Avant-garde filmmaker Abigail Child began her career in San Francisco in 1977 with the experimental film Some Exterior Presence. She had been originally trained to make documentary films, but as her interests primarily lay in the technicalities of film form, she switched to the cutting edge where she became recognized for her fast-paced, whimsical short films. From 1981 through 1989, she began producing a seven-part film, Is This What You Were Born For?, a reworking of different film genres, such as film noir, pornography, and the documentary, designed to explore their underlying content and social setting. In 1987 Child created Mayhem, a film about lesbianism. She moved to New York in 1980 where in addition to filmmaking, she was also active in the avant-garde film movement: teaching, putting together public screenings, and publishing theoretical writings in several film and poetics journals across the U.S. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
PERILS
Una serie de retratos. Cuando se pierde tan abruptamente una narrativa, creo que el sonido toma más importancia de la que tendría normalmente. Este es el caso. La improvisación está increíble, mientras se nos remite a POW! (Batman y peleas) y caricaturas.
“An homage to silent films: the clash of ambiguous innocence and unsophisticated villainy. Seduction, revenge, jealousy, combat. The isolation and dramatization of emotions through the isolation (camera) and dramatization (editing) of gesture. I had long conceived of a film composed only of reaction shots in which all causality was erased. What would be left would be the resonant voluptuous suggestions of history and the human face. PERILS is a first translation of these ideas.“
“The all black-and-white Perils (one wants to supply "of Pauline") is a typical effort, engaging the viewer with a dizzying parody of silent film that shows her characters in a variety of portentous poses and fragmented melodramas. Child's juxtapositions in this work made between 1985 and 1987 are more whimsical than disturbing, with rapid-cut mock fights and mysterious rituals interrupted briefly by simple titles ("1," "2," "Earlier") of the kind found in silent film. Her use of sound is wildly inclusive and constantly challenging, incorporating everything from fugitive piano figures to drama-queen screams in overdub and adding a pleasurably disorienting layer of meaning.“
MAYHEM
“Characters from PERILS reappear, this time in a film noir setting, soap opera thrillers and Mexican comic books generating the action. Perversely and equally inspired by de Sade's Justine and Vertov's sentences about the satiric detective advertisement, MAYHEM is my attempt to create a film in which Sound is the Character and to do so focusing on sexuality and the erotic. Not so much to undo the entrapment (we fear what we desire; we desire what we fear), but to frame fate, show up the rotation, upset the common, and incline our contradictions toward satisfaction, albeit conscious.“
“Mayhem (1987), running 20 minutes, works some of the same territory but adds bits of film noir imagery to its secretive story of inexplicable crimes. Child tantalizes the viewer with stark black-and-white images, again rapidly intercut with all manner of bizarre footage of people running frantically up and down stairs or making out on a rooftop.Japanese hard-core porn from what looks like the 1930s adds to the fragmented fun, as a naked lesbian tryst is interrupted by a masked man. Significantly, a straightforward male sexual fantasy is upended as the dykes force the masked man to cater to them. Apparently inspired by that heady duo the Marquis de Sade andRussian formalist filmmaker Dziga Vertov, Mayhem has a shotgun editing style that rains over the viewer like confetti.“
“Perils and Mayhem are part of an ongoing series of shorts — "detachable" in the words of their creator — called "Is This What You Were Born For?" Another entry in that series is Mercy (1987), clocking in at a mere 10 minutes but packed with powerful, often arresting images. Child's whimsy is in full tilt here, interweaving shots from home movies, industrial film, and various kinds of found footage into a witty collage. The film authoritatively inverts the Kodak Moments syndrome in its brief running time. A faded color scene of a soldier running to the arms of his family, probably shot in the 1950s, carries the voiceover "How does it feel to see your son become a man?" Child answers that question with images that bring up many more questions: two sweaty pro wrestlers going at it; a bronco busting a steer; high school boys wrestling; masses of faceless men at some undisclosed event; and more charmingly, little boys in a dance class. The spiraling of images has an almost vertiginous effect, but some of them linger long enough to unsettle, as in the shot of a naked man from what looks like old medical footage becoming increasingly agitated as a siren wails ever-louder in the background.“
“Child says, "I started as a leftist documentarian, but I quickly grew tired of the limits inherent in the
documentary structure."
B/side, at 38 minutes a long work for Child, is a documentary of sorts, in the author's words "an experiment in entering imaginatively the delirium of the Lower East Side." The delirium focuses on Dinkinsville, a tent city that erupted during Mayor David Dinkins' era. But typically, there's nothing straightforward about this record. Child is a discreet observer, dispassionate in her recording of the daily rituals of life in this desperate dystopia. Women washing in the streets, setting up their lean-to's, haggling over merchandise — these prosaic events are recontextualized through Child's rhythmic editing and strong compositional sense, which brings a poetic power to the events it chronicles. Actress Sheila Dabney plays the numb Everywoman wandering with a kind of hopeless grandeur through the film's grim tableaux.“
“Since the 1970s, experimental filmmaker and poet (and lesbian) Abigail Child has been engaged in a kind of cultural archaeology. Unearthing found footage from such disparate sources as industrial films, vacation and home movies, porn loops, and snippets from forgotten B-movies, she recycles and updates approaches to cinema that have a freshness and sense of wonder that recall the movies' silent days. While this approach suggests the reactionary, the result is in fact quite the opposite. Child's work, which plays periodically at such venues as the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Cinematheque, is the subtlest form of agitprop, powerfully exploring very modern issues of gender and class through early (and present-day, for that matter) cinema's primary artistic strategy: montage, both visual and audio. Also like silent film, Child's work shows an unself-conscious delight in the visual.“
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/32/abigailchild.php
