Cineaste
Review of Pavle Levi's book, Jolted Images: Unbound Analytic (Amsterdam University Press, 2016)
Excerpt: ‘I have a soft spot for books that begin with personal anecdotes. Pavle Levi’s Jolted Images: Unbound Analytic’s opening lines, as Levi recalls his five-year-old self being subjected to repetitive syntonic therapy in Belgrade during the 1970s, immediately piqued my curiosity. Treatment for amblyopia (lazy eye) in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia meant participating in a series of projections that required its patients-turned-viewers to “follow the dot (the afterimage caused by flashing)” that kept moving across a wall. Some years later, Levi finds himself flabbergasted when drawings from Les Lilley and Mirko Ilić’s comic book “Survival” (Spunk No. 1, 1979) bring back this memory of chasing the elusive dot. Jolted Images is an eclectic study that brings together films, posters, drawings, comics, and dreams. Even though comparing films to dreams is familiar terrain, Levi’s treatment of his life experiences as valuable research material is precisely what is often lacking in scholarly texts about media. Coupled with Andrej Dolinka’s graphic designs, the fourteen compact chapters are a persuasive reminder that books about art should never be published without images, as it is too often the case.’
Published in Cineaste, vol.XLIII, no.4, 2018
Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence
'Slow Violence Exposed. Review of Rob Nixon's Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor and Stacy Alaimo's Exposed: environmental politics & pleasures in posthuman times', co-written with Sam Jury
Excerpt: ‘Although there is nothing scientifically uncertain about climate change and the fact that human activity is increasingly destroying habitable environments, it seems as if an alarming number of people remain sceptical. In the global north, our news and art are awash with graphic depictions of environmental disasters, but what if these depictions, in their attempt to be spectacularly hard-hitting, end up distancing us from the deeper truths? Could our inability to acknowledge climate change be a failure of representation? Nixon’s book addresses this kind of mediated misunderstanding of violence by asking ‘how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making? (…) Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, is an expansive and thought-challenging work in three parts, divided as ‘Post Human Pleasures’, ‘Insurgent Exposure’ and ‘Strange Agencies in Anthropocene Seas’. Early in the book Alaimo, currently Professor of English at the University of Texas Arlington, sets out her essential proposition: ‘what forms of ethics and politics arise from the sense of being embedded in, exposed to, and even composed of the very stuff of a rapidly transforming material world?’
Published in Cultural Studies, June 2018
Studies in Eastern European Cinema
‘The time of kings is over: heterogeneity in contemporary Polish cinema’, a review of Ewa Mazierska’s Polish Postcommunist Cinema: From Pavement Level (2007)’
Synopsis: This review analyses they key thesis in Ewa Mazierska's thorough research, that 'has apparently lasted "as long as post communist cinema itself"', which relate to the multiplicity of genres in contemporary Polish cinema. 'Mazierska's demonstration of the heterogeneity of Polish films is reflected in her appreciation of different genres, with the most prominent being police/gangster films.'
Published in Studies in Eastern European Cinema, vol.1, no.1, February 2010
Studies in Eastern European Cinema
This publication contains two reviews:
A film festival review: 'Fracturing time and space: fragmentation as an avant-garde strategy. A Report on the Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade, Serbia, 2013.' This review focuses mainly on the Festival's Academic Forum which this year centred around the notion of fragmentation as an avant-garde strategy.
A book review: 'Lithuanian Art Cinema Through the Bordwellian Lens. A review of Anna Mikonis's Poetic Cinematograph. An Artistic Current in Lithuanian Cinema (2010).' In this review I look at Mikonis's employment of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's formalist methodology in relation to Lithuanian art cinema between the 1950s and early 2000.
Published in Studies in Eastern European Cinema, vol.5, issue 2, October 2014
Sight & Sound
Review of Lorraine Mortimer’s book, Terror and Joy: The Films of Dusan Makavejev (University of Minnesota Press, 2009)
Published in Sight & Sound, July 2009