Gattégno. This was a co-production between Cargo Films and Odeon, one of the contributors to the funding of the vampire film. Mortel Transfert went into production in April 2000. It was subsequently shown at various festivals: the polar festival at Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and the Berlin festival. The general reaction to the film was that its mixture of genres, thriller and comedy had not gelled in quite the way Beineix had intended.

Karel Reisz's chief motivator as a director, which radically limited the number and types of projects he chose to film, but at the same time guaranteed a clear line of continuity in his own work, was the interior life of his characters. This interest led to his movement away from documentary realism to a more personal, hybrid mode of film-making. Although Reisz kept a firm critical distance from his characters' self-interpellating 'madness', he was also an obvious admirer of the outsider's will-to-power and the subjective, often dreamlike world (Morgan, Isadora, Everybody Wins) that they construct for themselves outside the prevailing Zeitgeist. Reisz was able to sustain this enquiry by radically transforming the nature of cinematic realism as a viable critical medium. Reisz knew when to let the art direction do the work, and when to move the camera in order to open up shifting correlatives within a single take.

Recent scholarship on transnational cinema has questioned long-held understandings of what might be termed an 'authentic' national film. Even Pedro Almodovar has acknowledged a political inflection to his recent work grounded in issues of historical memory. It is perhaps not insignificant that Almodovar's production company, El Deseo, was the Spanish co-producer of Lucrecia Martel's La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman. This chapter argues that the film enunciates a trauma of collective guilt and grief that remains unarticulated in overt narrative terms. A hit-and-run contemporary thriller where plot gradually gives way to metaphor, The Headless Woman clinically dissects the mechanisms that operate a culture of the disappeared. Martel uses the hit-and-run narrative to comment on a society in denial. This is a film about the unspoken privileges that underpin a society. Spanish critics seemed wilfully reluctant to accept the film as a parable on the collective history of the disappeared.

This chapter brings together all five thinkers discussed in this book and critically evaluates the public reception of their work. It asks to what extent the five intellectuals are able to articulate a fully counter-hegemonic approach in relation to the ambient discourses about Muslims and Islam in contemporary France. It also briefly discusses their work in relation to the next generation of emergent Muslim voices in France’s public sphere.

Despite her established reputation as a successful filmmaker, Coline Serreau could not find a producer to support her project for a silent film called Chari-Bohu in 1990. In the conclusion of her book on French Women's Writing 1848-1994, Diana Holmes emphasises the dilemma women writers were confronted with and which many women filmmakers in France have encountered in their career. More important perhaps is the emergence of filmmakers coming from outside the traditional film circles, whose social and ethnic background contrast with their elders'. The success of Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noël? shows that the 'feminisation' of French cinema seems to go beyond the increasing number of female directors within the French film industry. The huge difficulties most women filmmakers faced to finance their films meant that, when they could find a producer, they were (are), willingly or not, reduced to making cheaper films than their male counterparts.