Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental writing and media since the 1980s, having completed more than thirty film and video works and installations, and six books. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child’s early film work addressed the interplay be- tween sound and image in the context of resh aping narrative tropes, in a manner that prefigured many contemporary and future media concerns. Her major projects include Is This What You Were Born For?: a 9 year, 7-part work; B/Side: a film that negotiates the politics of internal colonialism in New York City; 8 Million: a collaboration with avant-percussionist Ikue Mori that re- defines the “music video”; The Suburban Trilogy: a modular digi-film that prismatically examines a politics of place and identity; and MirrorWorlds: a multi-screen installation that incorporates parts of Child’s “foreign film” series to explore narrative excess. A new film, A Shape of Error, is constructed as an imaginary ‘home movie’ of the life of Mary Shelley.
Origin of the Species is an experimental documentary that explores the current climate of android development with a focus on human/machine relations, gender and the ethical implications of this research. The film provides an insider look into cutting edge ...
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A cinematic reflection focused on the quotidian, with unexpected sound/image juxtapositions and bristling space/time vortices made cognizant through editing. The film was begun in a "blue" moment a year ago, returned to during the Covid19 pandemic and loc ...
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An hour-long collage essay, charging the discussion with her enlightened aesthetic of poetry, the archive, and experimental montage. As the Most Dangerous Woman Alive, Goldman's life is seen as an ongoing negotiation of revolutionary purity and personal fr ...
Watch NowIn Rome for a year at the American Academy, I created imaginary home movies of scenes from the life of Mary and Percy Shelley. I was attracted to these authors — their life of poetry, politics and sexual invention—and inspired by my previous fictionali ...
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Inspired by Vertov's Lullaby from the 1930s, as well as by Warhol's Screen Test portraits and Frampton's Manual of Arms from the 1960s, vis à vis constructs black and white portraits into a set of Romances, a notebook of sexualities: s/m, lesbian, gay, st ...
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Abigail Child's short, ELSA merdelamerdelamer, is a smoky, punky and sexy chapter in the collectively made Feminist bio-drama, MamaDada about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, avant-garde performance artist, sculptress and poet. The Baroness trav ...
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An experimental l6mm feature, A Shape of Error is based on the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley— writers whose lives forecast the modern in their concern for women, free love and labor. ...
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Words taken from lines of Nada Gordon's unrequited love poems, whose sentences are taken, in their turn, from anonymous web poems, reveal a history of sexuality. ...
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Four African-American men living in Cleveland, Ohio confront the issues and emotions related to coming out as gay men. ...
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What do construction workers do in their well-earned breaks? How might Angelina Jolie's and Brad Pitt's relationship have ended? And what really happened between Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford during the summer of 1959? The answers to these and many othe ...
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In collaboration with Monica de la Torre & Bunuel's Women Without Love. Status and culture crack the mirror of family secrets, dreams, hauntings and wish-fulfillment in shifting and multiplying frames. ...
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Found footage exploring public and private space, organized formally as a sonata, centered around work and issues of class: the divisions between home and public, owners and workers, saturation and flow, structure and improvisation. ...
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B/Side is a poignant and intelligent exploration of the urban homeless, combining sensitive footage of their exterior situation and entering imaginatively into interior deliriums. Framed by footage of the encampment locally known as Dinkinsville on New Yor ...
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Experimental music and eroticism swirl about each other in Shiver, the second of the 8 Million stories which can be found in this lively and continuing collaborative 'album'. In Kiss of Fire , Child reworks images from her squisy TV soap Swamp (1991), to p ...
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Swamp uses the soap opera format to play with the structure and expectations of the family melodrama. Following the melodramatic format that "if it can happen, it will happen," coincidence and unlikely events abound in a gleeful send-up of lurid intrigue, ...
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Images and sounds of American mass media, are dissected and carefully composed into a rapid-fire montage which reveals the processes at work. ...
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A beautifully ambiguous study of the nude in light and movement, this short silent film focuses on the dimly lit bodies of two women shot from Child's distinctly non-male perspective. ...
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In 1983, filmmaker and poet Abigail Child cut up old footage from Between Times, a documentary profile of high school girls in Minneapolis which she had produced for WNET/PBS back in 1975. That footage would then be integrated into work of a drastically di ...
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The condensed filmic work of Abigail Child, borrowing strategies from found footage, Appropriation Art, Language Poetry and experimental music, stands a a landmark in the experimental cinema of the 1980's. The processing of interruption and fragmentation i ...
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Covert Action is a stunning melange of rapid-fire retro imagery accomplishing Child's proclaimed goal to "disarm my movies." "I wanted to examine the erotic behind the social, and remake those gestures into a dance that would confront their conditioning an ...
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Mutiny employs a panoply of expression, gesture, and repeated movement. Its central images are of women: at home, on the street, at the workplace, at school, talking, singing, jumping on trampolines, playing the violin. The syntax of the film reflects the ...
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Prefaces is composed of wild sounds constructed along entropic lines, placed tensely beside bebop rhythms, and a resurfacing narrative cut from a dialogue with poet Hannah Weiner. Child tells us, "The tracks are placed in precise and asynchronous relation ...
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Peripeteia I and Peripeteia II, shot by the artist in Oregon's rainforest, alone and without electricity. "Extending from PERIPETEIA 1 - a navigation by light, contrasting the camera's fixed sight with "in site" movement. A sculpture of glass, mirrors and ...
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Recurring emergence of narrative. The "loaded" image becomes the determinant feature for reading otherwise unemotional footage; a first experiment in what is an ongoing investigation. ...
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Peripeteia I and Peripeteia II, shot by the artist in Oregon's rainforest, alone and without electricity. "Navigation spiraling sunwards. Exploring the movement of forest and body, seeking the larger pattern of my digressive attendance. Filmed in the Orego ...
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[This film is] structured on the four-handed nature of film: original footage (outtakes from a television documentary I was directing in the spring of 1975 in the South Bronx and Brownsville) manipulated, then optically printed, then manipulated again. ...
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One of the early documentaries that Child made before turning towards the experimental cinema, and whose footage she repurposed for her later work, MUTINY (1982-83), GAME is a portrait of a prostitute and pimp in downtown Manhattan. ...
Watch Now"Abigail and Jonathan Child's 20‐minute exploration of the new Lower East Side. At one point in the Child's film, an old man with an East European accent surveys his neighborhood, which has been invaded by the blacks, the hippies, the ex‐ Urban poor an ...
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A superabundance of useless information effectively subdues freedom of speech. Condense and survive! ...
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