Functional differentiation is introduced as a defining characteristic of modern society and one that is rarely discussed by critical theorists. The result is that there are glaring sociological and explanatory deficits in that literature. Systems theory is very useful for understanding sociological realities such as functional differentiation. However, systems-theoretical orthodoxy often assumes that social systems have to be coded in reductively binary terms such as legal/illegal. Orthodox approaches often suggest that social-systemic coding happens in a-historical and automatic ways. This book therefore adopts a significantly modified version of systems theory. The book also draws on other sources, such as Gramsci and constitutional theory. The version of critical theory that emerges on this basis is clearly distinct from first- and second-generation Frankfurt School critical theory. It is also markedly distinct from a number of other theoretical currents that see themselves as offering critical theories of society following in the steps of the Frankfurt School.

This Sporting Life is the first feature film of Lindsay Anderson. Anderson had been impressed by David Storey's novel This Sporting Life and wanted to direct the film himself. This chapter considers the claims to authorship and production of This Sporting Life. Storey adapted his own deeply personal novel and the resultant film script was the first collaboration between Storey and Anderson.

More than any of the films of the cinéma du look, La Lune dans le caniveau exemplifies the characteristics Bassan enumerates: a mise en scène which privileges exuberance, light, movement, especially the curves and curls of the camera, and an emphasis on sensation. This chapter explores the language and the way it generates a particular type of nostalgia unanchored in the real, unlike, say, heritage cinema. It locates the film's visual style and its narrative concerns in a genre which reviewers have on the whole not mentioned in relation to La Lune dans le caniveau. The chapter explains why the main interest of the film beyond its re-articulation of melodrama is the way in which Depardieu-as-star is reconfigured in the film, his iconicity questioned: he is de-iconised and re-iconised by the film in a gesture towards an impossible authenticity.

This chapter is the first modern edition of a fragment from an early modern printed verse miscellany, complete with notes and an introduction discussing the text, presumed authors, printing details, the context of printed verse miscellanies and the miscellany’s reception. Published as an octavo in 1603, The Muses Garland is part of the English interest in printed poetic miscellanies ushered in by Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), and a successor to such late Elizabethan verse collections as The Phoenix Nest, Englands Helicon or A Poetical Rhapsody, miscellanies often addressed to and composed of pieces by courtiers and aristocrats that describe poetry as a medium that dignifies poets. Possibly compiled by Munday, Davison or Breton, or, perhaps even more tentatively, Markham, Pricket or Barnfield, the miscellany includes two poems by Spenser, and ascribes the authorship of two poems to ‘S.P.S.’ (possibly two previously unknown poems by Sir Philip Sidney). The political and poetic prestige of The Muses Garland also derives from its emphasis on the figure of the Earl of Essex, partaking in a trend of making him speak posthumously in the years after his death.

Lev Kuleshov (and Hitchcock) recognised what for them was the essence of cinema: the presence of desire and its evocation in the image. Kuleshov's montage experiments demonstrated the fictive nature not of the image but, in any succession of them, the joins. Kuleshov particularly designed film experiments that divorced the fragment from a real continuous space beyond it (off -screen). He insisted instead on the artifice (the fiction) of the join between shot-fragments. In American films, which inspired Kuleshov, things were different. In these films, an actor and a bowl of soup or a revolver were in the same real space and time as they would be in the theatre. In American film practices, the joins between shots were motivated by the narrative, that is, the succession of shots was dictated by a logic of events and of character which the film at once constructed and followed.

The release of Assassins in France in 1997 was to prove a defining moment in Mathieu Kassovitz's directorial career. The film's intensely polemical stance, its more experimental approach, combined with a wholly negative worldview and graphic depiction of violence, effected, for the first time, a conscious distancing by Kassovitz from his popular audience. The degree of negative and often highly personal criticism directed at Assassins, following on from the tense and pressured conditions under which the film had been completed in time for the Cannes festival, led Kassovitz to the verge of depression and nervous exhaustion. The version of Les Rivières pourpres adapted for the screen by Kassovitz and Grangé focuses squarely on the parallel investigations of two police detectives. The policier has, moreover, always formed the natural point of interface between French and American cinema.

Flora Gomes's four feature films - Mortu nega; Udju azul di Yonta; Po di sangui; and Nha fala - trace, in chronological sequence, different aspects of the last 30 years of Guinea-Bissau's history, from the height of the anticolonial struggle to the present day. This chapter focuses on the relationship between the ideas and texts of Amilcar Cabral and Gomes. It offers another revisiting of the overworked, and in certain respects unworkable, pairing of tradition and modernity, but another of the lessons of Cabral, particularly at the end, is that certain repetitions are essential, indeed, inescapable. In the search for authenticity, the image of the 'return to the source' is fundamental, and it is this image which the chapter examines: in relation to film studies, via the work of Manthia Diawara; in relation to political struggle, via Cabral; and in relation to both, via the films of Gomes.

Part eight offers three chapters of advice for good citizenship: citizens ought to be thoughtful and mature in making decisions; they ought to be virtuous rather than slaves to vice; and they ought to have the greatest zeal for the commonwealth.

Joesph Losey's involvement in Secret Ceremony, Boom! and Figures in a Landscape was a case of blatant economic necessity. The films are perched precariously between these Puritan and Marxist extremes. At their best - Secret Ceremony - Losey was able to foreground moral questions in light of their cultural constructs, producing a didactic distance in which basic instincts such as incest can be simultaneously felt and critically examined through both Freudian and Marxian frameworks. At their worst - Boom! - Losey tends to confine his protagonists within hermetically sealed environments so that serious ontological issues of life, death and sex are divorced from all social and political (i.e. class) relevance. The films can be usefully grouped together because of their stylistic and thematic similarities. In each case, Losey supplements his trademark baroque mannerisms with an overt, fable-like narrative structure, all the better to polarize his latent Manichaeism.

This chapter examines how the Downing Street Declaration was created and how the Irish sought to develop the peace process. In particular, it looks at the complication of text and principles as well as conceptual areas and strategy.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book seeks to argue for Mathieu Kassovitz's importance in contemporary French cinema as a filmmaker whose work has engaged with key shifts in French cinema since the early 1990s, such as: new realism, the banlieue film and the 'post-look' spectacular genre film. It establishes Kassovitz as a director who consistently occupies the position of a 'popular' filmmaker, and whose films reflect the increasing prominence of youth at the heart of contemporary popular French culture. In a national cinema that has made strategic use of the auteur's cultural cachet in order to mark its difference from Hollywood, Kassovitz is seen by many to side more closely with the American 'invaders' than the defenders of French cultural exception.

Part eleven presents an annalistic narrative of Genoese history from its origins to 1133, divided into nineteen chapters. Each chapter describes a single bishop of Genoa and narrates city and world events during his tenure.