Round-Up of Recent Arrivals: New Exhibition Files from Abigail Child, Craig Baldwin, Charlotte Pryce, Lewis Klahr

Posted December 8th, 2020 in New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, New Films, News / Events

Over the past few months, we’ve added many new exhibition files to our digital collection, including for the following films:


Mutiny (Abigail Child, 1983, 11 min, color, sound, digital file or 16mm)

“This movie is a new kind of classic, it has invented once and for all the machine-gun sound of explosives and composed sentences with speeded-up speech and wild singing, laughter, hardly [at] all understandable, with violins screeching like falling bombs and a Hispanic grind dance …. There are tender closeups in interviews with women, and marvelous documents of dancers, street performers, all races & styles. These are brave and straight-talking people; this is a feminist film, and it is important. All the sound makes a talky song of many voices.”
– Anne Robertson, X-Dream



Bulletin (Craig Baldwin, 2015, 6 min, b&w, sound, digital file)

An exploded view of a ballistic issue. With Big Pharma and the NRA lurking just outside the frame, a mid-century media-archeological marvel unpacks the triangulated discourse of familial patriarchy.

“Strong medicine for sensitive people”



Discoveries on the Forest Floor 1-3 (Charlotte Pryce, 2007, 5 min, color, silent, digital file or 16mm)

Three Miniature, Illuminated, Heliographic studies of plants, observed and imagined. The individual titles of the films are: Burnt Umber/ pale ochre/ Burnt Umber, The Talk of Lichen on a Lonely Day, Those whose Attachment to the Earth is but Tentative.



Altair (Lewis Klahr, 1994, 8 min, color, sound, digital file or 16mm)

Altair offers a cutout animation version of color noir. The images were culled from six late ’40s issues of Cosmopolitan magazine and set to an almost four-minute section of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” (looped twice) to create a sinister, perfumed world. As in my 1988 visit to this genre, In the Month of Crickets, the narrative is highly smudged leaving legible only the larger signposts of the female protagonist’s story. The viewer is encouraged to speculate on the nature and details of the woman’s battle with large, malevolent societal forces and her descent into an alcoholic swoon. However I feel it is important to add that what interested me in making this film was very little of what is described above but instead a fascination with the color blue and some intangible association it has for me with the late 1940s.