Cut between sessions on DLT SECTION, structured on the four-handed nature of film: original footage (outtakes from television documentary I was directing in the spring of 1975 in South Bronx and Brownsville boroughs of New York City) manipulated, then optically printed, then manipulated again. 4 X 4.
"The film is largely red, black, and white. The effect is one of starkness, yet tempered by the richness of the red and its alternating suggestions of violence, church and ritual ... the interaction of darks and lights translates tone and form into felt exterior/interior presences. Exteriors are stark, snow covered, angular; interiors are dark, mysterious, rounded. These two extremes are somehow mediated by the figure in a white suit who forever undergoes the ritual of entering a dark doorway with linear slats of light. He stands or moves somewhere between these two domains: the exterior linear world and the other world which it houses, where exists the presence of softness and the possibility of touch." - L. Dackman, Cinemanews
1977, 16mm, color/si, 8m, $50
Navigation spiraling sunwards. Exploring the movement of forest and body, seeking the larger pattern of my digressive attendance. Filmed in the Oregon coastal rain forest, fall.
1977, 16mm, color/si, 9m, $50
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.
1978, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $40
Extending from PERIPETEIA 1 - a navigation by light, contrasting the camera's fixed sight with "in site" movement. A sculpture of glass, mirrors and film vies with the choreography of the cardinal points: dense shelter, rain, red emulsion. Filmed in the Oregon coastal forest, June.
Award: SF Art Institute Film Festival, 1979
1978, 16mm, color/si, 12m, $75
This film was crucial to my understanding of composition, to my desire for an encyclopedic construction (the world "out" there), and reaffirmed my allegiance to rhythm, the rhythm of body-nerve-mind.
"Juxtapositions of light made this dream consumed image between the penny arcades & mirrors reflecting masturbating naked brain of magnetized nitrous screens crackling is like pulp beside dummy circumstance." - Bruce Andrews, Jimmy and Lucy's House of K
"THE RHYTHM!!!! the rhythm, like jazz, comes out of & returns to the BODY (the animal nature of film!, illustrated by the organic reticulation patterns of the self-processed segments): the 'meanings' of the shots (constantly undermined thru highly intentional overload): ... all films are 'different EVERY viewing' but this one more specifically so: colorfully constructed along lines of color: associative values emerge as if by chance, like memory, fleeting but there, reemerging altered: all films different every viewing but this one more intentionally so: takes several screenings to even know where it begins ...." - Henry Hills, Cinemanews
1979, 16mm, color/si, 10m, $75
An urban landscape film constructed from materials gathered over two years looking out at downtown San Francisco. The elements "folded" and mixed, Time redefines Space: the erector and helicopter appear as toys within a schizy motor-oil-ized ballet mechanique.
1979, 16mm, color/si, 12m, $75
IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? is conceived as a way to bracket my ongoing film investigations in the context of the aggressions of the late Twentieth Century: the title is from an etching by Goya, part of the Disasters of War series. The work is in seven detachable parts, each of which can be viewed by itself for its own qualities. The films don't form a single line, or even an expanding line, but rather map a series of concerns in relation to mind, to how one processes material, how it gets investigated, how it gets cut apart, how something else (inevitably) comes up.
1981-1987, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 56m, $350
"Like ORNAMENTALS, PREFACES is an abstract work which plays with formalist elements in a wide range of images on color and negative stock. It becomes a kind of 'preconscious' of the two completed films to follow, whose scope and image bank are more narrowly defined. The rapid-fire cross cutting of the images is extended to the construction of the sound track, which is also a dense panoply of fragments. What results is an impressive musique concrete composition, a collage of 'female' sounds interwoven with others: snippets from vocal music, conversations, poetry reading etc. Child plays with memory, not only her own and the world's, but also cinema's: its conventions, polarizations (man/woman) and hierarchization of images." - Robert Hilferty, New York Native
1981, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $75
"Child's camera creates a small masterpiece ... a richly textured film that is simultaneously revealing and mysterious as a study of the nude in light and movement." - Cecilia Dougherty, 1989 Frameline Film Festival, San Francisco
1988, 16mm, b&w/si, 3m, $40
Featuring Polly Bradfield (violinist), Sally Silvers (dancer), Erica Hunt (poet), and Shelley Hirsch (singer).
"This movie is a new kind of classic, it has invented once and for all the machine-gun sound of explosives and composed sentences with speeded-up speech and wild singing, laughter, hardly [at] all understandable, with violins screeching like falling bombs and a Hispanic grind dance .... There are tender closeups in interviews with women, and marvelous documents of dancers, street performers, all races & styles. These are brave and straight-talking people; this is a feminist film, and it is important. All the sound makes a talky song of many voices." - Anne Robertson, X-Dream
"Plastically a marvel, a discerning powerhouse performance." - Ken Jacobs
1982-1983, 16mm, color/so, 11m, $75
I wanted to examine the erotic behind the social and remake those gestures into a dance that would front their conditioning, and as well, relay the multiple fictions the footage suggests (the "facts" forever obscured in the fragments left us). The result is a narrative developed by its periphery, a story-like rumor: impossible to trace, disturbing, explosive.
"Collaging found footage ..., existing and original sound, [Child] undermines the authority of the past (as attributed to photographs and texts), and the 'inevitability' of the future (as mapped out by social convention) .... While Child's film titles allude to detective serials, spy and adventure stories ... her films complexly examine everyday actions, perhaps suggesting that this is the terrain for strategies and struggles to keep open the question 'Is This What You Were Born For?' " - Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive
1984, 16mm, b&w/so, 11m, $80
With Diane Torr, Sally Silvers, Plauto, Elion Sacker. Sound improvisations: Charles Noyes and Christian Marclay.
An homage to silent films: the clash of ambiguous innocence and unsophisticated villainy. Seduction, revenge, jealousy, combat. The isolation and dramatization of emotions through the isolation (camera) and dramatization (editing) of gesture. I had long conceived of a film composed only of reaction shots in which all causality was erased. What would be left would be the resonant voluptuous suggestions of history and the human face. PERILS is a first translation of these ideas.
1985-1986, 16mm, b&w/so, 5m, $50
With Diane Torr, Ela Troyano, Plauto, Elion Sacker, Rex West. Additional sound: Christian Marclay, Charles Noyes, Zeena Parkins, Shelley Hirsch. Photographed by Child, Jeff Preiss (second camera).
Characters from PERILS reappear, this time in a film noir setting, soap opera thrillers and Mexican comic books generating the action. Perversely and equally inspired by de Sade's Justine and Vertov's sentences about the satiric detective advertisement, MAYHEM is my attempt to create a film in which Sound is the Character and to do so focusing on sexuality and the erotic. Not so much to undo the entrapment (we fear what we desire; we desire what we fear), but to frame fate, show up the rotation, upset the common, and incline our contradictions toward satisfaction, albeit conscious.
1987, 16mm, b&w/so, 20m, $120
MERCY, the last in the series, is encyclopedic ephemera, exploring public visions of technological and romantic invention, dissecting the game mass media plays with our private perceptions.
1989, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $80
"SWAMP uses the soap opera format to play with the structures and expectations of the family melodrama. Enthusiastic overacting and a predictably convoluted plot set the scene for a labyrinthine tale of submerged connections, masked relationships and disguised identities. Following the melodramatic formula that 'if it can happen, it will happen,' coincidence and unlikely events abound in SWAMP's gleeful sendup of lurid intrigue, threatened morality, and endless double-crosses .... With looped and repeated edits, fast-paced action, and aggressively funky video effects, Child layers on artifice and excess as the TV serial sputters apart in a dizzying, discontinuous montage.
"With dialogue by Sarah Schulman, the video brings together a Bay Area cast including filmmaker George Kuchar, writers Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, and Kevin Killian, comic Marga Gomez, activist Teddie Matthews and On Our Backs editor Susie Bright." - Liz Kotz
1991, VHS, color/so, 33m, $100 Home; $200 Other
Director, Producer, Editor, Camera: Abigail Child; Music Composition: Ikue Mori; Performing Musicians: Catherine Jauniaux (vocals), Zeena Parkins (accordion), Hahn Rowe (violin) and Ikue Mori (percussion).
A video album combining documentary and narrative elements: Short songs chart erotic tales in an urban topology. Includes FISHTANK, SHIVER, KISS OF FIRE, 8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE, and FAINT CLUE. There are "8 million stories in the Naked City" and these are some of them, circa the early '90s.
"Abigail Child competes with Nam June Paik in this cacophonic storm of images in which experimental music and eroticism swirl about each other." - World Wide Video Festival, 1992 "Music is even more crucial to 8 MILLION, in which dazzling collages within several individual vignettes are incorporated with the venturesome sounds of percussionist Ikue Mori and her group. Some of the vignettes are elusive, but they are remarkably sensual and beautiful." - Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times, 1997
Awards: Award Winner, Atlanta Film and Video Festival, 1992; Performed live at Intermedia NY (premiere), 1992 and at New Langton Arts, SF, 1992; featured at Worldwide Video Festival, 1992; Universite d'Ete, Lille, France, 1993; NY Film Festival Video Visions, 1993.
1992, VHS, b&w/color/so, 25m, $75 Home; $250 Other
Child's B/SIDE is a provocative exploration of the urban homeless, combining sensitive footage of their exterior situation and entering imaginatively into interior fantasies. Framed by footage of the encampment locally known as Dinkinsville on New York's Lower East Side, where some of the homeless of Tompkins Square Park settled after the riots of June 1991, the movie begins with the encampment's first night and ends with the fire and subsequent destruction of the lot in October of the same year. Applying rhythmic construction, poetic license and a generous eye to bodies in poverty, B/SIDE documents a gritty vision of late 20th century urban life.
"[F]ew of the films, experimental of otherwise, display the visual confidence and sociopolitical torque of Abigail Child's meditation on homelessness, B/SIDE, which is as modest and resonant as most alternative film is jejune." - Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice, March 1997
"[A] rich Impressionistic work incorporating a stunning use of sounds and fragments of music; B/SIDE is as lyrical as it is critical." - Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times, October 1997
"Abigail Child's latest film works like a finely crafted poison dart. Its initial hit is subtle; the effect is curare - hypnotic, over-powering, lethal. ... Through a stylish, yet edgy, mix of staged shots, documentary footage and soundscapes - Child takes the viewer inside a homeless woman's world. ... [S]mart and fearless." - Gordon Bowness, XTRA!, Toronto, April 1997
Awards: Official Selection, London and Rotterdam Int'l film festivals; Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997; Oberhausen Film Festival Touring Package and Archive; Prize Winner, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Osnabr�ck Media Arts Festival; Cineprobe, Museum of Modern Art, NY.
1996, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 38m, $120
Sound montage created by A. Child with additional recording by musicians Zeena Parkins (synthesizer), Christian Marclay (turntables), Shelley Hirsch (vocals), and Jim Black (drums).
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.
"endearingly scrappy" - Ed Halter, New York Press, October 2000
"both disorienting and seductive..." - Shelley Bancroft, South End News, 2000
"Child decomposes the gestures that would compose us. The films are charged with a startling and playful musicality and a poetic and rigorous compression... With vigorous acuity these films seek to reterritorialize the elements of film. They call into question the structures of narrative, power and gender, testing the ways in which we assimilate information and navigate through history and memory." - Mark McElhattan, Curator New York Film Festival
2000, 16mm, color/b&w/so, 18m, $90
"DARK DARK is a ghost dance of narrative gesture melding four found story fragments: Noir, Western, Romance and Chase. The music of Ennio Morricone provocatively interacts with the images, tantalizing the audience with webs of memory, meaning and elusive folly." AC
DARK DARK travels behind the scenes to re-view storytelling and its place in our cultural movie-influenced milieu. With loving attention to its 'slates' and 'waits,' its anonymous crew and actors, DARK DARK creates a comic but somehow disturbing voyage into the 'story.'
[Child's]...editing slays the syntax bound progression that makes narrative film so dull... The edit is a creative act that makes revisiting the work ever appealing and distinct from meal based media. Bravo! - Willie Le Maitre, Montreal
PREMIERE: at Avantgarde Visions, the New York Film Festival 2001 in "Carnal Ghosts." October 14. European Premiere: Rotterdam International Film Festival 2002. Also selected for Black Maria [Director's Choice Prize]; ArtCite Ottawa; Jerusalem; Osnabruck; Cote Court, Paris; Ann Arbor [Liddell $ Prize]; Images Festival Toronto [Logue $ Prize; Jerusalem Film Festival; Seoul Film and Video Festival; Curtas Metragens Vila do Conde, Portugal; Festival Bologna.
Director/Producer/Editor: Abigail Child; Music: Ennio Morricone; Additional Sound Recording + editing: Abigail Child; Mix Harvestworks; Lab, Cinema Arts. USA 2001
2001, 16mm, b&w, so, 16m, $100
Three films from the ongoing series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? See film descriptions above.
1981-1984, VHS, b&w/color/so, 30m, $325
See film descriptions above.
1985-1987, VHS, b&w/so, 30m, $325
Contact: A. Child, 303 East 8th Street NY NY 10009
212-673-1608
achild@mindspring.com