March 1, Tuesday, 7:30PM, 2005
Recent Works of Abigail Child

"Since the 1970s, experimental filmmaker... Abigail Child has been engaged in a kind of cultural archaeology. Unearthing found footage from such disparate sources as industrial films, vacation and home movies, porn loops, and snippets from forgotten B-movies, she recycles and updates approaches to cinema that have a freshness and sense of wonder that recall the movies’ silent days. While this approach suggests the reactionary, the result is in fact quite the opposite. Child’s work, which plays periodically at such venues as the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Cinematheque, is the subtlest form of agitprop, powerfully exploring very modern issues of gender and class through early (and present-day, for that matter) cinema’s primary artistic strategy: montage, both visual and audio. Also like silent film, Child’s work shows an unself-conscious delight in the visual." - Garry Morris, http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/32/abigailchild.html

The Future is Behind You 21 min, 16mm, 2004 - Boston premiere

The Future is Behind You creates a fictional story composed from an anonymous family archive from 1930’s Europe, reconstructed to emphasize gender acculturation in two sisters who play, race, fight, kiss and grow up together under a shadow of oncoming history. I am looking, as always in found material, for the story below the story. Here there are at least 3 levels: 1) the home movie in which a family from 1930s Germany near the Swiss border poses for the camera, preternaturally happy. Unusually, the mother is main cinematographer; 2) the historical moment which remains as text trace, undermining the image and serving as covert motive for the action; 3) the development of gender identities—the innocent freedom of the elder transformed into socially bruised ‘bride,’ the irrepressibility of the younger moving from tomboy to awkward, diffident adult. At once biography & fiction, history & psychology, THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU excavates gestures to explore the speculative seduction of narrative; it seeks a bridge between private & public histories. Premiere: NY FILM FESTIVAL 04; FIRST PRIZE-JURY Award Black Maria 2005.

Dark Dark 16min, 16mm, 2001

“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.” PREMIERE: at Avantgarde Visions, the New York Film Festival 2001 in “Carnal Ghosts.” October 14th. European Premiere: Rotterdam International Film Festival 2002. Also selected for Black Maria [Director’s Choice Prize]; ArtCite Ottawa; 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;Viennale 2002

 

Cake and Stake 20min, 16mm, 2002-2004

The first part of a series of digital projections that excavate ‘girl training’ in the legacy of home movie and post-war American suburban culture. The project is imagined as a digi-novel in chapters. The first part re-reads the American dream to question the American nuclear family.

Oberhausen Catalogue April 28-May 4 2004
"A rambunctious embrace, body to body, woman to woman, entrance to exit— inlaws-foregrounding the construction of cinematic meaning, the elusive nature of memory and desire, the hysteric familial arena of the social. A comedy of manners and movement, the film, like all parts of this new series, excavates 'girl training' in the legacy of home movies and post-war American suburban culture, and is conceived for both loop installation and single-screen projection." (AC)

Screenings: Oberhausen, NY Film Festival, Chicago EarPlay Festival, Videarte Mexico, Foster Gallery (Wisconsin); BAM New Wave Festival; Onion City Festival; Virginia Center for Creative Arts;Festival des Cinemas differnts de Paris.