The history of filmmaking demonstrates that the form and content of films need not be restricted to prevailing patterns founded on the ubiquitous Hollywood style. It also demonstrates that there are perfectly viable, interesting and challenging ways of communicating stories and ideas using alternative cinematic means, which are often provocative and revealing. In his study of American cinema of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Robert Philip Kölker, considering the films of a group of filmmakers which included Penn, Altman, and Scorsese, identified them as filmmakers who were, refusing the classical American approach to film. Scorsese has been called 'the only director in Hollywood whose devotion to cinema justifies everyone's notions of popular art'. Breaking the Waves marked the return of Danish film director Lars von Trier to the cinema screen after a period of making The Kingdom, a hospitaldrama series for television.

This chapter argues that the 'academic' discourses are inexorably bound up with the preferences and interests of the Chinese government, and underpinned by mainstream academic thinking on security. A critical anatomy of the discourse of multipolarity and the nontraditional security discourse illustrates that discourses of security in China remain a fertile ground of dispute and confusion. It also illustrates that there is a clear deficit of Chinese scholarly engagement with critical security studies. The end of the Cold War and the opening of China's scholarly engagement with global international relations scholarship have ironically helped to entrench realism and its dominance in Chinese international relations scholarship. China's enthusiastic embrace of the 'national interest' as central in governing its foreign and security policy-making was meant to signal the changing worldview of a revisionist power and the 'normalization' of a revolutionary state.

This chapter investigates whether postdramatic theatre can claim any real philosophical distinction from the dramatic model which shares the overall theatrical framework, regardless of their differences in aesthetic form. The exclusive alignment of text-driven performance with the dramatic model has undergone significant developments since it was first proposed by Hans-Thies Lehmann in 1999. The chapter examines three of the most common poststructuralist charges levelled at the dramatic model. Firstly, it upholds the origin myth through its mimetic repetition of reality; secondly, it upholds the origin myth through its dependence on a theological playwright; and finally, it offers an illusion of original presence concealing its reliance on repetition and representation. The question of radical poststructuralist potential in relation to the charge of theocratic authorship needs to be differently understood.

By patient examination of the original Italian text of Matteo Bandello this chapter offers evidence that William Shakespeare had read the story of doomed lovers in the Novelle, and perhaps in Luigi da Porto's 1530 version, too. It shows that Shakespeare is not the first author to carefully link the events in this fictional story of star-crossed lovers to actual dates, holy days, and lunisolar events in a specific calendar year. The chapter also shows that Bandello reworked da Porto's story to conform the action to the solar and liturgical calendars of AD 1302. It suggests that Shakespeare's close reading of Bandello may have inspired Shakespeare to exploit the tale of Romeo and Juliet to interrogate the Gregorian reform of 1582 by linking events in his tragedy to actual dates and holy days in that topsy-turvy year.

The relations between a belligerent government and the adverse party's nationals are regulated partly by international and partly by national law. Civilians in the adverse party's territory are treated broadly speaking in accordance with the provisions of the national law, and while their freedom of movement may be restricted their treatment overall must be in accordance with Geneva Convention IV. If the capitulation relates to the surrender of an inhabited place, it may contain stipulations concerning the treatment of the civilian population. Conditions in a capitulation should relate only to the immediate purpose of effecting the surrender and not contain terms which would forbid the surrendered personnel from carrying arms in the future, for that is a political and not a military issue. Passports may be granted by a commander on his own authority or in accordance with his own military law.

As a settler-colonial nation in the southern hemisphere, Australia’s geopolitical positioning is consistently questioned. Australia’s relationship with Asia has become especially significant following substantial levels of Asian migration since the Vietnam War, and the increased economic importance to Australia of, successively, Japan, China and, potentially, of Indonesia and India. Sport, among other cultural forms, has been championed as a promising domain of diplomacy (broadly defined as encompassing political, economic, social and cultural exchange in both formal and informal environments). The opportunities for ‘football diplomacy’ are greatly enhanced when a common continental or regional governance structure allows Australia to be defined as an Asian sporting nation and so to host and participate in the 2015 AFC Asian Cup. Here, as in all sporting events, nations engage in overt competition, but this repositioning of Australia for a sporting purpose is symbolically unifying, and may signify a new mode of integration and collective identification that situates Australia within Asia in the Asian century. This chapter divines lessons from this case study that may apply in informative and useful ways to the wider analytical field of sport and diplomacy.

This chapter shows how hegemonic attempts to define and solidify Australian national identity have always been contested and unstable. It elucidates how Australian national conflict has been linked with tangible conflicts over land, injustice and power, and how they have been closely intertwined with anxieties about insecurity. The chapter argues that such a politics forestalls the achievement of a holistic and non-militarized security based upon the emancipation of human beings. It also argues that the operation of security politics gravely distorts Australian defence and foreign policy and directly endangers both others and the state's own citizens. The chapter suggests a range of ways in which the practices and conceptualizations of security, identity and sovereignty in Australia need to be refigured if Australian defence and security policy is to be rebalanced. It is important to place systems and processes of representation in security affairs, and politics more generally, under critical scrutiny.

This chapter contextualises the book’s scholarly contribution. The chapter begins with a critical survey of the complex historical relationship between Islam and homosexuality, with attention to the work of Scott Kugle, Samar Habib, and Khaled El-Rouayheb. The chapter establishes that the current Islamist dismissal of homosexuality does not hold when considering Islam’s deeply embedded cultural homoeroticism. In dialogue with Joseph Massad and Habib, the chapter furthers a blended model of sexuality which strategically adopts constructionist and essentialist perspectives. This is aided by the elasticity and multivalence of the term queer, which is offered as an anti-normative positioning against the strictures of both Western homosexual ethnocentrism and Muslim homophobia. Inspired by the work of Gayatri Gopinath, Sara Ahmed, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this chapter coins the term queer micropolitical disorientation, arguing that queer Muslims in the diaspora disorganise both nationalist and diasporic ideologies with their dissenting sexualities. The chapter proposes an antithetical methodology, via the work of Edward Said, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, which ‘writes back to power’ and which is attentive to cultural and political specificity.

Several earlier novels as well as some other earlier films hadadumbrated the central conflict of Brief Encounter. Perhaps it wasthe sheer ordinariness of the protagonists and how they areperformed by less well-known actors that made such a strong appeal.By comparison with the film, the Coward play from which it isadapted appears limited and somewhat stiff.

This chapter aims at studying John Burton's human needs theory and locating his version of theory in a wider tradition of thinking. The assumptive basis of needs thinking as it relates to the analysis of behaviour and motives is examined in the chapter in order to lay the foundations for an understanding of the rationale of Burton's workshop theory. The human needs narrative of Burton postulates a version of the alienation thesis. The thesis consists of the idea of human needs as something original which cannot be suppressed. Human needs thinking often includes a form of biological determinism. The notion of determinism as it relates to the explanation of human behaviour is complex. Since determinism is the thesis that every event has a cause, belief in determinism often embraces the claim that all human behaviour is causally explicable.