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This article asks: how do art practice and research give form to changing dynamics of conflict? Its argument is two-fold: art's contribution can be developed from empirical considerations (what art finds out), and from methodological ones (how art finds something out). Bringing in art practice and the research methods it informs into political science helps understand conflict and its changes: by engaging simultaneously with the interaction between the collective and the personal, art practice and research elucidates those complex and layered narratives used by various actors in conflict that often resist approaches rooted in social and political sciences. By paying attention to everyday interactions and emphasizing dynamism, art provides a different way to chart changes in armed conflict. Art documents discourses that are difficult to communicate otherwise and allows us to detect and engage with the grey areas, transformations, processes and ambivalences of conflicts that escape neat categorizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses that film director Chris Marker's documentary film "Level Five" can be understood as a non-representational historical documentary and how this film interrogates representation concerning the form's ability to communicate historical events. It mentions how Marker's emphasis on the experiential dimension of images goes hand in hand with a desire to make historical films outside the strictures of chronology by cutting, trimming, and splitting.

Post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has been praised for its emotional immediacy and compositional simplicity. The work of Asghar Farhadi stands as an exception to this canon. His films focus on domestic conflicts and cultural contradictions in urban life and are marked by emotional complexity and intricate narrative structures. Focusing on these characteristics, critics have stressed his proximity to mainstream American cinema. The article analyses this proximity by discussing the thematic parallels that Farhadi's work enjoys with classical Hollywood films, as conceptualised by philosopher Stanley Cavell. The article explores the limit of this approach by connecting Farhadi's films to pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, a body of work that, despite the little attention it has received, can nonetheless provide significant insights into Farhadi's oeuvre to date, whilst bringing to the fore the heterogeneous tradition of Iranian cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elio Petri’sTodo Modo(1976) – based on Sciascia’s novel – features Marcello Mastroianni as a priest in charge of a group of politicians from the ruling party of the Christian Democracy on a spiritual retreat in a hotel. Here they begin to die one by one in unexplained circumstances. Petri’s declared aim was to damage the party as much as possible. The intention – which also motivates the distance from Sciascia – was to delimit a specific reality so to embed its distortions into the fabric of the film. However, the film was received mainly as an allegorical representation. This article argues thatTodo Modois both an effective example of European political cinema from the 1970s, because of the specificity of its analysis, and a lesson for political cinema in general. The film shows the need for political cinema’s pedagogical efforts to embrace reality’s distortions, rather than attempting to elucidate them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]