This selection of New York experimental filmmaker Abigail Child's recent work highlights her investigations of narrative, not so much the stories told, as the strategies of telling. Her newly completed series Is This What You Were Born For? consists of seven parts, each of which stands on its own, and which together comprise a complex, provocative exploration of power and gender relationships. While numbered chronologically, they are conceived of more as a “map” than a linear progression, with a concurrent emphasis on reading signs and making choices. And like the best maps, Child's series offers the potential for circuitous routes, tempting digressions and viable alternatives. For Child, the road traveled is less important than the process of traveling. When she traverse the well-trod terrain of documentary, melodrama, silent film and soap opera, she leaves the stones overturned, the bedrock exposed. Her project is subversive, deconstructing conventions-narrative, social and ideological-to construct alternatives.
