The participation of Latin American women in cinema is an invisible, hidden and incomplete history, which needs to be written, disseminated and linked to current film practices. This chapter revises the trajectories and cinematic practices of Latin American women in two countries with a longstanding film industry, namely Brazil and Mexico, with a particular emphasis on paradigmatic feature films produced by these female directors from the 1930s to the 1980s. Following in the steps of the vigorous and visionary enterprise of the pioneers, women filmmakers rose above social restrictions and maintained an active presence within the industry. Matilde Landeta's heroines, commit gender transgression, as they are powerful and independent women who are recognised for their moral strength and gender awareness. The chapter also discusses the transitional period in the 1950s and 1960s in which a revolutionary project emerged, known as the New Latin American Cinema.

The early Spenser, once he decided not to take holy orders, fully subscribed to the early modern chivalric code as it was practiSed by Sir Henry and Sir Philip Sidney. Little has previously been said about Sir Henry Sidney, but Brink shows that he and Lady Mary were likely to have been in London at Baynard’s Castle or Leicester House while Sir Henry attended Privy Council meetings. Also, it remained a possibility that he would again be sent to Ireland with Philip Sidney as his deputy until February 1600. The literary evidence of contact between Spenser and the Sidneys consists principally of commendatory poems, but in this chapter Brink shows that Lodowick Bryskett, a close friend of Spenser’s in Ireland, was resident in London from 1579 to 1581. Earlier Bryskett accompanied Philip Sidney on his Grand Tour, and, as Sir Henry’s protégé, held the position of Clerk of the Council in Ireland. Bryskett, thus, was a connecting link for Spenser, the Sidneys, and Ireland.

This chapter charts antecedents for Brexit in British history. Key to the discussion is a recurring nativist reaction to European engagements. A strategic bias towards the periphery resulted. In contrast, the United Kingdom’s occasional attempts to be a core continental power often foundered. Purist notions of insular sovereignty and ‘victory’ in two world wars hampered a precise appreciation of Britain’s independent leverage. These dilemmas intensified amidst integrationist currents in Europe after circa 1950, making previous approaches obsolete. Although a workable balance was constructed after the UK’s adhesion to the European Community in 1973, from the mid-1990s, an intra-Tory civil war tipped antithetical visions of British interests against each other, culminating in the 2016 referendum. The struggle over Brexit is profoundly cultural, raising issues beyond definitive resolution.

The work of Dounia Bouzar and her engagement in the political debates about Muslims in France raises significant questions about the relationship between Islam, secularism and feminism. Bouzar could be described as a Muslim feminist, in that her work has consistently been concerned with what she calls ‘la condition féminine’, including questions such as the headscarf, women’s equality in the private and public spheres and, more recently, the indoctrination of young Muslim women by Islamist groups. This chapter will focus on Bouzar’s recent writings from a feminist perspective, taking into account the following themes in particular: disruptive discourses in the public arena, the notion of la femme-alibi (token woman), the experiences of women who intervene in the public arena and, finally, the relationship between feminism and anti-racism.

In the 1990s, Jean-Luc Godard's work was marked by a distinct turn towards the past, by a new concern for history. The hypothesis of the end of history has been most famously asserted in recent times by Francis Fukuyama. Godard's Allemagne neuf zéro can be seen as a response to the kind of triumphalism surrounding the reunification of Berlin and the victory of western capitalist democracy. JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre presents an image of Godard at a moment in time, engaging in such typical activities as working on films and walking by the lake. In Hélas pour moi, Godard aims to give his story a completely different status to the kind of information that is easily assimilated but quickly forgotten in the contemporary sphere of audiovisual media.

This chapter traces the institutional and legal context in which transnational parties (TNPs) first emerged and developed. We show that TNP development expanded after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty but remained rudimentary until the 2000s. We aim to explain why the EL, founded in 2004, was a relative latecomer to the field of TNPs and we consider debates between sceptics, idealists and realists as to the potential of TNPs to develop into fully-fledged pan-European political parties. We examine the different functions of TNPs – co-ordination and information exchange, socialisation, legitimacy, policy-making – and discuss where we think the EL has developed to date and where it has stalled. We conclude with some remarks concerning the future of TNPs.

The nature and strength of the ties of English nationhood has been the subject of much scholarly discussion recently, particularly following Krishan Kumar's The Making of English Identity. This chapter examines the work of two journalists and writers who came to prominence in the Edwardian years: Arthur Mee and G. K. Chesterton. In his Short History of England of 1917, Chesterton engaged fiercely with Protestant and Whig narratives of English history. Chesterton and Mee regarded English religion and patriotism as a seamless whole. This was grounded in three beliefs. First belief was in the existence of a distinctively English union forged by a common Christian faith. Second was in the virtue of the English people against their elites. Finally, the third was in place as the focus of a wider attachment to England. Mee hitched Liberalism firmly to religious faith, the kind of faith that he believed was uniquely English.

Those who admired Michael Winterbottom's first cinema feature, Butterfly Kiss or the telemovie Go Now would not have been likely to expect him next to turn his interests and talents to adapting Thomas Hardy's late Victorian tragic novel, Jude the Obscure. The film moves inexorably, as the novel does, towards its bleak denouement, stopping short of the death of Jude with which Hardy concludes his agonising fable of lives crushed by a heartless society as well as by a malign fate. Winterbottom also adapted Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge to make The Claim, which fits easily into one of the dominant Western paradigms. If Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy diverges wildly from the first-person chronicle that was the characteristic genre and mode of the eighteenth-century English novel, Winterbottom's A Cock and Bull Story plays with several recognisable film genres, its own most obvious genre is that of the film-about-filmmaking.

In José Luis Garci's Ninette the political and social realities of the Franco era are reduced to a set of comic markers. Set in Paris in 1959, among a family of Republican exiles, the film wears its history lightly, using exile and censorship as the driving mechanisms of a frothy comedy of frustrated sexual desire. This chapter shows Garci's project is multiply nostalgic, first, in its reinvestigation of the critical potential of Spanish genre film in the late Franco era; second, in its harnessing of the visual and performative codes of classic theatre and cinema; and third, in its revisiting of the city of Paris as a signifier of political freedom, sexual identity and modern cosmopolitanism, as well as cinematic escapism. The collapsing of the character of Ninette and the city of Paris into a single spectacle is at the heart of the film's reworking by Garci.

Robert Bresson had originally intended to shoot Lancelot du lac immediately after Journal. The 1996 issue of Positif largely devoted to Bresson contains details of an extraordinary correspondence between Bresson and George Cukor, who in a classic case of unlike poles attracting expressed his admiration for Journal and offered help in getting the film distributed, as it eventually was, in the United States. More than ten years later, in 1964, Bresson wrote to Cukor saying that he would like to film Lancelot in English, with Natalie Wood and Burt Lancaster who seemed to him the very incarnation of the hero. Lancelot was eventually made with finance from, among others, the state-owned broadcasting company ORTF, the actor-director Jean Yanne and the maverick producer Jean-Pierre Rassam.

This chapter discusses the production and reception of the film Is That All There Is? This is Lindsay Anderson's final film, an on-screen essay and a mock-documentary self-portrait, which was commissioned for television by BBC Scotland.

Luis Bunuel is one of the major auteurs of cinema. Film theatres and television channels around the world devote seasons to his films, the presses roll with analyses of his work and references to his 'mastery' are routine. His technical achievement is the bedrock on which his ideas and vision depend for their impact. This chapter focuses on a technical analysis of his last film, Cet obscur objet du désir/That Obscure Object of Desire, in order to prove that point. The transparency of Bunuel's filming style is crucial in creating an effect of realism to anchor the subversive quality of his idiosyncratic narrative, and his standard way with establishing shots precisely demonstrates this point. The chapter also discusses Bunuel's mastery over other techniques such as montage, narrative structure, and metadiegetic communication through his choice of metaphorical objects.

This chapter outlines how dialogue was conducted leading up to the Good Friday Agreement. It highlights the intensity of dialogue, the role of American influence and how pressures were managed as to create expectations about power-sharing and agreement.

This chapter explores the period of the Sunningdale Agreement and how the Irish Government sought to influence Sunningdale and deal with its aftermath in the wake of unionist intransigence.