alr

Text and Image, Voice and Elision

Director in Person
Free Admission
  • Mutiny

    Directed by Abigail Child.
    US, 1982, 16mm, color, 10 min.

Mutiny employs panoply of expression, gesture and repeated movement. Its central images focus on women: at home, on the street, in the workplace, at school, talking, singing, jumping on trampolines, playing the violin. The broken syntax of the film reflects both the possibilities and the limitations of a speech, which "politically, physically and realistically" flirts with the language of opposition.

  • Covert Action

    Directed by Abigail Child.
    US, 1984, 16mm, black & white, 10 min.

Child subverts the truncated language of conventional narrative cinema by interjecting title cards à la silent cinema as ironic counterpoint and uses a dialogue between two poets, Carla Harryman and Steve Benson, to confound any consistent hypothesis. A sexual politic steeped in deception, a story only half revealed. “Here rupture and repetition comprise the structuring principle. The film explodes in your face: it drives on until its final image, a summation of its prehistory, history and future – a tree being uprooted. What could be a more apt metaphor for the contemporary crisis in narrativity and sexuality?” – Robert Hilferty, NY Native

  • To and No Fro

    Directed by Abigail Child.
    US, 2005, digital video, black & white, 5 min.

First in a series of five “foreign films” for projection/installation.  A reworking of Bunuel’s Women Without Love and a chance to crack the mirror of family secrets and repression. Speculative play with image, sound and space outside the frame.  Status and culture haunt bourgeois dreams suggesting an alternative wish fulfillment of letters: the text speaks; the scene looks.

  • Mirror World

    Directed by Abigail Child.
    US, 2006, digital video, color, 15 min.

Second in the “foreign film” series. A reshaping of Mehboob Khan’s classic Bollywood feature Aan into surrealist noir. Formal play and poetic “mistranslated” subtitles deconstruct the narrative to locate a sub-version: princess becomes maid, the maid becomes queen. Mirror World wrenches narrative causality to explore class and sexuality, and in the process discovers ways to wreck havoc on our “normal” perceptions of world and story.

Part of film series

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Abigail Child:
Films and a Lecture

Current and upcoming film series

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Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

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Museum Hours: Mati Diop’s Dahomey

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Albert Serra, or Cinematic Time Regained

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Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy

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The Shochiku Centennial Collection

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Planet at 50

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The Yugoslav Junction Continues!

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Theo Anthony, Subject to Review

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The Ideal Cinematheque of the Outskirts of the World