In Film Theory I collect my academic texts for all my fellow film scholars & students, please feel very welcome to read, discuss, cite & link. For more info, or to connect, please visit the sites below.
Research Interests
Art psychotherapy, psychology of cinema, psychology and alchemy, alchemical symbolism in art, mythopoesis, women in the arts, female gaze, feminist film theory, transpersonal and archetypal psychology, cinema as therapy, spectatorship, filmmaking, visual anthropology, cinéma vérité, experimental cinema, film noir, documentary film, transrealism, psychogeography, storytelling in art therapy, psychology of exceptional human experiences, consciousness & culture.
Papers & Essays
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.
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…
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.
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.
PhD Proposal & MA Dissertation
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.
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…
BOOKS
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).
OTHERS ON MY FILM WORK: CITATIONS
Humor and Nonviolent Struggle in Serbia by Janjira Sombatpoonsiri.
Folding cubanidad : a Deleuzian approach to contemporary Cuban cinema by Paola Monaldi
Cinematic representations of nationalist-religious ideology in Serbian films during the 1990s by Milja Radović
For some of my other work in film theory – please see on Scribd:
The Magic of Joy: Cinema of Emir Kusturica, From Realism to Magical Reality
Essay, 2004, European Cinema, Birkbeck College, University of London.
Lola On Film 