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This chapter examines the film career of British director Terence Davies. The cinema of Davies is one of contradictions—between beauty and ugliness, the real and the artificial, progression and tradition, motion and stasis. These opposites reflect a certain struggle, for the filmmaker and his characters, to make sense of a confusing and sometimes violent world. For Davies, this struggle constitutes a reckoning with his past, a highly personal account of a fractured childhood; for the viewer it has resulted in one of the richest, most idiosyncratic, and arrestingly experimental bodies of work put out by a narrative filmmaker. The chapter focuses on the distinct emotional quandaries Davies' films evoke in the viewer and proposes that their tonal and political in-betweenness is a form of cinematic queering. Through the exploration of their contradictions, these films function within seemingly recognizable generic parameters only to then explode and thus queer conventional notions of narrative cinema.

This chapter focuses on anarchist pedagogy in cinema. Narrative cinema, which has traditionally conceived of the classroom as a cinematic microcosm that can encapsulate the conflicts and contradictions of childhood and adolescence, provides fertile territory for charting the ideological — and often aesthetic — vicissitudes of authoritarian, reformist, and anti-authoritarian education. The chapter then looks at how film can both reflect pedagogical currents, and even function as pedagogical practice itself. It considers “classroom films” such as Richard Brooks's Blackboard Jungle (1955), which is a paradigmatic example of a film in which a teacher is portrayed as a near-saintly redeemer. The chapter also examines classroom insurrections in Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933) and L'Atalante (1934), as well as Lindsay Anderson's If... (1968). Finally, it discusses the dilemma of the anarchist intellectual, and addresses how anarchist pedagogy extends far beyond the confines of the classroom or academic conference. Released on the cusp of the twenty-first-century, Peter Watkins's La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) is an exemplary case study in how radical cinema can coincide with anarchist pedagogy and an ethics and aesthetics of self-emancipation.

This chapter focuses on the argument that transgender articulates uncertainty as to the categories of gender and sexual identities. It analyses mainstream and independent queer community-based documentaries and narrative cinemas that reveal the strains between transgender and lesbian and gay identities in the French context. The chapter compares and contrasts the emergence of political activism against institutional psychiatry with more intimate projections of transgender by filmmakers such as Patrice Chéreau and Jacques Nolot.

This chapter examines the Hollywood classical narrative cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. Classical narrative cinema consists of an explicit integration of mise en scène and narrative, character development and action, dialogue and sequence. In the classical American love film, characters, the events that happen to them and the words they say, or that are said of them, gravitate around a moral center, which can be a problem or a choice. The moral space of the film is the horizon of an implicit thought process that the characters go through, or will have gone through, in order to complete the actions of the story. The film Casablanca narrates two parallel and separate trajectories of choice. The love relation in the film consists in this reciprocity of a choice situation.

Lindsay Anderson's film, This Sporting Life (1963), is the subject of this chapter. This chapter provides a sustained discussion of the relationship between the film's style and meaning. The key to understanding this film is to examine the relationship between the film's organisation of space and its deployment of characters within this space. This movie demonstrates a remarkable predilection for filling its frames with bodies. In addition, the stylistic choices that Anderson makes in order to pursue this policy have resulted in some of the most interesting critical debates concerning New Wave film. Thematically, there is an overwhelming desire for personal expression evident in Anderson's film. As the film unfolds, the demonstration of this desire is accompanied by the inevitable dissatisfaction that comes from a lack of personal fulfillment. Internally, both of these things contributes with equal ferocity to the wide spaces of the rugby pitch that Frank Machin (Richard Harris), the film's protagonist, plays upon and the narrow rooms of the house he shares with Margaret Hammond (Rachel Roberts), his landlady.

The conclusion journeys back across the different processes explored in the preceding chapters in order to stress continuities in the procedures that prompt mental image composition in spite of the very different films from different geo-political contexts and eras that have informed this study. It also asks how the fruits of this research might relate to an even broader range of filmic examples. The argument throughout the book emphasises that no one process is attached solely to the examples discussed in any given chapter and indicates how a number of processes sometimes coalesce when viewing an individual work. To take this argument further, the conclusion suggests that these processes, especially the opening account of layering, are portable and relevant to moments of mainstream narrative cinema as well as further examples from art house cinema and documentary. When characters tell stories in the diegetic space without their words giving way to images that illustrate what they are narrating, when a voice-over is evocative and diverges from what is seen on screen, or when a soundtrack speaks louder than words, there is an opening for the image-making capacity of the imagination that has been the book’s focus throughout.