Local Canadian Preview of PRECIPICE (2025)
Local Canadian Maritime Preview of Abigail Child’s PRECIPICE (2025) Fri, September 19, 2025, 2:30pm at Lunenburg Doc Festival
"On Nova Scotia’s South Shore, where fishing once shaped the communities, new pressures are shifting the landscape. Precipice points the lens at Rose Bay, and up river, tracing the fragile edge between memory and disappearance, as working-class lives are recast against rising seas and fancy coastal development. Echoes of old home movies, Mi’kmaq tales and present-day restoration (including oyster farming, wetland preservation, woodlot management) interweave into a portrait of resilience. The film, evoking the tone and pace of Brett Story’s The Hottest August (2019) focuses on the intersection between climate change and a community's response to this global emergency.” —Walter Forsyth (Dir. LDF)
Abigail Child will be present with a Panel following, including: Rosmarie Lohnes (Helping Nature Heal) and Barry Stevens (Mi’cmaq engineer/entrepreneur).
PRECIPICE © Childworks (2025) 82 minutes. Color. Sound. Producer/Director/Camera: Abigail Child. Edited by Mary Patierno & Abigail Child. Consultant Editor: Yael Bitton. Additional Camera/Sound: Robert Withers & Zachary Boser. Additional Producers: Michelle Silliboy & Jennifer Burton. Shot in Lunenburg County, NS, Canada in digital (2021-24)
Upcoming EVENTS
Panelist and Speaker at Vassar Institute for "Women's Work: Preserving Independent Film/Video Histories" Feb. 26-28, 2026 w/MM Serra, Lynne Sachs, + Peggy Awhesh.
Residency at Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy. October/ November, 2026
Rencontre avec Abigail Child (Encounter with AC). Feature film on Child and her work by Michel Amarger and Frédérique Devaux. To premiere in Paris Fall 2026 in conjunction with DVD release and in parallel to the Collectif Jeune Cinéma festival screening of Is This What You Were Born For. They will publish one of Child’s poems and there will be a booklet accompanying the feature.
CineOP 20th Mostra de Cinema de Ouro Preto. Featured artist with screenings and Talk.•• Heritage film festival and AV preservation symposium in Brazil (June 24-July 2, 2025)
Publication of essay “On the First Minute of Abigail Child’s Mayhem” by Jan Op de Beeck in the (multi-lingual) Sabzian, https://www.sabzian.be/text/on-the-first-minute-of-abigail-child’s-mayhem-part-6-of-is-this-what-you-were-born-for-1987 Written in 2020, published in English March 2025. De Beeck writes: Similar to how Paul Auster in The New York Trilogy uses the coordinates of the detective novel in order to dramatically and philosophically push the observation, interpretative urge, and diffused surface of signs, Child develops a “negative” or “inverse melodrama” that explores the world as a “messy, ambiguous space,” in which criticism’s other leg is plodding in pleasure, and suspense is indicative of brewing social tensions that may emerge over time.
Rare Screening of THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY
Monday, March 17, 2025 at 7pm, at the New York Film-Makers' Cooperative. Rare screening of THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY in New York, including CAKE + STEAK, THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU, and SURF + TURF.
A feature-length project about girlhood and the immigrant dream, focusing on post World War II North American suburbs and between the war Europe, critically seen through the lens of gender, property and myths of nation. —A rambunctious embrace, body to body, woman to woman, entrance to exit—in-laws foregrounding the construction of cinematic meaning, the elusive nature of memory and desire, the hysteric familial arena of the social. The project is prismatic, in that each part explores a different perspective in terms of both cinematics and historical era.
Learn more about THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY.
Readings
October 27, 2025, 8:00 pm. St. Mark's Church. East Village. Reading at Memorial for Rebecca Cole Heinowitz.
May 9th, Friday 7pm. Imaginary Elegies at Pete’s Candy Store, Brooklyn NY. With Anselm Berrigan and Alyssa Quart. Curated by Cole Heinowitz and Iris Cushing.
April 26th, Saturday 4pm. OtherWords Series at Mason Public Library in Great Barrington, MA. Child with Mohammed Zenia. Curated by Evelyn Reilly and Michael Gottlieb.
Books + Articles
Cinema as Archive in Artists’ Moving Image. by Sarah Smith. August 2025. Bloomsbury Publishing. w/writing on Mirror World (2014) and B/side (1996).
“Abigail Child, The Pulse of the Last Machine” Chapter in The Attractions of the Moving Image. By Tom Gunning. Ed. Daniel Morgan. University of Chicago Press. 2025
“Piracy and Poetics: Appropriation and Process” in Found Footage & Collage Films: The Artist’s Voice. Ed. César Ustarroz. Published by Found Footage Magazine, Spain. 2025
Upcoming RETROSPECTIVES
Retrospective in Rio de Janeiro at the Brazilian Cinemateca. Coordinated by Adriana Curso.
ExFM Talk
Talk via zoom with ExFM, the experimental film scholarly interest group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Hosted by John Powers (Washington University, St. Louis), Oksana Chefranova (Yale University) and Shrijita Banerjee. Nov. 15, 2024.
Group Shows
MUTINY (1982-83) in “Listening” Part of L’Age d’Or. Cinematek Brussels. Curated by Victor Focquet & June Laka. Dec 14, 2024.
MUTINY (1982-83) in Experimental Downtown Festival. Roxy Theater, in coordination with NY Film Coop. October 2024.
SURFACE NOISE (2000) in Ecopoetics II. National Gallery of Art Washington DC. with films by Warren Sonbert in series “We are Still Here” June 9, 2024. Also at Museum of Modern Art, NYC in June 2023 (two shows).
B/SIDE (1996) in "Politically-Trenchant New York City Symphony Films” (1984-2006) Allied Productions Project Space. Curated by Jon Gartenberg. August 9, 2024.
CAKE + STEAK (2004) in Unexpected Pleasures: Women, Punk, and Experimental Film celebrating book of same name by Racheal Garfield. at e/flux Screening Room. Brooklyn. Film Screenings including work by Child, Ahwesh, Bromberg and others. September 17, 2024.
Just as punk created a space for bands such as The Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity through a transgressive, strident new female identity, it also provoked experimental feminist filmmakers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of filmmaking.
The films in this screening were part of a rebellious, feminist punk audiovisual culture. In their filmmaking and their performed personae, film and video artists such as Peggy Ahwesh, Betzy Bromberg, Abigail Child, Vivienne Dick, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Ruth Novaczek, and Anne Robinson (all of whom will be screened) offered a powerful, deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist femininity, creating a new punk audiovisual aesthetic. While not all of these artists identified as punks, the spirit of punk provoked experimental feminist filmmakers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of filmmaking. A vital aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audiovisual culture can be traced back to the techniques and forms of these pioneers, who, like their musical contemporaries, worked in a pre-digital, analog modality that nevertheless influenced the emergent digital audiovisual culture of the 1990s and 2000s.
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Radio INTERVIEW
ABIGAIL CHILD interviewed by Christopher Funkhouser and reading her poetry for WGXC 90.7FM, Greene and Columbia County community radio. September 26, 2024.
Abigail Child is this month's guest on Poet Ray'd Yo. We listen back to audio segments from soundtracks to her films Surface Noise and Prefaces, and she reads 'a bunch of great work'. Tune in via wgxc.org & on the FM at 90.7 in the upper Hudson Valley.
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ABIGAIL CHILD's INTRUSIONS OF DESIRE,
A Retrospective • March 24-28, 2023
This spring, Anthology hosts a long-overdue retrospective of the work of the moving-image artist, writer, and poet Abigail Child. A leading figure of the generation of experimental filmmakers that emerged in the late 1970s-early 1980s, Child has continued to make innovative and challenging work – in a dizzying variety of forms and on a wide range of topics – ever since.
Child, who has often grouped her films into thematically and/or formally linked series, first gained widespread recognition with the seven films presented under the title “Is This What You Were Born For?” Created between 1981-89, these works inspired (and continue to inspire) a plethora of commentary, and have become modern classics. But Child’s body of work extends far beyond this renowned series, encompassing her rarely-screened but remarkable early films; later cycles such as the “Suburban Trilogy” (2004-11) and the “Foreign Film” series (2005-14); and feature-length works produced over the past decade, including the experimental biographical films UNBOUND: SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF MARY SHELLEY (2013) and ACTS & INTERMISSIONS: EMMA GOLDMAN IN AMERICA (2017), and the recent ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES (2020), which explores the growing field of android development and the ethical, emotional, and psychological impacts of these technological developments.
This retrospective gathers together all these films and many more, offering a rare chance to experience and grapple with Child’s body of work as a whole. Child has restlessly explored different mediums and modes, often working with preexisting footage – drawn from Hollywood films, advertisements, home movies, and many other sources – which she radically transforms in ways that unite formal experimentation and social-political analysis. But what unifies her moving-image work above all is the unparalleled dynamism of her investigations into the relationship between sound and image, the still not-fully-tapped possibilities of cinematic montage, the technique of audiovisual fragmentation, and the complex mechanisms of language. Child’s films, videos, and installations activate the potential energy of the cinema to an extraordinary degree.
Child will be here in person for the majority of the screenings!
“[Child] has for decades been an inspiring teacher, and I feel the same energy drives her films. The very title of the series: ‘Is this what you were born for?’ captures the tone of her pedagogy: Asking questions, not instilling answers, demanding a personal address from filmmaker to viewer, probing the very foundations of one’s existence. […] The complexity of Child’s pedagogy relies on such juxtapositions and transformations in meaning between image and sound, image and image, language and noise, as well as image and language.” –Tom Gunning, “Abigail Child: The Pulse of the Last Machine”
“As an artist and writer, Child has worked seriously across a range of media. In all of them, her principal form has been montage, developing, as Tom Gunning writes, ‘a system founded not on coherence, but on breakdown, not on continuity, but interruption.’” –Colin Beckett
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ABIGAIL CHILD Interviews on the Retrospective
Interview w/Matt Skallerud of Pink Media for the #ILoveGay web channel. Feb. 9th at 2 p.m. EST https://screenanarchy.com/2023/02/experimental-and-documentary-filmmaker-abigail-child-receives-career-retrospective-at- nycs-anthology.html
Interview w/Kami Spanenberg for Classic Couple Academy podcast. North Carolina. March 1
https://raynbowaffair.com/anthology-film-archives-present-abigail-child/
Self Discovery Media network. Podcast Sara Troy 3.15.23
https://queerguru.com/career-retrospective-of-experimental-visual-artist-filmmaker-and-poet-abigail-child/
Women’s Crush Wednesdays Podcast: highlighted the retrospective on today's episode.
https://tinyurl.com/52pmmk86
Exclusive Interview: Moving-Image Artist Abigail Child, CLASSIC COUPLE ACADEMY
https://classiccoupleacademy.com/exclusive-interview-moving-image-artist-abigail-child
ABIGAIL CHILD PUBLICATIONS AVAILABLE
Found Footage Magazine, Volume 8.Special Issue on Abigail Child
$25
Special Issue on Abigail Child. Essays by Gracia Ramirez, Jeffrey Skoller, Maureen Turim, Rachel Garfield, w/interview by Camilla Magarida.
“Child’s contribution aligns her own work to this lineage of irrational modernism for her questioning of gender binaries without providing easy answers.”
–Gracia Ramirez
Order Online: https://foundfootagemagazine.com/issues/issue-8/
THIS IS CALLED MOVING: A Critical Poetics of Film
$34.95
In these essays, Child draws on her career as a practicing poet and filmmaker to explore how these two language systems inform and cross fertilize her work. Forward by Tom Gunning.
From Gunning’s Forward: “Child becomes, in effect, a feminist Muybridge, breaking down gestures and actions to reveal unconscious and otherwise invisible patterns and determinates.”
This book is avaliable at University Alabama Press (https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817351601/this-is-called-moving/). Also on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Is This What You Were Born For? Strategies of Appropriation and Audio-Visual Collage in the Films of Abigail Child
A monograph with interviews and essays on Abigail Child’s signature film series, “takes on the challenge of opening up these densely packed and enigmatic films.... rich, multi-textual (and multi-textured) works that seek to provoke questions rather than provide set answers.” —Patrick Friel, Afterimage
The Born For cycle has been described by film scholar P. Adams Sitney as “one of the most important and original sequences in the American avant-garde.”
Includes DVD of Born For?
Published by MētisPresses(https://www.metispresses.ch/fr/is-this-what-you-were-born-for).
NFTs Exhibition
Blonde Fur by Abigail Child is included in “Demystifying NFTs: The Award Exhibition” in the Voxels metaverse and at Chashama in Manhattan, following a two-month NYFA-awarded Fellowship. December 2022.
Maverick American artist Abigail Child explores the complex and provocative intersections of gender, sexuality and family in the dynamic loop BLONDE FUR in a revised, special edition created from her 16mm archive for minting as an NFT.
Deftly blending experimental techniques, innovative soundscapes and home movies, this hypnotic work originates with home movies from the metropolitan east coast. Child arms her images with sound to unsentimentalize these iconic scenes: of parents and children, families and cocktails, fur coats and dress-up. The result is a cross between Clairol (“blondes have more fun”) and Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” Funny, hypnotic, rhythmic and visually popping, the bodies seen through the hysteric whirl of image and sound become a hip-hop painting, an ironic restating of capital, gender, and the family’s position within our western world. From the opening voice: “my grand-daughter” to the sighing close over an abstraction of silver and gold, BLONDE FUR re-enacts and releases us from the suffocation of things and propriety that commodity capitalism provokes.
This loop is part of a larger feature film, The Suburban Trilogy, which in turn is built out of three award-winning films: CAKE + STEAK, THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU, and SURF + TURF. BLONDE FUR comes from the first part, CAKE + STEAK, color, sound, 16mm original.
Concept, Sound and Editing by Abigail Child.
Made with the aid of a Harvestworks Media Residency.
EXHBITED in somewhat different form as projected loop in “Media Frames: Video Installation Electronic Media November 4-24, 2003 at Foster Gallery, University of Wisconsin. Shown as quadraphonic installation at Galerie Rachel Haferkamp in Cologne, Germany Jan 26 to Feb 4, 2006; at Tesla Gallery, in Berlin, March 18, 2006; at the Municipal Building in Kassel, July 2007. Also previously exhibited as wall installation at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis (2006)
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Book Launch & FILM Streaming Program
Mercy(1989) by Abigail Child is streamed by LUX Moving Image in honor of the Book Launch of Typical Girls. Experimental Filmmaking and Punk by Rachel Garfiel.
Typical Girls. Experimental Filmmaking and Punk, an on-going programme of classic feminist/punk/experimental films from the 1970s and 1980s curated by Rachel Garfield to accompany her new book Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s, Bloomsbury, 2021. Featuring films by Vivienne Dick, Tessa Hughes Freeland, Betzy Bromberg,Ruth Novaczek, Anne Robinson, Susan Stein, Abigail Child & Sandra Lahire.
Experimental Filmmaking and Punk aims to analyze and situate the aesthetic and intellectual ambition of a range of women filmmakers operating during the 1970s and 1980s with punk as a contextualizing scaffold. The aspiration that musicians such as Poly Styrene and The Slits portrayed has a legacy and influence in the attitude of these filmmakers that it is timely to address and that moments, such as the Top of The Pops debut of Poly Styrene, marked the emergence of a new female subjectivity that was picked up and followed through by these filmmakers. The ground had been prepared by second wave feminism but punk delivered a strident visual example of what could be possible and an alternative way forward outside the serious earnestness of the political realm. These women did not necessarily identify as feminist, certainly the punks often did not at the time. Nonetheless, the punk of women such as Poly Styrene with her retro clothes of clashing colours, her shouty voice and artlessly enthusiastic dance was an affirmative negation of the normative modes of femininity. Where femininity demanded grace and beauty punk was a celebration of its failure. Such erstwhile versions of femininity were ditched in favour of an awkward female youth as a lived relationship with the world using an aggressive camp as cipher against middlebrow expectations of what it was to be a woman.
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Ann Arbor Film Festival x Video Data Bank :
Medium Meet Medium
Mutiny by Abigail Child, 1982 is shown at AAFF x Video Data Bank: Medium Meet Medium.
To celebrate the Video Data Bank's partnership with the Ann Arbor Film Festival for its 60th edition. The VDB highlights a special program at the AAFF AAFF x Video Data Bank: Medium Meet Medium on March 26th, 2022.
This program, highlighting work from the collection at the Video Data Bank, features titles from seven artists that utilize the technical, aesthetic, and thematic conventions of both video and film in fluid, colorful form. It provides a reflection on the history of the Ann Arbor Film Festival and its relationship to video, noting that it is imperative to reflect on the moments in which mediums meet, converse, and converge.
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TUFTS NOW, for ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES
Interview with Director Abigail Child, co-Producer Jennifer Burton, and roboticist Matthias Scheutz. April 7th, 2022. TUFTS NOW, for ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES
“What could be more important today than our relation to machines and algorithms? We are already fully participant, voluntarily or not—data drawn from us every minute we are walking down the street, talking on the phone, on the web. We normalize these technologies, inhabit them Frightfully adaptable, we become them, these infections, this rule by number. Artificial intelligence is influencing what we watch where we go and increasingly, who we elect. If androids are developing consciousness, what kind of life-form are humans becoming? Are we imagining androids will inherit a world we poison? Is this contemporary research connected to our unconscious desire to populate a world that we have made hostile to human life?
My cultural influences include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Philip K. Dick stories and automata such as the fortune-telling humanoid that was present in amusement arcades at the Jersey Shore when I was growing up. Equally so, the cartoons I watched with obsessive affection. The result: an abiding interest in artificial construction, how it is created and how our society will use/or enslave it.” ——AC
Found Footage
Is This What You Were Born For - Part 5: Covert Action by Abigail Child, 1984 is published by FOUND FOOTAGE & COLLAGE FILMS.
Found Footage & Collage Films: Selected Works is edited and introduced by César Ustarroz. For enthusiasts of avant-garde cinema, this deluxe limited edition of sixteen short films provides a vivid account of various creative processes in the recycling of images in experimental moving image art.
The DVD+Blu-ray box set comes complete with a book filled with analysis and insights of the selected films. Written by leading scholars and film critics for the occasion, this publication is an essential reading for understanding the aesthetics and contexts of found footage filmmaking and handmade cinema in contemporary moving image culture.
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NYU EXPERIMENTAL FILM LECTURE
NYU EXPERIMENTAL FILM LECTURE: NOV 19, 2021
recorded on this Zoom file: https://vimeo.com/664570244
Abigail Child: “Where is Your Rupture?”
“The title of this lecture takes off from Andy Warhol’s Where Is Your Rupture, an early 60s painting which cuts off both a diagrammatic torso and the text beneath it. The result is at once detached and personal, a fragment with both text and body broken, incomplete."
Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental writing and media since the 1980s, having completed more than fifty film/video works and installations, and written 6 books. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child addresses the interplay between sound and image, to create in the words of LA Weekly: “…a political filmmaking that’s attentive to form.” Winner of the Rome Prize, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, the Stan Brakhage Award, Child has had numerous retrospectives worldwide. These include Harvard Cinematheque, the Cinoteca in Rome and Image Forum in Tokyo. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art NY, the Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, Museo Reina Sofia, and in numerous international film festivals, including New York, Rotterdam, Locarno and London.
Watch the video