The sequence at the Odessa Steps is one of the most dramatic and famous in The Battleship Potemkin and possibly over the whole of Sergei Eisenstein's work, but it is not exceptional in its structure compared to other sequences in that film and in other films. The Odessa Steps sequence has a number of features relating to the organisation of time and of space dependent on procedures of montage and the composition of shots. From the beginning of the film, Eisenstein constructs series of shots along graphic lines and lines of movement. There is an apparent development and continuity in Eisenstein's early films, but these continuities do not belong to a natural course of the action but rather to a correspondence between shots. The central montage strategy of Eisenstein is a montage of correspondences whereby elements distant in time and space and from different realities are brought together.

This chapter begins with the idea of utopia which was the original theme of Coline Serreau's first documentary and which is central to her first fiction film, Pourquoi pas!. The 'community' created by the three bachelors could be seen as another alternative to accepted gender roles, and a variation of the ideal society created by the trio of Pourquoi pas!. The chapter examines the ways Serreau endlessly rewrote and re-created her ideal communities from one film and one play to the next. Taking intertextuality in its wider sense, the chapter analyses the direct and indirect influences and quotations from the 'philosophical century' and to a lesser extent from the seventeenth century. It demonstrates Serreau's originality and skilful synthesising of a number of inherited genres, from the conte philosophique to the fairy-tale.

This chapter focuses on programmatic and policy development within the EL. We examine the elaboration of policy at the various conferences and Congresses the EL has held since 2004 as well as in the common manifestos for the European Parliament elections. We discuss the impact of the Tsipras candidacy for the post of European Commission in 2014. Both this, and the subsequent election of a Syriza-led government in Greece, were landmark events for the EL. The retreat of that government in the face of pressure and blackmail by the Troika of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund were experienced by the EL as a bitter shared defeat. The experience of Syriza and the previous disappointments associated with the government participation of a full EL member party in Italy and an observer party in Cyprus suggest distinct limits to the EL’s ability to exert decisive policy influence upon its components – or to help them ‘govern’ in any more radical a fashion than the social democratic rivals of the radical left. Nevertheless, the EL has achieved a considerable degree of policy coherence and has sharpened its critique of the European Union since 2015.

This chapter discusses the British relationship with the Continent through the usage of the term Iron Curtain, both in broader popular discourses and with a particular focus on three travel narratives (by David Shears, Anthony Bailey and Tim Moore) that span almost fifty years of British and European history – from the pre-détente Cold War years to the Brexit era. The narratives reflect the evolution of British views of borders and geopolitical orientations, engaging with the Iron Curtain as the hardest European border to date as well as Britain’s position towards/within Europe. Significantly, the travel narratives represent the Iron Curtain not only as a (changing) material structure, but also as a lasting trope of exclusion and isolation. The analysis is informed by Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space as well as border studies and cultural explorations of nostalgia.

In 1945, when the French scrambled to rebuild their empire shaken by the Second World War, only the Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai appeared to challenge colonial rule in Indochina. Sihanouk and Mohammed V appeared to be the docile ones in Cambodia and Morocco. All of that changed within a decade as Bao Dai threw in his lot with the French, while Sihanouk and Mohammed V led independence crusades against their colonial kingmakers. This chapter uses a comparative framework to explain why two colonially crowned monarchs in the French empire – Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia and Mohammed V in Morocco – survived decolonisation to become the fathers of independent nations while Bao Dai in Vietnam did not. Four main factors help explain these two different outcomes: the nature of French colonial monarchy in each protectorate; the specific local, national and international circumstances; the individual personalities of each sovereign; and the strategies they employed.

This chapter is devoted to two films directed by two of the most prestigious figures in the history of Hollywood comedy: Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be became part of the canon as one of the most brilliant comedies in the history of Hollywood in so far as its romantic comedy elements remained invisible. Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid was almost universally rejected because its satire was too base, too obscene, too vulgar, or because its satirical view of love, sex and marriage was too hard to take. The chapter argues that the study of the two films from the point of view of romantic comedy would help to change dominant views of what the genre has been or should be. It is devoted to cases of texts in which romantic comedy interacts with other comic subgenres, such as marriage comedy, satire, and comedian comedy.

The 1950s proved to be a difficult decade for Joseph Losey, a period marked by prolonged exile, the ever-lengthening reach of the blacklist and the constant fear of betrayal. This chapter discusses Losey's three films during his period of exile in the 1950s. While it is clear that the films of this period represent a scattered potpourri of projects undertaken by a director simply trying to survive, both economically and artistically, it would be a mistake to dismiss them as anomalous or peripheral to the central themes and narrative continuities of Losey's seemingly more mainstream, 'signature' productions. The Sleeping Tiger, The Intimate Stranger and A Man on the Beach mark the beginning of a certain stylistic excess, as a means both to explore and mitigate the realities of historical rupture and to draw a concrete analogy between exile and the cultural estrangement of class and gender division.