Articoli di riviste sul tema "Julien (Firm : Paris, France)"

This article recounts a little-known episode in C. G. Jung’s life and in the history of analytical psychology: Jung’s visit to Paris in the spring of 1934 at the invitation of the Paris Analytical Psychology Club (named ‘Le Gros Caillou’), a stay marked by a lecture on the ‘hypothesis of the collective unconscious’ held in a private setting and preceded by an evening spent in Daniel Halévy’s literary salon with some readers and critics. KEYWORDS collective unconscious; France; Julien Green; Daniel Halévy; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl; Ernest Seillière.

In 2014, in the course of the Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine consciously opted for European values. Thus, cooperation with one of the founding member states of the EU bears strategic importance. The author believes that the the interaction between the two countries is based on ancient relations between France and Ukraine. Apart from political relations, France and Ukraine are bound by creative endeavours of many artists. After celebrating the 25th anniversary since the establishment of diplomatic relations between our countries, the Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and France opened an exhibition dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the foundation of Ukrainian diplomatic service. The author stresses that France was the first Western state with which Ukraine signed the 1991 Interstate Agreement on Mutual Understanding and Cooperation. Moreover, it was in Paris where the Charter of Paris for a New Europe was signed, the document which allowed Ukraine to join the CSCE as a full-fledged member. Taking into account the current development in the east of Ukraine, the author underscores that France and Germany were the initiators of the Normandy Format negotiations. France consistently supports the territorial integrity of Ukraine, while not recognising the annexation of Crimea and takes a firm stand towards Russia. The author mentions the establishment of the France-Ukraine friendship group, headed by Valerie For-Muntean. Apart from political cooperation, economic ties between the two states are also gaining momentum. Nowadays, Ukraine is examining modern initiatives of France in ecology, energy efficiency, etc. The article outlines the interation of the two states in the educational sphere. France is encouraging numerous riveting projects intercultural projects displaying the best specimens of modern Ukrainian art. New intercultural contacts are also gaining ground. The author highlights the main events held at the culture and information centre of the Embassy and reports about the multidisciplinary festival Week-End a l’Est – Kyiv. Yet another recent development has been the inauguration of the web platform Nouvelle Ukraine, whose aim is to raise awareness about Ukraine in France, contribute to the positive image of the country, and build economic and cultural contacts. According to the author, the cooperation of Ukraine and France is only beginning to gain momentum and has infinite potential. Keywords: France, Ukraine, the EU, France-Ukraine friendship group, Ukrainian-French ties.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of institutional investors’ ownership and type on information asymmetry and stock market liquidity in France. Design/methodology/approach – The sample includes 162 French-listed firms from 2007 to 2009. The methodology relies on linear regressions using the method of ordinary least square. Before examining the interaction between liquidity and institutional investors, the authors check for the existence of the endogeneity problem by applying the Durbin-Wu-Hausman test of Davidson and MacKinnon (1993). The results of the endogeneity test show that institutional investors’ ownership and stock liquidity are endogenous. A simultaneous equation model using the double least square method is then tested to address this problem. Findings – The findings show that the proportion of institutional investors has a positive and significant effect on stock-market liquidity, which confirms the signal theory and trading hypothesis. These investors perform high trading activity which favorably affects market liquidity. The results also show that pension funds improve stock liquidity. This result suggests that pension funds manage huge assets decreasing transaction costs and improving liquidity. They display a positive signal to the market about more transparency and a low level of informational asymmetry. Practical implications – These results highlight the institutional investors’ role in defining the level of liquidity on the French market. The findings also stress the relevance of developing institutional investors’ demand for the Paris market in order to better assess firm value, protect minority ownership and improve market liquidity. Originality/value – In the French institutional setting, institutional investors act as a control device since minority shareholder interests are less protected than in Anglo-American counterparts. This result highlights the significant role of institutional investors in corporate governance structures and on financial markets. Their presence is a guarantee for minority interest protection and for more liquid stocks.

The article presents an analysis of the colonial exhibition of 1931 in the context of the metamorphosis of the colonial idea in France. After the First World War, the difficulties in managing the colonies were increasingly felt in France. The French political class hoped to give new vitality to the national consciousness, which was threatened by various social-revolutionary and anti-colonial movements, through the reform of colonial policy. The colonial exhibition of 1931 became the apogee of imperial propaganda in the metropolis and a symbol of unity between the Third Republic with its colonies. Its success was associated with the extent to which the colonial idea penetrated French society and with the stabilization of the mother country's relations with her colonies between the two world wars. The colonial discourse of the 1931 exhibition was an apology for republican centrism expressed through the firm positioning of racial superiority, the demonstration of the validity of the ideals of progress inevitably brought about by colonization, and the dominance of French values. The author demonstrates that the new political situation that developed after the Great War contributed to the achievement of colonial consolidation, on the part of the majority of parties and, mainly, through the deployment of the state propaganda machine. The colonies and the colonial question marked the outlines, the brushstrokes, as it were, of a national union. This union between the national and the colonial, the nation and the empire, was twofold. Between the two world wars, national and colonial issues became logically interlinked and interdependent. The author concludes that the 1931 exhibition propagated the idea of the imperial order through the display and presentation of idealized indigenous cultures represented by a variety of artifacts, fine arts, and architecture. The 1931 exhibition became a general imperial holiday, and was intended to serve the unity between the imperial centre and the colonies. It became an important tool of imperial construction, a fairly effective means of broadcasting the official imperial ideology, and a metaphor for the colonial republic, which embodied the cultural, social, and mental characteristics of the imperial nation; its hidden meaning was directed against the growing ideas of colonial nationalism and resistance.

Purpose This paper aims to investigate whether a high level of voluntary disclosure attracts sell-side analysts. In other words, the authors check whether the number of analysts following a given firm increases with the extent of voluntary information that corporate managers provide in annual reports. Design/methodology/approach The paper relies on regression analyses to study the relationship between the level of coverage by sell-side analysts and the extent of voluntary disclosure for a sample of 155 non-financial firms listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange and members of the SBF 250 index. Findings The empirical results show that the number of analysts following a given firm increases with the extent of voluntary disclosure. Consequently, the authors conclude that analysts are interested in the volume of information provided voluntarily by corporate managers. Their interest varies across the voluntary-information categories (strategic, financial, non-financial and governance) disclosed in annual reports. Originality/value This study extends previous research by investigating sell-side analysts’ preferences in terms of voluntary-information categories in annual reports. A better understanding of the effects of sub-categories of voluntary information is useful to corporate managers wishing to meet market expectations and attract sell-side analysts. In fact, the authors verify how each category of disclosed information (strategic, financial, non-financial and governance) affects the analyst coverage intensity. In addition, the authors apply our study in the rather interesting empirical setting that is France, which is characterized by a low investor protection and a large number of active analysts.

Jacques Fontanille é um dos expoentes da semiótica de tradição greimasiana, tendo participado como um dos discípulos e estudiosos mais próximos do reconhecido semioticista Algirdas-Julien Greimas nos círculos de debates dos seus Seminaires em Paris, aos quais dá continuidade juntamente com outros pesquisadores de destaque pela criação dos Séminaires Intersémiotiques de Paris. Doutor em Semiótica pela Universidade de Paris IV-Sorbonne e docente da Université de Limoges, onde fundou o Centre de Recherches Sémiotiques – CERES (Centro de Pesquisas Semióticas) e atuou como reitor. Fontanille é Professor Emérito do Institut Universitaire de France. Em seus trabalhos, mantém articulação com a semiótica fundadora, sem deixar de fazer importantes desdobramentos para as investigações atuais, sobretudo trazendo novos objetos de investigação a esse domínio de conhecimento. Além disso, tem uma vasta e referenciada obra, com a publicação de dezenas de livros e artigos, muitos deles traduzidos para diversas línguas. Para citar alguns: Le savoir partagé (1987), Les espaces subjectifs (1989), Sémiotique des passions (1991, em co-autoria com A. J. Greimas), Semiótica de las pasiones: El seminario (1995), Sémiotique du visible (1995), Tension et signification (1998, em co-autoria com C. Zilberberg), Sémiotique et littérature (1999), Soma et séma (2004), Dictionnaire des passions littéraires (2005, em co-autoria com E. RalloDitche e P. Lombardo) e Significação e visualidade – exercícios práticos (2005). Em entrevista à Revista Interin[1], o pesquisador falou sobre as diferenças e proximidades entre os processos de comunicação, significação, enunciação e linguagens e também sobre as transformações sofridas e necessárias à semiótica no contato com seus objetos de pesquisa. Relembrou o caráter empírico da semiótica enquanto ciência, além de estabelecer algumas relações entre estudos sobre corpo e sinestesia. Compartilhou ainda passagens e memórias do processo de escrita e publicação do livro Semiótica das paixões (1991), com A. J. Greimas, relembrando a necessidade de vínculo com o outro (ou outros) para a produção de conhecimento. [1] Entrevista concedida por ocasião de sua visita a Curitiba, convidado a ministrar palestras no PPGCom/UTP. Sua vinda foi possível graças à solidariedade acadêmica de colegas do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos de Linguagem – UFF-RJ e a parceria dos Grupos de Pesquisa INCOM (Interações Comunicacionais, Imagens e Culturas Digitais), da UTP, e SeDi (Grupo de Pesquisa em Semiótica e Discurso), vinculado ao PPG Estudos de Linguagens da UFF. Contou com o apoio financeiro da FAPERJ-RJ e da UTP-PR. Agradecemos à professora Doutora Kati Eliana Caetano por mediar o evento e auxiliar neste percurso semiótico de conhecer o outro. Entrevista realizada em Francês, em 12 de março de 2020, na Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná (UTP) e traduzida por Analuce Danda Coelho Medeiros.

Gourmelen M. Saint-Jacques I, Morineau G. Soliman H, Julien R, Fiet J. 11β-Hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase deficit: a rare cause of arterial hypertension. Diagnosis and therapeutic approach in two young brothers. Eur J Endocrinol 1996;135:238–44. ISSN 0804–4643 We report the clinical history and results of endocrine investigations in two brothers born to consanguineous parents, who presented with hypokalemia and arterial hypertension when they were aged 2 and 6 years. The hormonal serum assay results, including extremely low values for aldosterone and plasma renin activity, favored the existence of apparent mineralocorticoid excess. A diagnosis of 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (11β-HSD) deficiency was made, based on assays of the hydrogenated urinary metabolites of cortisol and cortisone, as well as of corticosterone and dehydrocorticosterone. Indeed we found a very low rate of urinary elimination of cortisone metabolites: tetrahydrogenated cortisone was reduced to between 0.10 and 30 μmol/24 h, which is 15–100 times lower than the normal rate; hexahydrogenated cortolones a and β were found to be 7-to 20-fold lower than normal levels; and the 11-keto-17-ketosteroid derivatives of cortisone were also reduced. Urinary elimination of the cortisol-reduced metabolites 5β- and 5α-tetrahydrogenated cortisol were slightly reduced or normal. These results argue in favor of a deficit in the enzyme 11β-HSD, which oxidizes cortisol into cortisone. A moderate defect in the conversion of cortisol into 5β-THF compared to normal conversion into 5α-THF was also found. With respect to corticosterone metabolism, we demonstrated the presence of a defect in the oxidation of that steroid into dehydrocorticosterone, also due to the deficit in 11β-HSD. Arterial hypertension and hypokalemia were corrected by treatment with dexamethasone, concomitantly with correction of the low aldosterone and plasma renin activity levels. On the other hand, during this treatment, urinary concentrations of the metabolites of cortisol. cortisone and corticosterone were only moderately affected. Jean Fiet, Laboratoire de Biologie Hormonale, Hôpital Saint-Louis, I Avenue Claude Vellefaux, 75475 Paris Cedex 10, France

This article re-examines a crucial aspect of French history between 1789 and 1793, and one which remains controversial : the attitude of Louis XVI towards the Revolution. It does this by exploiting an important and unpublished source, the letters of the king's secret plenipotentiary to the European powers, the baron de Breteuil, to the foreign monarch most trusted by the French royal family, Gustavus III of Sweden. Since Louis XVI's precarious position in Paris from the October Days until his death prevented him from expressing his true feelings except very rarely, historians since have found it difficult to reach firm conclusions on his political views and motivation during the Revolution, and the result has often been partisan judgements from left and right. The issue has been further clouded by persistent claims for over a century that several of Louis's most important letters of this period are forgeries. While they do not resolve all these problems, the letters of Breteuil to Gustavus III, which are incontestably genuine, reveal Louis XVI's views on critical events between 1791 and 1792 as represented by the politician closest to his real policy, to the fellow-ruler in whom he had the most faith. The most important subjects covered are Breteuil's interpretation of Louis XVI's true attitude to the constitution of September 1791, his distrust of his brothers, the comtes de Provence and d'Artois, and the plan for an armed congress of the European powers to put pressure on revolutionary France. These letters, and Gustavus III's replies to them, are published at the end of the article in an appendix.

A little over one hundred years ago submarines progressed from the stage of an invention to that of an innovation. This was thanks to the take-off of a technology that alone could enable them to develop - electricity, the crucial element in the second industrial revolution. But the electric motor alone offered little for this new weapon of war at sea because of the extremely feeble range of its batteries. For safety reasons the internal combustion petrol engine was rejected as a means to recharge the batteries whilst the submarine was surfaced. From 1904 the brand-new diesel engine, powered by a safe heavy fuel, would give the submarine its definitive configuration and endow it with great military potential -major use of which was made in the two main wars of the Twentieth Century. Until diesel trials were successfully completed, the steam-engine was preferred. The experimental phase was long and painful, proceeding by trial-and-error and with many mistakes. It was the work of three French companies : Sautter-Harlé, the French Otto Gaz Company, both located in Paris, and the French Diesel-Engine Company at Longueville (near Bar-le-Duc), The completion of this stage of development concerned the four-stroke diesel engine. But around 1910 the German firm M.A.N. came up with a two-stroke variant. Several countries including France adopted this prematurely, for it was far from fully ready. Germany drew on this for a Machiavellian plan aimed at pushing its future enemies onto a disastrous course that would have weakened their submarine forces. This unknown episode is now revealed through exploitation of the archives of the Sautter-Harlé company, deposited in the private collections of the Service Historique de la Marine, cartons 1GG 1-66.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting influences leverage ratios. In particular, this paper aims to determine whether firms with higher CSR disclosure scores have better access to debt financing. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a panel data analysis of non-financial French firms listed on the Euronext Paris Stock Exchange and members of the SBF 120 index from 2010 to 2015. The environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure scores that are collected from the Bloomberg database are used as a proxy for the extent of ESG information disclosures by French companies. Findings The empirical results demonstrate that leverage ratios are positively related to CSR disclosure scores. In addition, the results show that the levels of long-term and short-term debt increase with the disclosure of ESG information, thus suggesting that CSR disclosures play a significant role in reducing information asymmetry and improving transparency around companies’ ESG activities. This finding meets the lenders’ expectations in terms of extrafinancial information and attracts debt financing sources. Research limitations/implications The research is based only on the quantity of the ESG information disclosed by French companies and does not account for the quality of the CSR disclosures. The empirical model omits some control variables (e.g. the nature of the industry, the external business conditions and the age of the firm). The results should not be generalized, since the sample was based on large French companies for 2010–2015. Practical implications France is a highly regulated context that places considerable pressure on French firms in terms of CSR policies. The French Parliament has adopted several laws requiring transparency in the environmental, social, and corporate governance policies of French firms. In this context, firms often regard CSR policies as constraints rather than opportunities. This study highlights the benefits that result from transparent CSR practices. More precisely, it provides evidence that the high disclosure of ESG information is a pull factor for credit providers. Originality/value This study extends the scope of previous studies by examining the value and relevance of CSR disclosures in financing decisions. More precisely, it focuses on the relatively little explored relationship between the extent of CSR disclosures and access to debt financing. This paper demonstrates how each category of CSR disclosure information (e.g. social, environmental and governance) affects access to debt financing. Moreover, this study focuses on the rather interesting empirical setting of France, which is characterized by its highly developed legal reforms in terms of CSR. Achieving a better understanding of the effects of ESG information is useful for corporate managers desiring to meet lenders’ expectations and attract debt financing sources.

The aim. A comprehensive study of the functional state of the small intestine and the study of the relationship of its disorders with the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.Materials and methods. 86 patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease at the stage of steatosis and steatohepatitis were examined according to the results of ultrasound examination of the liver using the SONIX OP apparatus (Canada) and the FibroMax test of BioPredictiv company (Paris, France). Patients underwent a blood glucose test using an Huma Star 600 analyzer (Germany) and insulin using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The HOMA-IR insulin resistance index was calculated. In order to determine abnormal digestive disorders in the small intestine, a stress test was performed with soluble starch, membrane digestion with sucrose, absorption with glucose. IDBs were evaluated using a hydrogen breath test on a LactofN2 apparatus from the AMA firm (St. Petersburg). To assess colonic microflora, stool was sown for dysbiosis.Results. According to clinical data, in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, damage to the small intestine occurs in a non-manifest form. However, in the study of the functional state of the small intestine in patients, a significant decrease in cavity and membrane digestion, increased absorption are detected. In patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, an increase in blood insulin was observed compared with the control group (16,64±0,78 μIU/ml versus 10,46±0,56 μI/ml, p=0,000002). The HOMA-IR insulin resistance index was also increased in patients compared with the control group (2,84±0,11 versus 2,05±0,07, p=0,00003). Excessive bacterial growth was diagnosed in 62 (72%) of patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, while with liver steatosis — in 33 (55%), with steatohepatitis 1 degree of activity — in 11 (61,1%), with steatohepatitis 2 degrees — in 6 (66,7%), with steatohepatitis 3 degrees — in 2 (100%) of patients. According to the results of stool stool, dysbiosis was detected in 56 (65,1%) of patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. A correlation analysis revealed negative relationships between the severity of excessive bacterial growth and digestive digestion, between the severity of excessive bacterial growth and membrane digestion, and a positive relationship between the severity of excessive bacterial growth and absorption.Conclusion. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is accompanied by disorders of the digestive and resorptive functions of the small intestine, and the development of dysbiosis. These disorders are often subclinical in nature and can be identified and evaluated after special studies.

AbstractSince 1988, when this journal carried an article on Andrics Bongen (ca. 1732-1792), probably the first cabinet-maker in Amsterdam to have made marquetry furniture in the French style in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, not one item has been added to his small oeuvre. It is therefore still not clear whether Bongen had a long and successful career, nor whether his production was large. This article deals with the eighteenth-century activities of Matthijs Horrix (1735 -1809), a furniture maker who in certain aspects may be regarded as Bongen's Hague counterpart. He, too, hailed from Germany, set up independently in the Netherlands in the 1760s and worked in the French style from the outset of his career. There are however no doubts as to bis success : he was The Hague's best-known furniture maker in the late eighteenth century, with the largest workshop. In the course of the nineteenth century the firm he founded grew into the largest in the Netherlands (note 4). Whereas it cannot be ascertained whether 'French' cabinet-making was ever a dominant trend in Amsterdam, one gets the impression that such was to some extent the case in The Hague after 1760. In the city where the Stadholder's court and foreign embassies were based, the French-oriented court style had been a significant factor since at least the late seventeenth century (notes 5, 6 and 8). Many patrons in The Hague were probably keen on furniture which actually came from France. In 1771 the guild of furniture makers complained to the city council about the influx of furniture imported from abroad; this probably meant imports from France (notes 9 and 10). Several furniture makers in The Hague began to imitate the French models. As early as 1761 Matthijs Franses (ca. 1726-1788), who came from Kempen near Krefeld, advertized that he made and sold a variety of veneered furniture in the French style. His descriptions are not very clear, but mention is made of commodes and tables inlaid with copper (in the Boulle technique?), commodes 'à la Diligence' with gilded bronze mouldings and marble tops, desks and 'Ouvrages en ébène'. Franses says nothing about marquetry featuring different kinds of wood, the most popular decorative technique in Paris around 1760 and the kind of work with which Bongen made his debut in Amsterdam in 1766. It seems likely that Horrix arrived in The Hague around 1761. He was born in 1735, probably in Lobberich near Krefeld (note 25). In a petition submitted in 1764 he stated that he had been apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in The Hague 'for some years'; the period in question was probably not longer than three years (notes 26 and 27). At the beginning of this period, then, Horrix was already 25 years of age or older. In view of the common practice throughout Europe for boys to be apprenticed to a craftsman at the age of fourteen or thereabouts for a period of some six years (note 28), Horrix may have worked in one or more shops elsewhere after his apprenticeship and before his arrival in The Hague. However, no information about this period is available. On May 15 1764, Horrix was enrolled in the Hague guild as a master cabinet-maker (note 33). On January 9th of that year he had acquired citizenship, and on May 5th he had married Elisabeth de la Fosse of The Hague. The wedding was witnessed by

Two Acremonium spp., A. tubakii and A. rutilum, were isolated from rotted peaches (Prunus persica (L.) Batsch ‘Miraflores’) after ripening at 15 and 20°C, respectively, for 10 days. Fruit harvested in September 1994 in Mula (Murcia) at a firm-ripe stage of maturity were either nontreated or washed with water at 18°C and sorted in a packing line. Sorted fruit were treated with an aqueous dilution of iprodione (Rovral 50% WP Rhône-Poulenc Agrochimie, Paris, France) at 2 g·liter-1, pH = 7, and 18°C for 5 min. Half of the iprodione-treated fruit were forced-air pre-cooled to reach 0°C at the endosperm in about 12 h. Isolations of fungi were made from subepidermic tissue of decay margins of fruit with potato dextrose agar (PDA). Fungal species were identified after axenic cultures were grown on PDA for 10 days at 30°C. Acremonium spp. were identified based on microscopic morphology of asexual reproduction structures, using taxonomic keys. No other fungi were isolated from fruit decayed by Acremonium spp. A. tubakii decayed 1.7% of the iprodionetreated and pre-cooled fruit ripened at 15 or 20°C and the fruit treated by iprodione without pre-cooling but ripened at 20°C. These fruit were completely decomposed and oozed liquid. Colonies of this species were light colored, with nonramified, nonseptate, and hyaline conidiophores. The one-cell, ovate, and hyaline conidia of the fungus were enclosed in slimy heads. A. tubakii did not cause any brown discoloration of the PDA media. A. rutilum affected 3.2% of the iprodione-treated fruit ripened at 20°C. In contrast to A. tubakii infection, A. rutilum affected only the surface of fruit, which remained dry. Cultures of A. rutilum were white to pink and the conidia were one-celled, ovate, and hyaline, forming a head on the tip of the nonramified conidiophores. Conidia were long, nonseptate, and distinct from the somatic hyphae. Acremonium spp. probably developed on injuries caused by handling and/or treatments, because these rots did not occur on untreated fruit. Rhizopus nigricans, and to a lesser extent other fungi such as Alternaria, Cladosporium, and Penicillium spp., also commonly caused decay of sampled fruit. A. tubakii is a ubiquitous soil fungus reported from various European countries. A. rutilum isolated from diseased apples were pathogenic upon reinoculation (1). Both fungi were not found in the Spanish type culture collection of 1990. Other Acremonium spp. have been identified in melon roots in Spain (2). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of Acremonium spp. causing decay of peach in Spain. References: (1) C. Brooks et al. Phytopathology 4:403, 1914. (2) J. García-Jiménez et al. Plant Dis. 78:416, 1994.

In the 1920s, a movement of revival of sacred art began in France, which also included stained glass. Its revival was associated with a departure from the illusionistic character of stained glass of the 19 th century and a reference to monumentalism and the spiritual tradition of the Middle Ages. The search for a new concept of stained glass, both in its ideological and technological aspects, resulted in the creation of “artists’ stained glass” (vitraux d’artistes), realised from the middle of the 20 th century on official commissions, thanks to the cooperation of ecclesiastical institutions and state authorities, which acquired a firm legal and financial basis in the 1980s. The stages of this evolution were marked by stained glass ensembles designed by the masters of the post-war avant-garde: G. Rouault and J. Bazaine in Notre Dame de Toute Grâce on the plateau Assy (1937–1946); H. Matisse for Notre Dame du Rosaire in Vence (1940); A. Manessier in Saint Michel in Les Bréseux with the first abstract stained-glass windows (1948); F. Léger, J. Bazaine and J. Le Moal in the interior of Sacré-Coeur in Audincourt, (1949–1951); Le Corbusier in Notre Dame in Ronchamp (1951–1955) and the modern stained glass of J. Villon, R. Bissière and M. Chagall, which was introduced for the first time to a world-class monument of architecture, the Cathedral of Saint-Étienne in Metz (1955). The restoration of the Cathedral of Saint-Cyr et Sainte-Julitte in Nevers provided an opportunity for representatives of the younger generation: R. Ubac, C. Viallat, J.M. Alberola, G. Honegger and F. Rouan (1973–2011), to showcase their vision of stained glass painting. With the exception of Alberola, all were associated with the non-figurative trends that had been developing since the 1950s. The same trend referring to the Cistercian tradition included the outstanding realisations of J.P. Raynaud in Noirlac (1975–1977), P. Soulages in Conques (1986), J. Ricardon in Acey (1991–1994) and A. Nemours, a representative of the Art Concret movement, at Salagon (1998). The return to figuration found a continuation in the projects of G. Garouste for Notre Dame de Talant (1996–1997), C. Benzaken for Saint-Sulpice in Varennes-Jarcy (1991–2007), M. Raysse, associated with the Nouveau Réalisme movement, for Notre-Dame de l’Arche d’Alliance in Paris (1986–1998) and G. Collin-Thiébaut for Saint Gatien in Tours (2010–2013). The creators of vitraux d’artistes accepted the prescribed programmatic framework without giving up their freedom of choice in means of expression and aesthetic conventions. Thanks to the research and creativity of the artists – the introduction of innovative technological processes or a new interpretation of traditional materials and craft methods – but also the courage of the ecclesiastical and, above all, state commissioners, French stained glass has fully integrated itself into the evolution of contemporary visual expression.

For the first time the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences, IASCYS, ( http://iascys.org), has awarded the Charles François International Prize, during the 10thUES-EUS Congress (http://ues-eus.eu), in Brussels, Belgium, Europe. The first step of the procedure was the nomination of interesting papers through asking for the reviewing process by all IASCYS Academicians. So, 6 weeks before the start of the meeting, a booklet of 40 abstracts, all previously anonymously peer-reviewed by the scientific committee of the congress, and each as a 1 page of text, with neither author(s) name(s), nor affiliation(s) or references, was sent to all Academicians. After a 1 month delay, 10 papers of people from 9 Countries (Algeria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Russia), have been nominated by Academicians, by e-mails replies. After the congress organizers have proposed as jurors a team of 3 systems scientists who all are speaking both French and English (the official formal languages of the UES-EUS congress), an equal number of 3 Academicians, who are as well fluent in English, French and other languages, attended as the IASCYS part of the jury. After this key step of peers pre-selection, the second step, during the meeting in Brussels, was for all 6 jurors to listen and participate to the corresponding talks-debate for each of the selected papers, in order to rank the top 3 of the most promising works, and then to reflect on the final ranking for the award. The jurors were anonymous. The listening process was the usual process of talk (20 min) and questions (10 min) with the public as in every congress, but also with personal no-formal discussion of jurors with the nominated persons. The first Charles François International Prize of the Academy (gold medal) was awarded to Julio LABORDE, a young Chilean research engineer who is working in the International industrial firm 'Insight Signals'. He is also a student in the prestigious École Pratique des Hautes Études, in Paris, France. His talk was about "Extraction of Information from Agent Base Models. A new pre-topological metric for controlling the propagation of crises." It took place during the 'Methods and tools for risk management of complex socio-technical systems'session. No discussion, his work was the most promising work of the congress. His work was the most promising work of this congress of the European Union for Systemics.This second step allows also, after a debate, to award 3 second places (3 silver medals). They all got the Charles François tutorial in Systems Science on a USB stick and they all, gold and silver medals (Figure 1), will have a certificate of ranking. But, all of them, will get their certificates of award/ranking only after their paper proof will be corrected and accepted. The other 3 certificated persons, silver medals, are (by alphabetic order): -Mick ASHBY, a research engineer in computing sciences who is working for IBM in Germany. His work was about the application of a new paradigm 'The Ethical Regulator Theorem'; -Tjorven HARMSEN, a very young Swedish women who is in Ph. D. in the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, in Berlin (Germany). Her work was ab out 'Crisis as Social Autocatalysis. On the emergence and Utilization of Opportunities' (a very promising talk, a young researcher to follow; and -Daniela TERRILE, a women who is Professor in the Department of Design at the Polytechnic Institute of Milano, Italy. Her work was about 'Applications of the Target Constellation Model'. 2 other works were also very interesting but one was not into the book of abstracts (it was not peer-reviewed), the other one was into it but it was not pre-selected. No process is perfect. But the rule is the rule: no peer-reviewing, no preselection, means no competition. The important point is that few of the 'preselected and nominated, but not ranked in the top 3' participants said they will attend the next one edition of the Prize in Morocco. And other young researchers said they will do their best to attend another occurrence of the Prize. The Prize was opened to strengthen multi-disciplinary research and the multi-language communication of recent results, towards a worldwide education in Cybernetics and Systems Thinking (Bricage, 2017), which are aims of the Academy (Bricage, 2014). “Want to influence the world? Map reveals the best languages to speak.” (Ronen et al., 2014). On the IASCYS website you will find the rules of the Prize, in English, Spanish, French and Russian.

Il me regarde. Parfois il murmure des mots que je ne comprends pas. Et puis il s’assoit sur le lit, et il rabat les couvertures. Il dit mon nom tout bas, tu dormais, mon amour ? Là il n’y a plus d’espoir, je sais que ça commence. J’ouvre les yeux sur le noir de la chambre qui peu à peu s’éclaire et dévoile le visage de papa. Il n’y a pas de mots pour ce qu’il me fait dans la chambre. Voix coupée, je ne pourrai jamais le dire. À moi seule je le dis pour ne pas me perdre de vue. Lori Saint-Martin (1999). Mon père, la nuit (p. 7). L’instant même. Nous voilà au troisième solstice d’hiver pour la revue HYBRIDA. J’ai eu la chance de passer mon anniversaire à Montréal, de recevoir l’automne aux couleurs changeantes, de savourer l’énergie du jaune, ma couleur préférée, décliné à l’infini : citron, cadmium, moutarde, ocre, auréolin, indien, de Naples, de Sienne, de Cambodge… L’Association Internationale des Études Québécoises, incarnée dans la précieuse figure de Suzie Beaulieu, a contribué à la réussite de ce séjour d’un mois à l’Université de Montréal, accueilli par une personne magnifique et généreuse, écrivaine prestigieuse à juste titre, Catherine Mavrikakis, qui venait de publier son dernier roman Niagara (2022), ainsi que par son entourage académique et familial, son frère Nicolas Mavrikakis, perspicace critique d’art ; son conjoint, l’insigne professeur de littérature Terry Cochran, et leur fille Loulou, toujours le sourire aux lèvres et aux yeux… Le mois d’octobre est spécialement animé du point de vue culturel à Montréal ce qui m’a permis de participer à une intense vie culturelle : nouvelles publications, activités théâtrales, expositions artistiques, cycles organisés par la cinémathèque québécoise (dont la superbe rétrospective sur l’œuvre du canadien Bruce LaBruce)… Je me suis plu à visiter les intéressantes librairies montréalaises toujours en ébullition. J’ai eu la chance d’entrer en contact direct avec le monde éditorial québécois qui connaît certainement un nouvel âge d’or, des maisons d’édition d’une longue tradition comme Gallimard, dont l’ancien directeur Rolf Puls m’a parlé de tant d’anecdotes littéraires en nous régalant avec des huîtres et des oursins des mers du Nord, et dont l’actuelle directrice générale, Florence Noyer, m’a ouvert également les portes. Tout comme les éditions du Boréal où je suis passé plusieurs fois, reçu magnifiquement par Jean Bernier, avec qui j’ai passé des moments d’intense complicité où j’ai pu partager la passion pour Marie-Claire Blais, qu’il connaît dans le moindre détail, et le deuil à cause de la disparition douloureuse, cet intense mois d’octobre, du jeune écrivain Simon Roy, qui était venu à Valence présenter son premier roman Ma vie rouge Kubrick (2014) ; ainsi que celle de Lori Saint-Martin quelques jours plus tard. Il me reste à mentionner la maison d’édition Héliotrope. Un vrai bijou. J’ai eu le privilège de partager quelques conversations littéraires et humaines de haut niveau et une belle promenade du côté du Mont Royal, avec une halte dans la petite pâtisserie du quartier portugais pour prendre un vrai café, avec sa directrice, écrivaine elle-aussi, Olga Duhamel-Noyer, une âme sœur, qui dirige cette maison respirant sans aucun doute un air nouveau, fortement stimulant. Ma valise était donc bien pleine au retour à Valence et j’aurai de quoi lire dans les prochains mois. Tout cela m’a permis de rencontrer, parfois intensément, dans divers contextes, plusieurs écrivain·e·s, tous les âges confondus, dont je signalerai, par ordre alphabétique, Martine Audet, Arianne Bessette (écrivaine discrète et sensible avec qui j’ai connecté immédiatement), Lula Carballo (« ma Lula », mon double), David Clerson, Pierre-­André Doucet (charmant auteur et musicien acadien spécialement remarquable), Clara Dupuis-Morency, Benjamin Gagnon Chainey, Julien Guy-Béland (personne exceptionnelle, engagée, et écrivain percutant), Monique Proulx, que j’ai reçue à Valence et que j’apprécie énormément comme écrivaine et comme personne, avec qui j’ai partagé des croissants et de la confiture faite maison sur son balcon en regardant les arbres perdre leurs feuilles lorsqu’elle me dédicaçait son dernier roman Enlève la nuit (2022) ; et, bien entendu, Lori Saint-Martin. Je ne voudrais pas oublier le professeur de l’Université de Montréal Alex Noël, qui s’intéresse à la littérature québécoise récente et à la mémoire queer, et qui m’a fait découvrir le travail de l’artiste multidisciplinaire canadienne, originaire de l’île Maurice, Kama La Mackerel et le professeur espagnol de l’Université du Québec à Montréal Antonio Domínguez Leiva, écrivain lui-aussi, dont j’avais perdu la trace et avec qui je partage bien des intérêts littéraires autour du corps, de la monstruosité et du « panique ». Une dernière mention spéciale pour deux danseurs : Francis Paradis, personne instruite et empathique qui est restée tout le temps à mon écoute et m’a fait découvrir des lieux remarquables ; et, enfin, le danseur tunisien Achraf El Abed, en asile politique à Montréal à cause des persécutions LGBT dans son pays, n’ayant pas pu venir à Valence pour ces raisons lors du Colloque Queer Maghreb que nous avons organisé en juin 2022. Il a dansé pour nous en privé chez moi dans le quartier du Red Light de Montréal, pas loin de l’emblématique Café Cléopâtre, le jour de mon anniversaire, en compagnie de ma collègue et amie Adela Cortijo, qui était venue pour l’occasion. Je n’oublierai jamais ce moment magique. Merci à tous et à toutes pour avoir contribué à rendre ce séjour montréalais si spécial et si riche dans tous les sens. Comme je l’annonçais, nous avons perdu Lori Saint-Martin, excellente professeure, traductrice et écrivaine canadienne, ayant choisi le français comme langue d’asile et de refuge, d’identité réinventée, et surtout personne proche et généreuse, disparue dans la Seine, subitement. Des ombres spectrales ont envahi mon cœur et mes pensées à cause de ce destin trop funeste, trop tragique, trop romanesque, tellement j’ai envie de ne pas y croire… et, pourtant, Lori n’est plus là. Juste un dernier message sur WhatsApp quelques jours avant l’hécatombe : « Aquí todo bien » (« tout va vient ici »). Elle adorait l’espagnol, sa nouvelle demeure, sa nouvelle passion. Lori, mon amie, tu as troublé mon âme et laissé un grand vide difficile à combler. Je n’ai que des mots de gratitude envers toi. Et, pourtant, la vie continue à couler, elle coule et coule… comme les larmes des mères qui perdent leurs enfants dans toutes les guerres de la planète. Cette planète Terre qui pleure de plus en plus fort pour que l’on prenne soin d’elle, pour que l’on développe une conscience écologique efficace et durable… Temps catastrophiques, oui… excessifs, oui… scandaleux, oui… Et, pourtant, temps de Saturnales et de Noël, de fêtes, de chants et de vœux, de décorer les maisons, d’allumer les bougies et d’offrir des cadeaux, de rêves de santé, de paix et d’amour… tellement on a besoin de diluer les tensions que l’on ressent ; temps d’apaiser nos esprits… de se ressourcer, de reprendre haleine… de se projeter dans un meilleur avenir… malgré… Revenons à nos moutons… Le Dossier central de ce cinquième numéro de la revue HYBRIDA, coordonné par Fabio Libasci, vise à s’interroger sur les multiples enjeux de la notion d’extrême, que ce soit du point de vue chronologique que du point de vue conceptuel. En effet, l’expression « extrême contemporain », étant en perpétuel déplacement, reste spécialement attirante mais problématique, depuis sa création attribuée à Michel Chaillou, à la toute fin des années 80 du siècle dernier. On assisterait, de nos jours, à une « deuxième génération » de l’extrême contemporain. On pourrait donc l’actualiser pour faire référence aux productions littéraires et culturelles récentes au sens large. Du point de vue thématique, l’extrême est vite associé à la notion de limite, de démesure, voire de violence. En ce sens, force est de constater une tendance et une présence des esthétiques de rupture et des formes de l’excès chez des auteur·e·s contemporain·e·s, plus ou moins jeunes, ce qui nous a menés à nous pencher sur les usages et, peut-être les abus, de cette notion poreuse et changeante. Ce Dossier est composé de quatre articles venus de Côte d’Ivoire, de Finlande et de France. Ils abordent l’œuvre des écrivain·e·s Azo Vauguy, Koffi Kwahulé et Hélène Cixous et des cinéastes tels qu’Anne Fontaine, Christopher Doyle ou Julien Abraham. Dans la section Mosaïque, nous publions quatre articles très intéressants également. Hassna Mabrouk, de l’Université Chouaïb Doukkali (Maroc), en s’appuyant sur le révisionnisme historique proposé par les études postcoloniales et subalternes, s’empare de la figure historique de l’explorateur et interprète du début du XVIe siècle Mostafa Al-Azemmouri ou Estevanico, connue essentiellement en Europe sous l’angle de la relation de voyage de Cabeza de Vaca, trop eurocentrée, pour y opposer d’autres représentations de l’explorateur comme celle du personnage Al-Azemmouri qui apparaît dans le roman de Kebir M. Ammi, Les Vertus immorales (2009) où les représentations artistiques qui perdurent dans la ville marocaine d’Azzemmour où il est né. Ahmed Aziz Houdzi, de l’Université Chouaïb Doukkali également, analyse les transformations identitaires du sujet diasporique par rapport aux événements historiques dans le contexte français marqué par les attentats terroristes qui ont eu lieu à Paris en 2015. Il fait une fine lecture de Ce vain combat que tu livres au Monde (2016) de Fouad Laroui où le personnage principal se débat entre le désir d’intégration dans la société laïque et la tentation intégriste incarnée par l’État islamique. Lourdes Rubiales Bonilla de l’Université de Cadix (Espagne) se penche sur « l’affaire Batouala ». Dans son article, elle analyse avec précision les clés de la réception et de la diffusion dans la presse du moment du Prix Goncourt de 1921 octroyé au roman Batouala. Véritable roman nègre de René Maran. Ainsi, elle s’efforce de démontrer les mécanismes de la censure pour essayer de neutraliser le discours politique de l’auteur. Enfin, Diana Requena Romero de l’Université de Valence (Espagne) revient sur la problématique liée à l’étude des personnages féminins dans l’œuvre de Boris Vian. Pour ce faire, elle prend un corpus peu étudié qui est celui des nouvelles de l’auteur afin d’y déceler les processus de métamorphose du corps et les images de l’hybridation de la femme-animal située dans des espaces intermédiaires. Dans la section Traces, plus créative, nous publions trois contributions. Nous avons l’honneur de publier un texte fragmentaire bilingue (en français et en espagnol) de l’écrivaine québécoise, originaire de l’Uruguay, Lula Carballo intitulé restos de barrios (« des restes de quartiers ») où les bribes du passé se mélangent à la rupture du discours à la recherche de nouvelles voies d’expression littéraire. Son premier roman Créatures du hasard (2018) a été spécialement apprécié par la critique. Elle a aussi publié l’album illustré Ensemble nous voyageons (2021), co-écrit avec Catherine-Anne Laranjo et illustré par l’artiste Kesso. Carballo explore avec délicatesse et subtilité la mémoire liée aux souvenirs d’enfance et d’adolescence dans un contexte social spécialement marqué par la pauvreté et la migration, ainsi que les hybridations culturelles et la quête identitaire guidée par l’émotion et par un clair positionnement féministe aux côtés des minorités. Alexandre Melay nous offre [Timescapes], un document photographique présenté par l’auteur où il met en valeur ses préoccupations environnementales et nous fait partager son regard engagé face à « l’impossibilité du paysage » et « l’implacable déconstruction structuraliste du sujet ». Ces photographies en noir en blanc, sorte de cartographie de villes grises, polluées, envahies par les déchets et les éléments inhospitaliers, à l’ère du « Capitalocène », constituent un bel exemple de l’« extrême urbain contemporain ». Enfin, Natalia L. Ferreri de l’Université Nationale de Cordoba et Francisco Aiello de l’Université Nationale de Mar del Plata (toutes deux en Argentine) ont eu la générosité de choisir notre revue pour publier un long entretien en espagnol avec l’écrivaine française (née en Argentine en 1968) Laura Alcoba intitulé « ¿Para qué sirven las historias ? » (« À quoi servent les histoires ? »). Après l’évocation de son sixième et dernier roman intitulé Par la forêt (2022) où la narratrice évoque des expériences traumatiques telles que l’infanticide, le suicide et l’exil, Ferreri et Aiello passent en revue, d’une manière savante et subtile en même temps, les questions essentielles qui traversent l’écriture d’Alcoba où le geste de la traduction, la langue maternelle et la matière des histoires occupent une place prépondérante. Nous inaugurons la section Éventail, où nous voudrions, par le biais des recensions ou des comptes rendus, aérer et diffuser des publications de recherche ou de création proches des intérêts et des perspectives qui animent notre revue. En ce sens, nous publions l’intéressante et complète recension de Martine Renouprez de l’Université de Cadix (Espagne) sur le livre de Laurence Hansen-Love (2022), Planète en ébullition. Écologie, féminisme et responsabilité. Notre revue commence à décoller, à être indexée, répertoriée, présente un peu partout dans le monde grâce au grand intérêt démontré particulièrement par les chercheur·e·s africain·e·s. Un grand merci à vous. Bonne lecture et rendez-vous en juin 2023 pour questionner les « frontières » dans un Dossier intitulé LIMES. Sol invictus.

ABSTRACTFirst Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Julien Pernier is first author on ‘Myosin 1b flattens and prunes branched actin filaments’, published in JCS. Julien conducted the research described in this article while a postdoc in Patricia Bassereau's lab at the Institut Curie, Paris, France. He is now a postdoc in the lab of Christophe Le Clainche at the Institute for Integrative Biology of the Cell (I2BC), Gif-sur-Yvette, France, investigating the roles of actin-binding proteins in actin network dynamics and organization.

Cet article est un compte-rendu du livre : La langue littéraire. Une histoire de la prose en France de Gustave Flaubert à Claude Simon, sous la direction de Gilles Philippe & Julien Piat, Paris : Fayard, 2009, 571 p., EAN 9782213631158.

Cet article est un compte-rendu du livre : Postface à : La Langue littéraire. Une histoire de la prose en France de Gustave Flaubert à Claude Simon, sous la direction de Gilles Philippe et Julien Piat, Paris : Fayard, 2009, 571 p., EAN 9782213631158.

The threat of IRA terrorist attacks on French soil in the early 1980s necessitated the start of in-depth bilateral discussions between Britain and France concerning issues of counter-terrorism. France was initially reluctant to engage with Britain on these matters due to Paris’ concern that Britain would exert pressure to expand cooperation with the United States, and refused to budge from the position of cooperation only within the EEC once bilateral dialogues began. As terrorist attacks increased in France throughout the summer of 1986, the French government decided to take drastic counter-terrorist measures which angered many of their European neighbours. However, Britain’s firm support for French action had the effect of increasing British influence over France’s rather ineffective counter-terrorism policy, which in turn allowed London to apply more pressure on Paris to agree to wider consultations with Washington. Unable to resist British pressure further - particularly after the faux-pas over the Hindawi Affair - the French government in May 1986 finally decided to conduct deeper consultations on counter-terrorism issues with the United States and the other G7 nations, which resulted in the Statement on Terrorism at the G7 Summit in Venice in June 1987.

This article seeks to show, taking the example of delivery drivers, how inter-firm relations affect worker precarity. It is based on an in-depth field study carried out in the Paris region and backed up by the statistical analysis of national surveys. It focuses in particular on the role played by firms’ dependence in the precarity of work and employment, considering that both dependence and precarity should be considered ubiquitous. It then seeks to measure this dependence and highlight the factors that may increase it as the relative size of the firms, the chain of dependence and the position of firms in this chain. In this way, it sets out to show why the contractual status of employees can no longer provide job security in the context of unbalanced subcontracting relationships.

This article analyses the late fifteenth-century booklist on folios 78r to 82v of Manuscript français 2912 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, listing over 267 books in French. A close study of the material aspects of the document itself and of the texts listed in the inventory has allowed for a new dating of the booklist, to shortly after 1494, and for a fairly reliable hypothesis concerning the owner of the books: a bookseller specialising in second-hand books in French. The geographical indication in the booklist, «In Tours in front of the hôtel [town house] of monseigneur de Dunois», can be located in the town on the basis of historical maps: in the Grand Rue (now the rue Colbert) against the southern wall of the church of Saint-Julien or next to its southern and main entrance. Comparison with other book producers and booksellers in Paris and in Flanders shows that this is a typical location. The names and locations of booksellers and artisans active in the production of books in Tours as contained in the notarial archives of the town have unfortunately not permitted an identification of the bookseller, although the printer Simon Pourcelet had his printing workshop and bookshop nearby. Documented lending activities of booksellers in Flanders and the open character of other late medieval libraries and book collections show that this remarkably rich collection of literary, historical, pragmatic, and religious books in French was most likely an open access hub for reading in the vernacular in the bustling heart of late medieval Tours.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer worldwide, and the second leading cause of cancer death. Approximately one in five patients with CRC present with metastatic disease at diagnosis. The BRAF V600E mutation occurs in 8–12% of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC), and is characterised by an aggressive clinical course and poor prognosis. This article is based on a webinar discussion in March 2024, between two experts in gastrointestinal cancers, Chiara Cremolini, University of Pisa, Italy; and Julien Taieb, Georges Pompidou European Hospital, Université Paris-Cité, France, both of whom have a wealth of experience and expertise in the clinical management of CRC. The experts described the most important recent advances in the treatment of BRAF V600E-mutated mCRC, including data presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress in October 2023, and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Gastrointestinal (GI) Cancers Symposium in January 2024. Cremolini and Taieb gave valuable insights into topics such as the aggressive nature of BRAF V600E-mutated mCRC, and how this impacts choice of treatment, patient outcomes, and quality of life, as well as the importance of early testing and monitoring. The experts also discussed how the BRAF V600E mutation impacts treatment response and outcomes in patients with microsatellite unstable (microsatellite instability [MSI]) versus microsatellite stable (MSS) tumours, and recent key clinical trials in BRAF V600E-mutated mCRC. The importance of surgery in the multidisciplinary management of patients with BRAF V600E-mutated mCRC, BRAF as a prognostic marker in resected CRC, and real-world studies in this field were also explored. Finally, Cremolini and Taieb described what the future of the management of patients with BRAF V600E-mutated mCRC might look like, and which advancements in research they would like to see.

Introduction: At the Crossroad Well, I’ve been an important pawn [in regeneration], for instance, changing doors and windows, enlarging them, eliminating shutters and thus having big open windows, light […] Then came the florist, through a common friend, who was the second huge pawn who trusted in this […] then came the pastry shop. (Alberto, 54, shop owner). Alberto is the owner of Pleasure Factory, one of two upmarket restaurants in a gentrifying crossroads area in northern Milan. He started buying apartments and empty stores in the 1980s, later becoming property manager of the building where he still lives. He also opened two restaurants, and then set up a neighbourhood commercial organisation. Alberto’s activities, and those of people like him, have been able to reverse the image and the usage of this public crossroad. This is something of which all of the involved actors are well aware. They have “bet,” as they say, and somehow “won” by changing people’s common understanding of, and approach to, this zone. This paper argues for the necessity of a closer look at the ways that place is produced through the multiple activities of small entrepreneurs and social actors, such as Alberto. This is because these activities represent the softer side of gentrification, and can create zones of pleasure and authenticity. Whilst market forces and multiple public interventions of gentrification’s “hard” side can lead to the displacement of people and uneven development, these softer zones of authenticity and pleasure have the power to shape the general neighbourhood brand (Atkinson 1830). Speaking rhetorically, these zones act as synecdoche for the surrounding environment. Places are in part built through the “atmosphere” that consumers seek throughout their daily routines. Following Gernot Böhme’s approach to spatial aesthetics, atmosphere can be viewed as the “relation between environmental qualities and human states” (114) and this relation is worked out daily in gentrified neighbourhoods. Not only do the passer-bys, local entrepreneurs, and sociologists contribute to the local making of atmosphere, but so does the production of the environmental qualities. These are the private and public interventions aimed at refurbishing, and somehow sanitising, specific zones of central neighbourhoods in order to make them suitable for middle class tastes (Julier 875). Not all gentrification processes are similar however, because of the unique influence of each city’s scalar rearrangements. The following section therefore briefly describes the changes in Milan in recent times. The paper will then describe the making of a zone of authentic pleasure at the Isola crossroads. I will show that soft gentrification happens through the making of specific zones where supply and demand match in ways that make for pleasant living. Milan, from Global to Local and Back Milan has a peculiar role in both the Italian and European contexts. Its metropolitan area, of 7.4 million inhabitants on a 12 000 km² surface, makes it the largest in Italy and the fifth in Europe (following Ruhr, Moscow, Paris and London). The municipal power has been pushing for a long-term strategy of population growth that would make Milan the “downtown” of the overall metropolitan area (Bricocoli and Savoldi 19), and take advantage of scalar rearrangements, such as State reconfigurations and setbacks. The overall goal of the government of Milan has been to increase the tax base and the local government’s political power. Milan also demonstrates the entrepreneurial turn adopted by many global cities, evident in the amount of project-based interventions, the involvement of international architecture studios (“La città della Moda” by Cesar Pelli; “Santa Giulia” by Norman Foster; “City-Life” and “the Fair” by Zaha Hadid and David Libeskind), and the hosting of mega-events, such as the Expo 2015. The Milan growth machine works then at different scales (global, national, city-region, neighbourhood) with several organisational actors involved, enormous investments and heavy political struggles to decide which coalition of winning actors will ride the tiger of uneven development. However, when we look at those transformations through the lens of the neighbourhood what we see is the making of zones within the larger texture of its streets and squares. This zone-making is similar to leopard’s spots within a contained urban space, it works for some time in specific streets and crossroads, then moves throughout the neighbourhood, as the process of gentrification goes on. The neighbourhood, which the zone of authentic pleasure I’m describing occurs, is called Isola (Island) because of its clustered shape between a railroad on the southern border and three major roads on the others. Isola was, until the 1980s, a working-class residential space with a strong tradition of left-wing political activism, with some small manufacturing businesses and minor commercial activities. This area remained quite removed from the overall urban development that radically shifted Milan towards a service economy in the 1960s and 1970s. However, during the 1980s and 1990s, the land price impacts of private activities and public policies in surrounding neighbourhoods increasingly pushed people and activities in the direction of Isola. Alberto explains this drift through the example of his first apartment: Just look at the evolution of my apartment. I bought it [in the 1980s] for 57 million lira, I remember, then sold it in 1992 for 160, then it was sold again for 200 000 euros, then four years ago for 250 000 and you have to understand that we’re talking about 47 square metres. If you consider the last price, 250 000, I’ll tell you that when I first came to the neighbourhood you could easily buy an entire building with that money. The building at number five in this street was entirely sold for 550 millions lira—you understand now why Isola is a huge real estate investment, people like it, its central, well served by the underground—well it still has to grow from a commercial standpoint… This evolution in land prices is clear when translated into the price for square metre: 2.4 euros for square meter in 1985, 3.4 in 1992, 4.2 in 2000 and 5.3 in 2006. The ratio increase is 120% in 20 years, demonstrating both the general boost in the economy of the area and also what is at stake within uneven development. What this paper argues is that parallel to this political economy dimension, which may be called the “hard side” of gentrification, there is also a “soft side” that deserves a closer attention. Pastry shops, cafés, bars, restaurants are as strategic as real estate investments (Zukin, Landscapes 195). The spatial concept that best captures the rationale of these activities is the zone, meaning a small and localised cluster of activities. I chose to add the features of pleasure and authenticity because of the role they play in ordinary consumption practices. In order to illustrate the specific relevance of soft gentrification I will now turn to the description of the Isola crossroad, a place that has been re-created through the interventions of several actors, such as Alberto above, and also Franca and her pastry shop. A Zone of Authentic Pleasure: Franca’s Pleasure Corner We’re walking through a small residential street and arrive at a crossroad. We turn to look to the four corners, one is occupied by a public school building, the second and the third by upmarket restaurants, and the last by a “typical” Sicilian pastry shop and café. We decide to enter here, find a seat and order a coffee together with a small cassata, a cake made with sweet cheese, almonds, pistachios and candied fruit. While we are experiencing this southern Italian breakfast at some thousand miles of spatial distance from its original site, a short man enters. He’s a well renowned TV comedian, best known for his would-be-magician gags. Everybody in the café recognises him but pretends to ignore his presence, he buys some pastries and leaves. Other customers come and go. The shop owner, an Italian lady in her forties called Franca, approaches to me and declares: “as you can see for yourself, we see elegant people here.” In this kind of neighbourhood it is common to see and share space with such “elegant” and well-known people, and to feel that a pleasant atmosphere is created through this public display. Franca opened the pastry shop three years ago, a short time after the upmarket restaurants on the other corners. However, when we interviewed her she wasn’t yet satisfied with the atmosphere: “when I go downtown and come back, I feel depressed … it’s developing but still has not grown enough … Isn’t one of the classic rich places in Milan—it’s kind of a weird place.” Through these and other similar statements she expressed a feeling of delusion toward the neighbourhood—a feeling on which she’s building her tale—that emerged in contrast to the kind of environment Franca would consider more apt for her shop. Franca’s a newcomer, but knows that the neighbourhood has been “sanitised.” “It really was a criminal area” she states, using overtly derogatory terms just like they were neutral: “riffraff” for the customers of ordinary bars, “dull” for the northern part of the neighbourhood where “there even are kebab shops.” In contrast she lists her beloved customers: journalists, architects, two tenors, people working at the theatre nearby, and the local TV celebrity described earlier. When she refers to the crossroad she speaks of it as, “maybe the gem of the neighbourhood.” At some point she declares what makes her proud: A place like this regenerates the neighbourhood—to be sure, if I ever open a harbour bar I’d attract riffraff who would discredit the place. In short it’s not, to make an example, a club where you play cards, that bring in the underworld, noise, nuisance—here the customer is the typical middle class, all right people. The term “all right people” reoccurs in several of Franca’s statements. Her initial economic sacrifices, relative though if, as she says, she’s able to open another shop in a more central place (“we would like to become a chain-store”), are now compensated by the recognition she gets from her more polished clients. She also expresses a personal satisfaction in the role she has played in the changes in Isola: “until now it’s just a matter of personal satisfaction—of seeing, I’ve built this stuff.” Franca’s story demonstrates that the soft side of gentrification is also produced by individuals that have little in common with the huge capital investment that is at stake in real estate development, or the chain stores that are also opening in the neighbourhood. In one way, Franca is alone in her quest for regeneration, as most entrepreneurs are. In another way, though, she is not. Not only is she participating in the “upgrading” together with other small business owners and consumers who all agree on the direction to follow, thus building together a zone of authentic pleasure, but she can also rely on a “critical infrastructure” of architects, designers and consultants (Zukin, Landscapes 202) that knows perfectly how to do the job. With much pride in her interior design choices, Franca pointed out how her café mixes chic with classic and opposing them to a flashy and folk décor. She showed us the black-and-white pictures at the wall depicting Paris in the 1960s, the unique design coffee machine model she owns, and the flower vases conceived by a famous designer and filled by her neighbour florist. The colours chosen for the interior are orange, tied to oranges—a typical product of Sicily, whereas the brown colour relates to the land, and the gold is linked to elegance. The mixing of warm colours, Franca explained, makes the atmosphere cosy. Where did this owner get all these idea(l)s? Franca relied on an Italian interior design studio, which works at a global scale furnishing hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, bathing establishments, and airports in New York, Barcelona, Paris, and Milan. The architect with whom she dealt with let her “work together” in order to have an autonomous set of choices that match the brand’s offer. Authenticity thus becomes part of the décor in a systematic way, and the feeling of a pleasant atmosphere is constantly reproduced through the daily routines of consumption. Again, not alone in the regeneration process but feeling as if she is “on her own,” Franca struggles daily to protect the atmosphere she’s building: “My point is avoiding having kids or tramps as customers—I don’t want an indiscriminate presence, like people coming here for a glass of wine and maybe getting drunk. I mean, this is not the place to come and have a bianchino [cheap white wine]. People coming here have a spumante, and behave in a completely different fashion.” The opposition between a bianchino, the cheap white wine, and the spumante is one that clarifies the moral boundary between the targets of soft gentrification. In Italian popular culture, and especially in the past, it was a common male habit to have bianchino from late morning onwards. Bars therefore served as gendered public spaces where common people would rest from working activities and the family sphere. Franca, together with many new bars and cafes that construct zones of authentic pleasure in gentrifying neighbourhoods, is trying to update this cultural practice. The spumante adds a sparkling element to consumption and is branded as a trendy aperitif wine, which appeals to younger tastes and lifestyles. By utilising a global design studio, Franca connects to global patterns of urban development and the homogenising of local atmospheres. Furthermore, by preferencing different consumption behaviours she contributes to the social transformation of the neighbourhood by selecting customers. This tendency towards segregation, rather than mixing, is a relevant feature here, since the Franca’s favourite clientele are clearly “people like us” (Butler 2469). Zones like the one described above are thus places where uneven development shows its social, interactive and public façade. Pleasure and Authenticity in Soft Gentrification The production of “atmosphere” in a gentrifying neighbourhood goes together with customers’ taste and preferences. The supply-side of building the environmental landscape for a “pleasant” zone needs a demand-side, consumers buying, supporting, and appreciating the outcome of the activities of business people like Franca. The two are one, most of the time, because tastes and preferences are linked to class, gender, and ethnicity, which makes a sort of mutual redundancy. To put it abruptly: similar people, spending their time in the same places and in a similar way. As I have shown above, the pastry shop owner Franca went for mixing chic and classic in her interior design. That is distinctiveness and familiarity, individualisation and commonality in one unique environment. Seen from the consumer’s perspective, this leads to what has been depicted by Sharon Zukin in her account of the crisis of authenticity in New York. People, she says, are yearning for authenticity because this: reflects the separation between our experience of space and our sense of self that is so much a part of modern mentalities. Though we think authenticity refers to a neighbourhood’s innate qualities, it really expresses our own anxieties about how places change. The idea of authenticity is important because it connects our individual yearning to root ourselves in a singular time and place to a cosmic grasp or larger social forces that remake our world from many small and often invisible actions. (220) Among the “many small and invisible actions” are the ones made by Franca and the global interior design firm she hired, but also those done daily by her customers. For instance, Christian a young advertising executive who lives two blocks away from the pastry shop. He defines himself an “executive creative director” [in English, while the interview was in Italian]. Asked on cooking practices and the presentation he makes to his guests, he declares that the main effort is on: The mise en place—the mise en place with no doubt. The mise en place must be appropriate to what you’re doing. Sometimes you get the mise en place simply serving a plateau, when you correctly couple cheese and salami, even better when you couple fresh cheese with vegetables or you give a slightly creative touch with some fruit salad, like seitan with avocado, no? They become beautiful to see and the mise en place saves it, the aesthetics does its job …Do you feel there are foods, beverages or consumption occasions you consider not worth giving up at all? The only thing I wouldn’t give up is going out in the morning, and having a cappuccino down there in the tiny pastry shop and having some brioches while I’m at the bar. Those that are not frozen beforehand but cooked just in time and have a breakfast, for just two euros, two euros and ten […] cappuccino and fresh brioche, baked just then, otherwise I cannot even think—if I’m in Milan I hardly think correctly—I mean I can’t wake up really without a good cappuccino and a good brioche. Christian is one of the new residents that was attracted to this neighbourhood because of the benefits of its uneven development: relatively affordable rent prices, services, and atmosphere. Commonality is among them, but also distinctiveness. Each morning he can have his “good cappuccino and good brioche” freshly baked to suit his taste and that allows him to differentiate between other brioches, namely the industrialised ones, those “frozen beforehand.” More importantly, he can do this by simply crossing the street and entering one of the pleasure zones that are making Isola, there and now, the new gentrified Milanese neighbourhood. Zones of Authentic Pleasure In this paper I have argued that a closer attention to the softer side of gentrification can help to understand how taste and uneven development mesh together, to produce the common shape we find in gentrified neighbourhoods. These typical urban spaces are made of streets, sidewalks, squares, and walls, but also shop windows and signs, pavement cafés, planters, and the street-life that turns around all of this. Both built environment and interaction produces the atmosphere of authentic pleasure, which is offered by local entrepreneurs and sought by the people who go there. Pleasure is a central feature because of the increasing role of consumption activities in the city and the role of individual consumption practices. I f we observe closely the local scale where all of these practices take place, we can clearly distinguish one zone from another because of their localised effervescence. Neighbourhoods are not equally affected by gentrification. Internally specific zones emerge as those having the capacity to subsume the entire process. These are the ones I have described in this paper—zones of authentic pleasure, where the supply and demand for an authentic distinctive and communal atmosphere takes place. Ephemeral spaces; if one looks at the political economy of place through a macro lens. But if the aim is to understand why certain zones prove to be successful and others not, then exploring how soft gentrification is daily produced and consumed is fundamental.Acknowledgments This article draws on data produced by the research team for the CSS project ‘Middle Class and Consumption: Boundaries, Standards and Discourses’. The team comprised Marco Santoro, Roberta Sassatelli and Giovanni Semi (Coordinators), Davide Caselli, Federica Davolio, Paolo Magaudda, Chiara Marchetti, Federico Montanari and Francesca Pozzi (Research Fellows). The ethnographic data on Milan were mainly produced by Davide Caselli and by the Author. The author wishes to thank the anonymous referees for wise and kind remarks and Michelle Hall for editing and suggestions. References Atkinson, Rowland. “Domestication by Cappuccino or a Revenge on Urban Space? Control and Empowerment in the Management of Public Spaces.” Urban Studies 40.9 (2003): 1829–1843. Böhme, Gernot. “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics.” Thesis Eleven 36 (1993): 113–126. Bricocoli, Massimo, and Savoldi Paola. Milano Downtown: Azione Pubblica e Luoghi dell’Abitare. Milano: et al./Edizioni, 2010. Butler, Tim. “Living in the Bubble: Gentrification and Its ‘Others’ in North London.” Urban Studies 40.12 (2003): 2469–2486. Julier, Guy. “Urban Designscapes and the Production of Aesthetic Consent.” Urban Studies 42.5/6 (2005): 869–887. Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power. From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. ———. Naked City. The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.

Introduction Within wellness circles, there has been growing concern over an increasing focus on Alternative Right (or Alt-right) conspiracy (see Aubry; Bloom and Moskalenko). Greene, referring to a definition provided by the Anti-Defamation League, defines the Alt-right as a loose political network characterised by its rejection of mainstream conservatism, embrace of white nationalism, and use of online platforms (33). The “wellness revolution”, on the other hand, which marked a split from the health care sector in which “thought leaders” replaced medical experts as authorities on health (Pilzer, qtd. in Kickbusch and Payne 275), combines New Age practices with ideological movements that emphasise the “interdependence of body, mind and spirit” (Voigt and Laing 32). It has been noted that there is overlap between the circulation of conspiracy theory and New Age mysticism (see Ward and Voas; Parmigiani). Influencers following the Paleo diet, or Palaeolithic diet, such as Australian celebrity chef and Paleo diet guru Pete Evans, have also come under fire for sharing conspiracy theories and pseudoscience (see Brennan). Johnson notes that the origins of the Paleo diet can be traced back to 1975, with the publication of Dr Walter Voegtlin’s book The Stone Age Diet. This text, however, has been largely disavowed by Paleo leaders due to Voegtlin’s “white supremacist, eugenicist, and generally unpalatable politics”. Nevertheless, it is interesting to consider how white nationalism and conspiracy theory may overlap within the wellness space. A specific example occurred in 2020, when Pete Evans shared an Alt-right conspiracy meme to his Facebook account. The ‘butterfly-caterpillar meme’ contained the image of a black sun, a symbol equated with the swastika (Goodrick-Clarke 3). Though Evans later commented that the sharing of the hate symbol was unintentional, and that he misunderstood the symbol, this case raised questions about the ability of wellness influencers to amplify white nationalist messaging. This essay is concerned with the question: what makes the wellness industry a target for the spreading of white nationalist ideas? It argues that the wellness industry and far-right ideology possess a pre-occupation with bodily purity which makes it more likely that white nationalist material carrying this message will be spread via wellness networks. Through a critical examination of the media surrounding Evans’s sharing of the butterfly-caterpillar meme, this case study will examine the ideological aspects of the Paleo diet and how they appeal to a white nationalist agenda. Focussing on the Australian context, this essay will theorise the spreadability of memes in relation to white nationalist symbolism. It contends that the Paleo diet positions foods that are not organic as impure, and holds a preference for positive messaging. Alt-right propaganda packaged in a positive and New Age frame poses a danger in that it can operate as a kind of contagion for high-profile networks, exponentially increasing its spreadability. This is of particular concern when it is considered that diet can have an impact on people’s actions outside of the online space: it impacts what people consume and do with their bodies, as evidenced by calls for eating disorders created by algorithmic repetition to be considered a ‘cyber-pathy’. This creates the conditions for the wellness industry to be targeted using memes as recruitment material for white nationalist groups. The Paleo Diet and the Sharing of a Neo-Nazi Meme Pete Evans is a famous Australian TV Chef from the hit series My Kitchen Rules, a show that ran from 2010-2020. The show followed pairs from different households as they cooked for Evans and his co-host Manu Feildel. During the show’s run, Evans also became known for spruiking the Paleo diet, producing several cookbooks and a documentary on the topic. According to Catie Gressier, who conducted a study of Paleo dieters in Melbourne, Paleo’s aim is “to eat only those foods available prior to the agricultural revolution: meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, seeds and a small amount of fruit” and that this framed as a more “authentic” diet (3). This is seen as an ideological diet as opposed to others which may consist of rules or eating restrictions. The Paleo diet stresses “real foods” or “organic foods as close to their real state as possible” (Ramachandran et al.). Studies find that the paleo diet can be very nutritious (Cambeses-Franco et al. 2021). However, it is important to note that the presence of multiple influencers and thought leaders in the field means that there can be several variations in the diet. This article will limit its examination to that of the diet promoted by Evans. A common rationale is that the human body is incompatible with certain mass-produced foods (like grains, pulses, and dairy products, sugar, salt, and modification practices (like food processing), and that these are the cause of many modern conditions (Cambeses-Franco et al. 2021). While growing concerns over unnatural additives in foods are warranted, it can be observed that in Evans’s case, the promotion of the Paleo diet increasingly blurred the line between pseudoscience and conspiracy. In his Paleo diet book for toddlers, Evans emphasised the importance of the ideological diet and suggested that parents feed their toddlers bone broth instead of breast milk, prompting a federal investigation by the health department (Brennan). This escalated in 2020 during the global pandemic. In January, Evans promoted the work of a prominent anti-vaccine advocate (Molloy). In April, his Biocharger device, which he claimed could cure coronavirus, earned him a hefty fine from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (White). In November, several months after My Kitchen Rules was cancelled, Evans posted an Alt-right political cartoon with the image of a black sun, a symbol equated with the swastika (Goodrick-Clarke 3), to his Facebook account (Gillespie). In later news reports, it was also pointed out that the black sun symbol was emblazoned on the backpack of the Christchurch shooter (see Sutton and Molloy) who had targeted two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people and injuring 40. Initially, when a user on Facebook pointed out that the meme contained a black sun, Evans responded “I was waiting for someone to see that” (Evans, qtd. in Gillespie). Evans eventually recanted the image, writing: sincere apologies to anyone who misinterpreted a previous post of a caterpillar and a butterfly having a chat over a drink and perceived that I was promoting hatred. I look forward to studying every symbol that have ever existed and research them thoroughly before posting. Hopefully this symbol ❤️ resonates deeply into the hearts of ALL! (Evans, qtd. in Gillespie). The post was later deleted. In December of 2020, Evans’s Facebook page of around 1.5 million followers was removed due to its sharing of conspiracy theories and misinformation about the coronavirus (Gillespie). However, it should be noted that the sharing of the caterpillar-butterfly meme was different from the previous instances of conspiracy sharing, in that Evans stated that it was unintentional, and it included imagery associated with neo-Nazi ideology (the black sun). Evans’s response implies that, while the values of the Paleo diet are framed in terms of positivity, the symbols in the butterfly-caterpillar meme are associated with “promoting hatred”. In this way, Evans frames racism as merely and simplistically an act of hatred, rather than engaging in the ways in which it reinforces a racial hierarchy and racially motivated violence. According to Hartzell (10), white nationalists tend to position themselves as superior to other races and see themselves as protectors of the “white race”. “White” in this context is of European descent (Geary, Schofield and Sutton). There are conspiracy theories associated with this belief, one of which is that their race is under threat of extinction because of immigration from ‘undesirable’ countries of origin. This can also be observed in the Alt-right, which is a white nationalist movement that was created and organised online. According to Berger, this movement “seeks to unify the activities of several different extremist movements or ideologies”. This is characterised by anti-immigrant sentiment, conspiracy theories, and support for former US President Donald Trump. It can be argued, in this case, that the symbol links to a larger conspiracy theory in which whiteness must be defended against some perceived threat. The meme implies that there is an ‘us’ versus ‘them’, or ‘good’ versus ‘evil’, and that some people are ‘in the know’ while others are not. Spreadable Memes An important aspect of this case study is that this instance of far-right recruitment used the form of a meme. Memes are highly spreadable, and they have very complex mechanisms for disseminating ideas and ideology. This can have a dramatic impact if that ideology is a harmful one, such a white supremacist symbol. While the digital meme, an image with a small amount of text, is common today, Richard Dawkins originally used the term meme to describe the ways in which units of culture can be spread from person to person (qtd. in Shifman 9). These can be anything from the lyrics of a song to a political idea. Jeff Hemsley and Robert Mason (qtd. in Shifman) see virality as a “process wherein a message is actively forwarded from one person to other, within and between multiple weakly linked personal networks, resulting in a rapid increase in the number of people who are exposed to the message” (55). This also links to Jenkins, Ford, and Green’s notions of spreadability (3-11), a natural selection process by which media content continues to exist through networked sharing, or disappears once it stops being shared. Evans’s response indicates that he merely shared the image. Despite the black sun imagery, a Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat is clearly present. A political presence, and one that is associated with white nationalism, is present despite Evans’s attempts to frame the meme in the language of innocence and positivity. This is not to say Evans is extremist or supports a white nationalist agenda. However, in much the same way that sharing of imagery may not necessarily indicate agreement with its ideological messaging, this framing creates a way in which wellness influencers may avoid criticism (Ma 1). Furthermore, the act of sharing the meme, regardless of intention, amplifies its message exponentially. The Paleo Diet, the Far Right and Purity This overlap between wellness and white nationalist ideology is not new. In Jules Evans’s exploration of why QAnon is popular with New Age and far-right followers, she points to the fact that many Nazi leaders – Hitler, Hess, Himmler – “were into alternative medicine, organic and vegetarian diets, homeopathy, anti-vaxxing, and natural healing”. Similarly, Bernhard Forchtner and Ana Tominc argue that a natural diet which focussed on food purity was favoured by the Nazis (421). In their examination of the German neo-Nazi YouTube channel Balaclava Küche they argue add that “present-day extreme right views on environment and diet are often close to positions found in contemporary Green movements and foodie magazines” (422). Like neo-Nazi preoccupations with food, the Paleo diet’s ideology has its basis in the concept of purity. Gressier found that the Paleo diet contains an “embedded moralism” that “filters into constructions of food as either pure or polluting” (1). This is supported by Ramachandran et al.’s study, which found that the diet “promoted ‘real food’ – or the shift to consuming organic whole foods that are as close to their natural state as possible, with an avoidance of processed foods”. This framing of the food as real creates a binary – if one is real, the other must not be. Another example can be seen in Pete Evans’s Webpage, which lists about 33 Paleo recipes. The Butter Chicken recipe states: the paleo way of life is not meant to be restrictive, as you can see from this lovely butter chicken recipe. All the nasties have been replaced with good-quality ingredients that make it as good, if not better, than the original. I prefer chicken thighs for their superior flavour and tenderness. The term “nasties” here can be seen to create a dichotomy between real and fake, the west and the east. We see these foods are associated with impurity, the foods that are not “real foods” are positioned as a threat. It can be seen as an orientalist approach, othering those not associated with the west. As can be observed in this Butter Chicken recipe that is “getting rid of the nasties”, it appropriates and ‘sanitises’ ingredients. In her article on the campaign to boycott Halal, Shakira Hussein points out that “ethnic food” presents as multiculturalism in the context of white chefs and homecooks, but the opposite is true if the roles are switched (91). Later in her essay “Halal Chops and Fascist Cupcakes”, she discusses the “weaponisation of food” and how specific white nationalist groups express disgust at the thought of consuming Muslim food. This ethnocentric framing of butter chicken projects a western superiority, replacing traditional ingredients with ‘familiar’ ingredients, making it more palatable to nationalistic tastes. Spreading Consumption I have established that the Paleo diet, with its emphasis on ‘real foods’, is deeply embedded with nationalist ideology. I have also discussed how this is highly spreadable in the form of a meme, particularly when it is framed in the language of positivity. Furthermore, I have argued that this is an attempt to escape criticism for promoting white nationalist values. I would like to turn now to how this spreadability through diet can have an impact on the physical actions of its followers through its digital communication. The Paleo diet, and how to go about following it as described by celebrity influencers, has an impact on what people do with their bodies. Hanganu-Bresch discusses the concept of orthorexia, a fixation with eating proper foods that operates as a cyber-pathy, a digitally propagated condition targeting media users. Like the ‘viral’ and ‘spreadable’ meme, this puritanical obsession with eating can also be considered both a spreadable condition and ideology. According to Hanganu-Bresch, orthorexia sees this diet as a way to overcome an illness or to improve general health, but this also begins to feel righteous and even holy or spiritual. This operates within the context of neoliberalism. Brice and Thorpe talk about women’s activewear worn in everyday settings, or ‘athleisure’, as a neoliberal uniform that says, ‘I’m taking control of my body and health’. To take this idea a step further, this uniform could be extended out into digital spaces as well in terms of what people post on their profiles and social media. This ideological aspect operates as not only a highly spreadable message, but one that is targeted at the overall health of its followers. It encourages not only the spreading of ideology, in this case, white nationalist ideology, but also the modification of food consumption. If this were then to be used as a vehicle to spread messages that encourage white nationalist ideology, it can be seen to be not only a kind of contagion but a powerful one at that. White nationalist iconography that is clearly associated with white supremacist propaganda has the potential to spread extremism. However, neoliberal principles of discipline and bodywork operate through “messages of empowerment, choice, and self-care” (Lavrence and Lozanski, qtd. in Brice and Thorpe). While racist extremism does not necessarily equate to neoliberal and ethnocentric values, a frame of growth, purity, and positivity create an overlap that allow extremist messaging to spread more easily through these networks. Conclusion The case of Pete Evans’s sharing of the butterfly-caterpillar meme exemplifies a concerning overlap between white nationalist discourse and wellness. Ideologically based diets that emphasise real foods, such as the Paleo diet, have a preoccupation with purity and consumption that appeals to white nationalism. They also share a tolerance for the promotion of conspiracy theory and tendency to create an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy. Noting these points can provide insight into a potential targeting of the wellness industry to spread racist ideology. As research into spreadability shows, memes are extremely shareable, even if the user does not grasp the meaning behind the symbolism. This article has also extended the idea of the cyberpathy further, noting a weaponisation of the properties of the meme, for the purposes of radicalisation, and how these are accelerated by celebrity influence. This is more potent within the wellness industry when the message is packaged as a form of growth and positivity, which serve to deflect accusations of racism. Furthermore, when diet is combined with white nationalist ideology, it may operate like a contagion, creating the conditions for racism. Those exposed may not have the intention of sharing or spreading racist ideology, but its amplification contributes to the promotion of a racist agenda nevertheless. As such, further investigation into the far-right infiltration of the wellness industry would be beneficial as it could provide more insight into how wellness groups are targeted. Acknowledgements A previous version of this article was presented with Dr Shakira Hussein and Scheherazade Bloul at the Just Food Conference at New York University in June 2021. This article would not have been possible without their input and advice. Dr Shakira Hussein can be contacted at shussein@unimelb.edu.au and Scheherazade Bloul can be contacted at scherrybloul@gmail.com. References Aubry, Sophie. “‘Playing with Fire’: The Curious Marriage of Qanon and Wellness.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Sep. 2020. 29 July 2020 <https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/playing-with-fire-the- curious-marriage-of-qanon-and-wellness-20200924-p55yu7.html>. Berger, J.M. “Trump Is the Glue That Binds the Far Right.” The Atlantic 29 Oct. 2018. 20 July 2021 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/trump-alt-right-twitter/574219/>. Bloom, Mia, and Sophia Moskalenko. Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford University Press, 2021. Brennan, Imogen. “Pete Evans’ Co-Authored Paleo Diet Cookbook for Babies under Investigation.” ABC News 12 Mar. 2015. 13 Nov. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-12/paleo-diet-cookbook-for-babies-under-investigation-pete-evans/6309452>. Brice, Julie, and Holly Thorpe. “Chapter 1: Activewear: The Uniform of the Neoliberal Female Citizen.” Sportswomen’s Apparel around the World: Uniformly Dressed (New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures). Ed. Linda K. Fuller. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 19-35. Cambeses-Franco, Cristina, Sara González-García, Gumersindo Feijoo, and María Teresa Moreira. “Is the Paleo Diet Safe for Health and the Environment?” Science of the Total Environment 781 (2021). <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972101785X>. Evans, Pete. “Butter Chicken.” Peteevans.com. 8 Mar. 2022 <https://peteevans.com/recipes/butter-chicken/>. 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Introduction The term monster might have its roots in the Latin word monere (to warn), but it has since evolved to have various symbolic meanings, from a terrifying mythical creature to a person of extreme cruelty. No matter the flexibility in use, the term is mostly meant to be derogatory (Asma). As Gilmore puts it, monsters “embody all that is dangerous and horrible in the human imagination” (1). However, it may be argued that monsters sometimes perform the much-needed work of defining and policing our norms (Mittman and Hensel). Since their archetype is predisposed to transgressing boundaries of human integrity (Gilmore), they help establish deviation between human and in-human. Their cognition and action are considered ‘other’ (Kearney) and a means with which people can understand what is right and wrong, and what is divergent from appropriate ways of being. The term monster need not even refer to the werewolves, ogres, vampires, zombies and the like that strike fear in audiences through their ‘immoral, heinous or unjust’ appearance or behaviours. Rather, the term monster can be, and has been, readily applied as a metaphor to describe the unthinkable, unethical, and brutal actions of human beings (Beville 5). Inadvertently, “through their bodies, words, and deeds, monsters show us ourselves” (Mittman and Hensel 2), or what we consider monstrous about ourselves. Therefore, humans acting in ways that deviate from societal norms and standards can be viewed as monstrous. This is evident in the representations of public relations practitioners in media offerings. In the practice of public relations, ethical standards are advocated as the norm, and deviating from them considered unprofessional (Fawkes), and as we contend: monstrous. However, the practice has long suffered a negative stereotypical perception of being deceptive, and with public relations roles receiving less screen time than shows and films about lawyers, accountants, teachers and the like, these few derogatory depictions can distort how audiences view the occupation (Johnston). Depictions of professions (lawyers, cops, journalists, etc.) tend to be cliché, but our contention is that fewer depictions of public relations practitioners on screen further limit the possibility for diverse depictions. The media can have a socialising impact and can influence audiences to view the content they consume as a reflection of the real world around them (Chandler). Television, in particular, with its capacity to prompt heuristic processing in audiences (Shurm), has messages that can be easily decoded by people of various literacies as they become immersed in the viewing experiences (Gerbner and Gross). These messages gain potency because, despite being set in fictional worlds, they can be understood as reflective of the world and audiences’ experiences of it (Gerbner and Gross). Tsetsura, Bentley, and Newcomb add that popular stories recounted in the media have authoritative power and can offer patterns of meaning that shape individual perceptions. Admittedly, as Stuart Hall suggests, media offerings can be encoded with ideologies and representations that are considered appropriate according to the dominant elite, but these may not necessarily be decoded as preferred meanings. In other words, those exposed to stories of monstrous public relations practitioners can agree with such a position, oppose this viewpoint, or remain neutral, but this is dependent on individual experiences. Without other frames of reference, it could be that viewers of negative portrayals of public relations accept the encoded representation that inevitably does a disservice to the profession. When the representations of the field of public relations suggest, inaccurately, that the industry is dominated by men (Johnston), and women practitioners are shown as slick dressers who control and care little about ethics (Dennison), the distortions can adversely impact on the identities of public relations practitioners and on how they are collectively viewed (Tsetsura et al.). Public relations practitioners view this portrayal as the ‘other’ and tend to distance the ideal self from it, continuing to be stuck in the dichotomy of saints and sinners (Fawkes). Our observation of television offerings such as Scandal, Flack, Call My Agent!, Absolutely Fabulous, Sex and the City, You’re the Worst, and Emily in Paris reveals how television programmes continue to perpetuate the negative stereotypes about public relations practice, where practitioners are anything but ethical—therefore monstrous. The characters, mostly well-groomed women, are shown as debased, liars and cheaters who will subvert ethical standards for personal and professional gain. Portrayals of Public Relations Practitioners in Television and Media According to Miller, the eight archetypical traits identified in media representations of public relations practitioners are: ditzy, obsequious, cynical, manipulative, money-minded, isolated, accomplished, or unfulfilled. In later research, Yoon and Black found that television representations of public relations tended to suggest that people in these roles were heartless, manipulative bullies, while Lambert and White contend that the depiction of the profession has improved to be more positive, but nonetheless continues to do a disservice to the practice by presenting female workers, especially, as “shallow but loveable” (18). We too find that public relations practitioners continue to be portrayed as morally ambiguous characters who are willing to break ethical codes of conduct to suit the needs of their clients. We discuss three themes prevalent as popular tropes in television programmes that characterise public relations practitioners as monstrous. To Be or Not to Be a Slick and Skilful Liar? Most television programmes present public relations practitioners as slick and skilful liars, who are shown as well-groomed and authoritative, convinced that they are lying only to protect their clients. In fact, in most cases the characters are shown to not only believe but also advocate to their juniors that ‘a little bit of lying’ is almost necessary to maintain client relationships and ensure campaign success. For example, in the British drama Flack, the main character of Robyn (played by Anna Paquin) is heard advising her prodigy “just assume we are lying to everyone”. The programmes also feature characters who are in dilemma about the monstrous expectations from their roles, struggling to accept that that they engage in deception as part of their jobs. However, most of them are presented as somewhat of an ugly duckling or the modest character in the programme, who is not always rational or in an explicit position of power. For example, Emily from Emily in Paris (played by Lily Collins), while working as a social media manager, regularly questions the approaches taken by the firm she works for. Her boss Sylvie Grateux (played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), who embodies the status quo, is constantly disapproving of Emily’s lack of sophisticated self-presentation, among other aspects. In the episode ‘Faux Amis’, Sylvie quips “it’s not you personally. It’s everything you stand for. You’re the enemy of luxury because luxury is defined by sophistication and taste, not emilyinparis”. Similarly, in the first episode of Call My Agent!, Samuel Kerr (played by Alain Rimoux), the head of a film publicity firm, solves the conundrum faced by his anxious junior Gabriel (played by Grégory Montel) by suggesting that he lie to his client about the real reason why she lost the film. When a modestly dressed Gabriel questions how he can lie to someone he cares for, Samuel, towering over him in an impeccable suit and a confident demeanour, advises “who said anything about lying? Don’t lie. Simply don’t tell her the truth”. However, the subtext here is that the lie is to protect the client from unnecessary hurt and in doing so nurtures the client relationship. So, it lets the audience decide the morality of lying here. It may be argued that moral ambiguity may not necessarily be monstrous. Such grey characters are often crafted because they allow audiences to relate more readily to themselves by encouraging what Hawkins refers to as mental play. Audiences are less interested in the black and white of morality and veer towards shows such as Call My Agent! where storylines hone in on the need to do bad for the greater good. In these ways, public relations practitioners still transgress moral standards but are less likely to be considered monstrous because the impact and effect on others is utilitarian in nature. It is also interesting to note that in these programmes physical appearance is made to play a crucial role in showcasing the power and prestige of the senior public relations practitioner. This focus on attire can tend to further perpetuate unfavourable stereotypes about public relations practitioners being high income earners (Grandien) who are styled with branded apparel but lacking in substance and morals (Fröhlich and Peters). Promiscuous Women The urge to attract audiences to a female character can also lead to developing and cementing unfavourable stereotypes of public relations practitioners as uninhibited women who live on blurred lines between personal and professional. These characters are not portrayed as inherently bad, but instead are found to indulge in lives of excess. In her definition of the monstrous, Arumugam suggests that excess and insatiable appetites direct the monster’s behaviour, and Kearney outlines that this uncontainable excess is what signals the difference between humans and others. Such excess is readily identifiable in the character of Patsy Stone (played by Joanna Lumley) in Absolutely Fabulous. She is an alcoholic, regularly uses recreational drugs, is highly promiscuous, and chain-smokes throughout the series. She is depicted as prone to acting deceptively to maintain her vices. In Flack, Robyn is shown as regularly snorting cocaine and having sex with her clients. Those reviewing the show highlight how it will attract those interested in “its dark, acidic sense of humour” (Greene) while others condemn it because it emphasises the “depraved publicist” trope (Knibbs) and call it “one of the worst TV shows ever made” even though it is trying to highlight concerns raised in the MeToo movement about how men need to respect women (McGurk). Female characters such as Robyn, with her willingness to question why a client has not tried to sleep with her, appear to undermine the empowerment of the movement rather than support it, and continue to maintain the archetypes that those working in the field of public relations abhor. Similarly, Samantha Jones (played by Kim Cattrell) of Sex and the City is portrayed as sexually liberated, and in one episode another character describes Samantha’s vagina as “the hottest spot in town: it’s always open”. In many ways Samantha’s sexual behaviour reflects a post-feminist narrative of empowerment, agency, and choice, but it could also be read as a product of being a public relations practitioner frequenting parties and bars as she rubs shoulders with clients, celebrities, and high-profile businesspeople. To this end, Patsy, Samantha, and Robyn glamourise public relations and paint it as simply an extension of their liberated and promiscuous selves, with little care for any expectation of professionalism or work ethic. This is also in stark contrast to the reality, where women often tend to occupy technical roles that see much of their time spent in doing the hard yards of publicity and promotion (Krugler). Making Others Err Public relations practitioners are not just shown as being morally ambiguous themselves, but often quite adept at making others do deceitful acts on their behalf, thus nonchalantly oppressing others to get their way. For example, although lauded for elevating an African-American woman to the lead role despite the show maintaining misrepresentations of race (Lambert), the main character of Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington) in the television programme Scandal regularly subverts the law for her clients despite considering herself one of the “good guys” and wearing a “white hat”. Over the course of seven seasons, Olivia Pope is found to rig elections, plant listening devices in political figures’ offices, bribe, threaten, and conduct an affair with the President. In some cases, she calls on the services of her colleague Huck to literally, and figuratively, get rid of the barriers in the way of protecting her clients. For example, in season one’s episode Crash and Burn she asks Huck to torture a suspect for information about a dead client. Her willingness to request such actions of her friend and colleague, regardless of perceived good motivations, reinforces Mittman’s categorisation that monsters are identified by their effect and impact on others. Here, the impact includes the torturing of a suspect and the revisiting of psychological trauma by Huck’s character. Huck struggles to overcome his past as a killer and spends much of the show trying to curb his monstrous tendencies which are often brought on by PR woman Olivia’s requests. Although she is sometimes striving for justice, Olivia’s desire for results can lead her to act monstrously, which inadvertently contributes to the racist and sexist ideologies that have long been associated with monsters and perceptions of the Other. Across time and space, certain ethnic groups, such as those of African descent, have been associated with the demonic (Cohen). Similarly, all that is feminine often needs to be discarded as the monster to conform to the patriarchal order of society (Creed). Therefore, Olivia Pope’s monstrous behaviour not only does a disservice to representations of public relations practitioners, but also inadvertently perpetuates negative and inaccurate stereotypes about women of African American descent. Striving to be Ethical The majority of public relations practitioners are encouraged, and in some cases expected, to conform to ethical guidelines to practice and gain respect, admiration, and in-group status. In New Zealand, those who opt to become members of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) are required to abide by the association’s code of ethics. The code stipulates that members are bound to act in ways that serve public interests by ensuring they are honest, disclose conflict of interests, follow the law, act with professionalism, ensure openness and privacy are maintained, and uphold values of loyalty, fairness, and independence (PRINZ). Similarly, the Global Alliance of Public Relations and Communication Management that binds practitioners together identifies nine guiding principles that are to be adhered to to be recognised as acting ethically. These include obeying laws, working in the public’s interest, ensuring freedom of speech and assembly, acting with integrity, and upholding privacy in sensitive matters (to name a few). These governing principles are designed to maintain ethical practice in the field. Of course, the trouble is that not all who claim to practice public relations become members of the local or global governing bodies. This implies that professional associations like PRINZ are not able to enforce ethics across the board. In New Zealand alone, public relations consultants have had to offer financial reparations for acting in defamatory ways online (Fisher), or have been alleged to have bribed an assault victim to prevent the person giving evidence in a court case (Hurley). Some academics have accused the industry of being engaged in organised lying (Peacock), but these are not common, nor are these moral transgressors accepted into ethical bodies that afford practitioners authenticity and legitimacy. In most cases, public relations practitioners view their role as acting as the moral conscience of the organisations they support (Schauster, Neill, Ferrucci, and Tandoc). Furthermore, they rated better than the average adult when it came to solving ethical dilemmas through moral reasoning (Schuaster et al.). Additionally, training of practitioners through guidance of mentors has continued to contribute to the improved ethical ratings of public relations. What these findings suggest is that the monsters of public relations portrayed on our television screens are exaggerations that are not reflective of most of the practice. Women of Substance, But Not Necessarily Power Exploring the role of women in public relations, Topic, Cunha, Reigstad, Jele-Sanchez, and Moreno found that female practitioners were subordinated to their male counterparts but were found to be more inclined to practice two-way communication, offer balanced perspectives, opt to negotiate, and build relationships through cooperation. The competitiveness, independence, and status identified in popular media portrayals were found to be exhibited more by male practitioners, despite there being more women in the public relations industry than men. As Fitch argues, popular culture continues to suggest that men dominate public relations, and their preferred characteristics end up being those elements that permeate the media messages, regardless of instances where the lead character is a woman or the fact that feminist values of “loyalty, ethics, morality, [and] fairness” are advocated by female practitioners in real life (Vardeman-Winter and Place 333). Additionally, even though public relations is a feminised field, female practitioners struggle to break the glass ceiling, with male practitioners dominating executive positions and out-earning women (Pompper). Interestingly, in public relations, power is not just limited due to gender but also area of practice. In her ethnographic study of the New Zealand practice, Sissons found that practitioners who worked in consultancies were relatively powerless vis-à-vis their clients, and often this asymmetry negatively affected the practitioner’s decision-making. This implies that in stark contrast to the immoral, glamourous, and authoritative depiction of public relations women in television programmes, in reality they are mired by the struggles of a gendered occupation. Accordingly, they are not in fact in a position to have monstrous power over and impact on others. Therefore, one of the only elements the shows seem to capture and emphasise is that public relations is an occupation that specialises in image management; but what these shows contribute to is an ideology that women are expected to look and carry themselves in particular ways, ultimately constructing aesthetic standards that can diminish women’s power and self-esteem. Conclusion Miller’s archetypes may be over twenty years old, but the trend towards obsequious, manipulative, and cynical television characters remains. Although there have been identifiable shifts to loveable, yet shallow, public relations practitioners, such as Alexis Rose on Schitt’s Creek, the appeal of monstrous public relations practitioners remains. As Cohen puts it, monsters reveal to audiences “what a member of that society can become when those same dictates are rejected, when the authority of leaders or customs disintegrates and the subordination of individual to hierarchy is lost” (68). In other words, audiences enjoy watching the stories of metaphorical monsters because they exhibit the behaviours that are expected to be repressed in human beings; they depict what happens when the social norms of society are disturbed (Levina and Bui). At the very least, these media representations can act, much as monster narratives do, as a cautionary tale on how not to think and act to remain accepted as part of the in-group rather than being perceived as the Other. As Mittman and Hensel argue, society can learn much from monsters because monsters exist within human beings. According to Cohen, they offer meaning about the world and can teach audiences so they can learn, in this case, how to be better. Although the representations of public relations in television can offer insights into roles that are usually most effective when they are invisible (Chorazy and Harrington), the continued negative stereotypes of public relations practitioners can adversely impact on the industry if people are unaware of the practices of the occupation, because lacking a reference point limits audiences’ opportunities to critically evaluate the media representations. This will certainly harm the occupation by perpetuating existing negative stereotypes of charming and immoral practitioners, and perhaps add to its struggles with gendered identity and professional legitimacy. References Absolutely Fabulous. Created by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. 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Technique and creativity Having been called upon to provide a contribution to a publication dedicated to “Techne”, I feel it is fitting to start from the theme of technique, given that for too many years now, we have fruitlessly attempted to understand the inner workings of cinema whilst disregarding the element of technique. And this has posed a significant problem in our field of study, as it would be impossible to gain a true understanding of what cinema is without immersing ourselves in the technical and industrial culture of the 19th century. It was within this culture that a desire was born: to mould the imaginary through the new techniques of reproduction and transfiguration of reality through images. Studying the development of the so-called “pre-cinema” – i.e. the period up to the conventional birth of cinema on 28 December 1895 with the presentation of the Cinématographe Lumière – we discover that the technical history of cinema is not only almost more enthralling than its artistic and cultural history, but that it contains all the great theoretical, philosophical and scientific insights that we need to help us understand the social, economic and cultural impact that cinema had on the culture of the 20th century. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, when cinema had already existed in some form for a few years, when the first few short films of narrative fiction also already existed, the cinematograph was placed in the Pavilion of Technical Discoveries, to emphasise the fact that the first wonder, this element of unparalleled novelty and modernity, was still there, in technique, in this marvel of innovation and creativity. I would like to express my idea through the words of Franco Moretti, who claims in one of his most recent works that it is only possible to understand form through the forces that pulsate through it and press on it from beneath, finally allowing the form itself to come to the surface and make itself visible and comprehensible to our senses. As such, the cinematic form – that which appears on the screen, that which is now so familiar to us, that which each of us has now internalised, that has even somehow become capable of configuring our way of thinking, imagining, dreaming – that form is underpinned by forces that allow it to eventually make its way onto the screen and become artistic and narrative substance. And those forces are the forces of technique, the forces of industry, the economic, political and social forces without which we could never hope to understand cinema. One of the issues that I always make a point of addressing in the first few lessons with my students is that if they think that the history of cinema is made up of films, directors, narrative plots to be understood, perhaps even retold in some way, then they are entirely on the wrong track; if, on the other hand, they understand that it is the story of an institution with economic, political and social drivers within it that can, in some way, allow us to come to the great creators, the great titles, but that without a firm grasp of those drivers, there is no point in even attempting to explore it, then they are on the right track. As I see it, cinema in the twentieth century was a great democratic, interclassist laboratory such as no other art has ever been, and this occurred thanks to the fact that what underpinned it was an industrial reasoning: it had to respond to the capital invested in it, it had to make money, and as such, it had to reach the largest possible number of people, immersing it into a wholly unprecedented relational situation. The aim was to be as inclusive as possible, ultimately giving rise to the idea that cinema could not be autonomous, as other forms of art could be, but that it must instead be able to negotiate all the various forces acting upon it, pushing it in every direction. This concept of negotiation is one which has been explored in great detail by one of the greatest film theorists of our modern age, Francesco Casetti. In a 2005 book entitled “Eye of the Century”, which I consider to be a very important work, Casetti actually argues that cinema has proven itself to be the art form most capable of adhering to the complexity and fast pace of the short century, and that it is for this very reason that its golden age (in the broadest sense) can be contained within the span of just a hundred years. The fact that cinema was the true epistemological driving force of 20th-century modernity – a position now usurped by the Internet – is not, in my opinion, something that diminishes the strength of cinema, but rather an element of even greater interest. Casetti posits that cinema was the great negotiator of new cultural needs, of the need to look at art in a different way, of the willingness to adapt to technique and technology: indeed, the form of cinema has always changed according to the techniques and technologies that it has brought to the table or established a dialogue with on a number of occasions. Barry Salt, whose background is in physics, wrote an important book – publishing it at his own expense, as a mark of how difficult it is to work in certain fields – entitled “Film Style and Technology”, in which he calls upon us stop writing the history of cinema starting from the creators, from the spirit of the time, from the great cultural and historical questions, and instead to start afresh by following the techniques available over the course of its development. Throughout the history of cinema, the creation of certain films has been the result of a particular set of technical conditions: having a certain type of film, a certain type of camera, only being able to move in a certain way, needing a certain level of lighting, having an entire arsenal of equipment that was very difficult to move and handle; and as the equipment, medium and techniques changed and evolved over the years, so too did the type of cinema that we were able to make. This means framing the history of cinema and film theory in terms of the techniques that were available, and starting from there: of course, whilst Barry Salt’s somewhat provocative suggestion by no means cancels out the entire cultural, artistic and aesthetic discourse in cinema – which remains fundamental – it nonetheless raises an interesting point, as if we fail to consider the methods and techniques of production, we will probably never truly grasp what cinema is. These considerations also help us to understand just how vast the “construction site” of cinema is – the sort of “factory” that lies behind the production of any given film. Erwin Panofsky wrote a single essay on cinema in the 1930s entitled “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” – a very intelligent piece, as one would expect from Panofsky – in which at a certain point, he compares the construction site of the cinema to those of Gothic cathedrals, which were also under an immense amount of pressure from different forces, namely religious ones, but also socio-political and economic forces which ultimately shaped – in the case of the Gothic cathedral and its development – an idea of the relationship between the earth and the otherworldly. The same could be said for cinema, because it also involves starting with something very earthly, very grounded, which is then capable of unleashing an idea of imaginary metamorphosis. Some scholars, such as Edgar Morin, will say that cinema is increasingly becoming the new supernatural, the world of contemporary gods, as religion gradually gives way to other forms of deification. Panofsky’s image is a very focused one: by making film production into a construction site, which to all intents and purposes it is, he leads us to understand that there are different forces at work, represented by a producer, a scriptwriter, a director, but also a workforce, the simple labourers, as is always the case in large construction sites, calling into question the idea of who the “creator” truly is. So much so that cinema, now more than ever before, is reconsidering the question of authorship, moving towards a “history of cinema without names” in an attempt to combat the “policy of the author” which, in the 1950s, especially in France, identified the director as the de facto author of the film. Today, we are still in that position, with the director still considered the author of the film, but that was not always so: back in the 1910s, in the United States, the author of the film was the scriptwriter, the person who wrote it (as is now the case for TV series, where they have once again taken pride of place as the showrunner, the creator, the true author of the series, and nobody remembers the names of the directors of the individual episodes); or at times, it can be the producer, as was the case for a long time when the Oscar for Best Picture, for example, was accepted by the producer in their capacity as the commissioner, as the “owner” of the work. As such, the theme of authorship is a very controversial one indeed, but one which helps us to understand the great meeting of minds that goes into the production of a film, starting with the technicians, of course, but also including the actors. Occasionally, a film is even attributed to the name of a star, almost as if to declare that that film is theirs, in that it is their body and their talent as an actor lending it a signature that provides far more of a draw to audiences than the name of the director does. In light of this, the theme of authorship, which Panofsky raised in the 1930s through the example of the Gothic cathedral, which ultimately does not have a single creator, is one which uses the image of the construction site to also help us to better understand what kind of development a film production can go through and to what extent this affects its critical and historical reception; as such, grouping films together based on their director means doing something that, whilst certainly not incorrect in itself, precludes other avenues of interpretation and analysis which could have favoured or could still favour a different reading of the “cinematographic construction site”. Design and execution The great classic Hollywood film industry was a model that, although it no longer exists in the same form today, unquestionably made an indelible mark at a global level on the history not only of cinema, but more broadly, of the culture of the 20th century. The industry involved a very strong vertical system resembling an assembly line, revolving around producers, who had a high level of decision-making autonomy and a great deal of expertise, often inclined towards a certain genre of film and therefore capable of bringing together the exact kinds of skills and visions required to make that particular film. The history of classic American cinema is one that can also be reconstructed around the units that these producers would form. The “majors”, along with the so-called “minors”, were put together like football teams, with a chairman flanked by figures whom we would nowadays refer to as a sporting director and a managing director, who built the team based on specific ideas, “buying” directors, scriptwriters, scenographers, directors of photography, and even actors and actresses who generally worked almost exclusively for their major – although they could occasionally be “loaned out” to other studios. This system led to a very marked characterisation and allowed for the film to be designed in a highly consistent, recognisable way in an age when genres reigned supreme and there was the idea that in order to keep the audience coming back, it was important to provide certain reassurances about what they would see: anyone going to see a Western knew what sorts of characters and storylines to expect, with the same applying to a musical, a crime film, a comedy, a melodrama, and so on. The star system served to fuel this working method, with these major actors also representing both forces and materials in the hands of an approach to the filmmaking which had the ultimate objective of constructing the perfect film, in which everything had to function according to a rule rooted in both the aesthetic and the economic. Gore Vidal wrote that from 1939 onwards, Hollywood did not produce a single “wrong” film: indeed, whilst certainly hyperbolic, this claim confirms that that system produced films that were never wrong, never off-key, but instead always perfectly in tune with what the studios wished to achieve. Whilst this long-entrenched system of yesteryear ultimately imploded due to certain historical phenomena that determined it to be outdated, the way of thinking about production has not changed all that much, with film design remaining tied to a professional approach that is still rooted within it. The overwhelming majority of productions still start from a system which analyses the market and the possible economic impact of the film, before even starting to tackle the various steps that lead up to the creation of the film itself. Following production systems and the ways in which they have changed, in terms of both the technology and the cultural contexts, also involves taking stock of the still considerable differences that exist between approaches to filmmaking in different countries, or indeed the similarities linking highly disparate economic systems (consider, for example, India’s “Bollywood” or Nigeria’s “Nollywood”: two incredibly strong film industries that we are not generally familiar with as they lack global distribution, although they are built very solidly). In other words, any attempt to study Italian cinema and American cinema – to stay within this double field – with the same yardstick is unthinkable, precisely because the context of their production and design is completely different. Composition and innovation Studying the publications on cinema in the United States in the early 1900s – which, from about 1911 to 1923, offers us a revealing insight into the attempts made to garner an in-depth understanding of how this new storytelling machine worked and the development of the first real cultural industry of the modern age – casts light on the centrality of the issues of design and composition. I remain convinced that without reading and understanding that debate, it is very difficult to understand why cinema is as we have come to be familiar with it today. Many educational works investigated the inner workings of cinema, and some, having understood them, suggested that they were capable of teaching others to do so. These publications have almost never been translated into Italian and remain seldom studied even in the US, and yet they are absolutely crucial for understanding how cinema established itself on an industrial and aesthetic level. There are two key words that crop up time and time again in these books, the first being “action”, one of the first words uttered when a film starts rolling: “lights, camera, action”. This collection of terms is interesting in that “motore” highlights the presence of a machine that has to be started up, followed by “action”, which expresses that something must happen at that moment in front of that machine, otherwise the film will not exist. As such, “action” – a term to which I have devoted some of my studies – is a fundamental word here in that it represents a sort of moment of birth of the film that is very clear – tangible, even. The other word is “composition”, and this is an even more interesting word with a history that deserves a closer look: the first professor of cinema in history, Victor Oscar Freeburg (I edited the Italian translation of his textbook “The Art of Photoplay Making”, published in 1918), took up his position at Columbia University in 1915 and, in doing so, took on the task of teaching the first ever university course in cinema. Whilst Freeburg was, for his time, a very well-educated and highly-qualified person, having studied at Yale and then obtained his doctorate in theatre at Columbia, cinema was not entirely his field of expertise. He was asked to teach a course entitled “Photoplay Writing”. At the time, a film was known as a “photoplay”, in that it was a photographed play of sorts, and the fact that the central topic of the course was photoplay writing makes it clear that back then, the scriptwriter was considered the main author of the work. From this point of view, it made sense to entrust the teaching of cinema to an expert in theatre, based on the idea that it was useful to first and foremost teach a sort of photographable dramaturgy. However, upon arriving at Columbia, Freeburg soon realised whilst preparing his course that “photoplay writing” risked misleading the students, as it is not enough to simply write a story in order to make a film; as such, he decided to change the title of his course to “photoplay composition”. This apparently minor alteration, from “writing” to “composition”, in fact marked a decisive conceptual shift in that it highlighted that it was no longer enough to merely write: one had to “compose”. So it was that the author of a film became, according to Freeburg, not the scriptwriter or director, but the “cinema composer” (a term of his own coinage), thus directing and broadening the concept of composition towards music, on the one hand, and architecture, on the other. We are often inclined to think that cinema has inherited expressive modules that come partly from literature, partly from theatre and partly from painting, but in actual fact, what Freeburg helps us to understand is that there are strong elements of music and architecture in a film, emphasising the lofty theme of the project. In his book, he explores at great length the relationship between static and dynamic forms in cinema, a topic that few have ever addressed in that way and that again, does not immediately spring to mind as applicable to a film. I believe that those initial intuitions were the result of a reflection unhindered by all the prejudices and preconceived notions that subsequently began to condition film studies as a discipline, and I feel that they are of great use to use today because they guide us, on the one hand, towards a symphonic idea of filmmaking, and on the other, towards an idea that preserves the fairly clear imprint of architecture. Space-Time In cinema as in architecture, the relationship between space and time is a crucial theme: in every textbook, space and time are amongst the first chapters to be studied precisely because in cinema, they undergo a process of metamorphosis – as Edgar Morin would say – which is vital to constructing the intermediate world of film. Indeed, from both a temporal and a spatial point of view, cinema provides a kind of ubiquitous opportunity to overlap different temporalities and spatialities, to move freely from one space to another, but above all, to construct new systems of time. The rules of film editing – especially so-called “invisible editing”, i.e. classical editing that conceals its own presence – are rules built upon specific and precise connections that hold together different spaces – even distant ones – whilst nonetheless giving the impression of unity, of contiguity, of everything that cinema never is in reality, because cinema is constantly fragmented and interrupted, even though we very often perceive it in continuity. As such, from both a spatial and a temporal perspective, there are technical studies that explain the rules of how to edit so as to give the idea of spatial continuity, as well as theoretical studies that explain how cinema has transformed our sense of space and time. To mark the beginning of Parma’s run as Italy’s Capital of Culture, an exhibition was organised entitled “Time Machine. Seeing and Experiencing Time”, curated by Antonio Somaini, with the challenge of demonstrating how cinema, from its earliest experiments to the digital age, has managed to manipulate and transform time, profoundly affecting our way of engaging with it. The themes of time and space are vital to understanding cinema, including from a philosophical point of view: in two of Gilles Deleuze’s seminal volumes, “The Movement Image” and “The Time Image”, the issues of space and time become the two great paradigms not only for explaining cinema, but also – as Deleuze himself says – for explaining a certain 20th-century philosophy. Deleuze succeeds in a truly impressive endeavour, namely linking cinema to philosophical reflection – indeed, making cinema into an instrument of philosophical thought; this heteronomy of filmmaking is then also transferred to its ability to become an instrument that goes beyond its own existence to become a reflection on the century that saw it as a protagonist of sorts. Don Ihde argues that every era has a technical discovery that somehow becomes what he calls an “epistemological engine”: a tool that opens up a system of thought that would never have been possible without that discovery. One of the many examples of this over the centuries is the camera obscura, but we could also name cinema as the defining discovery for 20th-century thought: indeed, cinema is indispensable for understanding the 20th century, just as the Internet is for understanding our way of thinking in the 21st century. Real-virtual Nowadays, the film industry is facing the crisis of cinema closures, ultimately caused by ever-spreading media platforms and the power of the economic competition that they are exerting by aggressively entering the field of production and distribution, albeit with a different angle on the age-old desire to garner audiences. Just a few days ago, Martin Scorsese was lamenting the fact that on these platforms, the artistic project is in danger of foundering, as excellent projects are placed in a catalogue alongside a series of products of varying quality, thus confusing the viewer. A few years ago, during the opening ceremony of the academic year at the University of Southern California, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas expressed the same concept about the future of cinema in a different way. Lucas argued that cinemas would soon have to become incredibly high-tech places where people can have an experience that is impossible to reproduce elsewhere, with a ticket price that takes into account the expanded and increased experiential value on offer thanks to the new technologies used. Spielberg, meanwhile, observed that cinemas will manage to survive if they manage to transform the cinemagoer from a simple viewer into a player, an actor of sorts. The history of cinema has always been marked by continuous adaptation to technological evolutions. I do not believe that cinema will ever end. Jean-Luc Godard, one of the great masters of the Nouvelle Vague, once said in an interview: «I am very sorry not to have witnessed the birth of cinema, but I am sure that I will witness its death». Godard, who was born in 1930, is still alive. Since its origins, cinema has always transformed rather than dying. Raymond Bellour says that cinema is an art that never finishes finishing, a phrase that encapsulates the beauty and the secret of cinema: an art that never quite finishes finishing is an art that is always on the very edge of the precipice but never falls off, although it leans farther and farther over that edge. This is undoubtedly down to cinema’s ability to continually keep up with technique and technology, and in doing so to move – even to a different medium – to relocate, as contemporary theorists say, even finally moving out of cinemas themselves to shift onto platforms and tablets, yet all without ever ceasing to be cinema. That said, we should give everything we’ve got to ensure that cinemas survive.