Abigail Child

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.

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 different kind: The film was called Mutiny which, by its very name, signaled her abandonment of the humanist documentary tradition to which Between Times belonged, to become, in her words, “a prismatic rhythmic pinwheel” born of the artistic and political necessity to radically rethink form. Mutiny, in turn, stood as one of the most densely woven in a series of bold experiments that came to be known as Is This What You Were Born For?

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.

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 other interesting questions are provided by twelve queer New York filmmakers. Their films also scrutinize such topics as the difference between the way men and women dream, and how erotic tying a necktie or having a manicure can be.

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 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."

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 freedom, a complexity that Child mirrors in her own formal strategies. She layers multiple fragments of Emma’s liberatory legacy—from archive, from reenactment and from observational cinema—her speculative play with the revolutionary ideas extending to the present moment of feminist revolt!

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 punctuate romantic cliche.” Selected for New York Film Festival Video Visions (1993) Short songs chart erotic tales in an urban topology. Includes FISHTANK, SHIVER, KISS OF FIRE, 8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE, and FAINT CLUE. The myths of popular culture—romance and TV soaps— provide the motifs for the work which restructures memory-image-fragment to foreground the body against a mechanized landscape. In the shape of small stories, 8 Million rewrites women's drama.. And on occasion to be the basis of the score: image as conductor, the music performed to the video.

Contemporary ambiguities on the Jersey shore: the look is secular, the lifestyle capitalist, the religion orthodox. 40,000 Syrian Jews have moved into a landscape previously occupied by Irish, Italian, and the quite different sect of Askenazi Jews. The “unmelted pot” of America’s small towns is set within memory and contemporary oppositions. What does it mean to have class in America? What does it mean to be Jewish? I think of conflicts between Israel and Palestine, Serbia and Bosnia, India and Pakistan: neighboring families and races split apart by religion. Extreme poverty enforces the tribal, while extreme wealth maintains it. Surf and Turf provides no easy answers but raises issues that have too long stayed behind closed doors: what do we say when we think no one is listening?

A profoundly working-class community with an intense connection to its land and water is transformed into a pleasure paradise for the wealthy…all while the ground slips into the sea. A feature documentary, PRECIPICE focuses on the intersection between climate change and a changing shore community’s response to this global emergency.

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 possibilities and limitations of speech, while “politically, physically, and realistically” flirting with the language of opposition.

In collaboration with Adeena Karasick & Charles Bryant's Salome (1923) Child has layered and processed the images, recomposed the strains of music, and selected words and phrases to create a "succulent nexus" - fluid and strange.

Images and sounds of American mass media, are dissected and carefully composed into a rapid-fire montage which reveals the processes at work. The myth of the 'body beautiful' is effectively debunked in an overwhelming swirl of movement and sound

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, 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 in an overdone remake of the TV serial.

"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 and the (now‐ defunct) Fillmore East. He announces that he's satis fied with the conditions in this country 'except for the people.' ;Except for the People,; the title of the Child's film, is the rather terrifying theme of the entire program." - Vincent Canby, New York Times, Nov. 19th 1971

In 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 fictionalizing of home movies in Covert Action and The Future is Behind You. I worked with non-actors, the seasons and the extraordinary architecture and landscapes of Italy where the Shelleys were in exile for six of their eight years together. The result was a feature film A Shape of Error, gorgeous, emotional and harnessed to the narrative. I wanted to go further and abetted by digital technology, I have ‘exploded’ the film. The result is UNBOUND, digressive, looped, unpredictable, symphonic, spontaneous, messy—like life and memory.

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 laboratories in Japan and the USA where scientists attempt to make robots move, speak and look human. These scientists and their discoveries are contextualized with cinematic and pop culture references, to underline the mythic, comic and uncanny aspects of our aspiration to create machines that are eerily similar to ourselves.

This video essay combines diary footage of St. Petersburg with archival material, accompanied by the voices of two young Russians who, through personal anecdote, describe the emotional, political, and economic transformations that have wrenched their society.

LA LUCHA spans over 100 years, foregrounding three moments of citizen protests that have been met repeatedly with police brutality. Not merely prescient, LA LUCHA is of our time.

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 film vies with the choreography of the cardinal points: dense shelter, rain, red emulsion. Filmed in the Oregon coastal forest, June." - A.C.

[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. - AC