Film Theory – Lola On Film

The Unpublished Word (Manuscripts Don’t Burn) — On Censorship, Film Writing & Trauma

Reflecting on the emotional paralysis I underwent publishing a film review, I examine the impact of personal, familial, and collective trauma on individual expression, the implications of self-censorship on writing, addressing deeper dilemmas of engagement in polarised public discourse in post-conflict societies. Published in Patterns of Miscommunication in Contemporary East-Central European Cinema (2024).
Read more: The Unpublished Word (Manuscripts Don’t Burn) — On Censorship, Film Writing & Trauma
The Alchemical Screen: Enchantment and the Cinema

Did human desire for magic escape the scorn of rational thought via the vehicle of 20th century cinema? Through fascination with haunted universes, I explore narrative immersion, celluloid wizardry, the abandonment of the palpable for the ecstasy of the enchanted. Symposium paper. Goldsmiths, University of London.
Read more: The Alchemical Screen: Enchantment and the Cinema
Black Humour in Serbian Films of the Early Eighties

Examining the dark heart of laughter the symbiotic relationship of film and its audience, wiring us to think and talk in certain ways, its cultural impact, its myriad semiotic and cinematic legacies – this was my MA dissertation (Birkbeck, 2005), a bungy jump into Serbian (and YU) 80s cinema, four films, two filmmakers, Šijan and…
Read more: Black Humour in Serbian Films of the Early Eighties
From Door Frame to Freeze Frame: Femmes Ante Portas

Encountering feminine mysteries on celluloid, a post-Jungian analysis of the veneration of the Hollywood film icon, tracing the blazing trail of cinema femme fatales, their imagery framed in portals, where darkness and light meet, the heroines gazing back at us, in defiance, transforming into a new fluid form of femme fatale as action figure.
Read more: From Door Frame to Freeze Frame: Femmes Ante Portas
Fallen Women of Hollywood Melodrama: 1930s-1950s

Exploring the myth of the fallen woman in classic Hollywood melodrama, its historical, religious and literary antecedents, archetypal realms of the dark, wild feminine projected onto the screen, her impact on the spectator. A dispossessed femininity, fragmented and demonised, yet powerfully vibrant and creative.
Read more: Fallen Women of Hollywood Melodrama: 1930s-1950s
Archetypal Enchantment And The Twin Of David Lynch

Something in the nature of a recording defies rational explanation. A replica of life, its twin and its double, also its deathly echo, preserving life by embalming it for eternity, or at least until the shelf life of the medium itself expires. Images have the numinosity to affect us deeply – a capacity to heal…
Read more: Archetypal Enchantment And The Twin Of David Lynch
Film, the Alchemical Medium

On how we are enchanted by film, juxtaposing early film theory, post-Jungian analysis, anthropology of ritual, and the moving image as transformative tool in art therapy, coining the term archetypal enchantment. It serves as basis to my subsequent theoretical approach to cinema.
Read more: Film, the Alchemical Medium

Category: Film Theory