The Last Mission: Religion and Colonial Francoism in Spanish Representations of Africa

During Francoism, Spanish cultural production on Equatorial Guinea placed missionaries in a central narrative role, exalting their evangelizing labor. This article concentrates on the representation of the colonial mission in works by lay authors who shared an ideological affinity with the regime and received its institutional support: the documentary Una cruz en la selva (1946), the film Misión blanca (1946) and the novel Tierra negra (1957). These works branded a kind of Spanish Catholic colonialism as superior to other European models, but despite their propagandistic intention, they also reveal a series of anxieties and contradictions inherent to the Spanish colonial project.

Flight

As a conclusion, the chapter ‘Flight. Towards an Ecofilmology’ offers a synoptic view of the characteristics of the five tensive motifs, carrying out a general anatomy of the strategies used to generate cinematic tension with particular reference to their narrative role in the light of the embodied simulation hypothesis. The fundamental aspect highlighted is the link between the different ways in which the tensive motifs embody intentionality and the dynamic of disembodying-reembodying involved. Accordingly, the motifs can be understood as a means of negotiation between the desire for vertigo and excess and the necessity of bringing overstimulation back beneath the threshold that assures the legibility and reception of the film, in perceptual as well as moral, social, and commercial terms.

Scent in the Context of Live Performance

Ambient smell has long been a feature of live performance, no matter whether its presence was intentional or not. While, once upon a time, the incidental presence of malodour was an inevitable feature of proceedings, the deliberate use of scent can actually be traced all the way back to the earliest rituals. This review attempts to trace the long history of scent’s use in processions, pageants, and, most important, performance. From Shakespeare’s time onward, scent has been used as an atmospheric/ambient cue. It has been used to create a certain mood, to trigger memories/nostalgia, and, on occasion, it has also served a narrative role. While the use of scent has often been merely illustrative (or pleonastic), there have been numerous occasions where olfactory stimulation has taken on a far more important evaluative role, critical or otherwise. Most often, this has been in the theatre, but also on occasion in the context of the opera, musical, ballet, and comedy too. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in scenting live performance/entertainment, especially in the context of highly immersive and experiential multisensory events. While high-tech solutions to scent delivery have been a prominent feature of its use in the cinema, low-tech solutions have more often been incorporated in the live-performance setting. This and a number of other important differences between scent’s use in the theatrical versus cinematic setting are highlighted.

The Presence of Touch in Musset’s André del Sarto and Proust’s Le Mystérieux Correspondant

Touch, as a sense of proximity, is very important in emotional and intellectual communication. Is it possible to insert it in literature? By analysing lexical-semantic networks of terms related to the sense of touch in two nineteenth-century literary works—a play by Musset and a tale by Proust—this paper aims to explain the preeminent narrative role that these two young authors accord the sense of touch.

Love, sadness and other mental states in the Middle Welsh Owain (and related texts)

This article explores the devices employed by the medieval Welsh narrator of Owain, or Chwedyl Iarlles y Ffynnawn (‘The Story of the Lady of the Well’), to convey emotions and the mental states of his characters to his audiences. Although he generally remains inaudible, he uses, at some crucial points, words and phrases denoting emotions in a narrow sense, such as love, sadness and shame, in order to direct and steer the audiences’ perception and their understanding of the narrative. A comparison with thematically related texts, Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, and its Old Norse, Old Swedish and Middle English translations, helps to assess the narrative role of literary emotions in the Welsh text.

Gifts of welcome: Precarity, intimacy and the gift in Die Farbe des Ozeans (Peren, 2011) and Welcome (Lioret, 2009)

This article examines the role of Europe as gift in Lioret's Welcome (2009) and Peren's Die Farbe des Ozeans (2011) by focusing on gestures of welcome extended by white European characters to undocumented migrants. In both films, these gestures include gifts, in the form of money, shelter or skills taught, that play an important narrative role, but subordinate refugee characters' lives and stories to the emotional needs of white European 'givers'. In this way gifts of welcome become violent acts that reinforce European assumptions about European political and epistemological superiority, and paper over the existence of colonial and racist violence that continues to produce precarious lives.