Over the course of the spring semester, I had been working on several essays pertaining to aquariums across history—from 19th century productions to metaphors of aquariums in cinema. Across these projects, I’d spent a great deal of time considering the mechanics of aquariums: glass, aeration, milieu, and a whole host of other aspects that mediate the encounter between spectators and the aquatic world.

But earlier this year, I had an experience that allowed me to do just that…only out in nature. On a boat in Catalina, I was able to look out of dozens of viewing windows submerged under the water through which I saw various marine animals first hand.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is audio-visually saturated. Watching it in a theater, you heard hushed whispers come from behind you, while the near-drowning scene felt thick and heavy, as water sloshed, slid, and crashed all around. The critical focus on its visually-stunning panoramas is deserved, with the devil in the details, even in the most sweeping scenes that feature extras, vintage cars, and small signage.

But, for me, a certain set of details that I will never forget are the dead animals that permeate the scene of winter celebration and libations, when the family vacations in a hacienda full of taxidermy heads of pet dogs and trophy kills.

Besides the occasional gruesome accident that is the stuff of local news and our internal Nightcrawler-esque fascination with horror, amusement parks have largely maintained their good reputation for family fun. 

Yet, there has been a counter narrative in pop culture that dissects the very nature of escapism and capitalism that drives these parks in the most spectacular way: showing the attractions literally turn on the guests. In 2018, Westworld examines the consequences of that revolt throughout the entirety of its second season, picking up with the death of the park's creator where the first season violently ended, and 25 years ago today a similar idea was introduced to mainstream audiences in the theatrical release of Jurassic Park. 

At the end of Shakespeare in Love, a ship sinks and over the underwater, light-filled visuals comes forth the tale The Twelfth Night. The shimmering water glitters and the clothes and hair of the ships' unfortunate inhabitants calls to the audience with its rich details, which contributes to the exact displacement that allows the conscious play and willful distortion of Viola's appearance in the gender-bending comedy.

In Head Over Heels, a new musical that is wrapping up now at the Curran Theater in San Francisco, I was reminded of this scene upon reflection and the shared queerness the ocean not only permits, but encourages in their respective stories.

Call Me By Your Name will forever be on the lips of all queer writers, a title we perpetually utter when ratifying the queer cinematic cannon. It will also always linger as a taste of pleasure remembered. My lips can utter the title in a way the two protagonists could never. Call Me By Your Name was always a film I would love. It had entered the queer imagination before it was even released into any normal theater. Its place in history was known since Sundance, but what was less certain to me was my place in the film.

Would I identify with any of the characters? (I did.) Would I feel attracted to the men on the screen? (Yes.) It transported me both into "Somewhere in northern Italy" and my own summers past. I simultaneously felt embedded in their world and thrown back into mine.

Films shock and scare, delight and draw out tears—they're pieces of art that tell stories, but particularly stories that often deeply affect us. Many of these feelings can be preserved through the written word; for instance, when the fear comes from a haunting ghost. But of course, the audiovisuals of film add tremendously to the cinematic conjuring of emotions. So much so that sometimes the visuals themselves can be the unnerving agent, even if the subject matter isn't scary on its own. A loud sound and the appearance of a monster should scare—but even innocuous images can have this effect. As any scholar of film could tell you, often, without knowing what we should fear, the audience can be unwittingly manipulated by the smallest editing choices. So small, in fact, that mere frames can terrify.

At first, caught in the frenzy of learning new vegetarian dishes like black bean patties or crispy tofu, the loss of these national dishes wasn't all-consuming. Yet phone calls home as my mom prepared meat pies made my mouth water. So I resolved to updates these recipes past, substituting mushrooms, assorted vegetables, and lentils in for the ubiquitous ground meat common to nearly all of my favorite recipes. In doing so, I got to eat my favorite meals which is nothing groundbreaking or significant outside of my stomach's satisfaction. But there is also a sense in which I am updating something cultural, realigning Serbian food with my diet and lifestyle.

And importantly, the meals I'm making are also gluten-free, in order to also accommodate the man I live with, which in no small way is a significant part of my realignment and negotiation with Serbian culture

I recently watched Woody Allen's 1983 film Zelig, a mockumentary sharing the cultural impact of one fictional man, Leonard Zelig, who shifts and changes shape to match the people around him. Here, Woody Allen conjures the past—but as a relic of the past—through black-and-white, grainy film, but Allen is a director also prone to glorify the past, reinvigorating it through elaborate period production design that romantically conjures the costumes, texture, and atmosphere of decades long gone.

Just in the past decade, he has created three films that take place in these very roaring decades—Midnight in Paris (2011), Magic in the Moonlight (2014), and Café Society (2016). As a student interested in the art and film of these decades, these films are a treat, but this preoccupation with the past struck me as a fairly committed interest of Allen's that I believe relates to his larger concerns about creativity, celebrity and, ultimately perhaps, his own place in history

Terms like "haunting," "conjuring," or even just "appearing" flood my academic vocabulary. I write that sea animals simply appear and disappear, as if their bodies are constantly in an act of disembodiment in the films of Jean Painlevé, or I think about how an image in a surrealist work conjures another which conjures another in an endless play of mental hauntings. I'm drawn to this type of subtlety—brief pulsations on screen or airy references. Ephemerality was one of the words that buzzed in my head from the moment I learned it

Two recent indie films about ghosts have forced me to reconsider and begin to theorize these subtle hauntings of the cinema and what they reveal about the medium. While these are creatures that can scream or wail they can also appear and disappear at will, in Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016) and A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017) they're hardly there.

In this American landscape photograph, Asia exists first in the bodies of the few laborers we see. At Malakoff Diggins in Nevada in 1869, we can assume that the laborers were of Chinese descent, thus, the presence of Asia throbs in the muscles of these workers. In the image, however, that narrow conception of Asia would translate to only a few small figures in a photograph with grander subject matter

It's strange being in a place that feels like it shouldn't exist. As I walked over canals and rode gondolas, I couldn't help asking why people chose to create the city of Venice at all. It was beautiful. The water is stunning. But there is a coast that they could live on a few kilometers back. Why go right to the water's edge? Why build on a series of small islands? I couldn't help but think of the artificial islands of Dubai, which is perhaps an appropriate modern equivalent to explain the difficulty of establishing a city like Venice. As could be seen on any building by the algae growth, tide varies tremendously day-to-day to say nothing of seasons or storms.