This Is Called Moving

Download or read book This Is Called Moving written by Abigail Child and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2005-06-26 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. 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.