Alanna Thain
film theory; visual culture; theories of affect; cultural studies; philosophy of the body and movement; gender and sexuality; film production; animation; dance, performance and movement studies; David Lynch, Norman McLaren, Gilles Deleuze, Dave St Pierre, William Kentridge; research-creation; and post-cinematic practices.
My work is broadly interested in bodies, how they move through media and in the world, and their affects and intensities in time. These are the red threads connecting my research on subjects like minoritarian horror media and performance, sleep as a sociable form, dance on screen as a survival tactic, time and suspense in cinema, feminist media practices and communities, biotechnologies, lo tech research-creation and more. Focused on late 20th听and 21st听century media, art, performance and theory, I research, teach, and supervise in cinema and media studies, critical theory, performance, dance, gender, sexuality and feminist studies. I am director of the Moving Image Research Lab at 黑料不打烊, focused on the body in moving image media. I am former director of the Institute of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies (IGSF). My books include听Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema听(2017), and the forthcoming collections听Lo Tech Pop Cult: Screendance Remixed听(with Priscilla Guy, 2024)听and States of Immersion: Bodies, Medias, Technologies听(with Carl Therrien and Philippe B茅dard, 2024), and co-edited special issues on听鈥淒ormir/ Sleeping鈥 (滨苍迟别谤尘茅诲颈补濒颈迟茅蝉听2023); 鈥淪hort Form Horror: History, Pedagogy and Practice鈥 (听2022).听鈥#True鈥 (Necsus: Journal of the European Network of Cinema Studies, 2017), 鈥淧rises de Rue鈥 (颁颈狈茅惭补厂听2011) and 鈥淗ow is Research-Creation?鈥, (滨苍蹿濒别虫颈辞苍蝉听2008).听I run the FRQSC research team COR脡RISC, on epistemologies of embodied risk in minoritarian horror media and performance. I co-direct the research-creation project The Sociability of Sleep, which looks at sleep in contemporary culture as a site for social imaginaries. My other current research projects include work on reproductive horror, the somatechnics of horror ecologies, post-digital screendance in cinema and installations, nighttime design in Montreal, and 鈥淓nd Gays鈥, on post-apocalyptic practices in queer communities. I also run a bike powered mobile cinema, Cinema out of the Box, and work on ecological mobile cinemas and activism. Public facing scholarship is an important part of my practice, as are hands-on experiments in thinking through making.
Ph.D. Literature (Duke University)
B.A. Honours (黑料不打烊)听
Anarchival Outbursts: Dance and the Practices of Post-Digital Cinema
SSHRC Insight Grant, 2014-2019
Cinema today is on the move. This project traces dance's transversal movements between stage and screen media ecologies in a post-digital expanded cinema, exploring both mainstream and experimental works. How does a newly mobile "cinema" today move beyond public and home theatres to find innovative ways of staging audiovisual images? This project defines new articulations of body and technology in cinema in the wake of the digital turn, as live dance performance engages increasingly with audio-visual media technologies. If the "digital turn" has generally referred to the mainstreaming of digital effects, and the revolution afforded by digital cameras and non-linear postproduction technology, we must also consider how a new mobility of cinema has emerged through new platforms of presentation and dissemination outside of the box of the traditional theatre. This mobility is found in the material practices of post-digital cinema (through experimentation with new forms of installation and screening), in the content and form of cinema works themselves, and has produced new experiences of cinematic spectatorship and embodiment.
One of the best resources we have for understanding the effects of this new mobility is to think contemporary cinema through its relation to another art of movement: dance. "Anarchival Outbursts: Dance and the Practices of Post-Digital Cinema" explores key examples of dance in post-digital cinema to ask: what are the productive tensions and anxieties around bodily experience in the age of post-digital cinema that can only be addressed by recourse to dance? Across cinema, dance is newly popular at many levels of production. Screendance has become its own genre, complete with an established festival circuit; this emerging genre experiments with the specificity of how bodies move across cinema. Many feature filmmakers have turned their attention to dance films (eg. Phillippe Grandieux's Guy Maddin, Wim Wenders, Mike Figgis and Jaco Van Dormeal), exploring the potential for a new "expanded cinema" relative to what Chantal Pontbriand has termed "expanded dance". Other narrative filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and David Lynch have explicitly used dance as a means to explore the transition to digital cinema. Screendance has also served as a critical site of exploration of new modes of digital embodiment, through the synthespians of motion capture and digital composition (as with the experimental works of Thierry de Mey, Nicolas Briand, Philippe Bayleucq and others). At the same time, contemporary dancemakers integrate cinematic elements into their performances.
Anarchival Outbursts assesses how the effects of how intermedial performance changes the conditions under which we answer such fundamental questions as the liveliness of the cinematic image, and the effects of cinema's transformations of live bodies. As dance filmmakers experiment with the possibilities for new creation (not simply recording, reproducing or representing) opened up by screen dance, their works stage the complicated question of how we live our own moving images. What new avenues of expanded perception and action do the affects and sensations engendered by these images make possible? What does dance do in post-digital cinema?
Cinema Out of the Box brings mobile media out of the theatre and into the environment. With the help of the 黑料不打烊 Sustainability Projects fund and the Moving Image Research Laboratory, we have developed a fully mobile and self-sustaining film projection system - moved and powered by bicycle - that is capable of presenting cinema in just about any geography, temporality, or climate. Our mandate is to explore the urban ecologies of Montr茅al with a variety of moving image experiments, including 16mm, Super8, and digital screenings. We are interested in several animating questions: How much energy does it take to power projections? How do built environments interact with media ecologies? What kinds of interpretive links do we draw between film worlds and those the environments immediate to the screening? How can environmental media help us re-think the use of artificial spaces as a part of a general ecological practice?
for regular screenings and special events.
The Moving Image Research Laboratory ()
CFI-funded infrastructural laboratory for the investigation of relations between developments in moving image technologies and understandings of the moving body. Investigators: Michael Cowan (German), Alanna Thain (English), Thomas Lamarre (East Asian Studies/AHCS).
Other Projects
- Editor,
- Norman McLaren: 3 Films.听A book length study of three of McLaren's key films and the increasing importance of mid century animation to the wider field of cinema studies after the digital turn.
- Moving in an Experimental Night. A book project on contemporary intersections of dance performance and animation, including work by William Kentridge, David Lynch, Vera Chytilova, Norman McLaren, 4-D Art, Tino Seghal, Crystal Pite, and others.
- Project on 听
Books
听(University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
Edited Volumes
Special Issue of Studies in European Cinema, 鈥淓urope on Display: Spectacle and European Cinema鈥, co-edited with Michael Cowan. 2015.
Articles and Book Chapters
鈥,鈥 Senses of Cinema 79, 2016.
鈥淭he Present Feeling: Contemporary Art and the Question of Time / La sensation pr茅sente : l鈥檃rt contemporain et la question du temps.鈥 Introduction to the Catalogue for the Montreal Biennale, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art. With Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Toni Pape, Adam Szymanski, Ronald Rose-Antoinette, and Erik Bordeleau.
鈥淚n the Blink of an Eye: Norman McLaren Between Dance and Animation.鈥 Douglas Rosenberg, ed. Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016.
鈥淎 Birds鈥 Eye View of Leviathan鈥 Special Dossier in Visual Anthropology Review. Mark Westmoreland, ed. Spring 2015.
鈥.鈥 Co-authored with Toni Pape and Noemie Solomon. Special issue of Dance Research Journal on 鈥淒ance in the Museum鈥. Co-edited by Andr茅 Lepecki and Mark Franko (December 2014).
鈥淪onic ethnographies: Leviathan and New Materialisms in Documentary,鈥 Co-authored with Selmin Kara. In Music and Sound in Documentary Film, Holly Rogers, ed. New York: Taylor and Francis/ Routledge, 2014. 180-192.
鈥溾. Co-authored with Virginia Preston. TDR 57.4 (2013) 28-51.
鈥,鈥 Transmutations 1.1 (February 2013). Co-edited with Jennifer Spiegel and Magdalena Olszanowski.
鈥溾 Blindside Gallery, Melbourne, Australia.
"" Wi: Journal of Mobile Media 6.2 (July 2012).
"" Society and Space, July 2012.
鈥淒eath every Sunday afternoon: the virtual realities of Hirokazu Kore Eda's Afterlife" Memory in Contemporary Global Film, edited by Terence McSweeney, and Amresh Sinha. London: Wallflower Press, 2012.
鈥淩abbit Ears: Locomotion in Lynch鈥檚 Inland Empire鈥 In Francois-Xavier Gleyzon, ed. David Lynch in Theory. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia 2010. pp. 86-100.
鈥溾 Inflexions 4 (December 2010) 鈥淭ransversal Fields of Experience鈥 edited by Troy Rhodes and Christoph Brunner.
鈥淚nsecurity cameras: Elevator Criminality and Time鈥 滨苍迟别谤尘茅诲颈补濒颈迟茅蝉听14 (Fall 2010), Special Issue 鈥淏uild/Batir鈥 edited by Will Straw and James Cistneros.
鈥溾 Nouvelles 芦 vues 禄 sur le cin茅ma qu茅b茅cois 11.
鈥溾 In Medias Res,听Dance and Technology Theme Week, April 26-30, 2010.
鈥溾 Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation 2 (Fall 2008).
鈥,鈥澨Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation 1 (May 2008).
鈥,鈥Parallax 14.1 (Winter 2008), Special Issue on 鈥淚nstalling the Body.鈥
鈥淭he Intensions of Extensions: Compagnie Marie Chouinard鈥檚 bODY rEMIX/ gOLDBERG vARIATIONS鈥 differences 19.1 (Winter 2008).
鈥溾 Flow 6.12 (December 2007) Special Issue on Battlestar Galactica.
鈥溾 Invisible Culture 8 (Fall 2004).
- Principal Investigator, SSHRC Connection Grant, 鈥淭erms of Privacy: Intimacies, Exceptions, Exposures鈥, 2016,听$16,370.23
- Principal Investigator, SSHRC Connection Grant, 鈥淎ffective Encounters: Tools of Interruption for Activist Feminist Media Practices鈥, 2015, $15,818
- SSHRC Insight Grant, 鈥淎narchival outbursts: Dance and the practices of post-digital cinema,鈥 2014-2019
- FQRSC 脡tablissement de nouveaux professeurs-chercheurs grant for 鈥淟e remix du corps et des genres : les croisements contemporains de la danse, du cin茅ma et de l鈥檃nimation鈥
- Richard Plant Award for Best Essay in English, Canadian Association of Theatre Research, for 鈥溾淭endering the Flesh: The ABCs of Dave St. Pierre鈥檚 Contemporary Utopias鈥澨TDR/ The Drama Review. Co-authored with Virginia Preston, May 2014
- 黑料不打烊 Sustainability Fund, 鈥淐inema out of the box鈥, October 2013
- SSHRC Partnership Grant, Immediations: Art, Media and Event (co-applicant with Erin Manning, PI, Concordia), 2013-2020
- SSHRC Insight Grant, 鈥淎rt and Ideas in Motion: Parkour Project鈥, (co-applicant with Michael Jemtrud, PI), 2014-2017
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University (Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women)
- Resident Fellow,听Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, 2012-2014
- "Fabricating Aesthetics" L鈥橧nstitut de Recherche en Histoire de l鈥橝rchitecture grant, (Michael Jemtrud,Architecture, PI)
- CFI Leader鈥檚 Opportunity Fund Award for the MIRL (Moving Image Research Laboratory) 2010-2014, ($997,614) (co-applicant with Thomas Lamarre and Michael Cowan)