Abigail Child Films | Abigail Child Filmography | Abigail Child Biography | Abigail Child Career | Abigail Child Awards

New York-based filmmaker Abigail Child is primarily known for a seven-part series of films entitled Is This What You Were Born For? This intellectually challenging group of films explores genre, issues of representation, sexual identity, and body politics. The films are also significant explorations into film form, including the aesthetic possibilities of sound in cinema. As Lotz claims ?Child?s short, dense, and highly poetic films work to de-stabilize familiar images, sequences, and tableaux, insistently exploring the artifices which structure narrative, and probing them for moments of rupture and excess.? Child?s films use radical editing patterns, repetitions, image and sound fragments, and found footage to create their highly stylized, rigorous forms. Her films explicitly reference narrative genres such as film noir and melodrama in their interrogation of narrative codes and theories of representation. Child is representative of those avant-garde filmmakers in the late 1970s and early 1980s who combined the severe structuralist preoccupations of the early 1970s with more explicit ideological explorations. Child?s films differ from other theory films of the period in that their ideological inquiry does not overwhelm the formal experimentation and visual poetry in the films. Her work is also intensely musical, and has as much connection to certain kinds of language poetry and experimental music of the 1980s as to other avant-garde films. Perils, one of the films from this series, features music by John Zorn on the soundtrack.

Child?s most significant and best-known film is the 1987 Mayhem, which is specifically concerned with sexual politics and how narrative codes position the viewer ideologically. A difficult work that ends with a sequence from a Japanese pornographic film from the 1920s, Mayhem is infused with references to the rhetoric of film noir and melodrama, and creates an elaborate structure to explore the cinematic representation of male and female bodies. Child has stated that this film is her attempt ?to create a film in which sound is the character, and to do so focusing on sexuality and the erotic? (Child, ?Program Notes,? 1990). Mayhem includes many shots that employ single-source lighting common to film noir of the 1940s to create highly expressionist images. Characters are dressed in 1940s attire and are frequently framed in ritualized poses. The images constantly intercut between characters looking and being looked at, and individuals engaged in continuous pursuit. Child takes the rhetoric of the 1940s detective genre, a genre associated with danger, desire, violence, narrative entanglement, and obsessive behavior, and omits the narrative context for this rhetoric. Mayhem has no story because a story would be irrelevant to the film?s project. The film is more interested in examining the language of film and how we position ourselves as viewers.

The most radical aspects of Mayhem are its montage, which constantly cuts off shots and scenes before we can make sense of them, and the film?s sound construction, which also relies on fragmentation and repetition for its effectiveness. The formal severity of image and sound strategies make it an extremely abstract work despite its reliance on representational imagery. The film undoubtedly invokes the Russian Formalist precept of ?laying bare? the workings of art by making the viewer aware of its construction. The rhetoric of discontinuity is paramount in Mayhem just as continuity is the primary mode in Hollywood classical cinema. Child?s feminist project in Mayhem also includes portraying the film?s male figures as sex objects. The film?s nonlinear, fragmentary style and use of negative imagery creates a kind of dream logic to the proceedings. Mayhem ends with a now notorious sequence of two Japanese women engaged in a sex act being observed by a male thief, who is then captured by the women and forced to engage in sex with them. The sound that has been added to this sequence is a jaunty musical tune overlaid with voices of women. In fact, the human voice is a key articulating device throughout the film.

The notion of musicality also enters into Mercy, a film that functions altogether differently than Mayhem. It includes much found footage and is constructed in a collage style with many images referencing the organic and the body. The human figure is presented in a variety of contexts and in radically different film forms. Child includes footage from Hollywood movies, nonfiction films, and her own footage as well. The film also intermingles black-and-white stock with color footage. Mercy is a vibrant exploration of the rhythmical principle in cinema, and is much less concerned with sexual politics and feminist ideology than Mayhem. It is reminiscent of the films of Bruce Conner and Arthur Lipsett, filmmakers known for their collage stylistics, image and sound interaction, and use of found footage. Once again, sound plays a key role in Mercy as it does in most of Child?s other work.

Abigail Child is one of the most intriguing filmmakers to emerge in the last 15 years, and her films explore the more complex possibilities of formal experimentation in both image and sound. Her work is aesthetically groundbreaking and deserves thoughtful in-depth analysis, something it has rarely received since much of the critical comment around her films has tended to place her within the narrow context of sexual politics and lesbian filmmaking. Her artwork is much more than that.?MARIO FALSETTO