This chapter takes Bruno's theoretical metonym as a starting point for examining Icíar Bollain's deceptively transparent film narratives. Like the fictional 'Carte du Pays de Tendre', Bollaín's mises-en-scène map her characters' movement through contemporary Spain with narratives that give precedence to geographical and emotional journeys: Hola ¿estás sola? follows two young women's attempt to find work on the south coast and in Madrid; Flores de otro mundo explores female migration; and Te doy mis ojos, domestic abuse. The titles of these films play an integral part in this 'mapping', or rather, this remapping of women: each of them is associated with a gendered cliché that is subverted by Bollaín's co-scripted, open-ended narratives. It is the gift for social documentation, entertainment, collaborative transparency and the engaging of affect that suggests Madeleine de Scudéry's haptic map as a metonym for the way that Bollaín's first three films 're-map' turn-of-the-millennium female subjectivity.

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.