Product Description: This collection of essays addresses the question of lucidity as a thematic in literature and film but also as a quality of both expression and insight in literary criticism and critical thought more generally. The essays offer treatments of lucidity in itself and in relation to its opposites, forms of obscurity and darkness...read more

Photographs of missing children are some of the most haunting images of contemporary Western society. The specter of the child at risk from abduction, abuse, or illness, conjures questions about traumatic loss, protection and the family, nostalgia and childhood innocence. Emma Wilson argues that such questions increasingly return in the work of contemporary filmmakers. She explores the representation of missing and endangered children in a number of the key films of the last decade, including Kieslowski's Three Colours: Blue, Atom Egoyan's Exotica, Todd Solondz's Happiness, Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady, Lars von Trier's The Kingdom, and Almodovar's All About My Mother. Wilson contends that the loss of a child is perceived as a limit-experience in contemporary cinema, where filmmakers attempt to transform their means of representation as a response to acute pain and horror.

French Cinema Since 1950 brings together modern scholarship of the most widely viewed and studied works of the period including classic films such as Truffauts The 400 Blows, Resnais Hiroshima Mon Amour, and works by Godard as well as critical previews of some of the most recent French films up to 1998. It covers relevant directors and their writings, and provides a comprehensive overview of different types of cinema, from thrillers and love stories to historical drama and autobiographies.