Alison Taylor

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 research into European art cinema also includes publications on the performance style of French actor, Isabelle Huppert, and on the controversial work of Sandra Wollner. I have a monograph on Andrzej Żuławski's Possession (1981) forthcoming with Liverpool University Press, and am presently co-writing a book with Jason Jacobs on Nicolas Winding Refn to be published with SUNY.