Filmology – Lola On Film

Netflix’s Ripley

The Mapplethorpesque photography in Zaillian’s screen adaptation of Highsmith’s novel is a character in its own right, as Ripley is more a ‘setting’ than a ‘personality’, rather his setting becomes his personality — a social media influencer’s dream. He might be a human lacking a character or forever building a character, but there is a…
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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 our fascination with haunted universes, the paper explores narrative immersion, celluloid wizardry, and the abandonment of the palpable for the ecstasy of the enchanted. SYMPOSIUM. 21st Century Magic and Spirituality in Media and Culture. 30 Jun…
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The Artful Oscar

Oscars 2021 was a public exercise in reclaiming one’s own art from the hijack of a devouring billion-dollar entertainment industry, the scaling down from mass production to manufacture, a deliberate recalibrating and reframing in order to preserve cinema’s place in culture, in society, and in our individual lives. And to be sure, this ceremony was…
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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 within portals, places where darkness and light meet, the heroines gazing back at us, in defiance, transforming into a new fluid form of the femme fatale as action…
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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…
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Mystery Of Love: On Body And Soul

The evolutionary 2020 broke us down into essentials: the flesh we are made of, the dreams we inhabit, the lives we lead within our beating hearts. This film was made for this year. In the way scriptures were made for a particular time in history, and for all times, at the same time. It is…
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Chernobyl HBO: Seeing In The Dark

The only way to look at Chernobyl is through the complex ocular shield of the camera, otherwise we’d be staring at Medusa’s face, unprotected. An open nuclear reactor core burning our synapses through sheer magnitude of existential incomprehension. This is a piece of popular art offering the bleakest narrative possible, yet the audience rushed to…
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30 Years Of X: sex, lies, and videotape

Squeezed between the baby-boomer dharma sell-outs and the millennial hordes of tattooed accountants, the throwaway lettuce in a generational bacon sandwich of aspiring corporate drones, sits Gen X, i.e. my generation, sulking mascots of McJobs, deifying burning time creatively doing nothing. Enter our isolation chamber, Steven Soderbergh‘s 1989 Palme d’Or winner.
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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.
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The ABC Murders & Fascism Redux

Malkovich is a Poirot that lives in perpetual mourning, in a history hiding underneath its own frayed repeats. It’s 1933 Britain. Fascism as collective narcissism. Narcissism as ultimate isolation from life source. John Malkovich as Poirot, a stranger in a strange land, owning a detective’s cellular memory. This is esoteric Christie, avenging angel, her agent, Sarah…
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Film vs. Death: One More Time With Feeling

A testament to the inexplicability of mourning, the therapeutic nature of art. In this case, the art of the moving image, the most conjuring art of all. The camera becomes a dignified way to navigate the grieving process, to share. This is film as communion, echo of a longing, an evocation of love in that eternal painfully…
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Sharp Objects & The Initiation Of The Shaman

Camille emerged fully formed, a she-shaman forged in the era of the return of the witch, expanding the liminal space between traumatic events, taking the silver bullet of all audience assumptions and projections in a tale of female rage, all those dark vagina dentata materials blooming a venemous crimson red in the patriarchal dollhouse.
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Lola says…

Deconstructing the spectacle, measuring empty calories, offering nutritional insights on films newly released, as well as archival treasures, assessing the state of film culture, exploring new formats & illuminating cinema’s place in society, as well as in our individual psychology.
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Category: Filmology