Max Nelson’s writings on film and literature have appeared in the Threepenny Review, n+1, Film Comment, The New Republic, and other publications. He is an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books.
Max Nelson
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Writing on Public Books
Are You Nobody Too?
Early in 1862, Emily Dickinson began one of her poems with a startling announcement: “I can wade Grief – / Whole Pools of it – / I’m used to that – / But the least push of Joy / Breaks up my feet.” The British filmmaker Terence …
The Intrusion Artist
By the late ’50s, when he was already widely considered one of France’s finest filmmakers, Robert Bresson would confess in interviews that he hardly ever went to the movies. There was something about how people behaved in front of the camera that repelled him and that he had lost the power to block out. “I […]
“If Only I Could Direct Its Course”: On Pedro Costa
One way to get talking about the films of the Portuguese director Pedro Costa, which often seem designed to defy verbal summary, is to focus on what they refuse to show. The shot that introduces Mariana (Inês de Medeiros), the young nurse at the center of Costa’s second feature Casa de Lava, proceeds from a […]
