Review of Pavle Levi's Jolted Images: Unbound Analytic (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), Cineaste, vol.XLIII, no.4, 2018
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.'