Coline Serreau is one of the most famous female French directors alive, not only in France but also abroad. This chapter presents the director's films in chronological order and situates them in their political, social and cultural context. During the 1980s, Serreau's career moved towards fiction, and she worked both for the cinema and the theatre. Serreau often underlines her family's lack of financial resources. Serreau's reputation as a serious feminist documentary filmmaker was reinforced in 1979 by her contribution to a series produced by the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel and devoted to grandmothers. She was awarded 600,000 French francs which allowed her to finish the editing of Mais qu'est-ce qu'elles veulent? The chapter considers the way her films epitomise the evolution of French cinema and society. May '68 is considered by historians as a watershed in French society as well as in French culture.

Catherine Deneuve has appeared in at least one major film every year since turning 50 in 1993, often starring in several works in the same season in a career which has encompassed, and continues to encompass, work with leading French auteurs. This chapter focuses on three of Deneuve's films: Belle Maman, Dancer in the Dark, and Le Vent de la nuit/Night Wind. It offers an examination of the varied portraits of older women and of the processes of ageing offered by (and indeed to) Deneuve. Through an examination of Deneuve's roles in these three very different films, there will emerge a vision of her portrayal of gendered ageing as multilayered and complex. Deneuve's roles in these three works engage at once with established on-screen images of both maternity and sexuality while posing a series of challenges to the perceived status of '50 plus' actresses on the international screen.

Defeat in 1945 brought the end of the Japanese empire and occupation by foreign powers for the first time in Japanese history. As the American-dominated Occupation introduced radical reforms of democratisation in politics and society, debates among the Allies and Japanese raged over the fate and future of both the person of Hirohito and the institution of the emperor. The new constitution in 1946 transformed the emperor from an absolute monarch to a symbol emperor. This was widely supported in the decade after the Occupation ended in 1952. However, because Hirohito remained on the throne until his death in 1989, the issue of his war responsibility did not disappear at home or abroad. The Japanese left remained vigilant against revival of the ‘emperor system’ (tennôsei) while the far right criticised media treatment of the imperial family as ‘celebrity stars’. Conservative Liberal Democratic Party governments kept the monarchy important in Japanese culture and society, ignoring Emperors Akihito and Naruhito’s expressions of ‘remorse’ for the war while endeavouring to carry out their constitutional role as ‘symbol of the state’.

This chapter will demonstrate why Babès’ contributions are significant, in that they go well beyond the almost obsessive nature of French public debates regarding so-called ‘Islamic dress’ – the ‘external’ face of Islam, with the associated anxieties about women’s bodies and their outward appearances – to contemplate the ‘interiority’ and lived experience of Islam, a narrative which runs counter to political constructions or dominant discursive frameworks of Islam as a monolithic entity in contemporary France. Her work seeks to articulate a nuanced knowledge of Islam with an approach that examines the spiritual lives of Muslims, particularly in contemporary France. One finds throughout her work (in the form of monographs, essays, media interviews and blogs) a consistent interest in three aspects of Islam: what Babès refers to as la foi, le rite and la loi, that is, faith, rituals (practices) and religious law.

Historical memory is situational, the result of a cultural process of construction and representation. As obviously ruinous, perverse, and even demonic as the Nazis’ methods and beliefs were, their use of Nordic imagery and ideas depends on many of the same kinds of historiographic manoeuvres and even some of the same tropes that are traced in this book. As much as the Nazis’ notions of world dominance differed from the aspirations of every English writer considered, both groups shared the strategy of incorporating a Nordic past in their cultural memories. What might be called a parallel descent from Germanic prehistory thus has unsettling epistemic implications. If memory is conditioned not only by what is being remembered but by who is doing the remembering, as many critics maintain, then the process itself – the tropes it uses and the fact that it combines them – is in some ways subject-neutral. It is such malleability and reproducibility that would allow for the creation of competing views from the same recirculated images – totalitarianism as well as fantasy. These may be the qualities that give historical memory its greatest power.

This chapter investigates France’s conception and contribution to human protection from 1987 to 1993. It first discusses the emergence of France’s domestic norm of human protection. It then analyses the extent of the role played by France in the emergence of humanitarian intervention and argues that France was a norm entrepreneur between 1987 and 1991 before helping to consolidate the international principle through its practice from 1992. Finally, it investigates the French involvement in Bosnia and Herzegovina – France’s main intervention at the time – in order to illustrate the evolution of France’s conception and contribution to human protection during that period.

Profiles of Catherine Deneuve in film magazines such as Les Inrockuptibles and Première praise her adaptability, as they enumerate the many directors and co-stars she has worked with. In contrast, Deneuve's fashion persona is overwhelmingly identified with Yves Saint Laurent, with articles tracing the way she has worn his clothes throughout her life, such as In Style featuring her wearing Saint Laurent clothing to the Oscars in 1993 or while arriving in the south of France in 1968 to begin filming La Sirene du Mississippi/Mississippi Mermaid. This chapter is especially interested then in why it is that while Deneuve's cinematic star persona is noticeable for its flexibility, her fashion icon persona remains remarkably consistent, a play on words that recounts her most famous film role and turns it into a celebration of her beauty and longevity outside of that filmic sphere.

One of the key features of Jean-Jacques Beineix's relationship with the film image is the notion of seduction and the erotic. Beineix's screen career began in 1969 as a trainee for a long-running television comedy series, Les Saintes Chêries, directed by Jean Becker. This chapter explores the concept of the postmodernism, first in general terms, then in relation to film, before passing on to the specifically French focus on advertising. Beineix and Luc Besson's films also managed to reflect the contemporary mood of cynicism and alienation prevalent in the youth class, which felt disenfranchised, as films like La Haine in the 1990s have continued to underline. Several reviewers had used the word baroque in relation to Diva in 1981. It was not until 1989 that the issue was explored in some depth by Bassan, writing for the Revue du cinéma.

This chapter discusses J. Lee Thompson's The Guns of Navarone, which was a Second World War movie based on Alistair MacLean's tale of a desperate mission to destroy German cannon on a Greek island. Guns' prologue is set on the Acropolis where this story's connection to classical myth is emphasised with a voiceover which refers to 'the legend of Navarone'. Carl Foreman's screenplay attempts to develop psychological complexity and dramatic tension in its reconstruction of Maclean's band of saboteurs. Similarly, it seeks to widen and intensify the discursive elements of MacLean's text, sharpening its moral issues and underlining its allusions to classical mythology. Lee Thompson introduced audiences to what cinema would become in the age of the multiplex. He was aided by some immaculate cinemascope photography from Oswald Morris, who had learnt how to shoot seas.

In his obituary notice in the Guardian, John Clayton's fellow director and close friend Karel Reisz, who thought The Innocents the greatest of Clayton's films, also relates the power of the film to the chord the material struck in Clayton's memory of childhood. For the ability to locate the precise moment of maximum tension in a scene, Clayton's direction has a mastery comparable to that of another great director of domestic tension, William Wyler. Interestingly, Clayton was less happy with Quint's ghost than with Miss Jessel's: it was altogether cruder, he thought, more obviously melodramatic and Gothic, less atmospheric. Miss Jessel provided the dimension of supernatural sadness, but Quint was necessary to give the weight of diabolical threat. Pauline Kael had a fine phrase for Miss Jessel's tear on the blotter: she called it 'that little pearl of ambiguity'.

Outlines the changing nature of Irish emigration to Britain in decades before and after the Cato Street Conspiracy, and the changing role of Irish immigrants in the British radical movement.