Avant garde filmmaker Child revels in creating 'off space' on camera

All is quiet in the Jimmy Stewart Theater Tuesday afternoon, October 15. Experimental filmmaker and poet Abigail Child, here on campus to screen and discuss her work, has just spoken about the importance of sound in her films. In the audience, erudite academics, earnest film studies students and the odd member of public watch the screen intently as the numbers wind their way down to the opening shot: darkness.

The tinny sound of an old black-and-white movie soundtrack fills the room, gradually spiraling into a discordant tune. Still no image on the screen, but we sit, contemplative. Finally, the wiry-haired artist pipes up from the front of the room – a technical error has occurred. The use of sound may be central to her work, but we are supposed to see something onscreen.

With what is termed avant-garde work, we never quite know what to expect - except, perhaps, to be challenged, surprised, and probably befuddled. Since the late 1970s, Child's work has been pushing audiences to reconsider their assumptions about gender and social class, and to rethink their conceptions of reality. Her fragmented, spliced and looped montages, sometimes made entirely from found footage (material shot by others that the artist uses in his or her work, such as home movies) are not easy on the eye. Instead, they interrogate the structure of film narrative and the manipulative nature of the cinematic medium.

But this energetic powerhouse clad in a black pantsuit is certainly no sterotypical holier-than-thou Suffering Artist. She speaks candidly and clearly about her craft, taking questions in between screenings about the ideas and processes that go into the creation of her collage-like films.

"I don't try to make my work difficult," Child said. "What I want to do is to make people conscious. I want to make audiences come alive. I want them to have to think after watching my films, because this is what I want from art myself."

Upon graduating, however, the Harvard and Yale alum hardly expected that she would become an artist. With a degree in anthropology, Child had anticipated a career as an anthropologist in South America. Even today, she thinks of herself as an "ethnographer of urban spaces". It perhaps comes as no surprise, then, that Child began her filmmaking career as an investigative journalist, producing and directing documentaries about the underbelly of urban society for NBC.

The medium of television journalism soon proved to be "too patterned" for the restless artist's liking. Instead, she found herself drawn to what she terms "off spaces" – spaces where "the camera goes off, and people drop their masks."

Child was also uncomfortable with the fact that she was a middle class filmmaker making documentaries about the under classes, for she felt that she was "making a career out of others' unhappiness." This "impatience" with the documentary form, and her sense of "moral responsibility to the image" eventually made her decide to return to a more "painterly and sculptural relationship with the image," which marked the beginning of a body of cutting-edge work that she continues to build on.

The way in which Child likens her filmmaking to a variety of other art forms displays the sheer breadth of her artistic vision. When a member of the audience refers to the short clips and tableaus in her films as "snippets," she responds, "It's not a snippet - I see it as a note, a phrase, or a chord. I love jazz."

She conceives of film as "architecture of time" and she refers to the editing process as sculpting. She compares the project she is working on at present, a series of three films that stand independently, to a novel with many chapters.

Child's latest project marks a shift from urban to suburban spaces, and is made entirely from found footage. Because of this, she is itching to get behind the camera again.

We caught a preview of two of these chapters, "Where The Girls Come From" (2002) and "Cake + Steak" (2002), which were screened with "Dark Dark" (2001), "Perils" (1985-1987) and "Covert Action" (1984), the latter two being part of a seven-part series entitled "Is This What You Were Born For?"

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While Child once referred to herself as a "leftist documentarian," her work is not overtly political, despite the recurring themes of gender and class in her films. Instead, her work inhabits that "off space" that she explores so skillfully. She herself cautions the viewer against reading her films as being purely didactic, or dismissing them as being completely whimsical.

It is this ambiguity that ultimately makes Child's work so rich, as it allows for a multiplicity of readings. These grey areas and gaps are what keep the inquisitive artist inspired.

"It is when things start falling apart that I find the most interesting," she said. "Working in this space forces you to jump out of your skin, and really create."