Is This What You Were Born For?

Part 4 · Mar 10, 1986

Perils

The condensed filmic work of Abigail Child, borrowing strategies from found footage, Appropriation Art, Language Poetry and experimental music, stands a a landmark in the experimental cinema of the 1980's. The processing of interruption and fragmentation inform the series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?, reactivating the stakes of montage applied in different artistic practices.

Part 5 · Mar 10, 1987

Mayhem

In 1983, filmmaker and poet Abigail Child cut up old footage from Between Times, a documentary profile of high school girls in Minneapolis which she had produced for WNET/PBS back in 1975. That footage would then be integrated into work of a drastically different kind: The film was called Mutiny which, by its very name, signaled her abandonment of the humanist documentary tradition to which Between Times belonged, to become, in her words, “a prismatic rhythmic pinwheel” born of the artistic and political necessity to radically rethink form. Mutiny, in turn, stood as one of the most densely woven in a series of bold experiments that came to be known as Is This What You Were Born For?

Part 6 · Jan 1, 1988

Both

A beautifully ambiguous study of the nude in light and movement, this short silent film focuses on the dimly lit bodies of two women shot from Child’s distinctly non-male perspective.

Part 7 · Jan 1, 1989

Mercy

Images and sounds of American mass media, are dissected and carefully composed into a rapid-fire montage which reveals the processes at work. The myth of the 'body beautiful' is effectively debunked in an overwhelming swirl of movement and sound