CAKE AND STEAK

Year2002 Duration21 min. DirectorAbigail Child EditorAbigail Child Webhttp://abigailchild.com/films/cake_steak.htm

This documentary delves into home movies and the post-war American suburban culture to deal with “girl training.” Through keen observation of home-movie archives and slow-down or repetition techniques, Child emphasises movements, looks and poses in films to disclose the domestication of young girls to turn them into “perfect” women. A comedy skirting the sweetest of gestures.

Festivals
Oberhausen 2004, New York Film Festival 2003, Chicago Ear Play Festival 2004, BAM New Wave Festival 2003; Onion City Festival 2004, Festival des Cinemas differents de Paris: NEMO, Paris 2005.

Abigail Child

Abigail Child is a media artist and writer whose original montage pushes the envelope of sound-image relations to make, in the words of LA Weekly “brilliant exciting work…a vibrant political filmmaking that’s attentive to form.” Child is author of This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film (2005), and is currently editing a feature shot in Italy of the life of Percy and Mary Shelley, in the form of imaginary home movies. Child’s films from the 1980s explore sexuality, focusing on radical strategies to rewrite narrative. Child's films are in the collection of Museum of Modern Art, NYC and the Centre Pompidou among others.

Selected filmography
Covert Action (1985)
Mayhem (1987)
B/Side (1996)
Below The New (1999)
Surface Noise (2000)
To and No Fro (2005)
Mirror World (2006)
Ligatures (2009)
Riding the Tiger: Letters from Capitalist China (2010)