Review: ‘North by Current’ unyieldingly resists conventional thinking about confronting trauma and trans embodiment in America
With his family, Madsen retraces generational addiction by restaging pivotal moments in lyrically-assembled images of home video with an ethereal narration
In ‘North by Current,’ Madsen reflects on the death of his niece and develops a personal project to study the natures of grief, time, and origin. Credit: Photo via PBS
Pauline Kael once wrote that the worst thing about filmmaking is that in its attempt to be life-like, nobody can go back to correct the mistakes. That becomes vividly clear in Madsen Minax’s searching and tender film “North by Current” in which the director returns to his adolescence to portray a painful household tethered to tragedy over three years for a cinematic experiment. With his family, Madsen retraces generational addiction by restaging pivotal moments in lyrically-assembled images of home video with an ethereal narration. The result is a revitalization of the act of observation. This experiment is not an exercise in creating nostalgia, but creating identity while maintaining the subtleties of an overburdened family.
In the piece, Madsen reflects on the death of his niece and develops a personal project to study the natures of grief, time, and origin. Through overlapped timelines, Madsen asks the viewer: “How did you become who you became?’”. This question reverberates throughout the film like a mantra as it emerges from within the filmmaker’s motherly and sisterly relationships. Madsen’s interactions with the women of his family also provoke the director to challenge his understanding of maternity and femininity within his own masculinity. The filmmaker’s voice carries a tone of compassion which suggests the breaking of generational patterns of abuse and neglect, poised to incite a more internal search between parent and child.
By placing human relationality as the core of understanding and confronting trauma, the film’s unvoiced thesis reassesses both relationships and the nature of filmmaking itself. In one standout moment in which Madsen confronts his mother’s past negligence to his visibility as transgender man, the filmmaker realizes he can never return to correct those mistakes. However, the environment of the documentary form allows the Madsen and his subjects to be honest with each other and uncovers complexity in the overall process. The film unyieldingly resists all the conventional ways of thinking about confronting trauma and trans embodiment in America.
