film
Charlie Bertsch / 02 Mar 2023
We Are All Donkeys
Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO
The donkey is lying on the ground, like a corpse. We see a close-up of the blood-spattered hairs on its nose. But then it takes a breath, then another.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 16 Feb 2023
Ukraine in Hindsight
Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger’s astoundingly brutal adaptation of Eric Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel about World War I – the favourite to win this year’s Best International Film Oscar – is timely to a degree that would have been hard to imagine when the project began.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 18 Jan 2023
Sex Against Fascism
Dušan Makavejev’s Innocence Unprotected
Serbian director Dušan Makavejev’s 1968 film Innocence Unprotected manages both to explore the legacy of wartime trauma seriously and to make fun of itself in the process. (...)
Charlie Bertsch / 14 Dec 2022
The Sexism of Everyday Life
Jeanne Dielman, Directed by Chantal Akerman
When Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade poll about the greatest films of all time was published two weeks ago, people were shocked to see Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at the top.(...)
Josh White / 05 Dec 2022
Soviet Collapse, National Decline
Russia 1985–1999, by Adam Curtis
Adam Curtis is a collagist who deals with ideas and their emotional impact.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 30 Nov 2022
The Abstract City
Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, by Walter Ruttmann
Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis is strangely suited for these times, when traditional moviegoing is in perilous decline, providing a way to disentangle the art of cinema from that mode of consumption.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 23 Nov 2022
Surviving Italy
Climatic Rock, by Anduela Keku
The two tracks on Anduela Keku’s new EP Climatic Rock take listeners through a seemingly barren wasteland, a space defined by monotony, with nothing to focus on but the road ahead.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 17 Nov 2022
Neither the US nor Russia
Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars
Because Sergio Leone didn’t make films set in Europe or ones that obviously dealt with the continent’s problems, he has been excluded from the pantheon of its greatest postwar auteurs: Cocteau, Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Fassbinder, Truffaut, and Antonioni. (...)