Abigail Child

MERCY

part 7 from Is This What You Were Born For?

MERCY, the last in the series, is encyclopedic ephemera, exploring public visions of technological and romantic invention, dissecting the game mass media plays with our private perceptions.

BOTH

part 3 from Is This What You Were Born For?

A silent black and white study of two women. Quietly erotic and vulnerable. A moment of silence against the noise of the other films of this 7 part series.

MAYHEM

part 6 from Is This What You Were Born For?

Characters from PERILS reappear, this time in a film noir setting, soap opera thrillers and Mexican comic books generating the action. In the film, Sound is the Character and to do so focusing on sexuality and the erotic. With Diane Torr and Ela Troyano.

PERILS

part 5 from Is This What You Were Born For?

A homage to silent film—the clash of ambiguous innocence and unsophisticated villainy—dramatizing the theatrical postures of melodrama to reconstruct our ideas of romance, action, and drama. With Diane Torr, Sally Silvers, Plauto and Elion Sacker.

COVERT ACTION

part 4 from Is This What You Were Born For?

The film disrupts the rhythm of remembrance by subverting the institution of the home movie. It loops footage of two heterosexual couples on holiday: embracing, touching, stroking, playing leapfrog, awkwardly arranging their bodies and posturing for the camera eye. The effect is a kind of choreographed dislocation dance, a man with one woman, then another, two women together.

MUTINY

part 2 from Is This What You Were Born For?

Mutiny employs a panoply of expression, gesture, and repeated movement. Its central images are of women: at home, on the street, at the workplace, at school, talking, singing, jumping on trampolines, playing the violin. The syntax of the film reflects the possibilities and limitations of speech, while “politically, physically, and realistically” flirting with the language of opposition.

PREFACES

part 1 from Is This What You Were Born For?

Composed of wild sound constructed along entropic lines held to a tension by bebop rhythms and a surfacing narrative cut from the works of great vocal innovators and a dialogue with Hannah Weiner, poet. The tracks are placed in precise and asynchronous relations to images of workers, the gestures of the marketplace, colonial Africa and abstractions to posit questions of social force and gender relations/subordination. It becomes a kind of preconscious of the films to follow, whose scope and image banks are more narrowly defined.

ORNAMENTALS

Juxtapositions of light made this dream consumed image between the penny arcades & mirrors reflecting masturbating naked brain of magnetized nitrous screens crackling is like pulp beside dummy circumstance.

PACIFIC FAR EAST LINE

An urban landscape film constructed from materials gathered over two years looking out at downtown San Francisco. The elements "folded" and mixed, Time redefines Space: the erector and helicopter appear as toys within a schizy motor-oil-sized ballet mechanic.