Cinema provides entertainment, but it also communicates a set of values, a vision of the world or an ideology. From its beginnings more than a century ago, European cinema has dealt with the tension between these two functions in a variety of ways: at the extremes, dictatorial regimes have sweetened the pill of ideology with the sugar of entertainment. Meanwhile, spectators have persisted in seeking out, above all, the pleasure film can provide. Now available again in paperback, this book explores the complex relationship between entertainment, ideology and audiences in European film, through studies that range from the Stalinist musicals of the 1930s, to cinematic representations of masculinity under Franco, to recent French films and their Hollywood remakes. Diverse and entertaining, this study is addressed to students of film - especially French, German, Russian or Spanish - and to those readers and academics interested in both the history of cinema and in European culture. -- .
Introduction - Diana Holmes & Alison Smith Part I: Ideologies and cinematic pleasure 1. But eastward, look, the land is brighter: towards a topography of utopia in the Stalinist musical - Richard Taylor 2. Entertained by the class enemy: cinema programing policy in the German Democratic Republic - Rosemary Stott 3. The forbidden films: film censorship in the wake of the Eleventh Plenun - Daniela Berghahn 4. Sex and subversion in German Democratic Republic cinema: The legend of Paul and Paula (1973) - Andrea Rinke 5. The Good Soldier Svejk and after: the comic tradition in Czech film - Peter Hames 6. Cheaper by the dozen: La gran familia, Francoism and Spanish family comedy - Peter William Evans 7. Displacing the hero: masculine ambivalence in the cinema of Luis Garcia Berlanga - Parvati Nair 8.'When you're not a worker yourself...': Godard, the Dziga Vertov Group and the audience - Steve Cannon 9. Quand une femme n'en est pas une: gendered spectatorship and feminist scopophilia in the early films of Jean-Luc Godard - Eliane Meyer 10. The fictionalisation of terrorism in West German cinema - Stefan Wolff Part II: Entertainment and its ideologies 11. Of human bondage and male bonding: male relationships in recent Russian cinema - David Gillespie 12. Entertainment - but where's the ideology? Truffaut's last films - Diana Holmes 13. Performance in the films of Agnes Varda - Alison Smith 14. Singing our song: music, memory and myth in contemporary European cinema - Wendy Everett 15. Transatlantic crossings: ideology and the remake - Julia Dobson 16. 'Faith in relations between people': Audrey Hepburn, Roman Holiday and European integration - Peter Kramer Index -- .
