Salman Rushdie has a long-standing relationship with cinema and cinematic storytelling. Foundational to many deliberations is the film version of The Wizard of Oz. His novels are deeply invested in an aesthetic that is shaped by European art-house cinema, including auteur filmmakers such as Fellini, Godard, and Buñuel. Increasingly his relationship with Indian popular cinema and Bollywood has been explored, but the cinematic imagination continues to preoccupy Rushdie, not least in his novel The Golden House, where the central narrator is a film scriptwriter who imagines large elements of the plot as a film script. This chapter considers the wider context of cinematic production in relation to Rushdie’s fictional work to uncover the contexts of his cinematic influences and to consider how a cinematic style of storytelling is reformulated throughout his career for an increasingly cine-literate reading public.

Surrealism is thought to have taken a very firm stance against the genre of the novel, a view based in much of the work of André Breton, who championed surrealist poetry and inveighed against the bourgeois commercialism of the realist novel. Yet the story is more complicated, and needs to be seen more broadly. This essay begins by contextualizing what André Breton meant in the 1920s by ’the novel’, in a kinship with a larger tradition of writers not formally associated with surrealism, especially Marcel Proust. Starting from Breton’s Nadja and L’amour fou, this essay tells the secret story of the production and circulation of the intellectual ideas that went into Breton’s fictions, but also of their ramifications through other world writers and filmmakers: from Dante, Nerval, and Proust to filmmakers like the Chilean Raúl Ruiz in Time Regained and the Italian Paolo Sorrentino in La grande bellezza. Through the complex network opened by Breton’s theoretical and literary texts, the novel changes significantly across this history, overlapping with poetry, the essay, autobiography, and with art film today.

When Lev Tolstoy died in 1910, he was a literary celebrity, famous well beyond the borders of his native Russia. His death became one of the first truly international media events of the twentieth century. But the public hunger for images of the great man was already prominent much earlier in his life, when both commissioned and unsolicited portraits and photographs proliferated, creating an international Tolstoy iconography. Throughout the twentieth century, artists, filmmakers, and writers attempted to create their own vision of Tolstoy, either embracing or opposing, but always engaging with, this visual canon. This chapter discusses Tolstoy as a subject of art in painting, cinema, and the theatre, exploring the impact of celebrity-generated images on his representation in these media. First, it focuses on well-known portraits and sculptures of Tolstoy, from Ilya Repin’s famous paintings to Oleg Kulik’s playful installations, as well as controversial frescoes and advertising images. It then moves on to chart a very short history of Tolstoy’s appearance on film, first as a celebrity and then as a character. The final part of the chapter discusses Tolstoy’s postmodern afterlives in the works of Viktor Pelevin and in contemporary Russian theatre.

This chapter traces the history of the essay film from its origins in D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein (and theorizations by writers such as Hans Richter and Alexandre Astruc) to its manifestations in contemporary experimental cinema and video art installations such as John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea. The author argues that the essay film is uniquely positioned to incorporate and respond to political and social crisis.

Chapter 4 explores the foundation of extended business activities and tie-ins in the 1920s and 1930s that developed around Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse. The term ‘animated properties’ acknowledges that these popular fictional representations were attributed subjecthood and, as such, came alive outside the celluloid frame. Felix and Mickey were pre-packaged as family-friendly viewing. Doll effigies and other merchandise literally took the characters into the heart of the home. The chapter discusses the ambivalent role of intellectual property registration in stabilising the character merchandising trade, exploring what was particularly distinctive about the Disney Corporation’s industrial system of production and distribution. This successful strategy was an organisational one with cultural ambitions, engaging franchise managers and licensees in educating children and the trade about the protocols of consumption attached to play. The Disney brand came to signify child-friendly cultural content of all kinds, with trust in the name secured by the deployment of a new legal creation, the phenomenon of ‘world rights’ exploited by a new managerial class, Disney Enterprises’ agents.

Britten’s early love for the cinema - when he was spellbound in particular by the work of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers - and his later apprenticeship as a composer for documentary films in the 1930s are both charted in this chapter, which analyses his comments on the medium in his youthful letters and diaries and goes on to consider the impact film music had on his later stylistic development as a composer of works for the stage. High points of his own work in film include his scores for the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, including two celebrated collaborations with the poet W. H. Auden (Coal Face, 1935; Night Mail, 1936), his score for the feature film Love from a Stranger (1937), and his virtuosic orchestral music for Muir Mathieson’s educational film Instruments of the Orchestra (1946). The chapter concludes with an account of Britten’s close involvement with his own local cinema in Aldeburgh during the late 1960s.

This essay develops from the hypothesis that the relationship between Marx and cinema is mediated by a shared investment in the revolutionary subject, a collective being capable of abolishing capitalism, insofar as its liberation necessitates total demolition of the standing social order, from which an egalitarian organization of society might then develop. Beginning in Russia after 1917, when cinema was used as a material force to organize workers and peasants, the essay’s first half tracks the way that a cinematic emphasis on the industrial proletariat has been replaced, or superseded, by an emphasis on what Marx and Engels described as a relative surplus population. The essay’s second half illustrates this shift with reference to two popular films, released into the apparent fall of American economic hegemony, approaching them as ensigns of an economy in terminal crisis wherein revolutionary subjectivities might be forged out of the otherwise disaggregate members of the surplus population.

Taking as its point of departure the preeminent association between momentary experience and urban existence, this chapter expands on how the modern city’s relationship to temporariness is conceived by approaching it through particular forms of temporary urban space. It focuses in turn on several sites that emerged (and subsequently vanished) in the early twentieth century, each of which embodies a metropolis in microcosm: the White City exhibitions, the trench system on the Western Front, and the elaborate sets that were constructed for an expanding British film industry. In drawing a connection between literature’s interest in temporariness in this period and the pseudo-cities that parallel it – exhibitionary, military, and cinematographic – the chapter charts how responses to urban ephemera in the work of such writers as Isaac Rosenberg, Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair, and Katherine Mansfield are inflected through these spaces, as well as how such responses evolve across the century’s opening decades.

Between 1900 and 1914, British cinema went through a boom period. Film exhibition began to move out of church halls and music halls into new, purpose-built theatrical venues, while a generation of British producers and directors began to build and consolidate Britain’s film industry. This chapter gives an account of the challenge posed to literature, and the resources created for it, by the increasing popularity, the spectacular novelty, and the technical impressiveness of this early cinema. It shows how the emerging institutions of early British film culture – its studios, its theatrical venues, its accompanying film criticism and popular press – contributed to a new cultural landscape in which literature and cinema, in their reciprocal shaping, engendered a powerful set of ideas about the nature of cultural modernity.

This essay considers modernist internationalism and formal mutation in light of the globalized media ecology brought about by imperialism’s capitalist monopoly of the world-system. Since imperialism and colonialism constituted the first ever properly global system of control and circulation, modernism’s global imaginary and technical innovations cannot be understood outside of a world economic and technological frame. Building on scholarly narratives of modernism’s global vision and its metropolitan incorporation of the colonial periphery/“other,” this article shows how new media technology allowed for the rounding of the world and the advent of new literary forms such as the montage. Media discussed include cinema, photography, magazines, and the phonograph, while poets considered include but are not limited to Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Blaise Cendrars.

What did it mean for Iranian revolutionaries to understand the revolution as global? To answer this question, this chapter investigates the idea of enghelab-e jahani (global revolution) in Morteza Avini's documentary films and theoretical writings. Avini was a faithful supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini who dedicated his art and thinking to grassroots mobilizations of Hezbollah volunteers after the revolution. Raised in intellectual and artistic environments of avant-garde art before the revolution, Avini's key intellectual struggle was to reconcile the cosmopolitan nature of his prerevolutionary training in modernist art with postrevolutionary faith in political Islam's assumption that all people are eventually and universally convertible to Islam through the revolution. Navigating between the cosmopolitanism of modern art and the universalist aspirations of political Islam, combined with his socialist commitment to a materially more just society, Avini offered a theory of the global revolution in which the global emerged at the intersection of four discursively distinct categories: global, cosmopolitan, universal, and worldly, all of which reflected the Persian concept of jahani.

Stoppard has written several screenplays and won a shared Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. He has also done considerable script-doctoring and directed the film of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. His ongoing engagement with film has continued to influence the cinematic dimension of his writing.