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.

Jean-Luc Godard once famously remarked that writing film criticism was, for him, already a kind of filmmaking. A mixture of playfulness and reverent cinematic homage is to be found in the film language that Godard employs in A bout de souffle. The film became famous for its use of jump-cuts, and it may be difficult for today's viewers, familiar with the ultra-rapid editing of music videos and advertising, to appreciate how disruptive this technique appeared to contemporary spectators. The playfulness of À bout de souffle is visible, too, in the lengthy central scene between Michel and Patricia in the latter's hotel room which constitutes by itself around one third of the whole film. This tendency to balance his generic action narratives with extraordinarily long sequences representing the domestic life of a couple is one that characterises the whole of the first period of Godard's career.

Women of more ordinary physique were to occupy a new space, first of all on the stage, and sometimes on the big screen, since many plays mounted by the Splendid Company were to become films. Female humour and laughter cannot be considered without another powerful element: the motivation of often transgressive laughter. This chapter examines a few examples of Coline Serreau's humour in her comedies in order to assess whether or not she offers an alternative to the traditional male comedy, before considering in more detail and from a more general perspective the devices she uses to create humour. The golden age of French comedy was cut short by the First World War. Although the comedy was by and large a minor genre in the cinema of the Occupation, other forms of light film entertainment either remained (the farce) or emerged (the film zazou).

This chapter focuses on important stage in Marcel Carne's career by examining his relationship with a key moment in French film history indeed, probably its most famous moment the French new wave. As one of French cinema's master craftsmen, Carné was an obvious target for their critical hostility. While Carne usually deals with fatalism, melancholia, and loneliness, Le Pays d'où je viens is a happy film, shot in Technicolor, focusing on a small town during the Christmas period, the streets are covered in snow, there is an abundance of Christmas decorations, and a use of bright colours. In terms of gender, the film demonstrates a number of continuities and differences from Carné's earlier work. Le Pays d'où je viens in many ways still belongs to the tradition of quality, particularly through its style, which is classical throughout.

Although the perception of Georges Méliès as essentially a man of the theatre who happened to point a camera at the stage has long held sway, this chapter intends to provide a more complex assessment of Méliès's film techniques. The chapter examines individual scenes of some of his films using a model of structural analysis designed for narrative films. The aim of this exercise is two-fold: first, it reveals the narrative complexity of Méliès's films; and, in so doing, it demonstrates that early cinema need not be excluded from analysis using the tools of modern film theory. The chapter outlines the technical function of the major special effects, or trues, used by Méliès. It then progresses to a structural analysis of the narrative components of Méliès's films, by adapting Christian Metz's model known as la grande syntagmatique to a spatial model of mise en scène.

Following Francisco Franco's death in 1975, Carlos Saura's cinema, characterised by a tendency towards political allegory and an unmistakable resistance to the dictatorship, opened up in new directions. This chapter deals with his 1987 film El Dorado, a film which displays characteristics previously absent in Saura's cinema. It demonstrates a strong degree of political engagement that crucially links the film to his earlier oeuvre. Sociopolitical inquiry has remained central to Saura's filmmaking. El Dorado is a polyvalent work that combines historical revision of Spain's imperial past with considerations of a broader cultural legacy that has resonances and implications for mid-1980s Spain (and indeed Europe). Longstanding personal preoccupations, including some of a very intimate kind, also lie behind the film. The keys to appreciating El Dorado are multiple, ranging from the historical and cinematic traditions to the contemporary moment, and Saura's own family history.

Mediated unity is introduced as one of the key premises underlying almost all conceptions of modern statehood. The term mediated unity expresses the idea that if there was no way to bridge the metaphorical distance between citizens and the state, representation would be impossible. Within this framework mediation and the possibility of rational representation are intrinsically linked with the presupposition of an underlying unity. The premise is consolidated by the corollary premise that if there was identity or fusion between citizens and the state, representation would be superfluous. Identity between citizens and political authority would make representative institutions redundant. It is shown that although the premise of mediated unity is closely associated with thinkers with an explicitly dialectical position in matters of epistemology and politics, virtually all arguments in support of democratic legitimacy rely on either a strong or weak dialectical argument. Chapter 1 explains what is at stake in the deconstruction of the key concept of mediated unity.

Part one describes Genoa’s origins. It has four chapters. Chapter one explains who the first founders and builders of the city were. Chapter two relates how Janus, first king of Italy, constructed and built Genoa. Chapter three relates how Janus, a citizen of Troy, expanded and improved the original foundation. Chapter four relates how the god Janus, an idol of the Romans, was once venerated in Genoa.

Jacques Rivette's films are composed of scenes or sequences made up of one shot or only a few. Montage is a linkage or juxtaposition of differential elements and, as Rivette's films bear witness, should not be limited to the joining of shots. Montage, for him, is a seeking out of affinities between different moments of a film that exist in themselves and are there to be found and are the spirit and life of a film. During editing Rivette is interested to discover what a film is saying by itself (par soi-même) rather than what he might have wanted it to say. Shooting and composing in sequences allows Rivette to follow the action as it takes place and develops. A sequence shot is a shot of things developing in real time.