Max Nelson

The Tragic Mode

“I love Ralph Ellison’s definition of the blues as ‘an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.’ I set out to engage the catastrophe.”

The Asymmetry of Gender

“I’m not ready to jettison identity as a route into political awareness and action. But identity is not politics itself.”

Alone Together in Taipei

Intimacy in Tsai Ming-liang’s films is an elusive possession, but the desire for it is constant and always particular.

‘Don’t Write on Here, Bad Girl’

Over sixty years, Yvonne Rainer has made an art of bringing a deadpan comic tone to strenuous scenes of bodily exertion, political struggle, emotional strain, and taxing thought.

When Mesmerism Came to America

The direct encounters between clairvoyants and the men who mesmerized them seem less like collaborations than like competitions over who would set the terms of the session and whose interests it would serve.

Wild, Blooming Facts

Chris Marker, Always Moving

In his films, writings, and other projects, Marker kept returning to the matter of what it meant to live a happy life.

A Hard Road Home

The films of Chantal Akerman

Claire Denis’s Chemical Reactions

To want to get close to another person, in Claire Denis’s world, is to venture into strange and unknown territory. In her new film Un beau soleil intérieur, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), a divorced middle-aged painter, looks for a passionate, enduring love.

The Chevalier of Disquiet

Stan Brakhage: More Light

Stan Brakhage’s movies could be abstractions made by painting, scratching, or collaging directly onto the film stock itself, or intimate records of his family life. There is a disquieting tension in many of the films he made about his family during his first marriage.

Born to Sing the Gospel

A tone often emerges in Washington Phillips’s songs—a sense of vulnerability that undercuts the confidence his sermons project. The figures in his songs, as in many prewar gospel recordings, tend to be persecuted and burdened, doomed to roam a world of “sin and woe.”

‘What I Couldn’t Say Myself’

The greatest revelations in the show “Danny Lyon: Message to the Future,” currently at the Whitney Museum, come from Lyon’s little-known documentary films.