The Future is Behind You/ Cake and Steak

The Future is Behind You / Cake and Steak
Abigail Child, 2004, 20 min each, film to video


The next time I watch a piece by Abigail Child, I will be sure to bring headphones. The soundtracks to her work are equally as important as their image content, which I hadn’t realized until reading Scott Macdonalds interview with her.
The Future Is Behind You uses footage of a Bavarian family, and although it is the second part to Cake and Steak, it is very different in that it has a distinct plot. The story is secondary to Childs use of the footage to explore gesture, which links it back to Cake and Steak, and by the fact that she uses editing to create the drama of the movie, rather than depending on actual drama in the found footage.
Music is the primary source of the movies drama, moving the story along. She also employs digital editing to add inter-titles, layers, and subtitles which explain the family’s fictional lives.
Childs focus on gestures throughout The Future is fascinating to watch. She slows down and/or repeats moments which would otherwise flit by on the screen. In one such example, at the beginning of the movie, she repeats a slowed down and enlarged shot of a girl kissing another girl, who we are told is her sister. This otherwise non-remarkable gesture is made meaningful through this edit, we pause to think about the girls relationship to the sister. In this movie, the soundtrack is tied to the images more so than in her other movies.
I loved watching this one, it was delightful, not because of the content but because of what it did. I definitely took a lot away from it. I’ve been trying to figure out the different effects on the reading of a film that Abigail Childs inter-titles and subtitles make, versus those of Su Friedrich. Another connection to a movie for this class was made in Cake and Steak, which used words as a structure for the film. This is similar to Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim, but not as strict. It reminded me of my grandmother. She is a painter. Sometimes, to give herself a “problem” on the canvas to work out, she will paint a sentence onto the canvas, using it as a structure over which to paint shapes of color, until the sentence is no longer visible but some hint of the original “structure” of the sentence remains.
Obviously the words used in these films were relevant to it’s readings, but the connection I made to the paintings made me think more about the other, hidden structures of Abigail Child’s films.