Abigail Child Trailers
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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.
Child has exhibited worldwide, with retrospectives at Anthology Film Archives (NY), the San Francisco Cinematheque, Sala Trevi in Rome, Exis (Korea), and Harvard Cinematheque, and in important showcases such as The Whitney Biennale, the Viennale and MoMA’s Millenium show. Her work is featured at numerous international film festivals, including the New York Film Festival, Rotterdam, Locarno and London Festivals, among others and is in the permanent collections of MOMA, NY, Centre Pompidou, and Arsenal Berlin. Child has received numerous awards and accolades, including the Rome Prize, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Award and the Stan Brakhage Award. Harvard University Cinematheque has created an Abigail Child Collection dedicated to preserving and exhibiting her work. As a teacher at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Child has been instrumental in building an expansive media and film art program; she has influenced a generation of younger artists. Child is also the author of five books of poetry (A Motive for Mayhem, Scatter Matrix and Artificial Memory among them) and a book of critical writings: THIS IS CALLED MOVING: A Critical Poetics of Film from University of Alabama Press (2005).
Most Popular Abigail Child Trailers
Total trailers found: 42
11 November 2020
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.
05 October 2013
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, straight, solo.
08 February 2000
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.
01 January 1977
[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.
01 January 2005
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.
17 February 2017
An hour-long collage essay, charging the discussion with her enlightened aesthetic of poetry, the archive, and experimental montage.
01 January 2006
16mm to digital, w/ Gary Sullivan Foreign Film Series
01 November 1992
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’.
08 June 1979
A second landscape film, in this case urban. The work constructed from materials gathered over two years looking out at downtown San Francisco from a loft on Folsom Street.
01 January 1972
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.
07 June 1979
In Ornamentals (1979), Abigail Child explores rhythm and the poetry of the repetitive image form.
01 November 2020
A cinematic reflection focused on the quotidian, with unexpected sound/image juxtapositions and bristling space/time vortices made cognizant through editing.
01 January 1978
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.
15 May 2014
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.
16 November 2013
In Rome for a year at the American Academy, I created imaginary home movies of scenes from the life of Mary and Percy Shelley.
05 October 2013
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.
10 February 2007
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.
01 January 2001
“DARK DARK is a ghost dance of narrative gesture melding four found story fragments: Noir, Western, Romance and Chase.
10 March 1986
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.
01 January 1978
Peripeteia I and Peripeteia II, shot by the artist in Oregon’s rainforest, alone and without electricity.
01 January 1983
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.
10 March 1987
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.
01 January 2004
Cake and Steak excavates ‘girl training’ in the legacy of home movies and post-war American suburban culture.
01 January 2002
A short collaboration in NYC subways right after 9/11— envisioning the absence and paranoia of Metropolis.
01 January 1977
Peripeteia I and Peripeteia II, shot by the artist in Oregon’s rainforest, alone and without electricity.
01 January 2010
A feature-length experimental video based on a 6-week stay in Mainland China in October-November 2006.
29 January 2012
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.
01 January 2007
“In The Party, Child has assembled a remarkable array of subjects embodying the complex intersections of sexuality, race, and class.
01 January 1996
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.
01 January 1990
Swamp uses the soap opera format to play with the structure and expectations of the family melodrama.
01 January 1982
A superabundance of useless information effectively subdues freedom of speech. Condense and survive!
11 June 1970
"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.
01 January 1989
Images and sounds of American mass media, are dissected and carefully composed into a rapid-fire montage which reveals the processes at work.
01 January 1981
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.
01 January 1999
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.
26 April 2007
Four African-American men living in Cleveland, Ohio confront the issues and emotions related to coming out as gay men.
01 January 1988
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.
01 January 2020
LA LUCHA spans over 100 years, foregrounding three moments of citizen protests that have been met repeatedly with police brutality.
01 January 1984
Covert Action is a stunning melange of rapid-fire retro imagery accomplishing Child’s proclaimed goal to "disarm my movies.
01 January 2011
Contemporary ambiguities on the Jersey shore: the look is secular, the lifestyle capitalist, the religion orthodox.
01 January 2009
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.
02 January 2004
A fictional story composed from an anonymous family archive of 1930s Europe with two sisters who play, race, fight, kiss, and grow up together under the shadow of oncoming history.
