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Claude Chabrol's films break down the dubious critical barrier between art cinema and popular cinema. Rejecting the avant-garde and the experimental, Chabrol chooses to work within the confines of established genres. He has in fact filmed farce, melodrama, fantasy, war films, spy films and glossy literary adaptations. Chabrol has excellent new-wave credentials and is in some ways a representative figure for this innovative film movement in French cinema. For the small budget of 32 million old francs, he was able to shoot Le Beau Serge over nine weeks in the winter of 1957/8 and film it in what was essentially his home village. Chabrol has known periods of great success (the launching of the new wave in 1958, the superb Hélène cycle of the late 1960s, including his most famous film Le Boucher for his return to form in the 1990s). He also has had periods of inactivity and failure. His depiction of the middle classes usually concentrates on the family. Le Cri du hibou begins as Masques ends, with a framed image from which the camera slowly tracks back to reveal the presence of a spectator. Given that in Chabrol's cinema women are often lacking in financial or social power, there are limits to the ways in which they can either define themselves or escape their situation. This is spelled out most clearly in Les Bonnes Femmes, where the potential escape routes are sex, marriage into the bourgeoisie, a career, romance or death.
In a world defined by the flow of people, goods and cultures, many contemporary French films explore the multicultural nature of today's France through language. In a cinematic landscape increasingly characterised by multiculturalism and linguistic diversity, a number of contemporary French films are beginning to represent multilingualism as a means of attaining and exerting social power. This book is the first substantial study of multilingual film in France. Unpacking the power dynamics at play in the dialogue of eight emblematic films, it argues that many contemporary French films take a new approach to language and power. The book begins in central Paris in Polisse and Entre les murs, then travels to the banlieue in Un prophete and Dheepan. It then heads to another culturally loaded but very different space with Welcome and La Graine et le mulet, whose border-crossing stories unfold in the port cities of Calais and Sete respectively. Then, in London River and Des hommes et des dieux, the book steps off French soil, travelling to the English capital and former French colony of Algeria. It explores characters whose lives are marked not only by France, but by former colonies, foreign countries and other European states. In its depiction of strategic code-switching in transcultural scenarios, contemporary French multilingual cinema shows the potential for symbolic power inherent in French, other dominant Western tongues, and many migrant and minority languages. The book offers a unique insight into the place of language and power in French cinema today.
Explanations of working-class politics in Australia and Britain have traditionally been heavily rooted in domestic 'bread and butter', socio-economic factors, including the much-debated issue of social class. 'Traditional' and 'revisionist' accounts have greatly advanced our knowledge and understanding of labour movements in general and labour politics in particular. This book offers a pathbreaking comparative and trans-national study of the neglected influences of nation, empire and race. The study is about the development and electoral fortunes of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the British Labour Party (BLP) from their formative years of the 1900s to the elections of 2010. Based upon extensive primary and secondary source-based research in Britain and Australia over several years, the book makes a new and original contribution to the fields of labour, imperial and 'British world' history. It offers the challenging conclusion that the forces of nation, empire and race exerted much greater influence upon Labour politics in both countries than suggested by 'traditionalists' and 'revisionists' alike. Labour sought a more democratic, open and just society, but, unlike the ALP, it was not a serious contender for political and social power. In both countries, the importance attached to the politics of loyalism is partly related to questions of place and space. In both Australia and Britain the essential strength of the emergent Labour parties was rooted in the trade unions. The book also presents three core arguments concerning the influences of nation, empire, race and class upon Labour's electoral performance.
outside of the realm of state and society, except insofar as it impacts on these levels through prescribed restructuring imperatives. Put simply, orthodox understandings of the firm in IPE tend neither to open up the firm to examine the social power relations within, nor to look at their extension into wider social contests. Politicising the firm in IPE As scholars have more actively explored interdisciplinary approaches to understanding global change, recent debates have begun to offer politicised alternatives to the study of atomised states and firms. In particular
was now able to draw on the forms of social organisation that by 1968 had become the norm in Britain’s car factories – small-group workshop democracy and decentralised shop-floor bargaining – and with it, access to a degree of social power beyond that of many other categories of workers. Some of the effects of that power were not welcomed by employers. Unable to suppress disruption to production from sectional bargaining, from the late 1960s onwards, employer reforms looked to restrict shop-floor conflict and promote more orderly industrial relations. At Ford, this
calls a ‘handicap’ (2006: 102) preventing cultural integration. Yet multilingualism – the ability to learn, use and transition among multiple languages – is an opportunity. This scene, and the film in general, is about cultural difference, language barriers, the politics of migration, tensions between the First and Third worlds, the moral ambiguity of war and the trauma of displacement. But it is also about social power, as enacted through strategic use of language. In a cinematic landscape increasingly characterised by multiculturalism and linguistic diversity, a
and marginalisation from public life and so on, they brush aside wider analyses of social inequality and social power.5 At the same time, the ways in which issues surrounding the distribution of resources interact with long-standing gendered and raced social and economic processes are obfuscated. Most tellingly, this move marks a turn away from understanding inequality and injustice as a product of interconnected lived experiences:6 of competitive meritocratic processes that structurally rely on winners and losers; of the dependence of upward social mobility on
different levels of authority, but it relocates power from larger external institutional structures or systems on to the gendered bodies of individual actors. In doing so, it highlights how power is created, maintained and negotiated through practice, in the Bordieuan sense.37 Social power is only partially within the control of the individual. In this, ‘the law’ provides a useful exemplar. The law can be understood as an external regulating force that shapes social norms and which people either follow or resist. ‘The law’, however, has no physical being outside of its
, and party; each of these spheres struggles for dominance. 15 Weber’s model of social action was influential in the twentieth century. 16 For example, Michael Mann argued that societies and their histories were best described in terms of the interrelations of four sources of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political relationships. These relationships are both individual and institutional. In Mann’s view, historical change occurs as humans in pursuit of their goals form social networks, which coalesce into the four spheres mentioned above. One of
sound Orwellian, Deleuze was interested in how social power was increasingly operating not through centralized ‘disciplinary’ institutions (militaries, police, schools, factories) but through decentralized networks, creeping through society like a ‘spirit or a gas’. Deleuze pointed specifically to the coercive power of debt and credit markets as a prime example: here power is exercised not through outright coercion but through the way it entraps its targets into exploitative and extractive relationships. Debt and credit are enforced not by some single bureaucracy or