Abigail Child

Writings on film from an award-winning filmmaker and poet.

As the writer, director, producer, and cinematographer of almost all her 30 films, videos, and shorts, Abigail Child has been recognized as a major and influential practitioner of experimental cinema since the early 1970s. Hallmarks of her style are the appropriation and reassembly of found footage and fragments from disparate visual sources, ranging from industrial films and documentaries to home movies, vacation photography, and snippets of old B movies.
The resulting collages and montages are cinematic narratives that have been consistently praised for their beauty and sense of wonder and delight in the purely visual. At the same time, Child's films are noted for their incisive political commentary on issues such as gender and sexuality, class, voyeurism, poverty, and the subversive nature of propaganda.
In the essays of This Is Called Moving, Child draws on her long career as a practicing poet as well as a filmmaker to explore how these two language systems inform and cross-fertilize her work. For Child, poetry and film are both potent means of representation, and by examining the parallels between them—words and frames, lines and shots, stanzas and scenes—she discovers how the two art forms re-construct and re-present social meaning, both private and collective.

SUBJECTS OR COLLABORATORS INCLUDE:

Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Len Lye, Luis Buñuel, Edward Curtis, Laura Mulvey, Abel Gance, Ken Jacobs, Warren Sonbert, Peter Kubelka, Martin Arnold, Dan Eisenberg, Sheila Dabney, Bruce Conner, Arthur Lipsett, Mauel De Landa, Vivienne Dick, Henry Hills, Aline Mayer, Mary Lattimore, Nancy Miller, Anita Miles, Hannah Weiner, Nicole Brossard, Larry Eigner, Sally Silvers, Camille Roy, Johanna Drucker, Chris Tish, Jean Day, Michael Amnasen, Madeline Leskin

Read the introduction by Tom Gunning.

Abigail Child is Professor of Film and Animation at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and author of A Motive for Mayhem and Artificial Memory. Tom Gunning is Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago and author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph.

Reviews

"This is a splendidly original collection of essays, comments, and interviews. Child has published books of poetry (Mob, 1994; Scatter Matrix, 1996) in the same venues as the so-called L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, and her writing style sometimes resembles the fragmented but idea-filled paragraphs one finds in the prose of Charles Bernstein (A Poetics, 1992) or Ronald Silliman (The New Sentence, 1987). Here she complicates and expands their work substantially, as she transposes the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poet emphasis on writing onto the medium of film. Whereas the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets seem always to be rewriting Gertrude Stein, Child’s work seems much more expansive, with a richer range of reference. Bernstein’s polemics promise revolution, but his poems seem merely nonsensical and boring. By contrast, Child’s polemics seem much more practical, less than theatrical, and the poems, prose, and films all feel much more substantial. Including especially moving forays into issues of sexuality, the totality of the book gives a fine description of the potential of experimental filmmaking. Tom Gunning provides a concise, instructive foreword. Summing Up: Highly recommended."

—S.C. Dillon, Bates College, for Choice; Dec, 2005

“This Is Called Moving offers the reader a cogent analysis of the nexus between poetry and filmmaking. Drawing on examples of contemporary filmmakers (these instances come from a list that includes television, Michael Snow, Luis Buñuel and Robert Wilson) as well as her films, Child gives us a vivid sense of just how far this connected nature extends. Any number of classes that have film, literature, poetry or criticism as their basis could use this book as a constructive text. Child discusses both artistic process and theoretical concerns, extending her argument to relate to diverse critical perspectives. Well-written and accessible. This Is Called Moving was the basis for many personal meditations on writing as well as conversations with professors, students, friends, and aficionados of film and literature.… Child produces extremely polished expository prose that pulls the audience into her mind and thoughts. In doing so she elevates her essays to the level of complex intellectual analysis. Child takes us on a voyage of discovery…Linking visual and poetic explication, Child is able to show that these seemingly disparate artistic pursuits follow a similar logic of creation and meaning.”

—Scott M. Tomberlin, Central Washington University, Spring 2006 * Rocky Mountain Review