Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace’s rejection of ‘home’ and ‘homeland,’ and the primacy of the manifesto as an important polemical tool in framing one’s work, are explored in Chapter 3 in relation to Wall’s art history master’s thesis on the Berlin Dada group, which established “myth” as an anti-critical cultural practice that was broadly applied to much of the cultural activity then active in Vancouver. Vancouver’s seeming “lack of history,” the existence of back-to-the-land intentional communities living outside of the urban centre, the proliferation of other performance and media based art groups, and the influence of visiting American artist Robert Smithson’s earthworks are all examined as cultural expressions deemed a-historical or romantic by photo-conceptualists.

This chapter contains collection of texts between 1670 and 1826 connected with the Gothic Aesthetic. A rash of translations from the German in the early 1790s, including Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller's novella The Ghost-Seer, had a decisive impact on the development of Gothic fiction in Britain. Ann Radcliffe's final work of fiction, Gaston de Blondeville, was published posthumously in 1826. This was first published separately in the New Monthly Magazine, as an independent essay in aesthetic theory. It suggests the continuing importance of Shakespeare, and contemporary methods of staging his plays, as an example for modern writers employing effects of terror, specifically the supernatural. The originality of William Collins's Ode lies in the fact that personified Fear is positively wooed rather than avoided by the aspiring poet. It can be measured against another, far more conventional, 'Ode to Fear' by Andrew Erskine.

Terry Gilliam was keen to develop two very different projects, The Ministry and Theseus and the Minotaur, a proposal that would resurface several times in his career. By late 1979 Gilliam had Denis O'Brien's verbal backing for Time Bandits. Fantasy in Time Bandits is not an escape from reality, but a means of tapping into the realms that rationality has neglected, or replaced with a world mediated by the commercial media, ideology and tradition. Time Bandits marks the first of several films that feature children as protagonists or as critical observers of the actions and failings of adults. Time Bandits seems to function simply as the cinematic version of a Bildungsroman, a novel of development. Gilliam had teamed up with producer Arnon Milchan in his efforts to realise Brazil, which had been on hold since 1979.

The third chapter deals with the wholesale importation of a British team sport, rugby, into France. Led by Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the Olympics, who was the referee in the first French championship, its adoption by the French was a self-conscious response to defeat in the Franco–Prussian War. Choosing rugby over the more proletarian soccer, an haute-bourgeois and aristocratic elite played rugby at Paris’ most exclusive clubs, a moment reimagined by Henri Rousseau. But rugby could not be confined to these environs for long, and by the time of Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team, with its press photograph source, the sport was included alongside aeroplanes, the Eiffel Tower and advertising as a cipher of all that was modern in the Paris of 1913. Also on view at that year’s Salon des Indépendants was another picture of rugby, The Football Players, cementing the sport as a theme for salon cubism. During the First World War, rugby was celebrated by French nationalists as a sport that had trained its participants to become heroes on the battlefield. This, I surmise, is what led André Lhote to produce his cubist paintings of rugby during and after the conflict.