Critics seem to assume a dehistoricised and homogenised America that is somehow the antithesis of France. Perhaps this is because 'Renoir américain' was seen on European screens when the cold war was raging and the world seemed polarised between two monolithic blocs. This chapter retains Christopher Faulkner's notion of the ideological shift in Jean Renoir but suggests a more complex toing and froing before Frontist values are finally abandoned. Renoir experienced the United States as a refuge, a haven of freedom in a world where freedom was increasingly in short supply. The chapter suggests that Swamp Water and The Southerner can be seen as an outsider's engagement with myths of America. This Land is Mine and Diary of a Chambermaid, while noticeably inflected by Hollywood, have clear links to Renoir's Popular Front films. The Woman on the Beach and The River show men psychologically or physically maimed by the fighting.

This chapter introduces the context and rationale for the study, introduces the main research questions, and sets out an overview of the chapters and their central arguments. It shows how few studies have focused on the radical left’s international activity, fewer still on the European Left Party (EL). It critiques the idea that the radical left should be seen as intrinsically Eurosceptic.

This chapter provides brief details of some of the projects on which Jack Clayton was involved but which for various reasons either never materialised on screen or were made by someone else. The projects include A Child is Waiting; The Looking-Glass War; Sweet Autumn; The Walking Stick; Mary, Queen of Scots; Zaharoff Pedlar of Death; The Tenant; lf You Could See Me Now; The Main; Revelations; Hand-Me Downs; The Bourne Identity and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The list also includes One Last Glimpse; The Enchantment; Hannah; The Last Enemy; Cold Spring Harbour; The Stone Virgin; Augustus; Poe (The Dark Angel); The Cherry Orchard; Revolutionary Road; Hay Fever; Casualties of War; Massacre at Fall Creek and Silence. The chapter also reveals a lot about Clayton and perhaps even more about the industry in which he worked throughout his adult life.

What feminist filmmaking 'means' in Brazil has varied not only according to the history and contemporary status of women's rights and gender-related expectations, but also the chosen medium of expression (video played a vital role in expanding the discourses of citizenship during the 1980s) and targeted audience, as well as the geosocial locus of production. This chapter reviews the contributions of distinctive filmmakers in each of the three corresponding 'periods': military dictatorship, abertura, and retomada. It analyses the productive intersection of three transhistorical strands of activity: women's film education and their respective moments of creative emergence; the on-screen and off-screen relationship to the Brazilian state as an arbiter of cultural expression; and the textual definition and address of specific constraints and aspirations in relation to gendered subjectivity. The chapter directs our focus to the productive interaction of gender politics and aesthetics in the work of major women directors.

This chapter attempts the knotty task of evaluating Patrice Leconte's three films, namely, Monsieur Hire, Le Mari de la coiffeuse and Le Parfum d'Yvonne, in light of the critical conundrum. It involves, firstly, a rehearsal of the principal theoretical assumptions guiding discussions of fetishistic voyeurism in the cinema, and secondly, a rigorous close reading of the films in order to expose the broader narrative logics in which their allegedly sexist spectacles are embedded. Voyeurism and fetishism are concepts with considerable critical currency in film studies. Christian Metz's theory of the peculiarly hermetic subject/object nature of cinematic spectatorship was harnessed in the gender-specific account offered by psychoanalytically informed feminist work undertaken in the 1970s. The most influential of such accounts is undoubtedly Laura Mulvey's canonical Screen article of 1975, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'.

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.