Cinema provides entertainment, but it also communicates a set of values, a vision of the world or an ideology. European cinema has dealt with the tension between these two functions in a variety of ways. Diverse and entertaining, this book explores the complex relationship between entertainment, ideology and audiences in European film.

Diana Holmes is Professor of French at the University of Leeds
Alison Smith is Head of Film Studies at the University of Liverpool

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 García 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 Agnès 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 Krämer
Index