Origin of the Species

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. Framed by footage of the encampment locally known as Dinkinsville on New York's Lower East Side, where some of the homeless of Thompkins 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 beautifully a gritty vision of late 20th century urban life. —Kurzfilmtage - international short film festival Oberhausen

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. Child tells us, "The tracks are placed in precise and asynchronous relation to images of workers, the gestures of the marketplace, colonial Africa, and abstractions, to pose questions of social force, gender relations and subordination." This tape serves as a pre-conscious preface to the parts that follow, whose scope and image bank are more narrowly defined.

A cinematic reflection focused on the quotidian, with unexpected sound/image juxtapositions and bristling space/time vortices made cognizant through editing. The film was begun in a "blue" moment a year ago, returned to during the Covid19 pandemic and lockdown in New York City. It's pace, melancholy, and concentration on the everyday, rather than the grandiose, seem particularly suited to this moment in history. As well it returns again and again to themes of mortality and goodbye. The result is allusive and idiosyncratic, exhibiting cross-national globalism within and through the adjacencies of form and content.

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. The processing of interruption and fragmentation inform the series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?, reactivating the stakes of montage applied in different artistic practices.

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?

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.

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

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.

“In The Party, Child has assembled a remarkable array of subjects embodying the complex intersections of sexuality, race, and class. The film documents a party of African-American men in Cleveland, living "on the down-low” (having clandestine sex with men while leading apparently heterosexual lives), and showcases Child's unique ability to get people to reveal themselves.

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.

A superabundance of useless information effectively subdues freedom of speech. Condense and survive!

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.

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.

In Ornamentals (1979), Abigail Child explores rhythm and the poetry of the repetitive image form.

Cake and Steak excavates ‘girl training’ in the legacy of home movies and post-war American suburban culture. Constructed as a series of achronological ‘chapters’ in which Edenic images of adolescent twirlers, basement parties, and ‘dress-up’ are challenged by a sound montage composed of horror movie music, old TV shows, laugh tracks, and machine noise of our modern Arcadias, Cake and Steak is conceived for single-screen and loop projection.

16mm to digital, w/ Gary Sullivan Foreign Film Series