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This chapter examines social (or documentary) realism in feature film. It focuses on three of Ken Loach's films: Ladybird Ladybird (1994), made before his collaboration with screenwriter, Paul Laverty, and two after: Sweet Sixteen (2002) and It's a Free World... (2006). The reality uncovered in Ladybird Ladybird is arguably not strictly political in a primary, economically driven sense. It is based on the true story of Maggie (Crissy Rock) whose children are taken away by social services. The 'truth' premise that is a given in such an uncompromising work of social realism made for a stark confrontation: on one side, Loach protesting the truth of his depiction; on the other, social services crying foul on behalf of every beleaguered social worker in the country. It might be argued that the resulting standoff over who had truth on their side was not all that productive in improving social services in Britain. Meanwhile, Loach's Sweet Sixteen is a classic example of his later documentary-drama approach. It's a Free World... works to a very similar template as Sweet Sixteen. The chapter then considers realism in Paul Greengrass's drama-documentary Bloody Sunday (2002) and Jim Sheridan's In The Name Of The Father (1993).

This chapter discusses the theoretical and critical substance of Sergio Leone’s filmography, referencing modern and postmodern thinkers. It argues that the conceptual foundation of Leone’s cinema is a postmodern attempt to deconstruct complexity through the collapse of universal narratives (Enlightenment, Idealism, and Marxism), using irony and allusions to catastrophic events such as concentration camps, war, and revolution. The chapter illustrates Leone’s approach to cinema in relation to his experience between popular and political film, labeling his work “political spectacle.” It then elaborates Leone’s politics in relation to the two major thinkers who most influenced the director: Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Jünger (including Gramsci’s “national-popular” concept). This chapter analyzes Leone’s work—his début, The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), the “Dollars Trilogy,” and the “Once Upon a Time Trilogy”—chronologically, indicating the evolution of his work and its references to Italian and American history, from Fascism to the Vietnam War.

Nollywood has a reputation for avoiding political issues, but a genre of “political films” emerged after the end of military rule in 1999. Nollywood extended strategies it had already developed to represent the workings of power in society. Traditional rule by kings and chiefs becomes an allegory for national politics in Kelani’s Saworoide and Agogo Eewo. The money ritual film is a vehicle for analyzing mechanisms of political predation in Nnebue Rituals. The family film, whose melodramatic mode is suited to the highly personalized forms of power in Nigeria, turned to the political elite, as in Dark Goddess and Stubborn Grasshopper, which tells the story of the dictator Sani Abacha. Given the un-ideological character of Nigerian politics, the moralism that Nollywood shares with African popular culture effectively addresses much that matters in governance as well as expressing the grassroots desire for justice.

This chapter explores two recent works of experimental, historically grounded and hence political German films that effectively encapsulate the conceptual and critical agenda. They are Jörg Buttgereit's Nekromantik and Nekromantik 2. These films are not only more thematically complex and technically sophisticated than is popularly supposed, but they also share a set of artistic and ideological concerns more usually associated with the canonic auteurs of the Young German Cinema and the New German Cinema of the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s. In both Nekromantik films then, Buttgereit was keen to expose the highly manipulative nature of the film medium—specifically in the second film's depiction of heterosexual pornography and the first's re-creation of the slasher horror genre. Buttgereit not only produced stylistically inventive and conceptually sophisticated works of modern horror cinema but also offered a new model of German subjectivity for a post-reunification age. It is a considerable achievement for one whose films have been widely banned, critically neglected and commonly viewed as low-budget shockers of little artistic and intellectual merit. Such attitudes, needless to say, are entirely predictable responses from a still wounded, still traumatised national culture unable yet to engage with Buttgereit's unflinchingly radical stance.

This chapter discusses the international film culture of the 1960s and 1970s against the backdrop of the massive urbanisation of what used to be called the ‘Third World’. During these decades not only did world cinema modernise itself in the form of numerous, highly politicised and predominantly leftist, ‘new waves’, but so, too, did many (mega)cities of the global South. The chapter’s first case example, Moi, un noir (Rouch 1958), depicts how rural migrants, full of hopes for and dreams of a better future, flocked to these cities in search of jobs. The intersections between social and film history on a global scale, hence, between the emergence of a politically engaged international film culture and the massive urbanisation of the ‘Third World’, are, as the author argues, not coincidental, and neither is the rise of docufictional forms. Whether theorised as ethnofiction, docudrama, cinéma vérité or Impefect Cinema, these hybrid forms share their historical links with earlier movements (neorealism and the Grierosonian documentary, in particular), as this chapter’s second main example illustrates: De Cierta Manera (Gómez 1974), an essayistic docudrama that investigates the Cuban government’s slum removal policies in a Havana neighbourhood.

This chapter discusses two urban self-portraits, Tony Buba's Lightning Over Braddock (1988) and Michael Moore's Roger & Me (1989), in the context of historic urban identities giving way for the development of global cities. These films illustrate the decline of the American Rust Belt cities in the 1980s through first-person narratives in which the directors themselves appeared onscreen. Buba and Moore became characters as important as the depicted cities by using their own body and subjectivity in order to convey the main concerns of their community. And by combining an ironic self-portrait based on the aesthetics of failure with committed activism and guerrilla practices, both Buba and Moore widen the discursive possibilities of the socio-political documentary film, joining the defence of their respective communities with the expression of their own subjectivity.

This chapter evaluates the themes prevalent in Ken Russell's The Devils (1973). A key message in The Devils, which creeps up on the audience rather subtly, given Russell's rather unjust reputation as a sledgehammer of a director, concerns the misery and destruction which can result when politics and religion jump into bed together. As the film's final, spectacular shot reveals the ruins of the magnificent city walls shown near the start of the film, the scale of the horror of what has occurred really resonates; these bookends chillingly convey the film's main point. It was Cardinal Richelieu's desire to build a new, centralised (and Protestant-free) France in which, as he puts it to Louis XIII in the opening scene, ‘Church and State are one’, which has led to the destroyed walls of Loudun at the end, and it is clear to see who has blood on their hands. Russell said The Devils was his only political film, and one can just about taste his revulsion at the unholy marriage that has occurred between Church and State; the film presents a compelling argument for the separation of the two entities, which eventually came to pass in France in 1905.

This chapter explores journalism censorship and the debate about suppression to see how the consensus held together, and how the government was willing to use harsher methods to keep the news and commentary within proper bounds. Maintaining consensus in the twilight Cold War was not an easy thing for British democracy. The British Broadcasting Corporation kept a close eye on Cold War issues, and often favoured the government interest over that of the listeners and viewers. Government censorship marked the edges of acceptable public discourse. Cold War political film censorship tended to focus on Soviet- and Communist-bloc documentary and quasi-documentary feature imports. Although the D-Notice system had remained firm throughout the early 1950s, by the mid-1950s problems were cropping up. Heightened security censorship and press self-censorship may have kept some facts from Soviet spies, but it kept more of them from the British public.