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Today in The New York Review of Books: Darryl Pinckney recounts James Baldwin’s loves; Peter E. Gordon studies sociology; David Cole scrutinizes the Supreme Court’s thoughts on “conversion therapy”; Regina Marler finds Gabriële Buffet-Picabia’s place in the modern art canon; a poem by Amit Majmudar; and, from the archives, Martin Scorsese on how movies work.
Darryl Pinckney
Love’s Anguish and Force and Terror
Nicholas Boggs structures his moving new biography of James Baldwin around the writer’s most important relationships with men.
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Peter E. Gordon
Secular Priests
In its efforts to define religion, modern sociology has also sought to define itself.
David Cole
A Right to Commit Malpractice?
If the Supreme Court overturns a law banning licensed therapists from offering “conversion therapy,” it would throw into doubt how states have always regulated professional speech.
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Regina Marler
Avant-Garde Égalité
Gabriële Buffet-Picabia tended to minimize her part in the development of modern art, but a new book positions her as a central figure.
Free from the Archives
Auguste Lumière was born 163 years ago today. Together with his younger brother Louis, he invented one of the first motion picture cameras and screened dozens of the first movies ever made, mostly “actualities”—short, unedited footage of everyday activities like workers leaving a factory, a blacksmith hammering an anvil, or, most famously, a train pulling into a station.
In the Review’s August 15, 2013, issue, Martin Scorsese wrote about the development of the art and language of cinema, from the Lumière brothers’ work to D. W. Griffiths’s innovations to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 to the fractured present.
Martin Scorsese
The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema
“The cinema we’re talking about here—Edison, the Lumière brothers, Méliès, Porter, all the way through Griffith and on to Kubrick—that’s really almost gone. It’s been overwhelmed by moving images coming at us all the time and absolutely everywhere, even faster than the visions coming at the astronaut in the Kubrick picture. And we have no choice but to treat all these moving images coming at us as a language. We need to be able to understand what we’re seeing and find the tools to sort it all out.”
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