This chapter highlights that film theory is faced with two related requirements, namely, to extend the range of theoretical perspectives and core concepts available to the discipline, and to connect with ideas from other fields. Realist film theory and cinema provide an overview of nineteenth-century Lukácsian and intuitionist realist film theory. The relationship between philosophical realism and film theory needs to be explored further, as the question of realism and the cinema impinges upon other disciplines, including history, the philosophy and psychology of perception, gender theory, linguistics, phenomenology, information science, ethnography, artificial intelligence theory and branches of cognitivist research. The chapter explains that realism can also furnish models of theory and evidence, which may be particularly useful in the field of the documentary film. All of these constitute possible ways forward for future studies of cinematic realism, studies that may eventually come to establish a new paradigm.

The Sultan of Yogyakarta is the only royal figure in Indonesia who now retains an official government position, both as head of his sultanate and as hereditary governor of the province of Yogyakarta. This chapter explains how Sultan Hamengku Buwono IX (1912–88) was able to safeguard and strengthen that position through his support for Indonesian republicans in the struggle for independence against the Dutch in the 1940s, his negotiations with the new government to secure recognition of Yogyakarta as a ‘Special Region’ of the country, his own charisma and administrative abilities, as well as astute actions in favour of his subjects during this period. The contrasting case of Surakarta, where the sultanate survived for only a short time beyond independence, is also considered.

None of the images that are effaced by Michelangelo Antonioni's enlargements ever truly disappear. They make their presence felt as phantom shadows. The same is true with other disappearances, returns, repetitions and meanderings characteristic of Antonioni's films. Anna is never more present in L'avventura than when she vanishes. The presence of ghosts that stalk Antonioni's films give power to other scenes of effacement and erasure in L'avventura as when Sandro overturns the bottle of ink on the drawing done by the young man full of hope and inventiveness as Sandro once was in another life. In the classical cinema, the fragmentation of unities into morsels that then replenish the wholeness that they have broken away from is an operation of reconstitution, realignment and continuity.

There has been a general flattening by critics of heterogeneous forms, problems, concerns and types of filmmaking of the 1980s. For this reason many diverse and disparate strands of filmmaking need disentangling. This chapter undertakes such a task by performing a minute dissection of the heterogeneous elements shaped by Leos Carax into works of great complexity and élan in order to isolate the true singularity and originality of his 1980s films, Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang. In terms of Carax's allegiance to the nouvelle vague, there is little doubt that he drew great stylistic inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard. If the Carax-Godard link is examined in detail, it is possible to isolate the following overt influences of Godard on Carax's first films, for the purposes of illustration placing particular emphasis on how Bande à part resonates in Boy Meets Girl.

In her response to Ayelet Shachar's lead essay, Noora Lori commends Shachar for providing the conceptual language to critique the contemporary migration-enforcement practices of liberal states while developing a framework for countering the illiberal effects of these policies. Lori notes, however, that while Shachar explains that the shifting border contracts and expands into time as well as space, most of her empirical examples focus on spatial mobility. Dividing her response into two parts, Lori begins by elaborating on the temporal aspects of Shachar’s argument, notably legal maneuvers that deploy time to police the boundaries of the national body politic. These separate the chronological advancement of the clock from the counting of time under the mantle of the law: what matters is not how much time a person has resided in a territory but rather how that time is counted by the state. By pegging rights to a specific legal status, and counting the time of different statuses differently, states can suspend, slow down, or speed up chronological time in order to exclude, delay, or hasten the inclusion of particular non-citizens. The second part of Lori's response takes a step back to assess the larger implications of Shachar’s findings for our understanding of the political continuum between liberal democracies and authoritarian or autocratic states. Lori observes that, like the enterprises of colonialism and imperialism during previous periods, the practices associated with contemporary migration enforcement highlight the contradictions between democratic ideals and the actual practices of liberal states.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. This study of Michael Winterbottom is essentially concerned with his films, since most of his early television work is currently unavailable. Winterbottom is the most prolific and the most audacious of British filmmakers in the last twenty years. He does not merely keep up the pace but never ceases to be innovative and ambitious. Given his early association with Lindsay Anderson, he shows some continuity with the British New Wave. In films such as Go Now and I Want You, there is an unaffected interest in working-class lives, though with less sense of 'mission' than we would perhaps associate with those late 1950s/early 1960s directors. He has more in common with Anderson's restless, emotive and cerebral reactions to the worlds in which he situates his films and shares Anderson's absolute eschewal of sentimentality.

This chapter focuses on Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo, Wonderland, In This World and The Road to Guantánamo, with a brief reference to 24 Hour Party People as five very different films that have particular relationships with the historical world that they represent. A closer inspection of his films reveals a marked consistency, despite the perceived variation in genres and themes, a consistency that derives from a basic realist mode that closely attends to the historical import of the drama at the heart of all his films. The figure of Roberto Rossellini provides a useful way into thinking about Winterbottom's work in relation to the historical imperative that motivates these films. Rossellini's earliest films Rome, Open City and Paisà provide a useful comparison with In This World and Welcome to Sarajevo in particular.

In her lead essay for the volume, Ayelet Shachar introduces the concept of the "shifting border." Whereas borders are traditionally understood to exist at a country's territorial edge, prosperous countries are increasingly utilizing sophisticated legal tools to selectively restrict mobility and access by detaching the border and its migration-control functions from a fixed territorial marker. The shifting border extends the long arm of the state to regulate mobility half the world away, while also stretching deeply into the interior, creating what have been referred to as “constitution free” zones or “waiting zones” where ordinary constitutional rights are partially suspended. To understand this development, Shachar proposes a change in perspective from studying the movement of people across borders to critically investigating the movement of borders to regulate the mobility of people. Looking at cases in the European Union, the United States, Canada, and Australia, she reveals a paradigmatic and paradoxical shift in the political imagination and implementation of the sovereign authority to screen and manage global migration flows in a world filled with multiple sources of law. When it comes to controlling migration, states are abandoning traditional notions of fixed territoriality, but when it comes to granting rights and protections, the same states snap back to a narrow and strict interpretation of spatiality which limits their responsibility and liability. Shachar concludes her essay by exploring whether there are limits on such authority, and if so, how to activate them and who should do so.

This chapter examines women's documentary in Colombia, where pioneers such as Gabriela Samper began production in the 1960s, and where key female figures have continued to the present day. According to Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, in Latin America, the tendency to focus on militant revolutionary politics has meant the downplaying of other types of commitment, such as feminism's prolonged impact on cinema. The chapter addresses this question with regard to Colombia, taking a deconstructivist approach to the discursive frameworks of three important films: Chircales by Martha Rodríguez (with partner Jorge Silva), La mirada de Myriam by Clara Riascos with Colectivo Cine Mujer, and La Sierra (Margarita Martínez and Scott Dalton). Gender is in various ways imbricated in the national: in Chircales and La Sierra either desire for a woman (in the former) or woman's desire (in the latter) becomes bound up with desired versions of the nation, constituting a discursive shift.

During his long filmmaking career, which stretched from the 1920s to the 1990s, Marcel Carne had a profound impact on French cinema. For many his status as one of France's greatest directors is guaranteed by the continuing popularity of Les Enfants du paradis, a film that regularly appears at the top of critics' lists of 'best ever' French films. The first comprehensive academic study of Carne was undertaken by Edward Baron Turk in his monograph Child of Paradise: Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema. This chapter examines how Carné's recurring themes are expressed through his distinctive style. It focuses on how his work related to the changing cinematic context. The chapter considers Carné's films within the broader social and political context. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.

In 1991, Jacques Forgeas, who had collaborated with Jean-Jacques Beineix for Roselyne et les lions, gave the script of IP5 to Beineix, who worked on it for a couple of months. There were familiar names on the team: Robin for the photography, Yared for the music and Monnet, who played Frazier in Roselyne et les lions, as the village butcher. IP5 is the first film where Beineix had free rein with the narrative. As he has frequently pointed out, with his first three films he was in a sense merely illustrating a story, and even in the fourth he was using someone else's story, Le Portier's biography. In IP5, he was using Forgeas's original script, but the film is framed by two very personal statements penned by Beineix himself. Some reviewers suggested that IP5 was a film riding on the back of the ecological movement.

Romantic comedy has been described as a narrative of the heterosexual couple with a happy ending in which humour does not necessarily play an important part. The comic, protective, erotically-charged space is the space of romantic comedy. Humour can be theorised as integral to the genre even if there are some films that do not provoke laughter. There can be little doubt that the happy ending is a recurrent convention of the genre, but excessive concentration on this feature has tended to obscure the importance of humour. Another consequence of this critical emphasis has been the relegation of the rest of the comic narrative from critical discussion, especially of the middle section. The chapter also briefly illustrates how a film generally taken as a romantic comedy (although not only) might be analysed taking into account the main characteristics of the genre.