May
22
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Abigail
Child’s Is This What You Were Born For? Hosted by P. Adams
Sitney
Renowned film scholar P. Adams Sitney presents Abigail Child’s epic
avant-garde work of the 1980s Is This What You Were Born For?
(1981-1987, 16mm, 60 min.) followed by a lecture on the film. Please
note that Ms. Child will not be present.
No study of the American avant-garde cinema would be complete without
mention of P. Adams Sitney's groundbreaking contributions to the
field. His seminal Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000
and edited collections, Film Culture Reader and The Avant-Garde
Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism have provided lucid insight
for generations of film scholars and enthusiasts. P. Adams Sitney is Professor
of Visual Art at Princeton University and a current senior scholar at
the Getty Research Institute.
Abigail Child is a film and video maker whose work in montage and sound/image
relations pushes the envelope of film/video with humor and ephemeral beauty.
Her recent work explores mixed genres and strategies for rewriting narrative,
as well as exploring public space through memory and history.
Child began filmmaking in 1970 as a documentarian, producing seven independent
16mm documentaries between 1970 and 1976, among them the award winning
Game (1972) and Between Times (1975). In the mid 70s,
Child began to produce experimental work, culminating in her series Is
This What You Were Born For?.
In the 90s she turned to an investigation of public spaces, with B/side
(1996) and Below The New: A Russian Chronicle (1999) which was
shot in St. Petersburg Russia. Her newest films include Surface Noise
(2000), Dark Dark (2001) and Where the Girls Are (2002),
all premiering at respective New York Film Festivals while the single
channel version of Cake and Steak (2004) was featured at the
Oberhausen Film Festival this spring.
Abigail Child's films and videos have won many awards and have been shown
in retrospectives in conjunction with the New Museum at Anthology Film
Archives (New York), Torino Film Festival (Italy), ICA (London), Mercer
Union Gallery
(Toronto), The Collective For Living Cinema (New York), The San Francisco
Cinematheque and Frameline Film Festival (California). The work has officially
been selected for the Oberhausen Film Festival, Visions du Reel, Nyon,
the London and Rotterdam International Film Festivals, Pesaro Film Festival
(Italy), the New York Film Festival and Video Sidebar, the Latin American
International Short Film Festival (Toronto), and World Wide Video Festival
(Den Haag)-among many others.
Child has taught film/video production and history at various schools,
including NYU, Massachusetts College of Art, The Art Institute of San
Francisco, Sarah Lawrence and Hampshire College. Since Jan. 2000, she
is Chair of Film /Animation at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston.
---
Is This What You Were Born For? (1981-1987, 16mm,
60 min.)
Is This What You Were Born For? is conceived as a way to bracket
my ongoing film investigations in the context of the aggressions of the
late Twentieth Century: the title is from an etching by Goya, part of
the Disasters of War series. The work is in seven detachable parts, each
of which can be viewed by itself for its own qualities. The films don't
form a single line, or even an expanding line, but rather map a series
of concerns in relation to mind, to how one processes material, how it
gets investigated, how it gets cut apart, how something else (inevitably)
comes up. - Abigail Child
“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
Is This What You Were Born For? is a series of seven films:
Prefaces (Part 1) (1981, 16mm, color, sound, 9-1/2 min.)
Both (Part 2) (1988, 16mm, b&w/si, 3 min.)
Mutiny (Part 3) (1982-1983, 16mm, color, sound, 9-1/2 min.)
Covert Action (Part 4) (1984, 16mm, b&w, sound, 7-3/4
min.)
Perils (Part 5) (1985-1986, 16mm, b&w, sound, 3-1/2
min.)
Mayhem (Part 6) (1987, 16mm, b&w, sound, 16-1/2 min.)
Mercy (Part 7) (1989, 16mm, color/so, 10 min.)
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