Cinema as a mirror of postrevolutionary cultural negotiations. After the revolution, Iranian cinema becomes a shared format for national self-representation. Despite censorship and practical constraints, filmmaking developed a coded but locally recognizable language to explore tensions around class, region, gender, history, and politics. Acquiescing to censorship requirement that women actors never unveil, even when represented in private alone or with other women, filmmakers and audiences found themselves undermining the dramatic artifice of the cinematic fourth wall, the convention of invisible, passive dramatic observation taken for granted in modern filmmaking. Instead, audiences became collaborators of cultural meaning, acknowledging cinematic artifice and the possibilities of symbolic representation. Canny directors involved their viewers as conscious partners in a community of interpretation, pushing the limits of cultural critique. These self-reflexive Iranian films provide the most accurate format for reflecting on postrevolutionary national and political developments, making postrevolutionary Iranian cinema a mirror for national subjectivity and society.

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 article explores the reception of American popular visual culture in Ireland. The role Irish Americans played in the development of blackface is discussed, highlighting how blackface was used by the Irish to distance themselves from African Americans, thus helping their integration into (white) American society. Reception of blackface in Ireland is also explored. Consideration is then given to various technological visual media, notably large-scale panorama paintings, which offered American scenes of interest to Irish emigrants, and the cinema, which became so pervasive by the Great War that American cinema, especially, had eclipsed all other entertainments. The article then outlines the contributions made to Irish film by reverse migrants, who produced the first realist representations on film of Irish history and culture during 1910–14. The last section focuses on the ideological resistance by Catholics and nationalists alike to American cinema, which was deemed immoral and undermined the Catholic-nationalist project. This led in 1923 to the introduction of the first piece of media legislation in independent Ireland that severely restricted what could be shown in Irish cinemas. Notwithstanding this cultural protectionist measure, American cinema remained hugely popular in Ireland.

This chapter considers the formations and transformations of Greek epic in the cinema. The cinema has been fundamentally heroic and epic in both subject matter (the mythic past) and elevated visual style since its birth in 1895. Rather than resurvey this prominence of epic themes in the history of film, Winkler demonstrates their power through a reading of the cinema’s own epic genre par excellence – the Western. The chapter first shows how the American Western follows archetypal heroic models in both plot and character and how many films are patterned explicitly on Homeric epic. Winkler then turns to specific archetypal aspects of ancient epic, primarily Homer’s, in the Western. These include fame (kleos); rivalry to be the best (aristos Akhaiôn / fastest on the draw); the heroic code’s implications of doom and death; heroic rituals (arming before duels/showdowns as forms of aristeia); and fundamental story patterns, primarily the development from savagery to civilisation (chaos to kosmos) in the form of ktisis narratives connected with revenge (tisis). Winkler details the power of these archetypes by examining one of the most profound epic-mythic Westerns.

Although notoriously imprecise designations dating from the nineteenth century, ‘the Balkans’ and ‘Ruritania’ have played surprisingly prominent roles in configurations of identity in modern British literature and culture. Building on existing research into cultural representations, this chapter seeks to provide a survey of British engagement with the region, real or imagined, from early modern to recent times. Drawing on a range of examples and taking into account travel accounts and historiographical texts as well as fiction, cinema, and theatre, it argues that representation of these purported regions straddled fact and fiction, as well as high and popular culture. British images of the Balkans and/or Ruritania reflected both shifts in literary currents and modes, and changes in Britain’s relationship to Europe and the world as a whole.

On the Waterfront (1954) offers a particularly interesting case study of both film and music in the 1950s. Elia Kazan’s iconic depiction of waterfront corruption in Hoboken, New Jersey is revered for its neorealist cinematic techniques, masterclass in method acting, and concern for the collective plight of blue-collar longshoremen, but is perhaps best remembered as a classic story of one man’s tragic fall and ultimate redemption through the love of a woman. Concerned that the film lacked sufficient ‘star power’ for success at the box office, independent film producer Sam Spiegel eventually convinced Leonard Bernstein to compose what would be his first and only film score. This chapter argues that Bernstein’s music interacts with the film’s narrative in a way that is not only remarkable for one’s first score, but also represents an important contribution to 1950s cinema, employing textures and influencing composers who are still with us today.

Pirandello is one of the most famous and important cultural figures of Italian modernism, and his work is deeply invested in responding to the rapidly changing forces of modernization. This chapter examines his complex relationship with modernity through a comparison to the Italian avant-garde movement of Futurism: Where the Futurists were focused on using their cultural production to usher in and intensify processes of technological modernization, Pirandello’s stance is more complex and ambivalent. The chapter thus traces their responses to a shared set of cultural conditions, spanning from a shared rejection of scientific materialism and positivism to engagement with new models of sociology, psychology, and philosophy, and finally considers their divergent views of cinema and the promise of technology to transform the future.

Introduced in the 1890s, cinema became a vital part of the culture to which Pirandello devoted his career. While he engaged to some extent with cinematic practice in promoting his works for adaptation or writing a screenplay from his Six Characters in Search of an Author, his relation to the medium lies predominantly in the conceptual affinities between cinema as a unique and pervasive means of expression and his philosophical outlook as theorized in the essay On Humor, the blueprint of his poetics. Describing an author’s disposition and its ensuing literary technique, “humor” is a conceptual model according to which the reliance on reason in attaining truth leads to an interpretation of experience in multiple, coexisting, and conflicting illusory constructs. This chapter examines Pirandello’s response to cinema’s aesthetic possibilities, which is evident in some of the short stories he recommended for adaptation and in the novel Shoot! and his screenplay from Six Characters, a metafictional inquiry into artistic creation whose protagonist and actor in that role would have been Pirandello himself.

Chapter 2 asks how one constructs a tradition and transforms an available genre in the absence of one’s own. An essay on the flower “jasmine,” triggered by a remark that in the tropics one did not know what the daffodils in Wordsworth’s heavily anthologized poem meant, is the starting point of this chapter. How to connect language to thought and how to reconcile a language with an absent tradition takes Naipaul to a search for an appropriate genre that would function as creative structural plinths to his Trinidadian social comedies. At Oxford he had translated the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes but had failed to find a publisher for it. Now he turns to the picaresque genre and its more immediate expressions in Joyce and Steinbeck as a vehicle for his representation of an essentially Trinidadian picaroon society. In the act, Naipaul consciously deconstructs the regulatory nature of the law of genre with its very opposite, its tendency towards disorder. The chapter examines Naipaul’s early works beginning with Miguel Street (1959), his first written work albeit third published, as well as the cinematic adaptation of The Mystic Masseur.

This chapter takes up the literary reverberations of two types of photography – still and moving – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The invention and popularization of still photography in the nineteenth century posed a challenge to all existing forms of representation, visual or otherwise: Whereas earlier forms offered necessarily imperfect, inexact, and approximate renderings of depicted subjects, the detached “camera eye” promised total transparency, accuracy, and objectivity. With the invention of silent film and, later, talkies, the camera extended its dominion of objective representation into further dimensions and modalities. Carver reads work by William Empson, William James, W. H. Auden and others to argue that cameras served “not only to make the visible world familiar, as early inventors hoped they might do, but also to make it strange.”

The essay film in the United States has not been thoroughly investigated, even if it has existed in the US cinematic landscape from the earliest years throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Beginning with early theories of the essay film that emerged from Europe, the chapter explores the relationships between American essay film and bordering forms like documentary, art film, and experimental cinema. The final pages of the chapter analyze the contributions of filmmakers belonging to the LA Rebellion and influenced by Third Cinema and conclude with a mention of newer forms like the video essay and desktop documentary.

This chapter provides a partner to Vivien Gardners examination of theatre-going in Chapter 4. It examines the social and economic context of wartime theatre production, considering the ways in which the conflict impacted on theatre and shaped what could and could not be performed. It covers the practicalities of theatre-making during the war considering the enlistment of actors, touring patterns, the repertory system, censorship, military tribunals, and air raids. It positions the war as a period of change, whether in terms of the growth of cinema, the increasing role of women, changing sexual mores, or changing audiences. It shows how managers responded to this change in order to keep their businesses afloat, for example with the introduction of twice-nightly performances. The chapter also emphasises the importance of understanding the value of ‘feel-good’ entertainment, and shows how the interweaving of ‘new drama’ and multi-mode, popular entertainment on the touring circuits was designed to satisfy audience demand. In highlighting the ways in which the constraints of war determined both the format and content of theatrical production this chapter provides an important framework through which to read subsequent chapters.