Writings on film from an award-winning filmmaker and poet.As the writer, director, producer, and cinematographer of almost all her 30 films, videos, and shorts, Abigail Child has been recognized as a major and influential practitioner of experimental cinema since the early 1970s. Hallmarks of her style are the appropriation and reassembly of found footage and fragments from disparate visual sources, ranging from industrial films and documentaries to home movies, vacation photography, and snippets of old B movies. The resulting collages and montages are cinematic narratives that have been consistently praised for their beauty and sense of wonder and delight in the purely visual. At the same time, Child's films are noted for their incisive political commentary on issues such as gender and sexuality, class, voyeurism, poverty, and the subversive nature of propaganda. In the essays of This Is Called Moving, Child draws on her long career as a practicing poet as well as a filmmaker to explore how these two language systems inform and cross-fertilize her work. For Child, poetry and film are both potent means of representation, and by examining the parallels between them—words and frames, lines and shots, stanzas and scenes—she discovers how the two art forms re-construct and re-present social meaning, both private and collective.

This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Humor & Entertainment

Child, Abigail

Movies

University Alabama Press

Writings on film from an award-winning filmmaker and poet. 
As the writer, director, producer, and cinematographer of almost all her 30 films, videos, and shorts, Abigail Child has been recognized as a major and influential practitioner of experimental cinema since the early 1970s. Hallmarks of her style are the appropriation and reassembly of found footage and fragments from disparate visual sources, ranging from industrial films and documentaries to home movies, vacation photography, and snippets of old B movies. 
The resulting collages and montages are cinematic narratives that have been consistently praised for their beauty and sense of wonder and delight in the purely visual. At the same time, Child's films are noted for their incisive political commentary on issues such as gender and sexuality, class, voyeurism, poverty, and the subversive nature of propaganda. 
In the essays of This Is Called Moving, Child draws on her long career as a practicing poet as well as a filmmaker to explore how these two language systems inform and cross-fertilize her work. For Child, poetry and film are both potent means of representation, and by examining the parallels between them—words and frames, lines and shots, stanzas and scenes—she discovers how the two art forms re-construct and re-present social meaning, both private and collective.

Poetry. "Reading A MOTIVE FOR MAYHEM is a shattering experience. Like Child's films, the text motivates the reader into a space where time moves in multiple directions, forcing constant reshaping of cherished figures-including the naturally erroneous position of the girl. Between the complex layers, abstract and highly visual at the same time, one glimpses a new ethic of the text. Its folds, its remarkably intelligent movement enchant us"-Gail Scott. "A MOTIVE FOR MAYHEM is an extravaganza of jumps & starts & angles..."-Charles Bernstein.

A Motive for Mayhem

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Potes & Poets Press

From Solids

Roof Books

Poetry. "SCATTER MATRIX unfolds like a map, grid tracing multiple possibilites of language and form. Here is a scale, and a sense of time, where the score offers discrete signatures: 3 and 4 line measures upon which words balance or pivot forward. The result is a cumulation, a sense of connection along the diagonal, spins and collisions, slow fades and vaporous dissolves. Abigail Child's work invites productive inquiry and rewards readerly attention, to (the means of) the production of meaning, a late 20th century witness"--Erica Hunt.

Scatter Matrix

Contemporary

Nabu Press

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Winner of the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Departing from Abigail Child's previous books of poetry, MOUTH TO MOUTH spans the past two decades focusing on a series of romantic and sexual relationships with both women and men. From inside the sexual whirlwind of these relations and after, Child's attention to language as embodied material highlights how mediated and multiple layers of desire can be just as thrilling and physical on the page. Even as this divergent collection of writing ranges through these relationships, it also ranges through poetic methodologies, using computers as a writerly id and organizing principle, employing constraints and aleatory processes, and recalling the body's desires in a constant process of titillation, problematization, and ongoing translation.

MOUTH TO MOUTH

EOAGH Books

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Books by Child, Abigail

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Child, Abigail. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

A Motive for Mayhem

From Solids

Scatter Matrix

Mob

MOUTH TO MOUTH