British railways and the challenge from road haulage: 1919-39

Interwar Britain witnessed the rapid rise of road transport as a serious competitor to the railways. This article examines road–rail competition for freight traffic. It demonstrates that, contrary to previous accounts—which have been highly critical of the railway companies—their failure to prevent rapid loss of traffic to the roads was the inevitable consequence of the regulatory framework under which the railways had been returned to private control in 1921. Given the constraints imposed by this framework, price competition with road hauliers would have further depressed railway company profits. Railway policy thus concentrated on pressing for a revision of the legislative framework governing road–rail competition.

‘What Price Solidarity? Nuclear Dependence in NATO, 1949-1967’

Archive-based study of the dependence of NATO member states on the USA as nuclear guarantor, and the problems this entailed.

Paraméricas Utópicas: entranced and transient nations in "I Am Cuba" (1964) and "Land in Anguish" (1967)

This article examines the astonishing similarities between two political films, Land in Trance (Glauber Rocha, 1967) and I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964). Both address the subject of revolution through the enactment of trance. Both reject all forms of naturalistic account, adopting a series of anti-realist devices, such as poetic language, synecdoche, personification, parable and allegory, as a means of expanding the concept of the nation beyond territorial borders and conveying the meaning of revolution through the film form, rather than its content. Because there is no evidence that Glauber Rocha had seen I Am Cuba before he shot Land in Trance, these coincidences are treated as an intellectual 'transit' between film-makers whose art was fuelled by cinephilia and the belief in the reality of the film medium.

Sangue e carne no cinema de Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

'Macunaíma' (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1969) ends with a shot of blood emerging from the water. This text proposes an approach to this image following a comparison with other films by the same filmmaker: 'Couro de gato' (1960) and 'Os Inconfidentes' (1972). The main thesis is that in these images the aesthetical work with flesh synthesizes the ritual cannibalism and the capitalist one. This synthesis is specified in heroes’ assimilation by power.