Reaping the Whirlwind: The Wind That Shakes the Barley,Liberation and After in the Movies

Popular culture includes stories that define and justify the existence of groups and nations. Among those stories are creation accounts, especially stories of the forming of nations through struggles for liberation from oppression. The useful liberation myths are exemplified by two recent films: V for Vendetta and Children of Men. Another recent film, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, gives a sober and nuanced account of the Irish Rebellion. It includes the ambiguities of liberation events and the problems that arise and continue after the glorious moment of liberation.     

Angel and the Badman: Mockingjay,Spectre, and Choosing Sides in War Movies

Recent films in the James Bond series and the Hunger Games series have taken entertaining and sentimental versions of stories about violence in the struggle between the established state and rebels against the state. The craft of the moviemaker lends heroic stature to one side in this fight, thus justifying the use of violence. In these movies, different sides are made to seem virtuous. In the James Bond movies, the defenders of the established order are the good guys. In the Hunger Games movies, the rebels trying to bring down the established order are the good guys. Our ambivalence about violence, morality, and inequality in general is not resolved, but only masked by the needs of entertaining story telling.     

The Earthly Landscape of the Heavenly City: A New Framework for the Examination of the Urban Development of Frankish Jerusalem

This article introduces a new methodological framework for the examination of Frankish Jerusalem's urban development, based on a database encompassing documents relating to Jerusalem from the first half of the twelfth century. The deconstruction of documents according to their primary elements provides a new framework for their use in the study of the socio-economic mechanisms that propelled the transformation of Jerusalem's cityscape, hitherto commonly perceived as restricted to monumental construction. This supplements the panoramic view of the city, obtained from contemporary narrative sources and archaeological evidence, with an analytical depiction of the evolving urban environment. Such an analytical approach unveils previously undetected facets of Jerusalem's urban development, such as the early emergence and spatial distribution of residential areas, crystallisation of notions of property ownership and shifting patterns of economic conduct. It sheds new light on the periodisation and scope of urban change in Jerusalem and its correlation to wider socio-economic processes.