Film, Media and Music
This chapter takes a close look at Blake’s 7 (1978–81), appearing right at the beginning of the Thatcher era. The chapter situates the series alongside the beginnings of Thatcher’s time in office and showing, as the ensuing two series do, a wavering engagement with the themes that would begin to constitute Thatcherism, presenting an uneasy and ambiguous connection with the tropes of the era, and a detectable shift in the style of television compared to the examples from the previous chapter (even if their roots can be discerned in these antecedents). Blake’s 7 is a BBC dystopian series about a group of outlaws in the future who steal a space ship and use it to try to bring down the Federation – the corrupt ruling power of the galaxy. It presents a group of increasingly individualistic crew members with little affection or respect for each other, whose motives are very often selfish. It also presents a world where there is little reward for altruism, and futility is the dominant theme. In the end all the crew members are murdered by the Federation, their efforts apparently amounting to nothing. This chapter will discuss the ways in which Blake’s 7 departs from traditional consensus-era science fiction television, including the Machiavellian motives of most of the central characters (on both sides of the political spectrum), the elevation of the individual above the collective, and its portrayal of the apparent futility of political struggle.
This chapter focuses on Varda’s key fiction films up to Vagabond (1984): La Pointe Courte (1955), Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), Le Bonheur (1964) and One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1978). Where Varda’s career begins with an advocacy of couples in love – in La Pointe Courte and Cléo from 5 to 7 – the conception of the couple takes an extraordinary turn in Le Bonheur: a husband betrays his wife, only to then ask her to consent to his affair. Varda’s film is not necessarily critical of the husband’s actions, but nor does it endorse those actions. Rather, a guiding ethos of Varda’s works is that of refraining from judgement. The chapter expands on distinctions, introduced in earlier chapters of the book, between what Stanley Cavell calls acknowledgment and what Leo Bersani describes as connectedness. The chapter argues that Varda’s earlier films frame acknowledgment in a positive way, but, as her career progresses, the films move more and more towards an outlook that endorses connectedness.
This chapter focuses on Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad (1961) by raising the possibility that this film can be considered a remarriage comedy. From this perspective, the woman (A) leaves her husband (M) at the end of the film in order to flee from the château with the man she met last year at Marienbad (X). The chapter offers a very close reading of the film. While this reading of the film could not be called definitive in any way, the chapter proposes it as a possible and convincing reading of the film. Besides being guided by Stanley Cavell’s notions of remarriage comedy, the chapter also discusses Marienbad in the light of Henrik Ibsen’s play, Rosmersholm, a key reference for the film. The chapter is also guided by Toril Moi’s Cavellian interpretation of Ibsen (in her book Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism).
This chapter focuses on the unique ways that TV series contribute to screen borders. Ongoing series are able to adapt progressively to the changing political and social contours of Europe, and in some cases changing borders, as was the case with UK co-productions after Brexit. This chapter argues that the ‘border series’ has become a genre category of its own in contemporary Europe, and traces the most prominent characteristics of this vein of television. The first part examines key tropes, settings, and approaches in series that collectively represent what I identify as the European ‘border series’. European series from diverse locales on the continent share strikingly similar border imaginaries. The second half zooms in on three specific series that exemplify the mapping function of border series from three very different positions. All are also partially francophone, relating to and engaging with French or France in different ways. Capitani (2019–), the first series from Luxembourg distributed by Netflix (and the country’s first crime series), looks at Europe from a small but central perch. Occupied (2015–), a co-production of the Franco-German broadcaster Arte and Norwegian TV2, tells the story of an EU-endorsed Russian invasion of Norway in the near future as a response to that nation’s decision to halt all oil and gas production. Last, I consider the 2019 Arte limited series Eden, directed by Dominik Moll, who describes himself as a Franco-German individual but a ‘French’ director. The series traces five interwoven trajectories related to Europe’s refugee crisis.
This concluding chapter offers reflections on what thinking in terms of screen borders can tell us. It is a critical approach to viewing that takes into account what is on the screen and what or who is behind its creation. Viewing borders in screen productions inevitably triggers a mapping impulse that situates and resituates viewers in relation to the spaces shown on screen. I return to Jean-François Bayart’s query about where Europe ‘starts’ (and, by extension, ends). The answer to the question depends on one’s position, and in many cases hinges on narratives of who belongs where. Borders are potentially everywhere, but at least for some, almost nowhere.
This chapter focuses on the films of Eric Rohmer while also staging a discussion between theories proposed by Leo Bersani, on the one hand, and Stanley Cavell, on the other. While Bersani (writing with Ulysse Dutoit) has characterised Rohmer’s films as offering modes of ‘non-discursive contact’ – what has been called, throughout this book, ‘connectedness’ – Cavell has, by contrast, offered an account of Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter (1992) from the perspective of what he calls ‘comedies of remarriage’. Cavell’s arguments demonstrate that Rohmer’s key characters pass through phases of ‘Cartesian madness’: they doubt their own existence, as well as the existence of the world and other people. These characters, also, for the most part, pass through madness and are then transformed or fulfilled in various ways; certainly this is the case for A Tale of Winter. Therefore, the chapter provides a final criticism of Bersani’s theories of ‘connectedness’ in which Bersani’s negative account of Cartesian ‘mastery’ in instead seen, from Cavell’s perspective, as a potential mode of self-fulfilment.
This chapter proposes that Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939) offers some of the foundational themes that will later be taken up by the filmmakers discussed in the remainder of the book. The chapter especially engages with Stanley Cavell’s account of The Rules of the Game from the expanded edition of his book on The World Viewed (published in 1979). This chapter’s reading of the film especially focuses on the relationship between Christine and André, the former being the wife of Robert de la Chesnaye, and the latter being a romantic adventurer. Their relationship comes to an end when André is accidentally shot dead. This outcome, it is argued, is central to the film and exhibits what will be called, throughout the remainder of the book, a ‘tragedy of remarriage’. This is a way of making the point that, if this film had been a ‘comedy of remarriage’, Christine and André would have lived happily ever after. The Rules of the Game thus offers a key contrast with the American comedies of remarriage. Where the Hollywood film finds a happy ending, a European film finds no such thing.
Fellini’s most important films make tales of love central – in I vitelloni (1953) or La strada (1954), all the way up to Ginger and Fred (1984). Fellini’s most remarkable disquisitions on love and marriage occur in the pair of films from the mid-1960s: 8½ (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965). 8½ concludes, the chapter argues, on a note of reconciliation as the husband, Guido, appeals to his wife, Luisa, for forgiveness, and this married couple looks to the future with hope and positivity. The key concept that emerges in this chapter pertains to narcissism. Fellini’s male characters are typically narcissistic and controlling, especially when it comes to the women they (supposedly) love. The contours of narcissism are investigated in some detail with the conclusion that Fellini depicts the narcissism of men in love, but also that his films are critical of that narcissism. Typically, the path beyond narcissism can be found only if women are prepared to forgive men for their narcissism, as occurs most evidently, the chapter argues, in 8½.
Most of Truffaut’s films feature romances of one sort or another, but it is very rare for his films to feature a successful romance. This chapter therefore takes up themes relating to the couple as approached in the preceding chapter, mostly in relation to the final three films of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel cycle (Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979)). These films trace a remarkable period of French history from the perspective of the couple: from courtship, through marriage, infidelity and divorce, all in the context of social, moral and legal changes. The guiding thread of the cycle – and of Truffaut’s films more generally – is that any couple, and therefore any ‘love’ per se, is, at best, temporary. But this is no bad thing, for Truffaut’s films shed a remarkably positive light on the temporary nature of love. Building on some of the reflections of Leo Bersani from the previous chapter, this chapter makes a stronger claim for the relevance of Bersani’s notion of connectedness. From Bersani’s perspective, connectedness features connections between human beings that eschew notions of possession or control. Any notion of an ‘exclusive’ couple is therefore, from Bersani’s perspective, merely a relationship of control. Connectedness, on the contrary, requires an openness and expansiveness – what Bersani calls a ‘new mode of relation’ – that makes for a very different understanding of love. Truffaut’s films demonstrate, to a large extent, what such a new mode of relation would look like.
This chapter starts with a Paris station to follow multidirectional flows crisscrossing and traversing national spaces. French space is a crucial crossroads in contemporary Europe and the chapter also aims to show that Paris, a cultural, economic, and symbolic centre of France, is not just a destination but also a border space that – like the nation itself – has been ‘decentred’ in many ways that are reflected in screen media. From this starting point in Paris, the chapter uses case studies to consider how borders are represented and forged or deconstructed on screen. Claire Simon’s 2013 documentary Géographie humaine and its companion fiction feature Gare du Nord, both about and set in the eponymous station, are the subject of the first part of the chapter. The second discusses how the Gare du Nord fits into the wider European border puzzle that connects to the port city of Calais and the nearby Channel Tunnel, one of France and Europe’s most visible margins, on to the UK, and then more circuitously to central and eastern Europe. Two films, Francuski numer (Robert Wichrowski, 2006) and Somers Town (Shane Meadows, 2008), and the series The Tunnel (2013-2018) illustrate the link between the station and some of Europe’s most fraught hard and soft borders. The discussion of The Tunnel, which spans the pre- and post-Brexit era, allows me to consider some fundamental differences between the ways that films and ongoing series respond to changing border discourses.