In a short tribute to Woody Allen written for Positif in 1994, Patrice Leconte acknowledges and celebrates the eclecticism which has characterized his cinematic influences and tastes. In his eagerness to do justice to all those artists who have touched or impressed him, Leconte crosses nationality and generation, before finally expressing his admiration for the iconic Jewish-American tragic-comic director and actor. This reluctance, this restless, irritable inability to commit to any one discernable position or to follow any singular influence is perhaps at the heart of Leconte's diversity as a filmmaker. Leconte's refusal to profess an engagement to a single filmic genre, style, social project or political agenda is often dismissed as revelatory of a frivolous or adolescent lack of gravity. Leconte's films relocate ethical questions away from the body politic and into an imaginary world of intersubjective challenges, dilemmas and interactions.

This chapter explains that the Elizabethan grammar school education, which Spenser and Shakespeare would have received, involved learning to read Latin texts in Latin and to engage in double translation, i.e., sophisticated exercises in translating from Latin to English and back again. Brink surveys the unusually liberal education that Spenser would have received at Merchant Taylors’ School and suggests that Richard Mulcaster influenced Spenser’s decision to write in English. Mulcaster forcefully advocated educating the lower classes and even supported educating women. In this chapter, the reader is introduced to the typological reading encouraged by studying Alexander Nowell’s Catechism. The reader is shown how typological reading is likely to have influenced Spenser’s symbolism in Book I of the Faerie Queene.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book offers a new lens through which to examine Spain's cinematic production following the decades of isolation imposed by the Franco regime. At the heart of this project lies an examination of the ways in which established auteurs and younger generations of filmmakers have harnessed cinematic language towards a commentary on the nation-state and the politics of historical and cultural memory. The films discussed in the book encompass different genres (horror, thriller, melodrama, documentary), both popular and more select arthouse fare, and are made in different languages: English, Basque, Castilian, Catalan and French. The book focuses on locating how the different films treat wider issues of landscape (both rural and urban, abstract and concrete, filmic and theatrical) and memory in relation to the political shifts of Spain's history since the late 1970s.

Jean-Pierre Bekolo is at the forefront of a wave of innovative and dynamic young African filmmakers who have emerged since the early 1990s. Openly embracing the values and forms of urban African youth culture, Bekolo has created a cinema that exists at the interface between a global youth aesthetic and an experimental narrative approach that blurs both identities and genres. This chapter underlines the importance of tracing multiple strands within African cinema, and developing more complex genealogies of African filmmaking practice. It focuses on Bekolo's first feature film, Quartier Mozart, although some comparisons will be drawn with his approach in Aristotle's Plot and analysis the 'theoretical' questions raised by Aristotle's Plot. By tracing his own lineage within African cinema, and aligning his work with the maverick talents of Djibril Diop Mambety, Bekolo underlines the existence of different styles and approaches within the category of African cinema.

It was in 1965 that Roman Polanski would cast Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, described by one critic as a 'one-woman show', in a role that would effectively create a persona which would resonate throughout her future film career. The British-made Repulsion was Polanski's first English-language film and his second feature. This chapter contends that Repulsion can be read against the grain to offer a surprisingly sympathetic account of what happens to a young woman of the sexual revolution generation who rejects the imperative of heterosexual activity. It assesses and critiques the reception of Polanski's film Repulsion with regard to its portrayal of female subjectivity, arguing that Deneuve's presence in the film works to disrupt rather than to confirm straightforward stereotypes and codes of femininity. The chapter discusses the significance of this film for the development of Catherine Deneuve's screen persona.

Cinemascope, like depth of field, sequence shots, lengthy tracks, pans and the use of the zoom reduces the need for editing. Between 1926 and 1970, Howard Hawks made 22 films, one of which was in Cinemascope: The Land of the Pharaohs. In Hawks's 1956 interview in Cahiers du cinéma, just after the appearance of his Land of the Pharaohs, Hawks had said about Cinemascope. Rather than fragmenting space, space can be left relatively whole and time can be given its due, the time of an event being simply the time of the shot, hence the length of takes with these new techniques. André Bazin would argue that such techniques rendered the real more fully than did montage and that rather than breaking the real up for analytic and dramatic purposes as he claimed montage did, the real was left in its integrity .