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 / 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 / 03 Nov 2022

Breaking the Rules

Daisies, by Věra Chytilová

Czech filmmaker Věra Chytilová’s insisted that her remarkable 1966 film Daisies was a critique of decadence, personified in the young women, both named Marie, who are its protagonists. (...)

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