This chapter focuses on important stage in Marcel Carne's career by examining his relationship with a key moment in French film history indeed, probably its most famous moment the French new wave. As one of French cinema's master craftsmen, Carné was an obvious target for their critical hostility. While Carne usually deals with fatalism, melancholia, and loneliness, Le Pays d'où je viens is a happy film, shot in Technicolor, focusing on a small town during the Christmas period, the streets are covered in snow, there is an abundance of Christmas decorations, and a use of bright colours. In terms of gender, the film demonstrates a number of continuities and differences from Carné's earlier work. Le Pays d'où je viens in many ways still belongs to the tradition of quality, particularly through its style, which is classical throughout.

Although the perception of Georges Méliès as essentially a man of the theatre who happened to point a camera at the stage has long held sway, this chapter intends to provide a more complex assessment of Méliès's film techniques. The chapter examines individual scenes of some of his films using a model of structural analysis designed for narrative films. The aim of this exercise is two-fold: first, it reveals the narrative complexity of Méliès's films; and, in so doing, it demonstrates that early cinema need not be excluded from analysis using the tools of modern film theory. The chapter outlines the technical function of the major special effects, or trues, used by Méliès. It then progresses to a structural analysis of the narrative components of Méliès's films, by adapting Christian Metz's model known as la grande syntagmatique to a spatial model of mise en scène.

Following Francisco Franco's death in 1975, Carlos Saura's cinema, characterised by a tendency towards political allegory and an unmistakable resistance to the dictatorship, opened up in new directions. This chapter deals with his 1987 film El Dorado, a film which displays characteristics previously absent in Saura's cinema. It demonstrates a strong degree of political engagement that crucially links the film to his earlier oeuvre. Sociopolitical inquiry has remained central to Saura's filmmaking. El Dorado is a polyvalent work that combines historical revision of Spain's imperial past with considerations of a broader cultural legacy that has resonances and implications for mid-1980s Spain (and indeed Europe). Longstanding personal preoccupations, including some of a very intimate kind, also lie behind the film. The keys to appreciating El Dorado are multiple, ranging from the historical and cinematic traditions to the contemporary moment, and Saura's own family history.

Mediated unity is introduced as one of the key premises underlying almost all conceptions of modern statehood. The term mediated unity expresses the idea that if there was no way to bridge the metaphorical distance between citizens and the state, representation would be impossible. Within this framework mediation and the possibility of rational representation are intrinsically linked with the presupposition of an underlying unity. The premise is consolidated by the corollary premise that if there was identity or fusion between citizens and the state, representation would be superfluous. Identity between citizens and political authority would make representative institutions redundant. It is shown that although the premise of mediated unity is closely associated with thinkers with an explicitly dialectical position in matters of epistemology and politics, virtually all arguments in support of democratic legitimacy rely on either a strong or weak dialectical argument. Chapter 1 explains what is at stake in the deconstruction of the key concept of mediated unity.

Part one describes Genoa’s origins. It has four chapters. Chapter one explains who the first founders and builders of the city were. Chapter two relates how Janus, first king of Italy, constructed and built Genoa. Chapter three relates how Janus, a citizen of Troy, expanded and improved the original foundation. Chapter four relates how the god Janus, an idol of the Romans, was once venerated in Genoa.

Jacques Rivette's films are composed of scenes or sequences made up of one shot or only a few. Montage is a linkage or juxtaposition of differential elements and, as Rivette's films bear witness, should not be limited to the joining of shots. Montage, for him, is a seeking out of affinities between different moments of a film that exist in themselves and are there to be found and are the spirit and life of a film. During editing Rivette is interested to discover what a film is saying by itself (par soi-même) rather than what he might have wanted it to say. Shooting and composing in sequences allows Rivette to follow the action as it takes place and develops. A sequence shot is a shot of things developing in real time.

In any film, a shot change in a succession of images is a rupture even if it is used to constitute a continuity as is mostly the case. In Alain Resnais's films continuity is almost never the object of shot changes. In the classical system, the shot is effaced on behalf of the whole into which it is integrated. No shot in his films is singular. It contains all manner of similitudes and paths and into which it can enter and depart, like Carlos, like exterior voices, like an image that then multiplies into images like it, of women, of desire, of losses. Carlos is a refugee from Franco's Spain and a professional revolutionary seeking to overthrow the Spanish dictatorship. La Guerre est finie is a film that takes place in an instant in an interval between two rivers, two crossings, and two lives.

This chapter considers the specificity of French cinema in the 1970s before analysing in more detail Coline Serreau's first film. Serreau's work on stage and on big or small screens was strongly influenced by the political mood which succeeded May '68 in France. In France, the Utopian tradition in literature is particularly marked in the period preceding and following the 1789 Revolution. The presence in the background of a huge reproduction of a painting by the French seventeenth-century painter Lorrain reinforces in a way the idea of performance since the rebellious artists appear in some long shots to be part of the painted background. What J. P. Jeancolas calls the 'vague contemporary', which for him characterises French cinema before the 1970s, became much more precise afterwards. The 'contemporary' was mostly expressed through socio-political films.

This chapter details the dialogue with republicans that led to the IRA ceasefire of 1994 and how the formative stages of the peace process took shape through confidential contacts and channels

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The very structure of Joseph Losey's cinematic language, as well as his narrative style and content, are directly related to the artist's attempt to create a new, post-Cold War vision for radicalism and social change, as well as a personal atonement for the mistakes and misjudgements produced by the Old Left's dogmatic loyalty to an inhuman Stalinism. The chapter first explores the issue of film language. Having forged a cinematic connection between immanence and impulse, the chapter turns to their relevance to the Cold War politics of dislocation. While his The Boy with Green Hair constructed an ambivalent tension between the naturalism of absolute goodness and the spectre of violent impulse, the remaining films from Losey's brief stint in Hollywood, from 1947 to 1952, are largely devoted to analysing the psychology of this dark flipside.

In Assassins, the violence, its affects and consequences are played out from the start and in far more explicit and controversial fashion. Consequently, whereas Kassovitz's previous two features attempted essentially to engage with their popular audience at the same time as entertaining them, Assassins's polemical approach aims to confront, enrage and disgust its spectator into responding to the social issues of violence and youth alienation played out on screen. With its relatively large budget, high-profile release at the Cannes festival and casting of Serrault in the starring role, Assassins appeared to signal Kassovitz's arrival in mainstream French cinema following the cross-over success of La Haine. In Assassins, the spatially coded generational conflict within the mise en scène threatens to explode into violence in the Mexican stand-offthat takes place between Mehdi and Wagner following the death of Max.

Steffen Mau, in his response to Ayelet Shachar's lead essay, begins by recapping the historical development of border control. Before the twentieth century, it was possible to cross many national borders in continental Europe without travel documents or controls. Comprehensive systems for suppressing “informal” and non-authorized mobility are a relatively recent invention. Moving on to Shachar's essay itself, Mau acknowledges the value of her approach, which introduces a functional definition of borders. He identifies four key developments: increased selectivity and visa policies, internationalization of border regimes, macroterritorialization, and digitization and new border technologies. While Shachar includes these in her analysis, Mau argues that they can only be partially subsumed under the concept of the shifting border, and may in fact have a different momentum. In the final part of his response, Mau addresses Shachar's suggestions for developing an institutional-legal design that can match the change in border controls, offering a number of criticisms. While agreeing with her about expanding legal obligations in the area of humanitarian migration, he notes that the discussion should be extended to cover labor migration and tourism too. He also points out the mounting problems posed by the establishment of “smart borders." His final objection relates to the question of political feasibility. As necessary and normatively convincing as Shachar’s call for corresponding legal responsibility and shifting border control might be, it seems highly improbable that this will actually come to pass.

This chapter discusses the EL’s developing relations with both the social movements against austerity and the broader European left. It focuses upon the ways in which the EL has sought to build links, partly through its working groups, with trade unionists, environmentalists, feminists and other sections of the ‘movement left’, as well as participating in the World and European Social Forums and organising gatherings of broad left activists. The second part of the chapter examines some of the reasons why the EL has failed to date to attract a number of significant RLPs. We also consider the objections raised to the EL by more hard-line and traditionalist communist or Trotskyist parties. Finally, we conclude with a detailed discussion of the role of the GUE/NGL confederal group in the European Parliament and the EL’s relations with that group.

This chapter discusses J. Lee Thompson's career Hollywood with a focus on Cape Fear, which was an adaptation of John D. MacDonald's book The Executioners. The film set Lee Thompson's career in a whole new direction. In many ways, Cape Fear would distil the essence of Lee Thompson's cinema, and may therefore be regarded as the culmination of his British filmmaking trajectory. Although Max Cady is described in MacDonald's novel and in the film as 'an animal', Robert Mitchum plays him as the shrewdest and most intelligent of predators, able to control his simmering anger, match his tactics to the occasion and release his power to maximum effect. Lee Thompson accepted United Artist's invitation to take a production unit to Argentina to make Taras Bulba with a budget of $7 million and a cast which included 10,000 gauchos and their horses. He also completed two lavish comedies for Twentieth Century-Fox.