A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
Newark, New Jersey, USA
Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental writing and media since the 1980s, having completed more than thirty film and video works and installations, and six books. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child’s early film work addressed the interplay be- tween sound and image in the context of resh aping narrative tropes, in a manner that prefigured many contemporary and future media concerns. Her major projects include Is This What You Were Born For?: a 9 year, 7-part work; B/Side: a film that negotiates the politics of internal colonialism in New York City; 8 Million: a collaboration with avant-percussionist Ikue Mori that re- defines the “music video”; The Suburban Trilogy: a modular digi-film that prismatically examines a politics of place and identity; and MirrorWorlds: a multi-screen installation that incorporates parts of Child’s “foreign film” series to explore narrative excess. A new film, A Shape of Error, is constructed as an imaginary ‘home movie’ of the life of Mary Shelley. Child has exhibited worldwide, with retrospectives at Anthology Film Archives (NY), the San Francisco Cinematheque, Sala Trevi in Rome, Exis (Korea), and Harvard Cinematheque, and in important showcases such as The Whitney Biennale, the Viennale and MoMA’s Millenium show. Her work is featured at numerous international film festivals, including the New York Film Festival, Rotterdam, Locarno and London Festivals, among others and is in the permanent collections of MOMA, NY, Centre Pompidou, and Arsenal Berlin. Child has received numerous awards and accolades, including the Rome Prize, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Award and the Stan Brakhage Award. Harvard University Cinematheque has created an Abigail Child Collection dedicated to preserving and exhibiting her work. As a teacher at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Child has been instrumental in building an expansive media and film art program; she has influenced a generation of younger artists. Child is also the author of five books of poetry (A Motive for Mayhem, Scatter Matrix and Artificial Memory among them) and a book of critical writings: THIS IS CALLED MOVING: A Critical Poetics of Film from University of Alabama Press (2005).
Camera Operator:
2017 Acts and Intermissions
Cinematography:
2009 (If I Can Sing a Song About) Ligatures
2012 A Shape of Error
2017 Acts and Intermissions
Director:
1970 Except the People
1972 Game
1977 Peripeteia I
1977 Some Exterior Presence
1978 Daylight Test Section
1978 Peripeteia II
1979 Ornamentals
1979 Pacific Far East Line
1981 Prefaces
1983 Mutiny
1984 Covert Action
1986 Perils
1987 Mayhem
1988 Both
1989 Is This What You Were Born For?
1989 Mercy
1990 Swamp
1992 8 Million
1996 B/Side
2000 Surface Noise
2005 To and No Fro
2006 Mirror World
2007 Fucking Different New York
2007 On the Downlow
2009 (If I Can Sing a Song About) Ligatures
2010 Riding the Tiger: Letters from Capitalist China
2011 The Suburban Trilogy
2012 A Shape of Error
2013 Elsa merdelamerdelamer
2013 Unbound
2013 Vis à Vis
2014 Salomé
2017 Acts and Intermissions
2020 BLUE EDIT
2020 Origin of the Species
Editor:
1970 Except the People
1972 Game
1977 Peripeteia I
1977 Some Exterior Presence
1978 Daylight Test Section
1978 Peripeteia II
1979 Ornamentals
1979 Pacific Far East Line
1981 Prefaces
1983 Mutiny
1984 Covert Action
1986 Perils
1987 Mayhem
1988 Both
1989 Is This What You Were Born For?
1989 Mercy
1990 Swamp
1992 8 Million
1996 B/Side
2000 Surface Noise
2005 To and No Fro
2006 Mirror World
2007 Fucking Different New York
2007 On the Downlow
2009 (If I Can Sing a Song About) Ligatures
2010 Riding the Tiger: Letters from Capitalist China
2011 The Suburban Trilogy
2012 A Shape of Error
2013 Elsa merdelamerdelamer
2013 Unbound
2013 Vis à Vis
2014 Salomé
2017 Acts and Intermissions
2020 BLUE EDIT
2020 Origin of the Species
Producer:
1970 Except the People
1972 Game
1977 Peripeteia I
1977 Some Exterior Presence
1978 Daylight Test Section
1978 Peripeteia II
1979 Ornamentals
1979 Pacific Far East Line
1981 Prefaces
1983 Mutiny
1984 Covert Action
1986 Perils
1987 Mayhem
1988 Both
1989 Is This What You Were Born For?
1989 Mercy
1990 Swamp
1992 8 Million
1996 B/Side
2000 Surface Noise
2005 To and No Fro
2006 Mirror World
2007 Fucking Different New York
2007 On the Downlow
2009 (If I Can Sing a Song About) Ligatures
2010 Riding the Tiger: Letters from Capitalist China
2011 The Suburban Trilogy
2012 A Shape of Error
2013 Elsa merdelamerdelamer
2013 Unbound
2013 Vis à Vis
2014 Salomé
2017 Acts and Intermissions
2020 BLUE EDIT
2020 Origin of the Species
Writer:
1970 Except the People
1972 Game
1977 Peripeteia I
1977 Some Exterior Presence
1978 Daylight Test Section
1978 Peripeteia II
1979 Ornamentals
1979 Pacific Far East Line
1981 Prefaces
1983 Mutiny
1984 Covert Action
1986 Perils
1987 Mayhem
1988 Both
1989 Is This What You Were Born For?
1989 Mercy
1990 Swamp
1992 8 Million
1996 B/Side
2000 Surface Noise
2005 To and No Fro
2006 Mirror World
2007 Fucking Different New York
2007 On the Downlow
2009 (If I Can Sing a Song About) Ligatures
2010 Riding the Tiger: Letters from Capitalist China
2011 The Suburban Trilogy
2012 A Shape of Error
2013 Elsa merdelamerdelamer
2013 Unbound
2013 Vis à Vis
2014 Salomé
2017 Acts and Intermissions
2020 BLUE EDIT
2020 Origin of the Species
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.