Abigail Child

Abigail Child is a writer, poet, and filmmaker who has worked in experimental media since the 1980s. She has written six books and produced over thirty video and film projects. Abigail Child focuses on the relationships between image and sound to rewrite narrative, reconstruct home movies, and bring life to installations she creates. Her work has been exhibited in numerous places including, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Biennial Exhibitions, and Centre George Pompidou. She has screened her films all over the world. Her work will be preserved and exhibited in the Abigail Child Collection at Harvard University Cinematheque. Abigail Child currently resides in New York. Please visit her website to watch films such as Acts & Intermissions, The Suburban Trilogy, and many more.

Mia Zeidler: The first question I have for you today is when did you decide that you wanted to make films?

Abigail Child: I did a little film as an undergraduate at Harvard, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I actually applied to graduate school at NYU in film, at Harvard in architecture, and at Chicago in city planning. And I ultimately went to Yale because I couldn't decide, and the Yale art school had photography and architecture and city planning and, so that I thought, “oh I'll go there and that's when I'll decide.” In my second year at Yale, I got a bit of money. I think it was $600 to make a film. I started editing the film at night on the red eye shift, where I'd come in at like 9:00 PM and stay till 6:00 AM—I was in my twenties so I could do that—using the machinery of an advertising firm after hours. And it was one of those evenings... I was editing on a little upright Moviola with like a four inch screen. Ridiculous. And I said, “this is it!” I had an epiphany. I said, “I can do image, sound, anthropology, music” ….ideas. And, at the time, I thought I would become an anthropological filmmaker working in South America, because I spoke Spanish and I had done Anthropology in Mexico in my undergraduate days. So, that was when I decided I would be a filmmaker. And I feel extraordinarily lucky that it's still a challenge and still a profound interest to me.

MZ: That answer pairs really well with the films I did watch, I feel like I do see you digging into the found footage and trying to see what else is behind there, whether it's through repetition or through your sound. How did your interest in sound begin?

I, as well, started in film and then found a love for sound and have not turned back since then.

AC: I played piano as a kid. I think what really happened was my husband was a musician, and I always loved music, sound, but I didn't grow up in such a musical family. There was always a piano, but my partner was, at the time, a musician and then ended up working as an engineer, a mixer for records at a famous R&B recording studio, The Hit Factory in New York City. And so we got to be in recording studios with Jimmy Hendrix in the back, or going to England and meeting Chaz Chandler of The Animals, and going to concerts.

I was spending a lot of time sitting in the mixing studio, listening to music. One of the times I really remember very strongly was Jerry Ragovoy, at the time, was the owner of this particular studio. I think the Hit Factory is still around. He wrote, “Take a Piece of My Heart,” that Janis Joplin recorded. So on Monday, he had a famous pianist, Stevie Winwood , come in with his group, and they played the tunes. And then three days later he had a bunch of black musicians that were studio musicians playing the same tune. And it was a completely different experience. It was like a different song, and I'll never forget it, because it was so intriguing to see how the same melody, you know, recorded differently, different instruments, different sounds, different histories made different music. Some of my education in music was just listening and seeing that difference.

So that's certainly where my sense of sound came from. And then I think there was also a very conscious decision. There is a poet friend of mine, Ron Silliman, who talks about the matrix of poetry and finding the empty places, because that's where you want to go. And I think I was pretty conscious in the 70s that sound in film was fairly ignored. There was a lot of silent film or there was very normative sound work, and it felt like I could do something intriguing. So it was both, you know, a love and a sort of conscious decision.

MZ: I'm working right now, actually, on a sound-mapping project. We're trying to sound map all of UCSC, and I'm doing a recording workshop where we're learning how different microphones basically sound different on all instruments and where to position them. It's an interesting process of listening, and it's a beautiful one as well. How did you learn about implementing sound into film?

AC: I was just doing it. I mean, it was just playing, and working. I did have a job. It was 35 millimeter sound editing for Fania Allstars, produced by Fania Records, popular Latin music. I worked with them for a while, but I think it was more just listening and doing it. You know, nobody was really teaching me, per se. I was just listening. You know, learning from that. Then following my nose.

Just the sense of...if I wanted to change my audience’s head, I had to do something to disrupt conventional realities... that I wasn't interested so much in giving people exactly what they wanted. For me, art isn't about beauty and calmness, although certainly sometimes I love it in art and want it. But, for me, it was more about how to keep people alert. And it seemed like you had to do it formally, not just in content. So music became one of my formal attributes to change things around.

MZ: I do notice that, especially when I was watching The Suburban Trilogy. which brings me to my next question: From watching The Suburban Trilogy to Perils, you do use a lot of repetition, and being able to go back and forth, and trying to see something from an image or sound. What began this editing style for you and what do you personally enjoy about this process?

AC: I love shooting, because you can shoot for two hours. It's very physical, you're exhausted, you've been attentive and, you might get great stuff. And you can edit all day and maybe none of your cuts stay before the end of that. Editing to me seems to be the brain. It seems to be where you're kind of building the DNA, if you will. It's almost like the food is the shooting and then the recipe, how you put it together is the editing. So there's the intellectual interest in editing itself.

Cake and Steak uses a little repetition but The Future Is Behind You doesn’t use much repetition...I think maybe you're thinking of Covert Action, the home movie piece. I think I gave it to you to see, which were the couples kissing.

MZ: Yeah, that's the one.

AC: That one was...I just had such little footage. Basically, there was an ad at The Collective for Living Cinema for found footage, for 10,000 feet. By the time I got down there, it had all been taken by a colleague of mine called Alan Berliner, who then completed a film called Family Album. And all that was left was about, I guess, 800 feet, or maybe only 400 feet—not much. In other words, like 15 to 20 minutes of film.

When you look at footage originally, I always tell students it's one of the more exciting moments, because everything's possible. You haven't gone into it yet. You haven't discovered what it doesn't have or what it does do. Looking at that footage that became Covert Action, it was very exciting to see it, but it was very little. So I knew pretty much right away that I was going to have to duplicate a bunch of it. So that's what I did: I had duplicated the little bit of footage, and then I could play with it.

So it was really out of place, the moment; it was an aesthetics of poverty that did that. It's a very rich aesthetic.

MZ: I do personally also like to use repetition. I have been basically just taking clips from a bunch of different types of media and putting them together to show a distinct trope. I love to mess with repetition and media in general.

AC: I mean, repetition is also very musical. It's a way to emphasize. It's a way to look closely. Indeed, repetition is the heart of music and architecture, among the arts.

You probably know the work of the Austrians. The members of Six Pack, they are on Vimeo. There's some super famous people who played with Hollywood and repetition before digital film and did some great work.

MZ: I'm actually looking at it right now. It looks awesome.

AC: There's Martin Arnold and if you don't know his work, you should just go look at it. It's fantastic. So if you do cut-up with Hollywood material, you should definitely look at his work.

MZ: That sounds amazing. I should check it out. That does happen a lot at my, in my film program, it tends to be white male dominated art. The class I am in is the feminist filmmaking class. So that class is actually one of the most amazing classes I've taken. I took an experimental film class a couple of years ago as well. I'm also in media theory and the teacher has not spoken once about a female theorist in the class and it's been five weeks.

AC: In America, as to practicing filmmakers, I only know Trinh T. Minh-ha and myself, as practicing filmmakers who have addressed theoretical questions in print. THIS IS CALLED MOVING: A Critical Poetics of Film was out in 2005, and currently, I have a manuscript that examines film in the digital era.

MZ: How do you define the terms experimental and feminist? And what do those terms mean?

AC: Let's start with feminist. Let's start with that. As a woman, you just know the world is not equal and you experience it every day that way. And I'm a small woman as well. And so you're not listened to, you're excluded from conversations, even with your pals.

I think being a woman, you should automatically be a feminist. I know there was this, kind of, slap back after the 70s that was all,“I want to be feminine” and “I'm not with a bra-burners,” but I felt that was just PR and that all you had to do was look at relative rates of pay, relative representation in our government or in our corporate world or in our administrative world. I'm looking at women as service workers everywhere. You know, that's slowly changing, but clearly not enough. You look at what's going on in our politics, and you can tell that the ERA has not been ratified.

So my feeling is if you're a woman, you should be a feminist. And if you say you're not a feminist, it's just because you don't know what's going on. And you've heard lies somewhere or publicity that's wrong.

“Experimental” is a harder thing, I think, to define, in that, even Brakhage would say, “I'm not experimental. I know what I'm doing.” And then there's “underground,” but then you're buried underground. And then “alternative” or “independent.” But, of course, there's a huge difference between an independent, $3 million feature and an independent experimental film. So I don't think any of these words are actually very...I mean, any of them could work. I don't think one of them is the right term. I remember being at a conference where the word avant-garde was used, and the art historians were furious because avant-garde was kind of over from the thirties in painting and sculpture.. But, one of the things I felt is that the time arts of writing, poetry, film, music, dance never have been fully commodified. I think they retained their ability to be provocative and disruptive. So if I wanted a definition, I guess I would say—innovative, looking to bring a response out of the audience that isn't just sleeping. You know, pushing to get to a newer place.

How do I convey to people to think for themselves and to think in a new way? And it's tricky. It's about new ways to negotiate through art to get to life. And that, for me, is where I want to be. And I'll use all different kinds of strategies, sometimes more radical than other times. My aim is to make people think, one way or another. Sometimes it can be fast-moving and sometimes I want it to be fast-thinking.

MZ: That totally makes sense. It's a really good process, I think, and that really inspires me personally and I plan to take that into my work further.When I watched Unbound, I was amazed that you were able to make that in three years and that you created this imaginary story from home footage, but also use poets. I was reading more in your book about your love for poetry and hearing you speak about that. There's a point in Unbound where you have what sounds like two female voices that join at one point, speaking a monologue. Are the words written by the poets themselves or written by you?

AC: Most of the words are written by Mary Shelley or her half sister. The poetry itself is actually Percy Shelley, that the male voice says. But, it turns out Mary Shelley wrote tremendous amounts of diaries as did her half sister, Clare. And so I used a bunch of those. And then sometimes I would change them up as well. With Mary Shelley, I would know the facts and maybe add my own phrasing or sentences or speech to it. I always do a lot of writing around every film, and then some of it appears in; a lot of it gets, you know, back on paper, not in the film itself.

I'm glad you liked it. That one was such a crazy film because I made an entire film using two screens and then decided to kind of pressure it even more technically. So I hacked the software of Final Cut so that it did crazy articulations of the cinematic screen-space. And I was thinking of all the pages of writing and the overlay of writing and how to make that visible in the piece. It works best on a huge screen where all the little pieces have space. And the sound is halting or broken or repeating at times. The way memory is. So I liked the final result. That was hard to achieve..

MZ: After viewing The Suburban Trilogy, I came to the conclusion that you were showing us your family's past.

AC:The footage is all found. It's anonymous—there was a name on it, but I never located who they were. They're probably not Jewish. They are in Europe between the wars and the audience almost never figures out what country. Can you figure it out?

MZ: I don't think I can.

AC: No. Most people can't. My family is from Austria. My mother's family came in 1900. None of my family was within Europe in World War II. We all got out way, way, way earlier. Although the Holocaust, of course, haunts American Jews no matter where they're from, I think.

But, no, it's actually fiction in terms of storytelling. The dialogue with the little girls I made up. And then I spent a long, long time trying to figure out who was going to be the voices. I didn't know if it was going to be two voices. Two girls, the sisters talking... was it going to be just one of the girls talking? In the end, I didn't talk. I did text. Which was a solution that just worked better for me for that particular film. But just in light of thinking about what I wrote and what I quoted its kind of a mix. And the same is true with Unbound. I'll write something, but if I can use some historical material, I'll do that. Someone once said about my work, even Perils and Mayhem is sort of rewriting history to be the history I want.

You know, a much more feminine history, if you will.

MZ: In, The Suburban Trilogy, there's a scene where you bring up an interesting question of who is the camera. When you're altering the speed, I saw it as, you know, there's this young female being surveyed... and the way she's being surveyed multiple times and who is watching through that camera. Is that what you intended through that?

AC: Exactly. In fact, when I finished the film, I didn't have any of the questions. And when I looked at the film, I said, it has to have the questions, because the questions, you know, foregrounded both my point of view and the fiction. It stops what you're looking at, so you don't just stay in the dream world of history, if you will. One of the questions there was“who is the camera,” because, obviously, this young girl with her budding breasts and she’s just been, you know, sort of pointing them at the man, very innocently towards the water spray, the Gardner, or whoever it is.

I never knew who the camera was because maybe it was her father? The mother is the most absent. Is it the uncle with the camera? Or is it her mother? And I don’t really know. Which is unusual in this movie because it's usually the father.

Is it the father's eye looking below the flapping towel. So I added the question, Who is the Camera?— and I must say I had an ex boyfriend of mine who said, “I didn’t like that question”. And I had to laugh. I thought, “Oh my God. Right on.”

MZ: Yeah. I enjoyed that question a lot. We just did a little project on exploiting how many anime creators are all male and the way they depict women in their television broadcasts and, like, TV and Tokyo and stuff like that.

AC: I have some comic books where they put a tree trunk through the woman's body. It can be very, very violent. And of course, anime shows how both the men and the women are portrayed as predominantly infants. I'm interested in the way comics are organized on the page, and, previously I've used Mexican comic books as a score for Mayhem.

They relate to the noir film often, because of the way they cut the image. There'll be a leg in close-up to the camera and you'll see figures in the background. You can learn from looking at the way great comic books move through the page, or maybe even cheap comic books. Comic books are kind of great for design and ideas and abrupt cuts and exciting movement and startling movement: Big, little, foreground, background, side, front, multiple panels. I mean, you look at little Nemo. They have big, oversized books, you know, like three feet by two feet and they're fantastic. Fantastic.

MZ: That's amazing. So that, those are the types of comic books you specifically collect.

AC: Yeah. I do collect comic books. I have many, many, many, including Japanese, but also French and American. Now comic books are big. I’ve loved them forever.

MZ: I also noticed that you taught at the San Francisco Art Institute.That interested me just because I'm in college. What classes did you teach, were there any that you really liked, or did you ever teach anywhere else?

AC: I was in San Francisco for two different times, a fall and a spring semester. Mostly, I got grads, usually a grad seminar, maybe a film one. I loved to teach. I found it really exciting. I loved my students. Teaching in an art school is even better than at a university, because the students were crazier and more open. Among art kids, whatever I offered, they’d go, “Oh, give me crazier.” Which I enjoyed. In different places, I would do a sound class. What was just nice was being able to look at work, talk about work, encourage kids, give them assignments...

San Francisco is fantastic because we would have a night class and then we would all get into a car and go to the beach, afterwards... I taught 16 years at The Museum School in Boston, and I was senior faculty in Film and Animation. It was there I also did undergraduate production, graduate seminars, editing classes...And I instituted a course called “critical issues” where we could focus on women's film, or films from the 70s, or text in film, bring in poetry, or visiting artists. It was much fun.

MZ: It definitely has been a great experience learning and getting to have professors who do classes like that. I think that we do have the same system where the teacher does get to somehow select, like in within a spectrum, the class they're going to teach. And so it's really nice to have the opportunity. As a female filmmaker and sound designer, how do you feel in today's political climate and do you have any advice for female filmmakers or sound designers as to how to get their arts seen and not get held back by constraints?

AC: Well, the constraints are going to be there.You're going to have to fight that the rest of your life. But basically just make work. Make work that you love and find a group of people who share your aesthetic and bond with that. What year are you in college right now?

MZ: I'm in my third year, so I have a year left.

AC: Oh, that’s a good year. Junior year, that's the great year when you know what you are doing. You have to keep working and find a community that supports you so that you can get it out...build what you do. I don't know where you'll go, if you'll do movies or sound, but yeah, you'll figure it out. I mean, L.A. is certainly good for jobs. Do build the community, because that's how you get the jobs. And you may need to take time off, but then you may want to go back to grad school. I know CalArts is a great school for artists…brilliant, brilliant students and everybody gets work coming out of there.

Keep working. You know, be humble about it. Don't expect necessarily to run to the top right away… particularly as a woman, that's harder. Have a community of people who share what you love so that you have people who can help out and people you can help and people who can help get the jobs and move forward.Because you are going to need that community. Film and music are definitely more that way than, say, science.

MZ: I appreciate the advice. I'm definitely heading towards sound design. I also really like sound mixing. I'm not sure where I'll end up, but Vancouver, L.A., and New York—they're all kind of out there with my eyes open. In your latest film Acts & Intermissions, Emma says something along the lines of ”life doesn't leave room for romance.” Do you leave room for romance in your life and do you feel as if that statement is true?

AC: I feel like this trilogy is about women and desire. So there is Mary Shelley, who leaves her country to follow her heart and has five kids, and four die, and he, Percy Shelley, dies after eight years. But she's had the time of her life and wrote the first science fiction book as a teenager, ie. Frankenstein. She was 19. So that's one story. And then Emma Goldman is saying “if I'm devoted to my politics, there's no room for love or no one will tolerate my insistence on my politics.” But as far as my own life, no: I've got plenty of room for desire, romance and sexuality. But I do think it's harder for women to maintain it and to maintain their own...position. Can you have it all? Can you have a family, kids and a career? I think some people do it. I think it's hard. You have to be lucky. You know, a lot of the artists in New York aren't independently wealthy. I am not. I had to work throughout my life. It's a really different way to approach the world and it makes the art world more, unfortunately, unequal.

You can definitely have romance. Artists are complicated people; you might do best to marry a doctor. I am joking. Everybody's got a different thing.

Non-binary is a happening thing right now. There's polyamory, there's many possibilities.

In my newest film, I'm asking those questions: are we building Androids to inherit an earth that we poison? Is that what's going on in our unconscious brain? If there's no room for the body, what do we have?

MZ: It is pretty terrifying to think about all the automation that will come into place in the next few years as well. Can we expect any upcoming work?

AC: I'm trying to finish this new film, which right now I’m calling Origin of the Species.

It's about Androids and humans, and machine interrelation. The first in the trilogy was UNBOUND: revolving around 19th century Mary Shelley and Romanticism. The second was ACTS & INTERMISSIONS, focused on Emma Goldman and Anarchism in the 20th century. In the latest, we find the scientists assume an Android, a static awkward humanoid, is a woman.

My name is Mia Zeidler and I am based in Santa Cruz, California. I am an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz studying Film and Digital Media as well as a minor in Electronic Music Production. I am pursuing a career in Music Supervision and Sound Mixing. This interview was conducted over the phone from Santa Cruz to New York in February, 2020.