By Bergotte There is a filmmaker most people have never seen whose work contains some of the most powerful images in the history of cinema, and his name is Carl Theodor Dreyer. He made fewer than a dozen surviving features across forty years, worked in almost complete opposition to every commercial instinct the film industryContinue reading “The Reel Argument: Carl Theodor Dreyer”
Category Archives: History
The Human Condition According to Pushkin
By Bergotte To understand Russian literature is, in the end, to understand Pushkin — which is to say that it cannot be fully done from the outside. Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin is the writer whom every Russian author who followed him claimed as a father, a standard, and an impossibility: the source from which a wholeContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Pushkin”
Poul Henningsen
Makers & Rooms — Essay I The Light He Couldn’t Stop Arguing About Poul Henningsen designed the most beloved lamp in the world. He also wrote cabaret songs, picked fights with the bourgeoisie, and fled to Sweden ahead of the Gestapo. The lamp was almost the least interesting thing about him. By Bergotte There isContinue reading “Poul Henningsen”
The Cars
Essay · Music & Culture The Glamour of Disconnection The Cars made music about emotional unavailability and called it pop, which was either a very sophisticated joke or the most honest thing anyone did in the late 1970s, depending on how you felt about the decade. The answer is that it was both, and theContinue reading “The Cars”
The Self That Must Be Chosen: Who We Are According to Søren Kierkegaard
He wrote under false names, spoke in riddles, and refused to give answers. He died at forty-two having produced, in a little over a decade, the most searching account of what it means to be a human being that Western philosophy has ever attempted. Kierkegaard did not want to make things easy for you. HeContinue reading “The Self That Must Be Chosen: Who We Are According to Søren Kierkegaard”
Sophie Calle
Encounters · No. 1 The Art of Following Someone Sophie Calle has spent forty years turning other people’s lives — and her own grief — into something that looks, uncomfortably, like art. By Bergotte In January 1980, Sophie Calle followed a stranger to Venice. She had met him briefly at a party in Paris, notContinue reading “Sophie Calle”
The Reel Argument: Ingmar Bergman
By Bergotte Ingmar Bergman made films about the things we cannot say to each other, and he made them with a directness that is almost unbearable. He is routinely described as a difficult filmmaker — demanding, austere, heavy — and this reputation has kept more people from him than it has drawn in, which isContinue reading “The Reel Argument: Ingmar Bergman”
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World
Director: Sasha WatersTitle: Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the WorldYear: 2026Country: United StatesGenre: Documentary / BiographyRunning time: 91 minutesRating: ★★★★☆ What It Is Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is Sasha Waters’s documentary portrait of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Mary Oliver, whose deceptively simple poems about nature, solitude, mortality,Continue reading “Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World”
The Human Condition According to Tolstoy
By Bergotte Leo Tolstoy is the writer who makes other great writers feel provincial. Not because his books are the longest, though two of them are among the longest ever written, and not because his range is the widest, though it extends from the ballrooms of Moscow to the battlefields of Austerlitz to the peasantContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Tolstoy”
Issey Miyake
Encounters · No. 6 A Piece of Cloth Issey Miyake survived the atomic bomb at seven years old and spent the rest of his life making clothes that felt like freedom. These two facts are not unrelated. By Bergotte On the morning of August 6, 1945, Issey Miyake was seven years old and standing closeContinue reading “Issey Miyake”
My World of Interiors 