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.

This article identifies and elaborates on two models of resistance evident in JiaZhangke's film corpus. The deployment of different cinematic strategies produces an experimental calling into question of the value of truth and of truth as value. In the films here analysed Jia moves from resistance through organic observation to a model of resistance structured around a series of fabulations. If the first regime addresses the truth of ideology, then the target of the second is the ideology of truth. It is in this passage that Jia enters political cinema, collapsing the distinction between factual and fictional and opening up a space that belongs to no collectivity.

It depends on us, so it is said (Heidegger 1996, 128) Jean-Luc Nancy writes that there is no sense outside our being-together, no sense without us. The philosophical import of this argument emerges from the countersignature of a necessary corollary: that our being-together remains an outside to any specific assignation of sense. According to American director John Cassavetes this is the duty of cinema. His cinema testifies with the use of close-up to a modality of making sense that rests entirely on an in-appropriable term: us. What seems to emerge from the work of Cassavetes is that our way of making sense (therefore of having a world, the only one possible) maintains itself, on one side, on our beingtogether and, on the other, on the impossibility to categorize 'us' under a particular form of being-together. The question can be formulated in this way: is it not perhaps the case that for us to keep making sense, us has to escape the very possibility of a definition? These introductory remarks anticipate a description of the method here followed. The philosophical approach to a filmmaker is not taken simply as the possibility to unravel a convergence between concept and image. The task cannot only be that of treating a film as a philosophical example or to use a concept as a comprehensive approach to a particular cinematographic work. It is a matter of investigating how both philosophy and cinema creatively confront a problem: in this case the problem of our being-together in its relation with the question of sense. It is therefore not a matter of providing an entrance into Nancy's philosophy -in terms of powers of existence or absolute realism (Derrida 2005, 46) -or of describing Cassavetes's cinema -often labeled as cinema vérité -but of how cinema reopens the sense of what happens between us. Moving between philosophy and cinema one is always asked to look for their internal alliance and their creative possibilities. It will be thus a matter of exposing the cinematographic idea as it happens in the image and not to impose ideas from the outside. This work will proceed by unraveling three movements. The first part will treat the question of sense as posed by Jean-Luc Nancy; the second will investigate the relation of sense with cinema; the third will approach a

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Abstract:Petri's Todo 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 that Todo Modo is both an effective example of European political cinema from the 1970's, 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