Light Leaks
Light Leaks: Outdoor Cinemas and the Ecological Art of the Encounter
What kind of experiences are outdoor cinemas, and why are they so popular today? The last decade has seen a surge of experimentation with nontraditional, ephemeral or pop-up outdoor cinemas around the world. Situated at the intersection of cinema, media, mobile technology, urban flows, new forms of city sociabilities, art, performance, pop culture and community, what tools do we need to understand the work that these cinemas do? How can cinema as an experience of lived ecology, our mediated memories and the built environment resensitize us to sustainable and engaged forms of life? Well into its second century, cinema remains a potent sitefor social encounter, but the form of this encounter has changed dramatically.
Drawing together moving image media, embodiment, built environments and social and environmental ecologies, "Light Leaks" explores questions of outdoor cinematic architectures in relation to outdoor cinemas and urbanism's movements. "Light Leaks" will address how and when outdoor cinemas have incorporated, invited or excluded ecological surrounds, both material and incorporeal (eg. spectator memory and the movement practices of urbanites) and diverse publics . "Light Leaks” concerns site specific case studies in London, Montreal, Rome and Berlin that showcase a wide variety of approaches to outdoor cinemas in dialogue with urgent negotiations of rapidly changing urban environments, sustainability, community demands and media landscapes. Who is invited to participate in these new spaces and under what conditions? How do these projects facilitate novel sociabilities, and how do they reinforce zones of exclusion and expropriation? In what ways do these projects take up found ecologies of the built environment, social institutions and mediatized memories both collective and individual?
This project builds on PI Alanna Thain's long engagement with ecological explorations of collective spaces, and considers sustainability not solely as our impact on an environment, but as strategies for survival and thriving by minoritarian subjects. Since 2013, Thain has been running a bicycle powered outdoor cinema in Montreal: Cinema Out of the Box (link to come). The other members of the research team are Professor Will Straw, an expert in urbanism and media and a leading figure in the emerging field of night studies, and Professor Ipek Türeli, expert in cinematic architecture and the urban night, as well as a team of student researchers. Based at the Moving Image Research Laboratory at McGill, Light Leaks is funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant (2019-2022).
This project draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
research team
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Alanna Thain is an associate professor of world cinemas and cultural studies at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, where she directs the Moving Image Research Laboratory (www.mirl.lab.mcgill.ca) dedicated to the study of the body in moving image media. She is the author of Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema (U. of Minnesota Press, 2017). She also leads the FRQSC research team CORÉRISC (Collective for Research on Epistemologies of Embodied Risk). Her current projects include Anarchival Outbursts: Movement Practices of Post-Digital Cinema, and Light Leaks: Outdoor Cinemas and the Ecological Art of the Encounter. She also runs the bike powered itinerant outdoor cinema Cinema Out of the Box.
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Will Straw is Professor of Urban Media Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. He is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America (Andrew Roth Gallery, 2006) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook to Canadian Cinema (with Janine Marchessault, 2019) Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture (with Alexandra Boutros, 2010), Formes Urbaines (with Anouk Bélanger and Annie Gérin, 2014), and Night Studies: Regards croisés sur les nouveaux visages de la nuit (with Luc Gwiazdzinski and Marco Maggioli, 2020). He has published over 170 articles on music, cinema, popular culture and the urban night.
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Ipek Türeli is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Architectures of Spatial Justice (Tier 2) at McGill University. She has many publications on visualizations of the city in photography, film, exhibitions, and museums. Her books include Orienting Istanbul (2010) and Istanbul Open City (2018). Over the past decade of teaching at the School of Architecture, she has consistently guided architecture students to use digital storytelling to explore how the design of the built environment relates to social justice. Her recent research interests include low-income housing and participatory design, civil protest and urban design, and campus landscapes and race.
Student and Affiliated Researchers
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Eve Cable
Undergraduate Student, McGill University
Professional Biography: Eve Cable is a fourth year Cultural Studies and World Cinemas student at McGill University, where she is pursuing Honours research in avant-garde 20th Century film. She has previously interned for the Regent Park Film Festival, and also works in illustration and graphic design freelance and in various organisations. Eve is working under Professor Alanna Thain at the Moving Image Research Lab, working as an archivist with past materials from the MIRL.
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Steven Greenwood
PhD Candidate, McGill University
Professional Biography: Steven Greenwood is a PhD Candidate at McGill University, where he studies the relationship between queer cultures and popular culture. His dissertation and recent work focuses primarily on queer relationships to musicals, as well as the connection between Broadway, queer community, and history. He is also a playwright, screenwriter, and director, and serves as the artistic director of Home Theatre Productions in Montreal. In the summer of 2021, he will also be working as an intern for the Inside Out Queer Film Festival in Toronto.
Website: Home Theatre Productions
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Astrid Mohr
Undergraduate Student, McGill University
Professional Biography: Astrid Mohr is a third-year undergraduate student at McGill pursuing an Honours in Gender, Sexuality, Feminism and Social Justice Studies with a minor in Indigenous Studies. Her honours thesis will detail a history of female and non-binary-led film festivals across Canada through the 20th and 21st centuries. In 2018 Astrid founded the Femme Fatale Film Festival, a Toronto-based film festival dedicated to screening shorts by young female and non-binary filmmakers. She believes film festivals are one of the best ways to strengthen creative communities and is excited to continue researching and working in the field.
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Brandon Kaufman
Student, McGill University
Professional Biography: Brandon Kaufman is a filmmaker and student at McGill University, where his academic interests concern movements in the twentieth century cinematic avant-garde. He is a contributing writer to Cult MTL, for whom he covers music, and has published film criticism at various publications. He is currently working on three film projects, including an adaptation of a short story by the artist David Wojnarowicz. His participation with Light Leaks is generously funded by the Gregg Blachford and David McGillivray Internship Award.
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Katherine Milazzo
Undergraduate Student, McGill University
Professional Biography: Katherine Milazzo is an undergraduate student at McGill University, where she is pursuing an honours degree in English, Cultural Studies. Her thesis will examine autobiographical experimental practices of female filmmakers in postwar American cinema. In addition to Katherine’s work for the Moving Image Research Lab, she will be conducting research on dance and cinema for Dr. Alanna Thain. For the summer of 2021, Katherine is also working as a Research Fellow for the Boston-based Design Studio for Social Intervention, a creativity lab born out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that works at the intersection of art and activism.
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Ylenia Olibet
PhD Candidate, Concordia University
Professional Biography: Ylenia's interests of research focus on feminist film theory, transnational approaches to film studies, and reception practices. For her PhD research thesis she is focusing on contemporary feminist film culture in Québec from a transnational perspective, under the supervision of Professor Maule. Her research is funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture.
research project
Screening: "À l’ombre des astres" Sept. 2020 https://zoom-out.ca/view/a-lombre-des-astres
Image credit: Lasemaphore.org
Spaces of Sociability: Interdisciplinary Practices of Urban Media, European Network of Cinema Studies, June 9, 2021
Click here for further details.
Ipek Türeli (2021) Projections for the Urban Night: A Film-based Exploration in the Design Studio, Journal of Architectural Education, 75:2, 213-223, DOI: 10.1080/10464883.2021.1947676
Alanna Thain and Dayna McLeod, Laurent Lafontant, Bradford Nordeen, So Mayer, and Gary Varro. “Cinema’s Missing Bodies.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 62, no. 2 (2021): 223–41. https://doi.org/10.13110/framework.62.2.0223
Alanna Thain, "Cinema Out of the Box: Les ré-animations des espaces ambigus du cinéma et du média post-numérique" Écranosphère special issue on “Media Mutations”, eds. Santiago Hidalgo, Rémy Besson; Thomas Carrier-Lafleur; Philippe Theophanidis. March 2021 http://www.ecranosphere.ca/article.php?id=85
Alanna Thain “Reflektion: Ordinary Intimacies, Extraordinary Sites: Outdoor Cinema as Leaky Lab” https://smartkreativstad.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Levande_bilder_levande_stad_screen_low.pdf
Spaces of Sociability
Spaces of Sociability: Interdisciplinary Practices of Urban Media, European Network of Cinema Studies, June 9, 2021
The workshop was held over zoom during the NECS 2021 conference in June, 2021. Organized by Will Straw, Alanna Thain and Ipek Tureli, it also featured Dr. Toni Pape (assistant professor of media studies at the University of Amsterdam) and Dr. Eleonora Diamanti (filmmaker and lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at John Cabot University, Rome). It was organized around the prompt: “How does urban media create sociability?” Diamanti, Tureli, Thain and Pape led the audience through a series of practical exercises and discussions, and four students from McGill architecture program diagrammed the conversation and created a visual record of the event.
Proposition: This workshop explores interdisciplinary practices of somatic and mediated sociability in urban environments. “Spaces of Sociability” assembles experts in architecture, night studies, visual ethnography and video games studies. Bodies in transit through the city likewise transition through embodied archives of mediated memories and corporeal habits, remixing the space-time of the urban itself. Four short presentations will be followed by a moderated conversation, asking: how do the affective contagions of media forms move between onscreen and off-screen urban spaces? What affordances can identify and activate such contagions in pedagogy, research and dissemination? How do mediated movements, memories and experiences become playable and actionable in new contexts? Filmmaker Eleonora Diamanti will present a short film on Cuba’s urban night and discuss visual ethnography’s methods relative to to everyday digital visual practices of urban life. Will Straw will assess novel spaces of contemporary cinema exhibition, which set the dark space of film-viewing within fluid sites of sociability (bars, boutiques, and exhibitions). As they stimulate low-level transfers of sociability across the activities of perusal, conversation and spectatorship, to what extent must cultural forms perceived as “residual” embed themselves within atmospheres of multi-sensorial consumption in order to survive the contemporary media marketplace? Turning from actual sites to studio design practice in architecture, Ipek Tureli will address time-based design in studio teaching between architecture and cinema, through her innovative course and design prompt for creating “Projections for the Urban Night”. Building on media augmentation of bodily movement across urban spaces, Toni Pape’s contribution focuses on how movement practices and conventions from video games are (re)introduced into urban spaces. He will address methodological questions underpinning perceptual and kinetic transference (or kinetic desires) between media and urban space. The discussion will be moderated by Alanna Thain, director of the outdoor bike powered cinema, Cinema Out of the Box.
