On Doru Pop’s „Romanian Cinema: Thinking Outside the Screen”

For Slavonic & East European Review I assessed Doru Pop’s new book, Romanian Cinema: Thinking Outside the Screen. My review is not entirely open-access yet, but here it is anyway.

Discussing Hitchcock’s „Under Capricorn”

Thrilled to have been invited by my old friend Michał Oleszczyk to join him and Sebastian Smoliński on their terrific Hitchcock podcast Foreign Correspondents: Deeper into Hitchcock, for a chat about Hitch’s neglected Under Capricorn. I had a ball.  The episode is on YouTube and on Spotify. 

Passage

The fabulous cinephile website Sabzian has a section called Passage, in which critics, filmmakers and spectators are invited to choose and discuss a passage or fragment which has impacted their relationship with cinema. It was an honor and a thrill to be invited – and to write about the first two pages of a Corto Maltese […]

„Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” as Radu Jude’s ars poetica

A new article on Radu Jude’s filmmaking, co-authored with Veronica Lazăr. It explores Jude’s 2021 Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, considering it as a summation of the aesthetic and thematic concerns pursued by the Romanian director in his earlier films. The article also includes a discussion of Jude’s wonderful short film Semiotic Plastic, which […]

Radu Jude’s Montage Experiments with Documents of Oppression and Mass Murder

A new article co-authored with Veronica Lazăr. It discusses critically the following films—short and feature-length—by Radu Jude: The Dead Nation (2017), The Marshal’s Two Executions (2018), Punish and Discipline (2019), Uppercase Print (2020), The Exit of the Trains (2020), Caricaturana (2021), Memories from the Eastern Front (2022), and The Potemkinists (2022). In four of them—The […]

Literature, Jewishness, and Period Drama in Radu Jude’s „Scarred Hearts”

Another article co-authored with Veronica Lazăr. It discusses Radu Jude’s 2016 film Scarred Hearts, adapted from Max Blecher’s autobiographical novel with the same title (1937), as well as other writings of his. It is structured in four parts. The first references André Bazin’s celebrated essay on Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, bringing it to […]

“…and Gypsies get many a beating…”: On the Significance of Radu Jude’s „Aferim!”

A new article I have co-authored with Veronica Lazăr. It’s about Radu Jude’s 2015 film Aferim!. It considers the film as a revisionist take on the Romanian tradition of historical cinema. It discusses Aferim!’s originality as a depiction of the origins of contemporary Romanian anti-Roma racism. It analyzes Jude’s artistic strategies—for instance, his lavish and […]

Two Perspectives on Sainthood in 1951 (for „Bright Lights Film Journal”)

I have a new essay in Bright Lights Film Journal. It’s a piece I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. It is called „Two Perspectives on Sainthood in 1951: Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51 and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair”.

Radu Jude’s Satirical Studies of Male Rage and Self-Pity

This new article in English, co-authored with Veronica Lazăr, discusses four Radu Jude films – the shorts Alexandra (2008) and It Can Pass Through the Wall (2014), the never released, 60-minute long A Film for Friends (2011), and Jude’s official second feature, Everybody in Our Family (2012) – grouping them together as satirical studies of […]