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.(...)

John Foster / 24 Feb 2023

The Biggest Failure Ever

R. T. Howard’s Spying on the Reich

From the vantage point of the early 21st century, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the interwar period was a preamble to catastrophe.(...)

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 / 02 Feb 2023

Pre-Neoliberal Poland

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Scar

Krzysztof Kieślowski's 1976 film The Scar, which chronicles the construction and operation of a large chemical factory, breaks many of the rules that had governed narrative cinema since the silent era.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 14 Sep 2022

Details Are Everything

Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend

The first thing that came to mind, when I learned that Jean-Luc Godard had passed away, was a sequence from his 1967 film Weekend. Not one involving one of its many fiery car crashes or the guerrilla outfit that tramps around in the woods near the end, but something more subtle.(...)

Charlie Bertsch / 10 Aug 2022

Post-War Youth

400 Blows After Netflix

François Truffaut’s  The 400 Blows is one of cinema’s all-time classics, the 1959 film that demonstrated how deftly a new generation of French critics could transform themselves into the filmmakers of la nouvelle vague.(...)

The Battleground / 21 Mar 2022

Never Mind the News

The Battleground’s Spring Books List

It's easier than ever to lose sight of books. With global crises overtaking our lives every couple of years now, to read anything other than news gets harder by the day.(...)

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