Max Nelson

“Transgender issues have been turned into a vehicle of identity politics in progressive jurisdictions, and mirroring that, transgender issues have been activated by the right in the newest iteration of our endless culture wars.”

On Friday, we published an essay by Paisley Currah on sex classification and the hurdles to changing one’s legal sex. “For transgender people in the

In 1997 the Taiwanese film and theater director Tsai Ming-liang premiered a movie called The River. It starred Lee Kang-sheng, who has had major parts in

Chris Marker kept returning, across the vast body of films, writings, photographs, and multimedia projects he produced between the 1940s and his death in 2012, to the matter of what it meant to live a happy life. In an early essay about the novelist and playwright Jean Giraudoux, he quoted Sartre’s insistence that at certain moments the streets of Paris turn “fixed and clear” and offer up “an instant of happiness, an eternity of happiness.” The challenge, Marker thought, was to put such instants in a pattern, “to make the feeling of those privileged moments into a permanent conviction.” Sans Soleil—the dense, majestic essay film in which he overlaid footage from his many travels with the voice of an unseen woman reading letters from an unknown man—begins with a shot of three serene-looking young girls walking up a road in Iceland. “He said that for him it was the image of happiness,” the narrator tells us, “and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it nev

“I don’t have an idea,” the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman told Gary Indiana in a 1983 interview. “I have a feeling that I try to express.” But to be expressed in her films, feelings often had to first be chiseled down or left to chill.

Desire is both a source of momentum for Claire Denis's characters and a wellspring of confusion and instability. “There’s a chemical reaction between men and women,” says a baker’s wife to the young man who lusts after her in Nénette et Boni (1996), and the people in Denis’s movies often seem linked by invisible channels of longing. They smell one another, admire one another from afar, dance around one another, and in the process lose their footing in the worlds they occupy. To want to get close to another person, for Denis, is to venture into strange and unknown territory.

To describe the thinking behind his films, Stan Brakhage often quoted a saying attributed to the ninth-century Irish theologian John Scotus Erigena: “All things that are, are light.” This is not a sensibility that would seem to lend itself to making home movies, and there is a disquieting tension in many of the films Brakhage made about his family during his first marriage.

Danny Lyon has spent much of his career taking intimate photographs of marginal, working-class, and outlaw communities. Many of the most striking pictures in the Whitney Museum’s new survey, “Danny Lyon: Message to the Future," come from these milieus. But more than the pictures themselves, it’s Lyon’s sixteen nonfiction films that show how his relationships with his subjects have developed haltingly and sometimes tensely over time.