This chapter discusses J. Lee Thompson's return to Britain and Europe after establishing himself as a Hollywood director. The films discussed after his return are: Return From the Ashes, Eye of the Devil, Before Winter Comes, The Most Dangerous Man in the World, Country Dance, and The Passage. As if sensing that he needed to purge himself of Hollywood indulgence, Lee Thompson returned to his Elstree roots to make a taut black-and-white thriller, steeped in irony and nihilism: Return From the Ashes, based on Hubert Monteilhet's novel Phoenix From the Ashes. Before Winter Comes was set in occupied Austria at the end of the Second World War, and the location is a displaced persons' camp on the border between the British and Russian zones. The Most Dangerous Man in the World, made an ambiguous reference to both Chairman Mao, and was shot in Hong Kong as well as in Wales.

In an extended flashback sequence in Pedro Almodóvar's Los abrazos rotos/Broken Embraces, a brief dialogue between the would-be actress and filmmaker crystallises essential aspects of the film's complex narrative structure. The emphasis on the staging of story-telling acts suggests an important duality in characters' speech that links the personal with the social. The function of speech is cathartic and ultimately restorative, proposing through words to illuminate the conflicts that underlie surface symptoms and thereby to effect a 'cure'. After the initial sequences in filmmaker's apartment, the narrative evolves through three clusters of scenes of embedded voice dramas. These theatrical speeches self-referentially dramatise for the audience the dual acts of speaking and listening, placing cinema's conventional emphasis on seeing at a remove. They also provide a symmetrical structure with two scenes in which male characters seek to control the telling, and two by women.

This chapter examines three key themes that are common to the work of these three women filmmakers (Ariadna Pujol, Chus Gutiérrez, and Icíar Bollaín) in their treatments of rural Spain and immigration: the geopolitics of power and disempowerment, the fracture of historical cohesion, and questions of alienation. It discusses three films of the filmmakers which showcase economic migrants from the developing world seeking empowerment in Spain, a developed nation. Their presence in rural areas underlines the uneven nature of development outside the 'First World'. Geographical mappings become complicated through such movements and unevenness, as human migration leads to an unsettlement of the singularity of place and any unbroken imagination of history. The chapter argues that what we see in the work of these three women filmmakers is the contingency of the rural and the many strategies that migrant subjects undertake for survival.

Lourdes Portillo is a highly regarded filmmaker who works on the borders between two or more cultures and film traditions. Portillo's most highly acclaimed documentary to date is the award-winning Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman), a compelling investigation of the phenomenon of feminicide in the border city of Ciudad Juárez Chihuahua, Mexico. In terms of their activist politics, Portillo's films and videos are part of the Latin American film movement dedicated to an insurgent, aesthetic/political project that the Argentinean filmmaker Fernando Birri once called the 'poetics of transformation of reality'. In Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Portillo and Susana Muñoz depict how women, like the mothers of the disappeared, can redefine and reappropriate motherhood as a model of resistance for unifying women across various social backgrounds in their opposition to state terrorism and patriarchal nationalism.

Chapter 8 revisits the issue of E.K.’s identity and shows that Harvey was involved in preparing E.K.’s Gloss to the Shepheardes Calender. The Gloss introduces biographical details about Harvey’s life that Spenser by himself could not have supplied. On these grounds, Brink suggests that Harvey supplied the Gloss to Spenser, but that Spenser edited it and so assumed editorial control over the text. This textual analysis is supported by the bibliographical fact that the Gloss supplies annotations for references later cut from the text. Brink thinks that the combination of homosexual references in the text of the Shepheardes Calender and the discussion of pederasty in the Gloss makes Harvey’s participation all the more likely. Brink suggests the possibility that Spenser insisted on his anonymity in the text of the Shepheardes Calender and references to it because he wanted to prevent reprisals against Bishop John Young. After reviewing the joking interchanges in Latin between Harvey and Immerito in Familiar Letters, Brink suggests that it seems likely that, whatever fictional identity Rosalind has in the Shepheardes Calender, his personal romance ended happily with his marriage to Machabyas Chylde.

Some of the leading young American filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s had come to the cinema from a theatre background that had been radicalised in the late 1930s where visual values and 'reality' rather than the text and the word had become most important. Samuel Fuller came to the cinema not from theatre with its cultural and literary resonances, but from a world that was more crude, more direct and less cultivated, the world of tabloid journalism and mass media sensationalism. Fuller worked in tabloid journalism from the age of 12 years old, eventually becoming a reporter, then a crime reporter. Fuller's films are intensely realistic, but with an intensity and amplitude that unsettles their realism. In Forty Guns, Griff Bonell and his brothers Wes and Chico are out on a road in a desolate landscape stretched across the cinemascope surface of the screen.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the third part of this book. The book examines the work of three Spanish women filmmakers, namely Icíar Bollaín, Chus Gutiérrez and Ariadna Pujol in order to analyse the dissonant encounters between immigrants and locals in rural areas of Spain. Implicit in the very idea of bringing together the work of women filmmakers from Hispanic and Lusophone contexts is the notion that these cultural categories must necessarily be viewed in terms of their migratory and transnational histories. Migration, transnationalism and the crossing of borders must be seen as key aspects of contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone cinema. When viewed in terms of migration, transnationalism and the question of borders, what comes to light is the contingency and alterability of that which is apparently solid or is generally assumed to be fixed.

Ocana. Retrat Intermitent/Ocana. An Intermittent Portrait, directed by Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons in 1977, that is, at the height of the Barcelona movida sometimes referred to as the l.libertari, is highly representative of the impulse for renewal in Transition cinema and the attempt to document the new social reality. This chapter provides contexts and frameworks for the understanding of the film both in historical terms and in the way it engages with issues later developed by gender studies. In the 1970s, certain nineteenth-century mythologies of the Mediterranean as the locus of sensuality were very prominent in Catalan cultures. From the beginning of the film, José Ocaña questions why people wear clothes at all and it seems as if his 'stripteases' are designed to provoke. Ending on this note, Pons is underlining the most controversial aspect of his character and confirming a libertarian point of view for the film.