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This chapter assesses the emergence of American independent horror, looking at George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). By the mid-1960s, the traditional Hollywood studio system was responsible for only around 20 per cent of America's film production. The remainder came from independent film-makers and from films made outside of the United States, where labour and locations were cheaper. The 'New Wave' movements in countries such as Japan, France, Britain, and Czechoslovakia introduced new styles of film-making to American cinemagoers, who found them an attractive alternative to the classical Hollywood feature film. As such, the late 1960s saw enormous changes in American cinema, including within the horror genre. Influenced by social, political and cultural upheavals occurring in the country at the time, 1968 is often cited as the dawn of the 'modern American horror film'. The chapter considers how political and social turmoil in America led to a growing number of independent film-makers actively working against the industry establishment, taking advantage of the heavily diminished influence of the major studios, and producing films which rejected Hollywood conservatism and deliberately pushed the boundaries of acceptability.

This chapter explores Natan Gross's The History of Jewish Cinema in Poland, which begins with an assumption about the Jewish involvement in Polish cinema during the 1920s and 1930s. The vibrant Jewish community in the urban centres of Poland, first under the tsarist regime and then as part of independent Poland, supplied not only most of the film-makers and many of the writers and actors, but a large part of moviegoers as well. One of the most remarkable results of the phenomenon was that during the twenty years of independent Poland (1918–39), a country known for its widespread and deep-seated antisemitism, not even one overtly anti-Jewish film was produced. Natan Gross's short account of Jewish cinema in Poland reads like a cross between a production list and an annotated anthology of all the Jewish films that were ever produced in Poland. This may not sound like a resounding recommendation, but these are notable features for two reasons. First, Gross has valuable first-hand knowledge of the subject matter because he was a Jewish film-maker who worked on various Jewish films in Poland after the Second World War. Second, the tragic demise of that old and remarkable community lends a transcendent value to this — as well as any other — account of it.

This chapter addresses French documentary films. After a boom in the 1950s and during the New Wave, only small numbers of documentaries have been produced yearly for the cinema in France, this type of filmmaking becoming increasingly associated with television. Nevertheless, several notable contemporary French film-makers have experimented with the genre, especially during the New Wave, producing influential films which have become classics. Recently, the name of Nicolas Philibert has become associated with documentary films shot primarily for the cinema screen, and his film Être et avoir/To Be and To Have (2002) provides a perspective on recent French cinema developments. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of the film, including its representation of rural France, the transformation of the teacher, parents, and children into characters, and other related society issues.

In earlier chapters, it was argued that a movie fictionally “recounts” its story in audio-visual terms. On face of it, this implies that fictionally there is someone or something in the work that does the recounting. This conclusion is compatible with the viewer’s knowing nothing about the personality or character of the minimal recounting agency. If we ask whether movies have “narrators,” we could be asking whether such a minimal recounting agency is fictionally active in the film. Or we could be asking if the movie depicts a relatively robust character who fictionally carries out the work-internal narration. The answer to the first question is usually, “Yes,” and the answer to the second is almost always “No.” Most people have strong convictions that movies don’t have narrators, but it is explained why those intuitions are conflicted and unreliable.

This chapter examines Jean-Luc Godard, who is probably the most radical film-maker of the French New Wave, the one who really challenged the established post-war cinematic conventions to reinvent the film practices of the 1960s. To this day, Godard remains associated with taking post-war cinema by storm, and his early films, especially A bout de souffle/Breathless (1960) and Pierrot le fou (1965), have become undisputed landmarks in art cinema, constantly being reassessed, and remaining an inspiration for many directors. These two films are associated with a period of commercial success before Godard moved to even more radical forms of non-mainstream film-making. The two films act as cornerstones for the New Wave period: A bout de souffle is Godard's first feature film and could be read as a manifesto for the New Wave, while Pierrot le fou is regarded by many as the last work to be associated with New Wave style, as part of a transition period announcing the even more experimental projects that followed. The chapter discusses and compares these films with a view to illustrating key motifs and characteristics that have become part and parcel of Godard's early film signature.

This chapter assesses Shyam Benegal's seminal Ankur (The Seedling, 1972). The emergence of state-sponsored film-making in the late 1960s with Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome (1969) laid the foundations for a new cinematic discourse, giving way to the next phase in the development of Indian art cinema, dubbed by many as ‘parallel cinema’. The work of film-maker Shyam Benegal forms a major part of the parallel cinema movement, and the rural trilogy of films characterising his early work not only sympathised with the oppressed underclass but also established an influential political precedent for many of the young film-makers emerging from the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India. The chapter looks at the origins and context of New Indian cinema, as well as the definitions of parallel cinema and its importance to the development of art cinema. It also considers Shyam Benegal's authorial status, key ideological strands, and the film's role in helping to politicise cinema in India.

This chapter introduces the reader to the Splat Pack, a group of contemporary horror film-makers such as Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Neil Marshall, and Alexandre Aja. It examines how mainstream media hyped the Splat Packers, citing articles — including the one written by Alan Jones for the April 2006 issue of the British film magazine Total Film — that portrayed them as independent, subversive film-makers who operate outside the Hollywood mainstream. One of the ways in which journalists — and the Splat Packers themselves — construct the group's image of oppositional outsiderdom is by likening them to past horror directors like George Romero and Wes Craven from the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of subversive American horror films. This chapter suggests that the media hype heralding the Splat Pack's arrival offers an intriguing glimpse into how notions of independence, outsider status, and claims of subversion are used to sell films and the personalities of their directors.

This chapter assesses Louis Malle, who holds a unique, yet rather marginal, place in French cinema as a film-maker with an exceptional career in France and abroad. He made his first films on the margins of the French New Wave, without really becoming a part of it, but adopting some of the new trends and strategies of the emerging directors of that period. Malle was able to plan and direct his next films enjoying the freedom and independence associated with 'auteur' film-makers. His cinema oscillated throughout his career between the forms of fiction and documentary. The chapter looks at two of Malle's films which fall into the fiction category: Lacombe Lucien (1974) and Au revoir les enfants (1987). These films illustrate how closely Malle linked his fiction work to some of the 'direct cinema' techniques that he explored in his documentaries, in order to create a cinema of instinct and improvisation without trying to organise reality.

This chapter analyses Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002) using psychoanalytic film theory. Early psychoanalytic film theory invited the spectator to decode the unconscious of the film-maker, seeing film as a projection or expression of the film-maker's unconscious. For Almodóvar, this approach could be fruitful, as several people have claimed that Talk to Her is somewhat autobiographical. The second branch of psychoanalytic film theory focuses on characters and the audience's challenge and desire to analyse their unconscious motivations. Whilst this approach has been criticised, as arguably characters, by their very nature, are not real and thus have no unconscious, it can prove fruitful in an analysis of Talk to Her, particularly through the explicit references to psychiatry and Benigno's past. The third branch of psychoanalytic film theory is audience-centred, which sees characters' behaviours as being interpreted as explorations of the spectator's own unconscious. This approach is similarly interesting to consider due to the interesting position in which it places the spectator in relation to Benigno and the rape and forces the spectator to ask difficult questions.

The opening chapter, ‘The Camera-I: Patrick Keiller’s Early Short Films and Essays’, reconstructs Keiller’s early career and his shift from architecture to film-making, reading the use of ‘subjective camera’ and the creation of ‘subjective townscape’ in his early experimental works as crucial to the developing sensibility of his later docu-narratives. Excavating a history of the ‘London Film-makers’ Co-op’ and examining Keiller’s early essays before looking at the short films Stonebridge Park (1981) and Norwood (1983), it explores the ‘atmosphere of unemployed reverie’ and paranoiac, noir methods that provided a footing for the later Robinson series. At the same time, it offers a view of the exciting world of political agitation and experimental film of 1960s London.

This chapter investigates 'the realm of the fantastic'. According to philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, such a state exists only as long as there is indecision over whether the event is indeed a supernatural occurrence or a product of the imagination; once this is determined, one leaves the realm of the fantastic for that of either the 'marvellous' or the 'uncanny'. The chapter considers Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942), the first in a series of 'fantastic' horror films produced by Val Lewton for RKO Pictures in the 1940s. Famous for their use of suggestion and ambiguity, they are widely regarded as classics of the genre. Like Universal Studios before it, RKO used the horror film to transform itself into a major Hollywood force, injecting new life into a genre that had by then become staid and predictable. Their success came at a time of mounting problems for the majors, and when independent studios and film-makers began to play an increasingly important role in the industry.

This chapter provides a background of Alfred Hitchcock, whose remarkable achievements as a film-maker may be unmatched. As well as the numerous accolades, a number of Hitchcock films have proved unusually influential. Consider the chase thrillers such as The 39 Steps (1935) and North by Northwest (1959), the claustrophobic chamber pieces Rope (1948) and Rear Window (1954), the hallucinogenic romance of Vertigo (1958), the American Gothic of Psycho (1960), and the apocalyptic science fiction of The Birds (1963). While Hitchcock's status as one of the great film artists is unassailable and his reputation increases, there have always been dissenters. Traditionally, the case against Hitchcock is that he is little more than a popular entertainer, an observation he did little to counter, what with his use of genre and big stars as well as his eager adoption of the role of clownish showman. This book focuses on Hitchcock's penultimate film Frenzy (1972).

This chapter investigates how well the Council’s evolutionary development served in enabling it to satisfy the differing constituencies of support that form part of the landscape of film provision. Drawing on original interviews with senior figures from the UKFC and with key industry stakeholders, it assesses the challenges the organisation faced in handling a multiplicity of interest groups, concerns and expectations and how effectively the Council addressed competing economic, industrial and cultural objectives. This chapter also considers how the Council negotiated the various tensions between regional, national, European and international interests in an increasingly transnational film industry.

This chapter studies the genre and narrative of Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002). The narrative of Talk to Her flits between a double- and single-stranded plot line, plays with time with sometimes careless abandon, and contains coincidences that verge of the ridiculous. But yet, far from alienating the spectator, the narrative of Talk to Her pleasingly draws one in and lures the spectator into a position where they are able to suspend their disbelief, enjoy and engage with the plot. The spectator familiar with Almodóvar's films somewhat expects an unconventional narrative and thus is likely to find it unobtrusive. Meanwhile, like most Almodóvar's films, Talk to Her is hard to classify in terms of genre. Unlike the Hollywood system that relies heavily on either star or genre marketing, the marketing for Almodóvar's films relies heavily on his own status as an award-winning auteur film-maker. Talk to Her is thus not bound by generic convention in the way that many Hollywood films are.

This epilogue describes how silent film was not only replaced by sound after 1930, it disappeared. Sadly, this was in many cases literally. The nitrate film stock used in the silent era contained valuable materials including silver. Old film stock was frequently pulped in order to extract these. At the same time as the old silent reels were being dumped and destroyed, however, people were also starting to save them. The two important groups in this process were collectors and professional archivists. The silent era has also figured as a setting and plot line in popular sound films. The most famous and successful would be Singin' in the Rain (1952), a humorous picture of a fictional Hollywood studio facing the disruption of the new sound technology. In addition, great silent cinema moments influence later film-makers, who frequently include homage to their predecessors.

This chapter looks at Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir within the context of the Holocaust. It recounts the 1980s and 1990s that marked the emergence of second-generation Israeli cinema that was specifically produced by the children of Holocaust survivors. It also reviews the second-generation Israel films that address the subject of war and critique the Zionist project, which intimates that it had simply replaced the trauma of the Holocaust with a new and different kind of Israeli trauma. It also mentions Ari Folman, a child of survivors, who began making films during the period of second-generation Israeli cinema. The chapter describes Waltz with Bashir as an example of second-generation film-making and as a film that explicitly deals with Lebanon, but implicitly engages with events of the Second World War. It analyzes the function of the Holocaust in greater detail within the context of Israeli cinema of the early millennium and the cinema of second-generation film-makers.

This chapter reviews Deepa Mehta's elements trilogy: Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005). Both Fire and Earth are discussed in some detail while the focus of the chapter remains with the final film Water, which can be considered as Mehta's greatest achievement to date. Water is arguably also one of the most controversial films to have been made by an Indian film-maker since it addresses the religiously sensitive issue of Hindu widows. Due to the bulk of financing originating from Canada, Water is labelled as a Canadian film, thus complicating Mehta's position as an Indian film-maker. Residing in Canada, Mehta is part of the Indian diaspora. The chapter approaches the trilogy from an ideological perspective, exploring the politics of sexuality in Fire and the politics of nationalism in Earth. It looks at Water in terms of its controversial production history, its depiction of Hindu widows, and the interaction of ideology and politics.