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.
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