Light Leaks: Outdoor Cinemas and the Ecological Art of the Encounter

Principal investigator: Alanna Thain

Research Team: Will Straw and Ipek Türeli

Project Home: the Moving Image Research Laboratory, McGill University

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.