The filmmaker will be present to discuss her work.
8pm / 18 July 2010
The Odessa Club (Dublin)
The Odessa Club (Dublin)
The Experimental Film Club, in association with the SoundEye Festival, The National Sculpture Factory and Cork Film Centre, is presenting a very special screening of the acclaimed American experimental film maker and poet Abigail Child. The filmmaker will be present to discuss her work.
“Abigail Child’s series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? is one of the most assured and important projects to have emerged over the last decade. Constructing from and subverting a wide galaxy of source materials, these films are archeological digs into the very stuff, the conceptions, we are born into. Child decomposes the materials and gestures that would compose us. The films are charged with a startling and playful musicality and poetic and rigorous compression. Each image and sound cuts deep and works over time containing hidden and unhidden detonations working against the manufactured ambush that images have in store. Agile dances through treacherous debris, they negotiate an obstacle course of polar anatomies zig-zagging with corkscrew twists and nuclear splits -- a gambol against the hazards.
Detournments, deviations, disruptions, allures. Can aggression be sumptuous? These films are volatile and they have bite. Here the subliminal cannot caress, it comes out with its hands up, the smile wiped from its face. The accelerated velocity of these films doesn’t create an alternate camouflage. At this speed viewer passivity is unsafe and active viewing is a necessary pleasure. We are provoked to get up to speed, to be resourceful, dance, break step. These films put a spin on things. Shift the coordinates. The peripheries relocate to the core drawn by the centrifugal force of the editing. Posing a threat to threatening poses these frictions erupt with new clarity.” (Mark McElhatten, Associate Curator of Film & Video. American Museum of the Moving Image).
Abigail Child is a film and video maker whose work in montage and sound/image relations pushes the medium of film/video with humour and ephemeral beauty. Her films explore mixed genres and strategies for rewriting narrative, as well as investigating public space through memory and history. Child is, also, the author of a number of critical articles and several books of poetry
‘How meaning is made, how elements join together, how far elements can stand apart and still “connect”, how resonance and meaning is created, how putting together fragments of the world can create new forms, new ways of thinking, the utopian aspect, and the problematic of that desire […]‘
Child does not approach these issues primarily as a theorist (although theory is one component of her work), nor as a historian (although history remains important to her), but as a maker, and is that sense an experimenter as well as a poet. These works (both films and writings) are not products, but processes.
Child began filmmaking in 1970 as a documentarian. In the mid 70s, Child began to produce experimental work, culminating in her series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? , which includes the films Prefaces (1981), Mutiny (1983), Both (1988), Perils (1986), Covert Action (1984), Mayhem (1987), and Mercy (1989). If Child’s work took its initial energy from the utopian and liberatory rush of the counter-culture sixties, it was tempered and formed in the consequent critical reassessment of that period that came in the seventies, performed especially by both feminism and structuralism, in different ways.
(Written with reference to www.abigailchild.com and Tom Gunnings introduction to AC’s This is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film)
“Abigail Child’s series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? is one of the most assured and important projects to have emerged over the last decade. Constructing from and subverting a wide galaxy of source materials, these films are archeological digs into the very stuff, the conceptions, we are born into. Child decomposes the materials and gestures that would compose us. The films are charged with a startling and playful musicality and poetic and rigorous compression. Each image and sound cuts deep and works over time containing hidden and unhidden detonations working against the manufactured ambush that images have in store. Agile dances through treacherous debris, they negotiate an obstacle course of polar anatomies zig-zagging with corkscrew twists and nuclear splits -- a gambol against the hazards.
Detournments, deviations, disruptions, allures. Can aggression be sumptuous? These films are volatile and they have bite. Here the subliminal cannot caress, it comes out with its hands up, the smile wiped from its face. The accelerated velocity of these films doesn’t create an alternate camouflage. At this speed viewer passivity is unsafe and active viewing is a necessary pleasure. We are provoked to get up to speed, to be resourceful, dance, break step. These films put a spin on things. Shift the coordinates. The peripheries relocate to the core drawn by the centrifugal force of the editing. Posing a threat to threatening poses these frictions erupt with new clarity.” (Mark McElhatten, Associate Curator of Film & Video. American Museum of the Moving Image).
Abigail Child is a film and video maker whose work in montage and sound/image relations pushes the medium of film/video with humour and ephemeral beauty. Her films explore mixed genres and strategies for rewriting narrative, as well as investigating public space through memory and history. Child is, also, the author of a number of critical articles and several books of poetry‘How meaning is made, how elements join together, how far elements can stand apart and still “connect”, how resonance and meaning is created, how putting together fragments of the world can create new forms, new ways of thinking, the utopian aspect, and the problematic of that desire […]‘
Child does not approach these issues primarily as a theorist (although theory is one component of her work), nor as a historian (although history remains important to her), but as a maker, and is that sense an experimenter as well as a poet. These works (both films and writings) are not products, but processes.
Child began filmmaking in 1970 as a documentarian. In the mid 70s, Child began to produce experimental work, culminating in her series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? , which includes the films Prefaces (1981), Mutiny (1983), Both (1988), Perils (1986), Covert Action (1984), Mayhem (1987), and Mercy (1989). If Child’s work took its initial energy from the utopian and liberatory rush of the counter-culture sixties, it was tempered and formed in the consequent critical reassessment of that period that came in the seventies, performed especially by both feminism and structuralism, in different ways.
(Written with reference to www.abigailchild.com and Tom Gunnings introduction to AC’s This is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film)
P R O G R A M M E _ T I T L E S(TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 56 MINS APPROX.)
M U T I N Y
(1983, 16 mm, b/w and color, sound, 11 min.)
P E R I L S
(1986, 16 mm, b/w, sound, 5 min.)
C O N V E R T A C T I O N
(1984, 16 mm, b/w, sound, 10 min.)
M A Y H E M
(1987, 16 mm, b/w, sound, 20 min.)
M E R C Y
(1989, 16mm, color, sound, 10 min.)
