Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin féminin is about young people in Paris in the winter of 1965-66. As the title suggests, Masculin féminin is principally concerned with the sexual relations of these young people. The opinion of young people is constantly surveyed with regard to their sexual behaviour. Meanwhile, the steely monochrome photography places Masculin féminin much closer to the grim realism of Vivre sa vie than to the wild romanticism of Pierrot le fou. La Chinoise documents the activities of a group of young Maoist revolutionaries, centred around the apartment belonging to Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky)'s parents where they hold their meetings. There is a degree of uncertainty as to what the ' elle' in the title of Godard's 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle refers. The jarring violence of Week-end's film form its brutally confrontational style makes it an ultimately irrecuperable work.

This chapter explores the cultural context within which Mathieu Kassovitz emerged to direct his first three short films, concentrating in the second half on key transformations relating to youth culture that have taken place in relation to French popular culture. One of the most important of the trips to the cinema came in the mid-1970s when Kasso-vitz was about 10 and his father took him to the Paris Cinémathèque to see Duel. The young Kassovitz was immediately struck by Spielberg's directorial style - accurately described by Kolker as a proficient structuring of narrative and control of mise en scène that encourages the spectator to surrender themselves to the narrative. Kassovitz's first short film Fierrot le pou became a statement of intent from the ambitious young director. Through his cultural references and influences Kassovitz makes a conscious effort to place his films in the realm of mass popular culture.

This chapter takes Bruno's theoretical metonym as a starting point for examining Icíar Bollain's deceptively transparent film narratives. Like the fictional 'Carte du Pays de Tendre', Bollaín's mises-en-scène map her characters' movement through contemporary Spain with narratives that give precedence to geographical and emotional journeys: Hola ¿estás sola? follows two young women's attempt to find work on the south coast and in Madrid; Flores de otro mundo explores female migration; and Te doy mis ojos, domestic abuse. The titles of these films play an integral part in this 'mapping', or rather, this remapping of women: each of them is associated with a gendered cliché that is subverted by Bollaín's co-scripted, open-ended narratives. It is the gift for social documentation, entertainment, collaborative transparency and the engaging of affect that suggests Madeleine de Scudéry's haptic map as a metonym for the way that Bollaín's first three films 're-map' turn-of-the-millennium female subjectivity.

The sequence at the Odessa Steps is one of the most dramatic and famous in The Battleship Potemkin and possibly over the whole of Sergei Eisenstein's work, but it is not exceptional in its structure compared to other sequences in that film and in other films. The Odessa Steps sequence has a number of features relating to the organisation of time and of space dependent on procedures of montage and the composition of shots. From the beginning of the film, Eisenstein constructs series of shots along graphic lines and lines of movement. There is an apparent development and continuity in Eisenstein's early films, but these continuities do not belong to a natural course of the action but rather to a correspondence between shots. The central montage strategy of Eisenstein is a montage of correspondences whereby elements distant in time and space and from different realities are brought together.

This chapter begins with the idea of utopia which was the original theme of Coline Serreau's first documentary and which is central to her first fiction film, Pourquoi pas!. The 'community' created by the three bachelors could be seen as another alternative to accepted gender roles, and a variation of the ideal society created by the trio of Pourquoi pas!. The chapter examines the ways Serreau endlessly rewrote and re-created her ideal communities from one film and one play to the next. Taking intertextuality in its wider sense, the chapter analyses the direct and indirect influences and quotations from the 'philosophical century' and to a lesser extent from the seventeenth century. It demonstrates Serreau's originality and skilful synthesising of a number of inherited genres, from the conte philosophique to the fairy-tale.

This chapter focuses on programmatic and policy development within the EL. We examine the elaboration of policy at the various conferences and Congresses the EL has held since 2004 as well as in the common manifestos for the European Parliament elections. We discuss the impact of the Tsipras candidacy for the post of European Commission in 2014. Both this, and the subsequent election of a Syriza-led government in Greece, were landmark events for the EL. The retreat of that government in the face of pressure and blackmail by the Troika of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund were experienced by the EL as a bitter shared defeat. The experience of Syriza and the previous disappointments associated with the government participation of a full EL member party in Italy and an observer party in Cyprus suggest distinct limits to the EL’s ability to exert decisive policy influence upon its components – or to help them ‘govern’ in any more radical a fashion than the social democratic rivals of the radical left. Nevertheless, the EL has achieved a considerable degree of policy coherence and has sharpened its critique of the European Union since 2015.

This chapter discusses the British relationship with the Continent through the usage of the term Iron Curtain, both in broader popular discourses and with a particular focus on three travel narratives (by David Shears, Anthony Bailey and Tim Moore) that span almost fifty years of British and European history – from the pre-détente Cold War years to the Brexit era. The narratives reflect the evolution of British views of borders and geopolitical orientations, engaging with the Iron Curtain as the hardest European border to date as well as Britain’s position towards/within Europe. Significantly, the travel narratives represent the Iron Curtain not only as a (changing) material structure, but also as a lasting trope of exclusion and isolation. The analysis is informed by Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space as well as border studies and cultural explorations of nostalgia.