Emilie Bickerton

Emilie Bickerton lives in Paris and writes screenplays, including for Amnesia (2015).

Photomania

Emilie Bickerton, 22 November 2018

A few pictures have come to represent Félix Nadar’s work: Charles Baudelaire, undated, but probably between 1855 and 1862, standing in his elegant dark coat, half-unbuttoned waistcoat and bow tie, hands in pockets, staring back at the camera – defiant perhaps, but with the mouth and the eyes, which Nadar called ‘two drops of coffee’, betraying some vulnerability. Victor Hugo, side-on, avuncular, or on his deathbed; a glacial Eugène Delacroix; the incredibly joyless Goncourt brothers; a series of portraits of George Sand, who went to Nadar in desperation after a competitor had captured with great vividness her drooping mouth and double chin. The image was ‘making everyone scream’, Sand wrote to Nadar.

The ashtrays worry me: Eric Rohmer

Emilie Bickerton, 19 March 2015

Eric Rohmer​ never left things to chance, but he did make use of the unexpected. It’s a paradox we find a lot in his films, and something he practised daily in the double life he lived for more than seventy years. In his film-making he demanded exhaustive preparation and absolute precision: he recorded countless sunsets disappearing into the sea in the hope of capturing one elusive...

If you had taken a walk in Paris last autumn, you might have come across grinning cats graffitied on walls and buildings. The person responsible for this was Chris Marker: cats play an important role in his latest film, Chats perchés. Very little is known about Marker himself; there are perhaps 12 photographs of him in circulation, and even fewer interviews. But he has been enormously...

As If: ‘Cahiers du cinéma’

Jonathan Romney, 9 September 2010

In an essay on Avatar in the March issue of the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma, Slavoj Žižek wrote that, despite its superficial espousal of revolutionary action (by blue-skinned...

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