bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Conclusion: James Macpherson – Enlightenment Historian and Imperial Gael
Authors: MacPherson Mairi , MacPherson Jim
Published: September 2023

This chapter concludes the book, situating James Macpherson as an imperial Gael who used the tools and techniques of Enlightenment history writing to promote the place of the Highlands withing the British imperial state.
Conscripts and Reservists, Privatisation and Redemption
Authors: Sharpe Mani
Published: September 2023

Drawing from theories of privatisation elaborated by scholars such as Kristin Ross and Henri Lefebvre, this chapter is driven by three aims. Firstly, it shows how Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine/Goodbye Philippine (1963) and Robert Enrico’s La Belle vie/The Good Life (1964) reflect the culture of privatisation that arose during the decolonisation of Algeria. A second aim is to illustrate how both films revolve around an imaginary of ‘redemptive hygiene’, to quote Ross, enfolding their protagonists in a privatised bubble, composed of household routine, new consumerism, and fundamentally innocent domestic pleasures. A final aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how both narratives hinge upon a recurring figure in late-colonial French cinema, and one that will reappear in the following chapters: the wounded yet exonerated soldier-victim.
The War as Spoken by Algerians and the Left
Authors: Sharpe Mani
Published: September 2023

Drawing from studies of the voice and theories of documentary, this chapter is split into four parts. Part one is concerned with how Jacques Panijel weaponises the voices of the survivor-witnesses that feature in his documentary, Octobre à Paris/October in Paris (1962), chronicling the after-effects of a state-orchestrated massacre known as ‘October 17’, and assembling a poignant pacifist plea against colonial violence. Part two shifts focus, examining the many silences that linger just beneath the soundtrack of Octobre à Paris, before edging into various discussions about leftist suffering and ‘the textual voice of the Left’, to reformulate the vocabulary of Bill Nichols. Part three edges the debate towards J’ai 8 ans/I Am 8 Years Old (1961), by Yann Le Masson, Olga Baïdar-Poliakoff, and René Vautier, interrogating the dynamics of what I will call, following Michel Chion, ‘acousmatic testimony’, before the fourth part concludes with some conjectural thoughts about ‘the textual voice’ of Le Masson’s documentary. Both documentaries, I will argue, function in an ideologically ambivalent manner, on the one hand, promoting peace in Algeria (and Paris) through the medium of audio-visual interviews, and, on the other hand, redeeming the political identity of the Left after it had been accused of complicity in the perpetration of colonial atrocities.
Conclusion
Authors: Sharpe Mani
Published: September 2023

The conclusion to this book provides a summary of each of the chapters, particularly in relation to the concept of ‘redemptive pacifism’. It ends with some thoughts on the availability of the films in question, and the possibility of future research on the subject.
Comics, Comics Everywhere at Mid-century
Authors: Williams Paul
Published: September 2023

Chapter 2 discusses the high sales of comic books in the 1940s and early 1950s, a boom that started with superhero comics and would go on to include crime and romance comics. In the mid-1950s, publishers responded to the pressure exerted by the anti-comics movement and established a regulatory body to censor America’s comic books (crime and horror comics were especially vilified). Comic book sales in the second half of the 1950s went into decline, though industry self-censorship was not the sole reason: market saturation and competition from other media were also factors. But before this, in 1950, St John Publications and Fawcett Publications released a small number of crime comics as paperback books. Elsewhere in the comics world, newspaper strips might be reprinted in narrative chunks in book form, such as Walt Kelly’s strip featuring the character Pogo the Possum: Kelly’s satire of the 1952 presidential election was captured in the book I Go Pogo. Most book-length comics of the period came from artists who otherwise produced work for advertising agencies, animation studios, magazines, and publishing houses. These books were usually released by New York-based trade presses and attacked the glamorisation of war.
In Search of Adult Comics Readers: 1961–72
Authors: Williams Paul
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 examines how, from 1961 onwards, the editor and writer Stan Lee and artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko forged a new type of superhero comic at the company Marvel. These comics were characterised by continuous narratives and fractious, self-questioning heroes. Journalists commented on Marvel’s popularity with college students and the supposed realism of their comics; by the 1970s, both Marvel and DC were publishing stories addressing racism, environmentalism, and illegal drug use, known as the ‘relevance’ movement. Sales of DC’s comic Batman benefited from the Batman television series launched in 1966, though – like the Pop Art that visually quoted from comics – there was a mixed response from comics artists and fans. The term ‘graphic novel’ was coined in 1964 by Richard Kyle, which spurred other comics fans to debate this concept further; comics creators followed these discussions and published their own graphic novels. Furthermore, this period saw the emergence of underground comix, which had close ties to the counterculture; long-form comics were produced by underground comix creators, both in periodical and book form.
The Psychology of War: Gothic and the Redirection of the Uncanny
Authors: Smith Andrew
Published: September 2023

This chapter reads Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ as an account of World War One that is centred on anxieties about the return of the dead into the home. A number of short stories are also explored, many of which were published in The Strand during the war. Some of these tales make explicit use of the ghost story as way of containing trauma by emphasising the use of familiar ghost-story plots. Other tales are not specifically tales about ghosts per se, but explore how the shell-shocked soldier has become ghost-like through an apparent loss of identity. Such tales indicate that the return home is a return to a safe domestic space in which a soldier is fictively brought back to life and reincorporated into the family. These tales are shaped by narrative arcs and pervasive mind-sets which are indebted to the Gothic, although they are not obviously Gothic tales in themselves. However, their tacit engagement with that key Gothic category, the uncanny, influences how the missing are portrayed. How to bring the dead back to life provides an alternative language of spectrality to that encountered in formal ghost stories and, ultimately, dissipates the emotional anxieties associated with the uncanny.
Spiritualism, War and the Modernist Gothic
Authors: Smith Andrew
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that it is the testimony of the dead soldier that plays an important role in developing the fragmented nature of the Modernist aesthetic. In the Modernist context, how to write about ghosts is closely tied to how to write about the war. For the Modernist, such as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and David Jones, the ghost poses a problem for interpretation just as the war poses a challenge to conventional narrative form. This chapter examines how these issues of writing are linked to how ghosts (or, technically, spirits) attempt to communicate with the living in spiritualist publications. Early articles on the war in The Occult Review focused on the horoscopes of the chief protagonists and the esoteric writings of figures such as Nostradamus. Once the heavy casualties began to mount, the journal shifted its emphasis to the figure of the ghostly combatant who patriotically continues the fight. The Occult Review came to be as much interested in how messages are communicated as they were in their content, and this chapter explores various examples, including novels, supposedly dictated by dead soldiers and Oliver Lodge’s account of communicating with his dead officer son in Raymond (1916).
Genres, cycles and series
Authors: Laine Kimmo , Laine Kimmo
Published: September 2023

With a relatively limited output, it may not make sense to speak of genuinely Finnish film genres, but indigenous interpretations of such transnational genres as crime films, musicals, screwball comedies or melodramas were common. In general, Finnish studio cinema did not rely heavily on stable genres, but rather invested in more limited and short-lived groupings of films: cycles, sequels and series. This chapter explores the strategies employed by Finnish film studios to plan their output, be it in the long run (A, B and C-level films or genres), in the short run (sequels) or somewhere in between (cycles or series). Special attention is payed to lumberjack and vagabond films, the cycles of historical drama, problem film and ‘schlager film’ and three long-lasting series: Family Suominen (1941–59), Pekka Puupää (1953–60) and Inspector Palmu (1960-9).
Epilogue
Authors: Laine Kimmo , Laine Kimmo
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the causes and effects of the breakdown of the Finnish studio system during the 1950s and the 1960s. The actual structural crisis is usually dated to the late 1950s, with a more specific turning point in 1957–8, when the majors started laying off their staff and reducing their feature film production. Discussions about the crisis of domestic films had, however, been going on for nearly a decade. The chapter closes with a discussion of the influence the studio production mode has had on current Finnish cinema.
Grand and Not-So-Grand Inquisitors of the Reagan Age
Authors: McDonough Christopher M.
Published: September 2023

The four productions considered in this chapter--Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal (1989), Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Jules Dassin’s He Who Must Die (Celui Qui Doit Mourir) (1957), and Paul Bryers’ teledrama for Britain’s Channel 4, Incident in Judea (1991)—all use the story of the Passion and of Pontius Pilate as a way to critique power. Arcand’s gentle comedy, set in late 1980’s Quebec, features a Passion play-within-a-Passion play with two versions of Pilate, one played by the director himself. In addition, a French language film, Dassin’s spare black-and-white movie from the 1950s is drawn from the work of the excommunicated Greek author, Nikos Kazantzakis. Likewise taken from Kazantzakis is Scorsese’s big-screen production, featuring one of the 80’s biggest rockstars, David Bowie, as a memorable Pilate. Incident in Judea, drawn from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, focuses on the portion of the text that deals with Pilate and a misunderstood Jesus. Each of these films, inspired by Dostoevksy’s story of the Grand Inquisitor, ask whether Christ, were he to reappear today, would be recognised by society or Church leaders or instead subjected to the same persecution he suffered 2000 years ago?
‘We at War’: Pilate for the New Millennium
Authors: McDonough Christopher M.
Published: September 2023

After recounting the personal story of seeing Mel Gibson’s controversial but compelling The Passion of the Christ in a crowded theatre shortly after its premiere in 2004, the author reflects upon the performance of the gruff Bulgarian actor, Hristo Shopov, as Pontius Pilate. Set against his more compassionate wife played by Claudia Gerini, this Pilate speaks in Latin and Aramaic, but he seems motivated by twenty-first century concerns for power and position. Shopov will appear again as Pilate in the less compelling Italian production La Inchiesta (The Final Inquiry) from 2006. Several versions of the Passion narrative that have Pilate at their centre are made a decade later: the best of these is Risen, with Joseph Fiennes as a centurion-turned detective Clavius ordered to find Christ’s body by Peter Firth’s Pilate. Two productions by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey likewise appear in 2016. The remake of Ben-Hur features Pilous Asbaek as Pilate, while the NBC miniseries, A.D. The Bible Continues stars Vince Regan in the part. Each of these prefects is notable for his over-the-top villainy, while the vehicles as a whole reflect the increasingly militarised world that dawned after 9/11.
Subjects in the chains of debt
Authors: O'Shaughnessy Martin
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks first at how films by Laurent Cantet, the Dardenne brothers, and Mia Hansen-Løve show entrepreneurial neoliberal subjects reined in by debt, exposed to a generalised surveillance, including from loved ones, and with their futures foreclosed. Hansen-Løve’s Le Père de mes enfants is discussed more specifically to explore how the reverse shot of every cinema shot has become an indebted image and how faith in cinema can nonetheless be retained. The chapter places the films in dialogue with Maurizio Lazzarato’s account of debt and its spatio-temporal reach. It also draws on Laurent Berlant’s concepts of cruel optimism and impasse to engage with the films at the level of gesture and affect. Turning to more conventional films produced after 2008, it suggests they show cinematic narrative confronted with its own impasse, and resorting to its own cruel optimism, typically associated with children, to maintain the promise of the future.
From British Working-Class Gangsters to Hollywood Heroes: The Italian Job and Get Carter
Authors: Rasmus Agnieszka
Published: September 2023

This chapter investigates the most common approach to updating working-class British masculinity in Hollywood remakes. First of all, it focuses on Michael Caine’s gangster persona and how it develops across The Italian Job and Get Carter from the gangster light to the gangster heavy mode. Then, it shows how Caine’s two iconic roles are revisited by Hollywood actors, Mark Wahlberg and Sylvester Stallone respectively. It examines the consequences of casting decisions that reshape the remakes, whose predominant function is to serve as star vehicles for their Hollywood leading men. To this effect, the genre is tweaked to accommodate the requirements of contemporary Hollywood male stardom. Such film remakes tend to endorse heteronormative scripts and delegate any subversive elements present in the originals to the background. The chapter compares heist and caper subcategories within the gangster genre, locates both originals and remakes within larger film cycles, compares British and Hollywood stardom and masculinity and traces the growing interest in iconic British screen gangsters from the 1960s and 70s to the emergence of Lad culture and the renewed pride in British culture during Cool Britannia.
Beginnings Without Ends
Authors: van de Sande Mathijs
Published: September 2023

Prefiguration is often defined as an attempt to act in accordance (or even in full consistency) with one’s ultimate ends. But many contemporary protest movements seem to engage with prefigurative politics and experimentation, in order to find out in practice what a radical alternative might look like. How can one act consistently with one’s ends if one does not quite know what these ends will pertain to? We thus need to rethink the relation between means and ends in prefigurative politics. This chapter compares various contemporary, open-ended theories of prefigurative politics: the idea of prefiguration as a rehearsal, in which one experimentally acts ‘as if’ the future is already realised in the present; a post-anarchist conception of prefiguration that serves not one defined end but a plurality of (individually-held) ends or teloi; and finally an Arendtian concept of prefiguration that is radically open-ended. The chapter argues why and how Arendt’s anti-instrumentalist political theory may help us to reimagine prefigurative democracy as a beginning without ends – and, moreover, why this understanding of prefiguration comes closest to the experiences of contemporary protest movements and their experimental political practices.
Embodiment: Prefiguration and Synecdochal Representation
Authors: van de Sande Mathijs
Published: September 2023

Prefigurative protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the 15-M movement are often considered to have rejected any kind of political representation. But at the same time, these movements clearly represent something larger or other than themselves – how else could Occupy Wall Street claim to stand for ‘the 99%’? This chapter seeks to articulate a particular concept of political representation that is compatible with prefigurative democracy and participatory forms of organisation and decision-making. In order to do this, it must first disentangle various concepts of representation that often tend to be confused with each other – such as representation as ‘acting for’ or on behalf of someone on the one hand, and representation as ‘standing for’ something on the other. It is argued that the latter is particularly indispensable in any social movement politics. The chapter then engages with Ernesto Laclau’s constructivist concept of representation. Prefigurative democracy requires a synecdochal form of representation, where one part (e.g. an activist tent camp) symbolically ‘stands for’ a much larger group, agenda or discourse. In fact, this representative relation is prefigurative in its own right, as it helps to constitute its own referent (e.g. ‘the 99%’).
Intermedial Landscapes in the Work of Cao Guimarães
Authors: Butler Alison
Published: September 2023

Cao Guimarães exemplifies the intermedial practice of the contemporary artist filmmaker, moving fluently between media forms and artistic conventions as well as between the institutions of fine art and cinema. This chapter argues that two modes of landscape representation operate intermedially in Guimarães’s work: a painterly/cinematic mode which corresponds to the view from a distance, and a photographic/videographic mode that relates to embodied perception and intimate space. The tension between these two modes is used to articulate fundamental ethical and ecological concerns about the habitability of the world on which human activities have made such an impact. Works examined include: Gambiarras (2000–), Quarta-feira de cinzas/Epilogue (Ash Wednesday/Epilogue, 2006) and O homem das multidões (Man of the Crowd, 2013).
Exploring the Cinematic Imaginary: Carlos Adriano, André Parente and the Precision of the Vague
Authors: Beugnet Martine
Published: September 2023

This chapter ties photography and technology together in an exploration of the ways in which a persistent interest in the fusion of art and machine promotes a deeper understanding of the medium of the moving image as a means of both perception and expression. To that end, the chapter draws on the assumption that film’s immense contribution to the recent development of visuality continues to be born out of the moving image’s paradoxical standing at the intersection between photographic precision and visual uncertainty, as encapsulated in the idea of the vague (meaning both ‘wave’ and ‘vague’). Two works provide the basis for the discussion of intermediality seen in this light: Remanescências (Remainiscences, 1997), a short experimental film by Carlos Adriano; and Figures in a Landscape (2010), a multimedia installation by André Parente.
Possessing Archival Images: Ghosts, Songs and Films in Cartola – música para os olhos (2007) 1
Authors: Elduque Albert
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the music documentary Cartola – música para os olhos (Lírio Ferreira and Hilton Lacerda, 2007), dedicated to the important samba singer and composer Cartola (1908-1980), one of the founders of the samba ‘school’ Estação Primeira de Mangueira. The film is approached from an intermedial perspective that entwines its repurposing of archival images with its use of the lyrics of the Cartola songs as narrative agents. A key concept in this discussion is Ágnes Pethő’s take on ‘metalepsis’, defined by leaps between different narrative levels as produced by intermedial occurrences. The chapter argues that, in proposing unexpected relations between film footage and recorded songs, intermediality acts as a historiographic tool through which these two media are given a ‘new life’.
Gilda de Abreu’s O Ébrio as a Unique Intermedial Project
Authors: Adamatti Margarida Maria
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses the unique case of performer Vicente Celestino and his film-director wife, Gilda de Abreu, who together constituted an intermedial circuit of their own. An intermedial artist par excellence, Celestino was active in radio, revue theatre, cinema, opera and operetta. One of his greatest successes was the song ‘O Ébrio’ (The Drunkard), released on Guanabara Radio in 1935. Over thirty years, he and Abreu adapted ‘O Ébrio’ to different media – radio, record, theatre, cinema and literature – and it also came out in a TV soap opera version. The chapter analyses the film O Ébrio (1946), directed by Abreu, in light of the song’s multimedia transpositions, with special attention to the film’s musical sequences, where the frontiers between actor and character are shattered.
Queering Intermediality in Brazilian Cinema
Authors: Sousa Ramayana Lira de , Brandão Alessandra Soares
Published: September 2023

Relying on the understanding of intermediality as ‘medial transposition’ and ‘medial transformation’ (Rajewsky 2010), this chapter explores ‘in-betweenness’ at a specific moment in Brazilian film history: the surge of erotic films in the 1970s-80s and their intermedial dialogue with the literature from the period, which testifies to the circulation of queer desire between the two media. It focuses in particular on Ariella (John Herbert, 1980), a screen adaptation of Cassandra Rios’s novel Ariella, a paranóica (Ariella, the Paranoid), which constitutes a fascinating example of queer intermedial interaction. As an emerging field of investigation, queer intermediality – or intermedial queerness – allows for an exploration of the politics of gender and desire beyond conventional disciplinarity, and for an embrace of the refractions and distortions enacted by dissensual sexualities within media.
Intermedial Territories: Maps and the Amazonian Moving Image
Authors: Furtado Gustavo Procopio
Published: September 2023

Although Bye bye Brasil (Carlos Diegues, 1980) is a well-funded Embrafilme production and a classic of national cinema and Os Arara (Andrea Tonacci, 1980-2) is an unfinished television series made for the Bandeirantes Network (only two out of the three intended episodes were completed and aired), these contemporaneous films travel the same territory along the Transamazon Highway in order to reflect critically on the issue of national integration and its consequences. They are also works that consciously navigate historic changes in audiovisual media—exploring the relationships between cinema, television and (in the case of Os Arara) video. Their differences are mutually illuminating because they highlight the range of filmic possibilities vis-à-vis the ideal of territorial integration manifested, in both cases, by the incorporation of maps in the mise-en-scène. This chapter argues that, while Bye bye Brazil’ s spatial critique is accompanied by a cinematic version of cartographic integration, Os Arara enacts a refusal of totality by dwelling in the border territories between film, television and video, and also by remaining suspended in a perennial state of incompleteness.
An Intermedial Reading of Glauber Rocha’s Cosmogony 1
Authors: Nagib Lúcia
Published: September 2023

Even though Brazil and national identity have always been the focus of Glauber Rocha’s films, these are also attempts at universalising the national experience into the condition of the entire Earth. This is notably the case in what became known as his ‘trilogia da terra’, or ‘Earth trilogy’, including Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964), Terra em transe (Entranced Earth, 1967) and A idade da Terra (The Age of the Earth, 1981). In all three the reiteration of the term ‘terra’, meaning both ‘Earth’ and ‘land’ in Portuguese, announce their planetary ambition. Focusing on the former two, as they mark the rise and fall of the 1960s revolutionary hopes through radically innovative aesthetics, this chapter analyses cosmogonic intermediality in Rocha’s work according to two totalising and strongly intermedial figures. The first is the motif of the cross which resonates with Eisenstein’s ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ montage principles. The second is trance, which disrupts the finality and symmetry of the cross motif. The aim is to identify and describe the vertiginous synthesis of Brazil’s political and artistic history promoted in Rocha’s work.
Pathologies of Exclusion
Authors: Cole Phillip
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the measures taken by states such as the United Kingdom and the United States of America to keep out Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and how many of those excluded were subsequently murdered in the Holocaust.
It also examines the treatment of those who did reach sanctuary, for example in the United Kingdom, where Jewish refugees were sent to detention camps and many were deported.
The reason for this detail is to pose the question whether states in the Global North have made progress in their attitudes and policies towards displaced people.
It poses the Carens Test, described by Joseph Carens, where any policy that would have justified the exclusion of Jewish refugees in the 1930s should be seen as problematic. Those policies are examined in detail in the following chapter in light of the Carens Test.
The Challenge of Climate Displacement
Authors: Cole Phillip
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the challenge of climate displacement for international protection and the theory of displacement, and specifically at the idea of the Climate Refugee.
Firstly it looks at the issue of predicted numbers of people displaced by climate events and other forms of disaster, and at the debate around how those predictions should be treated with caution, given the complexity of displacement, and the ways in which climate events can interact with other factors.
It then discusses proposed definitions of the climate refugee or displaced person, and the debates around whether the concept of the refugee has any role to play here, before moving onto proposed frameworks for protecting or assisting the climate displaced, such as reforming the Refugee Convention, or establishing a separate legal instrument, or pursing a ‘soft law’ strategy.
The International Containment Regime
Authors: Cole Phillip
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the international protection regime as it exists, looking at its limits and the gaps within it.
It begins by exploring the Durable Solutions to refugee displacement pursued by UNHCR and other agencies – return home, local integration and resettlement to a third country of sanctuary. It explores how these solutions are failing to deal with any significant numbers of those displaced, and at how the majority of refugees are in a Protracted Refugee Situations.
The result of those failures is that the majority of refugees are in a situation of encampment, contained in their region of origin, and the chapter examines the consequences of long-term encampment for refugees, and at the growing numbers of urban refugees, who do not live within refugee camps.
The chapter examines the negative impacts of encampment for refugees, and the limits this imposes on their rights, as well as the impacts for urban refugees, especially their experience of violence.
Border Zones
Authors: Cole Phillip
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the idea of the border, using the idea of border zones, arguing that rather than clear lines between national territories, we have border zones as areas in which identities are contested, and these zones can occur anywhere, on the edges of states or in their centre.
It draws on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and others in expanding this idea of the borderland, as well as reports published by the World Bank emphasising the importance of borderlands for thinking about development.
The chapter explores the way in which indigenous peoples are conceptualised by nation states as existing within borderlands in need of development, drawing on the work of Aurora Vergara-Figueroa writing about Colombia, and Imogen Tyler writing about the Gypsy and Traveller community in the United Kingdom. It makes use of Tyler’s version of the concept of abjection to understand how such communities are figured as objectionable outsiders despite their location firmly within the territory of the nation state.
It concludes by conceptualising borders as processes constituting the inside and the outside, the citizen and the migrant, etc., and as zones where power and control are contested in very violent ways.
Unionism, Liberalism and Anti-Socialism: Politics in Scotland After 1945
Authors: Petrie Malcolm R.
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines Scottish politics between the general elections of 1945 and 1959. Traditionally, this period has been portrayed as one in which Scottish politics, mirroring wider British trends, was characterised by a cross-party consensus that viewed the principal function of government as being to ensure full employment and manage the nascent welfare state. Pivoting around the fortunes of the Unionist Party, this chapter challenges such narratives; it reveals instead the importance to Unionism of an electoral appeal phrased in terms of a liberal individualism. This rhetoric, animated by fears of totalitarianism, enabled the creation of an anti-socialist coalition that could attract many erstwhile Liberals, as well as voters with nationalist sympathies. The fragmenting of that coalition in the second half of the 1950s is then traced, as the anxieties caused by inflation and taxation led to a sense of dissatisfaction among Unionist supporters, creating the opportunity for the partial re-emergence of independent Liberalism.
Combating Centralisation: Europe, Local Government and the Rise of the SNP, 1967–1975
Authors: Petrie Malcolm R.
Published: September 2023

This chapter re-examines the rise in support for the SNP that occurred during the late 1960s and early 1970s, culminating in the party’s breakthrough at the two general elections of 1974. The chapter recovers two significant but often overlooked factors that demonstrated how the individualist rhetoric of the post-war era could, with some alterations, be adopted by supporters of constitutional change. Attention is given first to the concerns that arose in Scotland at the prospect of the United Kingdom joining the EEC. The focus shifts thereafter to the reform of Scottish local government, undertaken in the early 1970s. Both questions heightened concerns that government was becoming increasingly remote from the people. There was, moreover, a consensus among the major UK political parties in favour of both Common Market membership and local government reform. This allowed the SNP to position itself as the sole defender of Scottish interests.
Letting the People in? Direct Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in Post-war Scotland
Authors: Petrie Malcolm R.
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores understandings of sovereignty in post-war Scotland, beginning with an account of the failed campaigns launched by the Scottish Plebiscite Society and the Covenant movement. The chapter then considers the popularisation of ideas of popular sovereignty in Scottish and British politics during the 1960s and 1970s, with an emphasis on the impact of the introduction of the referendum into UK politics. In Scotland, the European and devolution referendums of 1975 and 1979 did more than test public opinion on Europe and devolution; they also fostered a belief that Scotland was a distinct constitutional entity, capable of expressing its collective political will through popular, rather than parliamentary, means. What, in UK terms, was an issue of representation became in Scotland a question of constitutional legitimacy, and, in turn, of national identity.
There Will Be Ogres: The Interstitial Aesthetics of Film Noir in the Early Films of Nikos Koundouros
Authors: Karalis Vrasidas
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the conditions for the reception of film noir in Greece by cinematographers, after the Civil War. It points out that the aesthetics of film noir became part of the visual regimes in Greek cinema indirectly through French, Italian and even Japanese cinema. The author investigates the stylistic ways through which Koundouros adapted aspects of film noir for his films in order to visualize the violent modernization of society and its transition from Community (Gemeinschaft) to Society (Gesellschaft). The alternation between inner and outer spaces frames his Ogre of Athens as a filmic space exploring the in-between, the interstitial aesthetics of Greek cinema, especially during the fifties in the other films made by Koundouros.
Historical Coincidence or Generic Cross-Pollination? The Angry Hills and the Birth of Film Noir in Greece
Authors: Tzioumakis Yannis
Published: September 2023

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Greek cinema saw the release of a number of films with many noir characteristics that critics and scholars have retrospectively identified as a Greek noir film cycle. While their status as films noirs in Greece has been debated in some depth, this chapter focuses on the UK-US production The Angry Hills (1959) that was shot on location in Greece around the same time, with a view to determining whether it was an inspiration for that film cycle. Directed by Robert Aldrich and written by A.I. Bezzerides (who had previously collaborated in the celebrated noir Kiss Me Deadly [1955]), The Angry Hills was a curious hybrid of a war film, a spy thriller and a melodrama that was also characterised by strong noir elements, stylistically and thematically. The chapter examines the film’s engagement with noir, before exploring the intriguing possibility that the presence of Aldrich and Bezzeridis in Greece and their engagement with local crafts and talent became a material influence on the Greek noir cycle that followed.
Noir Backstage: Yannis Maris from Page to Screen
Authors: Agathos Thanassis
Published: September 2023

The fate of crime film in Greece would be different without Yannis Maris (Tsirimokos, 1916-1979), whose novels and scripts defined the genesis of the Greek film noir. Maris was a pioneer writer who participated in the public discourse of the Athenian swinging 1960s by integrating elements of pulp fiction and pop culture into his work and is considered today the patriarch of the Greek crime novel, and the principal representative the Greek crime novel. The chapter focusses on Eglima sta paraskinia/Murder Backstage (Katsouridis, 1960), the film adaptation of Maris’s eponymous novel, the screenplay of which was penned by the author himself. The aim of the chapter is to provide a systematic comparison between the novel and the resulting film, which is a remarkably accomplished cinematic work and a seminal example of Greek film noir. By doing so, this study also examines the narrative and representational strategies used by both the director and the (screen)writer in order to adapt the source material for the screen.
Bums and Dark Alleys: Constructing Queerness in a Mid-1960s Greek Noir
Authors: Fessas Nikitas
Published: September 2023

In his chapter, Nikitas Fessas explores one of the most provocative erotic B-movies of the 1960s, The Bum of Fokionos Negri (Karagiannis, 1965). The author focuses on the construction of the Greek noir queer through a discursive Foucauldian-Lacanian framework, reading the film alongside a journalistic article of the same year. Fessas argues that, as a noir, Karagiannis’s text ‘offers a more complex negotiation of homosexual identities and queer masculinities when compared to other Greek genre films of the time. It does so by problematising traditional and modern hegemonic models of masculinity, while exposing the ideological mechanisms behind the naturalisation of specific gender and sexual identities and the marginalisation of others.’ The author also notes that Greek queer male identities and sexualities are delineated in both Karagiannis’s film and in the journalistic article as ‘symptoms of a degenerating, imported modernity.’
A Dark Intrigue of Murder: Kierion and Reconstruction , or Film Noir as Politics
Authors: Chalkou Maria
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses early New Greek Cinema’s films Kierion (1967–74) by Dimos Theos and Reconstruction (1970) by Theo Angelopoulos through the lens of film noir. It argues that both films made from left-wing perspectives and in a turbulent era – on the verge of and during the military junta of the Colonels (1967–74) – while being comfortably placed within the modernist film tradition, employ ‘noir’ themes, aesthetics, and narrative patterns in order to deal with authoritarianism and the bleak sociopolitical reality in Greece. Kierion is loosely based on the unsolved murder of the American journalist George Polk in 1948, during the Greek Civil War, to present Greek politics in the 1960s as a dark, labyrinthine topos of intrigue, corruption, murder and para-state violence. Similarly, Reconstruction based on a true story of a love triangle and a crime of passion, makes a strong political statement on the hidden horrors of life under dictatorship. The chapter illustrates how noir styles construct critical aesthetic and narrative spaces, which provide film-makers with powerful tools for socio-political commentary.
Neo-Noir and ‘Becoming-Murderer’ in Tonia Marketaki’s John the Violent
Authors: Mermigka Ioulia
Published: September 2023

Ioannis o Viaios/John the Violent is a 1973 black-and-white film written and directed by the renowned Greek auteur Tonia Marketaki. It was made just before the fall of the Greek junta (1967–74) and in line with the modernist aesthetics and politics of New Greek Cinema. The chapter explores John the Violent, in the breach between Gilles Deleuze’s movement-images and time-images, and attempts to make readable the intersection between the neo-noir aesthetics and the existential and political powers of the film. The chapter argues that the neo-noir sensibility of the film lies not in the classic noir presentation, investigation and solution of a crime, but in the multiple fascination with what Deleuze calls the ‘powers of the false’ in crime and cinema. John, the psychologically troubled but charming protagonist, seems to have committed the murder of a woman, as he willingly confesses to the police. While this might be true or not in the fictional narrative, Ι‎ will attempt to illustrate how Marketaki undermines narrative verisimilitude and how John the Violent is less about the story of a psycho-killer and more a neo-noir about the existential and political processes of a becoming-murderer.
The Unbearable Queerness of Singapore Sling : Towards a Queer Ethics and Politics of Irony
Authors: Psaras Marios
Published: September 2023

This chapter brings key tenets and ideas from queer theory, psychoanalytic feminism and ethical philosophy to bear on Nikos Nikolaidis's Singapore Sling. It focuses on the ethical repercussions of the film’s postmodern appropriation of techniques and strategies from film noir's excessive style and, particularly, of the film’s ironic construction of glamorised, yet disturbing, images of sexualised violence and disgust. As the chapter argues, Nikolaidis’s film stretches the limits of the socially acceptable and the representable on screen, thus emerging as a vicious exercise on queer textuality and cinematic irony that challenges the ethics and politics of mainstream representation. Ultimately, the chapter considers Nikolaidis’s abject (non-)representational politics as an ethical gesture that turns the spotlight on the way the spectator is implicated in mainstream cinema’s voyeuristic reproduction of images of sex, violence and suffering.
Greek Sleuths and Tough Cops: Noir Masculinities in Television Crime Shows (1992–2020)
Authors: Aitaki Georgia , Chairetis Spyridon
Published: September 2023

In their chapter, Georgia Aitaki and Spyridon Chairetis look at the construction of noir masculinities through the figure of the detective in three iconic Greek crime TV shows from the last three decades: Tmima ithon/Vice Squad (ANT1, 1992–95), Oi istories tou astynomou Beka/The Stories of Officer Bekas (ALPHA, 2006–08) and Eteros ego: Hamenes psyches/The Other Me: Lost Souls (COSMOTE, 2019–20). Opting for an approach that utilises textual, intertextual and extratextual elements, the authors follow the evolution of this character type in his various embodiments, analysing the performances as well as the actors’ star images, which carry various connotations. Aitaki and Chairetis argue that ‘noir might also be envisioned as a useful lens for understanding the dialectic of Greek (noir) television within the realms of gender and ideology, as well as reflecting upon the role of foreign television influences on the making of Greek noir masculinities, as they have been narrativised on screen.’
Blonde (1950–6)
Authors: Shingler Martin
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the film comedies that Dors made during the early to mid-1950s. It includes a discussion of how she gained a controversial reputation in America and Europe as a ‘Bikini Baby.’ It also discusses how the world’s press began comparing her to Marilyn Monroe despite Dors’ insistence on her difference by showcasing her sharp wit on stage, on screen and on the pages of some of Britain’s most popular movie magazines.
Brazen (1956–85)
Authors: Shingler Martin
Published: September 2023

This chapter begins with a discussion of the colourful widescreen romantic comedy La Regazza del palio (1957) that Dors made in Italy, considering how this was a perfect star vehicle for her. In stark contrast are her three British crime dramas of the late 1950s, referred to here as her ‘Tart Trilogy.’ Thereafter, having noted her brief second attempt at Hollywood stardom in the early Sixties, the discussion concentrates on Dors’ return to Britain and the low point of her life and career leading up to her third marriage in 1969. This covers some of the minor roles she played during the Sixties before exploring the revival of her film career in the early to mid-Seventies, as well as how she regained kudos as an actor shortly before her death in 1984.
Exploiting her nascent has-been status in Berserk! (1967)
Authors: Shingler Martin
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on Dors’ performance as a has-been star in a supporting role in Joan Crawford’s British thriller Berserk! (1967). It describes how American producer Herman Cohen and British producer-turned-director Jim O’Connelly allowed Dors to retain her sex symbol image in this exploitation film. Yet analysis of several of Dors’ key scenes as a loud-mouthed magician’s assistant reveals more than a hint of mockery about the way she’s presented here. The conflicting ambitions of dignifying and demeaning a faded star in an exploitation film are seen to operate here. Consequently, the curious mixture of admiration and contempt for Dors creates an unsettling and ambiguous cinematic experience, producing laughter and scorn as much as shock and horror.
Popping in and out as a virtuosic guest star in The Pied Piper (1972)
Authors: Shingler Martin
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores Diana Dors’ role as the Burgermeister’s buxom, bossy and bad-tempered wife in Jacques Demy’s The Pied Piper (1972). Based on the famous Grimm Brothers’ folktale of 1816, this musical fantasy starring Donovan in the title role included a small part for Dors, the 40-year old actress being billed as a ‘Guest Star.’ Here, she showcased her virtuosic acting skills in what was little more than a cameo role, deftly conveying her character’s marital and maternal failings in just six short scenes. Making a big impression in some highly theatrical costumes, she played Frau Poppendick as an archetypal fairy-tale villainess, while drawing heavily upon her own public image and screen persona. Analysis of her performance in The Pied Piper reveals what well-known stars can do with small character parts and how seemingly incidental roles give them a chance to flex their acting muscles while exploiting their celebrity.
Conclusion A dubiously Dorsian conclusion
Authors: Shingler Martin
Published: September 2023

Following an analysis of Dors’ extraordinary and largely improvised performance as a nameless lascivious and predatory middle-aged woman in a London bathhouse in Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (1970), this final chapter reconsiders the star’s spectacularly unsuccessful and supposedly disappointing film career. Arguing that Dors made a significant contribution to all kinds of movies, in parts great and small, from the age of 15 until her death at 52, it celebrates her distinctive combination of glamour and intelligence, naturalism and poise, acting skill and self-mockery. Although it’s hard to avoid an ambivalent response to Dors’ film career (especially when acknowledging that her status as star was undermined by successive box-office failures), what makes her so impressive is not only her skill, intelligence, range and versatility as a screen performer but also her longevity over five decades. This includes her resilience in the face of public scorn (notably as she aged and gained weight), as well as the distinctive – if not distinguished – and diverse film portfolio that she created over 39 years.
Situating Wisdom
Authors: O’Malley Austin
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the didactic mode across several prominent genres, paying special attention to the power imbalance between their speakers and addressees, the oral performance settings that they evoke, and their modular, ad hoc approach to knowledge. It treats Persian wisdom verse (andarz) and ascetic poetry in Persian and Arabic (zohdiyat) before exploring the didactic masnavi, showing how the latter is characterised by alternating homilies and narrative exempla reminiscent of the discourse of popular preachers, as well as a tendency towards paratactic structure.
ʿAttar and Persian Literary Sufism
Authors: O’Malley Austin
Published: September 2023

ʿAttar was writing in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century as sufism was spreading among new social classes through preaching and saint veneration; at the same time, sufi textual production on the Iranian plateau was becoming more Persian, more literary and less bound to scholastic contexts. This chapter argues that ʿAttar’s texts are exemplary of this new literary sufism: although they came to be beloved of shaykhs and initiates, they were also designed to appeal to variegated audiences without formal ties to sufi organizations. Furthermore, ʿAttar also displays a particular interest in text as a technology of spiritual instruction and practice. He circulated his own works in textual form, which was unusual for a poet of this period, and he compiled the Mokhtar-nama for a group of mystically minded companions who had specifically requested a thematically organised, written collection of quatrains for use as objects of contemplation (tadabbor/taʾammol).