Abigail Child: We Cannot Control the Pacing of this Movie

Watching an Abigail Child film for the first time feels like being bombed, tricked and tickled all at once. She interweaves seemingly unending arrays of stimuli drawn from bottomless piles of culture, all sources levelled up. She arranges them in sequences and submits them to layering, constant interruptions and repetitions, like someone tuning the radio, or hopping back and forth between TV channels. Sometimes there is synchrony between sound and image, or some continuity in the ordering of space and time—conventional cinematic cues that prompt the mind to search for meaning, recognize patterns and anticipate effects. But before we get too comfortable and savvy, Child thwarts those expectations and forces us to think again. Over the last forty years, she has used her multiple creative practices to explore meaning and culture in both serious and playful ways. Her work started to break new ground in the 1980s, engaging with the cultural voracity of the all-consuming eyes and ears of the multichannel TV generation, and with the DIY attitude and wholesale rejections of punk.

Through Child’s work we can see ways in which ideas, texts and audiovisual images are adopted, adapted and shared in popular culture, resulting in a sustained argument about how culture is comprised of a never-ending process of circulation and connection.

Found Footage Magazine is an independent and printed film journal distributed worldwide. It offers theoretical, analytical, and informative content that hinges on the use of archival images in media production practices.

FFM fills the void created by the fact that there has not been, up to this time, any forum for the collection and dissemination of information, critical thinking, and discussion of found footage cinema including all its manifestations: recycled cinema, audiovisual essay, collage animation, compilation film, archival cinema, mash-up, super-cut…

FFM accommodates a selection of articles and sections aimed at exploring issues of ethics, politics, form, and content related to the culture of recycled cinema: monographs, interdisciplinary essays, interviews, and opinion pieces concerning the eclectic universe of found footage filmmaking.

It is not available digitally. See https://foundfootagemagazine.com