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This book provides a comprehensive account of Robert Guédiguian’s numerous films since 1980, combining stylistic analyses with historical, political, and generic context. More importantly, it makes the case that Guédiguian’s work represents one of the most discretely original but radical projects of contemporary French cinema: to make politically committed films with friends, predominately in a local space, over a long period of time. The book starts with a consideration of the philosophy of friendship and its relation to politics, relation, difference, time, and space. It concentrates on Guédiguian’s early life in the Estaque neighbourhood of Marseilles, where he became politically active and developed the friendships that would continue in his filmmaking, as well as Guédiguian’s disillusionment with the Communist Party. It then examines the political pessimism of the 1980s through Guédiguian’s four early films. The book examines the turn toward local activism and utopianism in the 1990s, and follows Guédiguian’s work as it spreads into diverse experimentation with genres and registers in more recent work. It emphasises Guédiguian’s political assessments and his frequent meditations on history, violence, and utopia. But it returns consistently to the underlying themes of friendship, and thus intervenes at the crossroads of affect, politics, philosophy, and art.

Contemporary life is increasingly shaped through attunement to the atmospheric affordances of the media environment. Ambient Media delves into the use of music, video, film, and literature as tools to tune this atmospheric self. The book traces the emergence of mood-regulating media in Japan from the environmental art and Erik Satie boom of the 1960s and 70s to the more recent emphasis on “healing” styles. Focusing on how ambience reshapes those dwelling within it, Ambient Media explores the working of atmospheres designed for affective calm, rhythmic attunement, embodied security, and urban coexistence. The book argues for understanding ambient media as a specifically neoliberal response to mood regulation, serving as a way to atmospherically shape collective behavior while providing resources for emotional autonomy and attention restoration at the individual level. Ambient Media considers the adaptive side of atmosphere as an approach to self-care and social mobility. At the same time, the book considers the limits of mood regulation and the low-affect lifestyle when it comes to interpersonal life. Musicians, video artists, filmmakers, and writers in Japan have expanded on Brian Eno’s original idea of a style affording “calm, and a space to think,” providing materials to cultivate sensory serenity within the uncertain horizons of the contemporary social landscape. Offering a new way of understanding Japanese social demands to “read the air,” the book documents both the adaptive and the alarming sides of this turn to mediated moods.