In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pierre Boulez collaborated as a commentator and conductor on a series of challenging and distinctive BBC Television programmes about twentieth-century music. This chapter discusses the range of Boulez’s appearances on British television but focuses principally on this group of visually innovative broadcasts that combine musical analysis and performance to illuminate the creative processes of composers including Debussy, Berg, Schoenberg and Webern. Boulez’s own compositions, including ‘Improvisation II sur Mallarmé’ and Le Marteau sans maître, are also imaginatively visualised, with highly distinctive camerawork and cutting-edge graphics. Created initially for the television studio and later as individual film documentaries, these broadcasts often exploit the full potential of the medium of the time. Little seen since their initial transmission, these programmes remain provocative creative resources for all those engaged with combining music and moving images.

Since the 1960s, Sean O’Casey’s own life has repeatedly been a source of fascination for dramatists, and there have been a number of dramatic reconstructions of his life, often based on his own autobiographical writings. The best-known of these dramatisations was the 1965 MGM film, Young Cassidy, directed by John Ford and Jack Cardiff. This chapter examines this Hollywood version of O’Casey’s life and discusses a number of alternative biographical dramatisations. These dramatisations include the popular ABC television series Young Indiana Jones in 1992; Hal Prince’s 1992 play about O’Casey’s life, Grandchild of Kings; and Colm Tóibín’s 2004 play Beauty in a Broken Place (2004).

Literature is the space in which the inadmissible – including the otherwise largely unacceptable or unspeakable question of suicide – can be addressed. Focusing on the prominence of representations of suicide in modernist literature, this chapter addresses the question in the work of Woolf, Joyce, and Beckett. It argues that in Samuel Beckett’s major works, suicide appears prominently, and yet in the margins, while the works that thematise suicide are relatively minor in the Beckett canon. By distancing the act from the affective intensity with which it is usually associated, Beckett’s prolific references to suicide present the act as both unexceptional and lacking in pathos. This view of suicide can be aligned with the late-nineteenth-century views of the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, who considers suicide, ‘just a necessary incident from time to time’ in the course of the subject’s evolutions.

Few historical events have been more often depicted in film than the Holocaust. This started in the 1940s and continues to the present day. Many of the representational challenges and conundrums found in other arts are present in film as well, though if anything in more acute form. Film is arguably the most mimetic of all the arts, which makes the risk of prurience, voyeurism, or sadistic (or masochistic) pleasure in watching artificial depictions of the suffering of others all the graver. This chapter situates the history of Holocaust films between the poles of melodramatic realism embodied in the American television miniseries Holocaust and the epic documentary film Shoah. These represent conventional realism, on the one hand, and a rigorous and austere refusal to represent the past at except through images of the present, on the other. As the chapter shows, a myriad of other films situate themselves either at one pole or the other, or between the two.

This chapter considers Percy Shelley’s multifaceted depictions in modern popular culture as indicative of his ever-evolving reception in mainstream popular culture: he is simultaneously a rebel and an aesthete, a revolutionary and a fop, an ultra-canonical poet and a countercultural icon. Appearances of Shelley’s works – and depictions of the poet himself – in such popular media as television, film, comic books, graphic novels, contemporary fiction, pop music, and even international events like the Olympic closing ceremonies speak both to Shelley’s continued cultural relevance and to the variety of ways in which that relevance has evolved in the two centuries since his lifetime.

Cinema has a long tradition of exploiting the notion of the double. This is because of the cinematic resources that are available to convincingly portray, visually, a doppelgänger. Alfred Hitchcock was the master of this form. In several films including Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, and Psycho, Hitchcock established himself as the master of horror and exploited several different manifestations of the double. Other films dealing with the double, including The Matrix, Solaris, and Avatar, are also discussed.

Chapter 7 is focused on videos and animations. These methods are particularly suitable to work with adolescents and are also cost effective. Participatory videography can be a powerful tool to amplify the voices of adolescents to enable significant change in their lives. Specific ethical considerations are included as video may expose adolescent identity.

“Eusynoptos” takes its title from the Aristotelian notion of εὐσύνοπτος: “easily taken in at a glance.” In the Politics, Aristotle maintains that the size of a city is strictly delimited by the number of citizens that can be visually comprehended at a glance. But what if a machine were to augment the sensory capacities of humans? Could a political entity then be expanded beyond its natural limits? Confronting these questions in his film theory, Walter Benjamin modernizes eusynoptos by showing how the movie camera records large masses of individuals in a manner impossible for the naked eye. Informed by Benjamin’s idiosyncratic Marxism, the coda examines the reception of Nazi propaganda films in the United States in order to develop a critical theory of collective spectatorship that promotes a rational politics, thereby pressing back on an irrationalist tradition in aesthetics leading from Schelling and Schopenhauer through Nietzsche to fascism.

The usual view of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose is that it is a matter of writing fast without reflection, and the story of Kerouac drafting On the Road in April 1951 by typing/composing the whole novel onto a roll of paper in a three-week marathon presumably legitimizes this view. However, this chapter argues that we should understand Spontaneous Prose as a reinvention of textuality rather than simply a matter of writing fast and without reflection, which in turn allows us to understand Kerouac’s responsiveness to modern media (film and analogue recording in particular) to the paradigm of conventional print textuality, bringing into view his development of what might be termed “post-print textuality” in even his seemingly more conventionally written novels. Ultimately, this chapter shows that Kerouac’s experiments with textuality rewrote the standards by which “good literature” in the postwar era was measured.

After the publication of Eduardo Gutiérrez’s Juan Moreira (1879), its successful theatricaladaptation, and the numerous narratives about rebellious gauchos that followed, the set ofpractices and discourses that create a sense of belonging around the figure of the gaucho hascome to be known under the umbrella term of criollismo. Although recent research has shownthat criollismo did not disappear in the early twentieth century but converted to other nonliterary media, no approach considers the relationship between criollismo and cinema in thelong term and on a global level. In doing just this, this chapter focuses on the crossingbetween criollismo and cinema by looking at the images of the nation that gaucho-themed filmsbring into play. It explores how a repertoire of themes, characters, arguments, and landscapesdisseminated by criollista literature was adapted to film, projected globally in Hollywood movies, and then reappropriated by the local culture. Finally, it argues that this feedbackbetween criollista literature and film was fruitful until the late 1970s, when – after reaching a high level of violence – the political uses of criollismo became less massive and more sporadic.

Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s famed Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing (1929), indexes the relevance of interracial passing today. We explore Hall’s film to explain the contemporary appeal of Larsen’s narrative. Larsen’s Passing licenses interpretive possibilities that transcend its immediate moment, even as it seeks to criticize specific historical realities of modern intersectional identity. Hall’s neo-passing narrative of 1920s Black femininity employs cinema to highlight the enduring immobility of the color line and the erotic and social risk of crossing it.

We assess Hall’s adaptation of the two-protagonist structure as it personalizes Larsen’s depiction of racial liminality; consider Hall’s use of cinematography to adapt Larsen’s rhetorical sleight of hand regarding US racial discourses; and discuss the homoerotics of passing in both works. We then contemplate Hall’s casting choices. The final section takes up the conclusion of the two works. Hall resolves some of Larsen’s famous ambiguity, but poignantly showcases the essential instability of the gendered, racialized body in US literature and culture across a century.

The chapter considers gesture studies in relation to corpus linguistic work. The focus is on the Multimedia Russian Corpus (MURCO), part of the Russian National Corpus. The chapter includes a brief biography of the creator of this corpus, Elena Grishina. The compilation of the corpus out of a set of Russian classic feature films and recorded lectures is described as well as the methods of annotating it in detail. The gesture coding is not limited to manual/hand gestures, but also includes head gestures and use of eye gaze. The chapter considers the findings from the corpus, and reported in Grishina’s posthumously published volume on Russian gestures from a linguistic point of view. The categories include pointing gestures, representational gestures, auxiliary (discourse-structuring) gestures, and several cross-cutting categories, including gestures in relation to pragmatics and to grammatical categories, like verbal aspect. Additional consideration is given to other video corpora in English (and other languages) which are being used for gesture research, namely the UCLA NewsScape library being managed by the Red Hen Lab and the Television Archive.