Emilie Bickerton
JUST REMEMBER THIS
Describing the early stages of amnesia in the opening to My Last Breath, Luis Buñuel warned his readers that what would follow was not a tight, factual recounting of his life but something more chaotic, digressive and, yes, false. He had discovered with age that his memories were not always accurate, and found himself telling stories about things that never happened, like the wedding of his friend Paul Nizan at the church of St Germain des Près, with Sartre as the best man. Yet ‘our memory is our coherence’:
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Culture After Google
Emilie Bickerton on Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform. Diagnosis of a cultural production laid low by digital consolidation, and political proposals for a push-back.
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A Bonfire of Art
Emilie Bickerton on Michael Witt, Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian. Landmark reading of the director’s epic audiovisual essay, Histoire(s) du cinéma.
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Planet Malaquais
Emilie Bickerton on Geneviève Nakach, Malaquais rebelle. Biography of a world-wandering modernist writer.
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Paper Empires
Emilie Bickerton on Thierry Discepolo, La Trahison des éditeurs. The Hexagon’s ‘quality’ book trade skewered by a leading radical publisher.
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The Mage of Lake Geneva
Emilie Bickerton on Antoine de Baecque, Godard, biographie. Life and work of Europe’s greatest living visual artist.
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Sarkozy's Fifth Column
Emilie Bickerton on Serge Halimi, Les Nouveaux chiens de garde. Polemical attack on the French media as choristers of the new liberal order. Does Sarkozy’s victory mean the electorate is finally in tune?
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Adieu to Cahiers
Life-cycle of Cahiers du cinéma. The trajectory of the pre-eminent film journal, from cine-clubs of Liberated Paris to masterpieces of the New Wave, barricades to the pensée unique, tracked against broader changes in French intellectual culture.
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The Camera Possessed
Extraordinary career of Jean Rouch—surrealist, engineer, anthropologist, cinéaste—synthesizing the gains of Vertov and Flaherty, to take his camera inside the taboo. In Abidjan and Paris, ethnographical films appropriated by their subjects as springboard for the New Wave.
