Jean-Luc Godard
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 / 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. (...)
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.(...)