Mayhem (1987) by Abigail Child
Wednesday, April 1, 2026, 7:30 pm
Abigail Child: Is This What You Were Born For?
Abigail Child In Person
Presented in association with Gray Area
Admission: $15 General / $12 Cinematheque Members and Members of Gray Area
Event tickets *coming soon*
As an artist and writer, Abigail 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)
Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental media and writing since the 1980s, having completed more than fifty film/video works and installations and written six books. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child addresses the interplay between sound and image, to make, in the words of the LA Weekly: “brilliant exciting work… a vibrant political filmmaking that’s attentive to form.” In her work, 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. In her first San Francisco appearance since 2013, Cinematheque, Gray Area and Shapeshifters Cinema are thrilled to welcome Abigail Child in person to present a two-program sampler retrospective drawn from her rich and complex body of work. (Program note adapted from Anthology Film Archives)
Abigail Child: Is This What You Were Born For?
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 1980s]. 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)
SCREENING: Prefaces (ITWYWBF? part 1) (1981) by Abigail Child; color, sound, 12 minutes. Mutiny (ITWYWBF? part 2) (1982–1983) by Abigail Child; color, sound, 11 minutes. Perils (ITWYWBF? part 4) (1986) by Abigail Child; b&w, sound, 5 minutes. Covert Action (ITWYWBF? part 5) (1984) by Abigail Child; b&w, sound, 11 minutes. Mayhem (ITWYWBF? part 6) (1987) by Abigail Child; b&w, sound, 20 minutes. Mercy (ITWYWBF? part 7) (1989) by Abigail Child; color, sound, 10 minutes. PLUS: Surface Noise (2000) by Abigail Child; color, sound, 18 minutes. All works to screen as digital video. TRT: 87 minutes.
Abigail Child also appears in person at Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland, on Friday, April 3 to present her Foreign Film Series (2005–2014). Full details here.
Prefaces (1981) by Abigail Child
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. (Abigail Child)
Mutiny (1982–1983) by Abigail Child
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. (Abigail Child)
Perils (1986) by Abigail Child
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. Sound edited from Warner Brothers cartoons and improvisations by Charles Noyes & Christian Marclay. (Abigail Child)
Covert Action (1984) by Abigail Child
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. (Abigail Child)
Mayhem (1987) by Abigail Child
Characters from Perils (1986) 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. (Abigail Child)
Mercy (1989) by Abigail Child
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. (Abigail Child)
Surface Noise (2000) by Abigail Child
Found footage exploring public and private space, organized formally as a sonata, centered around work and issues of class: the divisions between home and public, owners and workers, saturation and flow, structure and improvisation. Music by Zeena Parkins, Christian Marclay, Shelley Hirsch and Jim Black. (Abigail Child)