Alison Taylor

Alison Taylor

Dr

  • Bond University, Transformation Colab (DPE)

    4229 Gold Coast

    Australia

20122024

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Research interests

My key areas of research are:
* screen aesthetics
* European art cinema
* violence and the everyday
* performance

My research primarily focuses on the intersection between screen aesthetics, violence, and the everyday. My book, Troubled Everyday (Edinburgh UP 2017) explores this dynamic within contemporary European art cinema, calling for a re-evaluation of dominant theorisation of the New Extremity, and demonstrating the significance of the quotidian in the affective potential of moments of extreme violence. I argue that films like Catherine Breillat's À ma sœur! and Gaspar Noé's Irreversible are unsettling not as a result of their moments of unexpected and graphic violence, but because their aesthetic patterning blocks us from tethering these acts of violence to secure and stable meaning by framing them as interruptions unassimilated into the fabric of the otherwise banal and ordinary. Moreover, I suggest that the screen aesthetics employed in these notoriously disturbing films reflect a contemporary experience of the everyday outside of the cinema in an age of terrorism; one that traditional and social media suggest is fraught with a pervasive sense of vulnerability to the threat of irrational and violent disruption.

My second book is a monograph on Andrzej Żuławski's extraordinary film Possession (1981) published by Liverpool University Press (2022) as a part of the Devil's Advocates series on horror cinema.

My research into European art cinema also includes publications on the performance style of French actor, Isabelle Huppert, and on the work of directors including Nicolas Winding Refn, Sandra Wollner, Peter Strickland, and Lucile Hadžihalilović.

I am presently co-writing a book with Jason Jacobs (UQ) on Nicolas Winding Refn to be published with the State University of New York Press.

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

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