Notes on Critical Practice
My writing usually begins with something particular: a gesture, a cut, a body in motion, a sound, an image whose status is uncertain. At other times it begins with a screening, a notebook, an archive, a city, or a conversation. Following such particulars can change the scale of an inquiry, moving from the relations within a film towards the histories and technologies that produced it, the conditions through which it survives, or the circumstances in which it becomes visible. These movements are not departures from the object so much as ways of discovering what the object is, what relations it enters, and what kind of thought it demands.
I try not to approach films with a conceptual framework whose conclusions are already secure. The histories, concepts and theoretical assumptions I bring to an encounter remain open to resistance: a film may complicate them, redirect them, or make them inadequate. But criticism is not simply a record of this encounter. It also constructs relations, makes distinctions and judgments, compares, abstracts and recomposes. An argument can emerge because two films are placed beside one another, because a historical detail changes the scale of a question, or because an image refuses the concept brought to it.
The work collected here moves between essays, close criticism, interviews, festival writing, translation, academic research, and more personal or experimental forms; increasingly, it also extends into audiovisual criticism. I am less interested in maintaining firm boundaries between these modes than in the different possibilities and resistances each produces. Form is not simply a container for an argument. An interview, an essay, a translation or a video essay permits different movements of thought while making others more difficult. In audiovisual work especially, juxtaposition, repetition, duration, voice and the relation between image and sound can become part of the process through which an argument is discovered and tested.
My doctoral research has grown from these concerns, as criticism itself has increasingly become an object of inquiry rather than simply a means of arriving at judgments about films. It asks how criticism thinks: how it moves between particulars and abstractions, constructs relations, makes judgments, revises concepts, and gives form to thought through its encounter with cinema.
Writing has appeared in Art Monthly, Cineaste, Documentary Magazine, Metrograph Journal, MUBI Notebook, Sabzian, Senses of Cinema, and elsewhere.
Selected Writing
A selection of representative criticism, interviews, essays and festival writing.
Immovable Images, Unstoppable Frames: On the Contradiction of Moving Images
Photogénie, Issue 20 · March 2024 · Essay
An essay beginning from one of cinema’s basic contradictions: movement produced from images that are themselves immobile, and the different forms of thought that become possible once that contradiction is taken seriously.
This is the paradox of moving images: a contradiction that only reproduces itself upon resolution.
The Image Is False: The Lodger as Hitchcock’s Manifesto
Outskirts · October 2023 · Essay
Beginning from a live orchestral screening of Hitchcock’s The Lodger, the essay reconsiders “silent cinema” through sound, mediation and unreliable images, treating Hitchcock’s early film as a compressed statement of problems that recur throughout his work.
The Lodger isn’t a silent film, but an inaudible one.
Travel Companions: Bahram Beyzaie & Amir Naderi
Metrograph Journal · 2026 · Essay
A comparative essay on two trajectories through Iranian cinema, considering childhood, movement, exile and migration alongside the problem of what it means to locate filmmakers within a national cinema.
Histories of French Cinema’s Moving Body: An Interview with Denis Lavant
Cineaste · Spring 2025 · Interview · Print
A conversation with Denis Lavant about physical performance, theatre, movement and a career extending across several histories of contemporary French cinema, including his long collaboration with Leos Carax.
Images in Fracture: On “Reclaiming Archives”
yanco · 2026 · Essay
An essay on archival images and the histories embedded within their damage, absence and displacement, asking what happens when filmmakers reclaim images originally produced under unequal political and technological conditions.
The archive becomes less a field to be investigated than a space to be inhabited.
Philadelphia Story: The Miracle of Love and Cinema in Philly
Koker Magazine · 2024 · Essay
A personal history of Philadelphia written through films, cinemas, neighbourhoods, friendships and departure, in which criticism gradually gives way to memoir and the city itself becomes part of the cinematic experience.
A Citizen of the World: Introduction to “Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema”
Sabzian · 2025 · Introduction / essay · with Gerard-Jan Claes
An introduction to Serge Daney through geography, travel, class and internationalism, considering cinema as a way of encountering a world larger than the circumstances into which one is born.
a way of taking without owning, of belonging without opting in.
Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024: Cinemalibero Strand Spotlights Maldoror and Landrián
Documentary Magazine · 2024 · Festival essay
A festival essay on Il Cinema Ritrovato’s Cinemalibero strand, moving between the histories of anti-colonial cinema, restoration and canon formation through the recovered work of Sarah Maldoror and Nicolás Guillén Landrián.
From Paper to Paper: Jean-Luc Godard’s Final Notebooks
Senses of Cinema, Issue 117 · 2026 · Feature essay
An essay on Godard’s final notebooks as material objects in which montage migrates from the editing table to paper, bringing cinema into contact with handwriting, collage, exhibition and the physical traces of thought.
Nourished by Time: Facing the Future of Cinema with Locarno’s Kevin B. Lee
MUBI Notebook · 2023 · Interview
A conversation with Kevin B. Lee about programming, audiovisual criticism and cinema’s relationship to past and future, asking whether new possibilities may depend less on novelty than on changing how cinematic time is inhabited.
Masao Adachi: Escape
Art Monthly, Issue 495 · 2026 · Film criticism · Print
A concentrated response to Adachi’s Escape, in which the filmmaker confronts his own revolutionary history through a dialogue between youthful militancy, political memory and survival.
Godard as Presence: A Ghost Obituary
Photogénie · 2023 · Essay / obituary
An obituary built through Godard’s appearances and disappearances: cameos, quotations, borrowed images and traces left inside other people’s films, asking what it means for a filmmaker to remain present after death.
Godard’s entire career can be seen as a series of appearances and disappearances.
Full Bibliography →
A chronological record of published and forthcoming criticism, interviews, translations, academic writing and other contributions.
