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Part of the series Dirty Looks at MoMAfilmmakers Abigail Child + Julie Zando in attendance!
PROGRAM:
Abigail Child, Mayhem, 1987, 16mm, B&W, sound, 20min.
Julie Zando, Uh-Oh!, 1994, video, color, 39min.
Turning pop culture on its head, Abigail Child's Mayhem and Julie Zando's Uh-Oh! queer Hollywood cinema and pulp fiction through montage and appropriation. In the process, the two filmmakers put forward radical alternatives to given conventions of female sexuality.
Child's film incorporates original footage and found pornographic material in a rapid-fire montage of sequences of objectification. Julie Zando adapts Pauline Reage's Story of O for the 1990s, with a cowboy garbed Eileen Myles assuming the position of mastery.
Poet, essayist and filmmaker Abigail Child sees her creations as a curious and particular intersection, often humorous, sometimes alchemical, between sound and image. Bodies, fetishes, symbols, icons and relics are reinvented and refitted to new realities and new desires. The total assembly is a movement metaphorically (with the ghostly re-emergence of Griffith on one side and on the other Eisenstein), and the images and poetic rhythms use structure as a magnifying glass to uncover the lies and injustices of history. Child’s film cycle, Is This What You Were Born For (1981–89), is a landmark of contemporary avant-garde cinema, and her recent works continue to be widely shown and celebrated. Films include Peripeteia I (1977), Perils (1986), Mayhem (1987), The Future is Behind You (2004–05), Mirror World (2006) and Ligatures (2009).
Julie Zando is a videomaker and former director of Squeaky Wheel Film and Video Coalition in Buffalo, New York. Her work exploits the raw and edgy properties of Hi-8 video with potent results while investigating the intermingling issues of power, sexual identity, and desire. Her work has shown nationally and internationally. In 1994 she was a recipient of the American Film Institute's Maya Deren Award.
The screening will take place on the roof of MoMA PS1. Each event is accompanied by Dirty Looks at MoMA: Mining the Collection, a reader featuring contributions by Abigail Child, Malik Gaines, Lia Gangitano, Ronald Gregg, James Hansen, David Everitt Howe, Wayne Koestenbaum, Priscilla Layne, Karl McCool, Eileen Myles, Bradford Nordeen, Luther Price and Lior Shamriz.