Read Jon Gartenberg's Program Note for Abigail Child's THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY

OFFICIAL POSTER FOR ABIGAIL CHILD’S THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY AT THE FILM-MAKERS’ COOPERATIVE, DESIGNED BY MATT McKINZIE.

ABIGAIL CHILD ANSWERING AUDIENCE MEMBERS’ QUESTIONS ABOUT THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY AT THE FILM-MAKERS’ COOPERATIVE; MARCH 28, 2025. SOURCE: MATT MCKINZIE.

On Friday, March 28th, filmmaker and poet Abigail Child presented her feature-length cinematic triptych THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, of which she is a longtime member. THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY is comprised of three films Child created over the span of a decade: CAKE AND STEAK (2004), THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU (2004), and SURF AND TURF (2008—11). Child describes the trilogy as “prismatic” and being “about girlhood and the immigrant dream, focusing on post-WWII North American suburbs and… the war in Europe, critically seen through the lens of gender, property and myths of nation.”

GME President Jon Gartenberg is a longtime friend and collaborator of Child’s and has programmed her work at film festivals internationally, including THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY, which was screened at the Pesaro Film Festival. Child was also a friend and collaborator of filmmaker Warren Sonbert, whose legacy GME represents. Since Sonbert’s untimely passing, GME has worked on an extensive project to preserve, distribute, and curate career retrospectives of his films on an international basis. Child has participated in a number of these career retrospectives, including panels and conversations with Gartenberg about Sonbert’s work, as well as screening her own film, SURFACE NOISE, which pays homage to Sonbert and his montage filmmaking style.

Gartenberg contributed the program note for Child’s screening of THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which can be read in full below:

Renowned film scholar and professor P. Adams Sitney's groundbreaking history of American avant-garde cinema (Visionary Film, 1974) posited the history of the American experimental cinema up until the mid-1970s in the Emersonian poetic tradition of literary romanticism and lyrical sentiment. The work of Abigail Child that emerged in the early 1980s ruptures with that history. She aligned herself with the poets who emphasized the language of the poem and engaged the reader to interact more closely with the text. A poet herself, Child also frequently adopted this approach in her own films, fashioning riveting and dense montage works of radical collisions of image and sound, and of narrative interruption and fragmentation.  

The most noteworthy of her early films in this vein is her seven-part magnum opus Is This What You Were Born For? (1981-1989). In this serial work, Child brings to the fore the themes of power and gender politics in American culture, deconstructing and reconstructing social narratives from a woman filmmaker’s perspective. In my view, with this film, Child emerged as a strong female voice in an experimental film field that was so often at that time associated with men.

In The Suburban Trilogy (2011), Child brings together three separately created films – Cake and Steak (2004), The Future Is Behind You (2004-5), and Surf and Turf (2011). These three films provide a multifaceted and incisive commentary on female identity. In Cake and Steak, Child weaves together a found footage collage in the postwar suburban American culture of suburban houses and their communities. Images such as those of a young girl in dress-up as a bride, girls leaving school with their dolls, cheerleaders twirling batons, basement parties, and mothers modeling their clothes before the camera articulate the social formation of young girls into women and mothers. Periodically, running text underscores the passive role of women in suburban society: “good girl”, “tomboy”, “maid”, “au pair”, and “cook”, to name a few. The dense sonic track comprises old TV show laugh tracks, horror movie music, and the filmmaker’s own field recordings, both underscoring and counterbalancing the rich and dense visual imagery.  Such cinematic techniques from the outset as split-screen images, freeze frames, superimpositions, febrile back and forth vibrations of shots, and abstraction, enhanced by a sonic track of voices, sound effects, and music, serve to fracture the flow of the classic cheerful suburban narrative and put into question the entire role of women in post-WWII society.

In The Future Is Behind You, Child brilliantly transforms an anonymous family archive of European home movie footage from the 1930s into a fictional narrative focusing on two sisters in a Bavarian family under the rise of Nazism. Scenes of the family hiking, skiing, bike riding, and other quotidian activities are backgrounded to images of the two sisters posing before the camera and coming of age, as one learns to kiss girls and the other becomes a bride, with one sister finally emigrating to Palestine and the other with her family to America. The inexorable rise of the Nazi’s persecution of Jews is narrated through the filmmaker’s use of her own created text over images, often in pointed contrast to images of smiling faces of the family members (such as of the uncle who is sent to Dachau). Experimental musician John Zorn’s accompanying soundtrack adds an eerie suspense to the flow of the fictionally constructed story.

The Future Is Behind You is a compelling treatise on three layers of authorial voices: the individual filming the original home movie, the fictional overlaid text by one of the sisters, and the filmmaker herself, Abigail Child, who shapes the entire narrative from the raw 16mm home movie footage. In doing so, Child plays with the temporal sequence of the original reels of footage, editing it to her own adroit constructed vision of the storyline. She puts into question the entire concept of what is fictional and what is real, what is included vs. what is omitted (via black frames and overlaid titles), and the filmmaker’s search for an appropriate ending. This film is an extraordinary commentary on the very construction of history itself, and of the concept of memory that accompanies the recounting of history, as well as a prime model of the freeform and open-ended possibilities inherent in the experimental filmmaking enterprise.

Surf and Turf is an adroit conclusion to this trilogy of films. Leaning on her earlier career in the 1970s as a producer of independent documentaries shot on 16mm, Child presents this work in a more documentary mode than the two other films in this trilogy. This specific movie focuses on the Jewish community in Deal, New Jersey, and brings to the fore her own religious and cultural identity that is written into the subtext of The Future Is Behind You. She elicits candid conversations from a close knit and closed society of Sephardic Jewish Community inhabiting this seaside town, especially between the elderly women at the beach club. In Surf and Turf, Child directly addresses a major focus of her filmmaking enterprise, that of the politics of place and identity. One of the most compelling comments in this film comes from a teenager who reveals, “I know my great-grandma was in the Holocaust, if that means anything.” Surf and Turf therefore reverberates with the inherited trauma of the eradication of Jewish people under Hitler, and strongly links this film with its predecessor, The Future Is Behind You.

Abigail Child is a polymath: experimental filmmaker, language poet, close collaborator with experimental musicians, and author of numerous books. She directs, shoots, and edits her own films. She works in a variety of filmmaking modes, including found footage, documentary, and historical fiction, and addresses issues of personal identity set against the culture at large. As such, she rightly deserves a place in the canonical history of noteworthy experimental filmmakers (irrespective of her gender).

Note: Due to a prior travel commitment, I am sorry not to be with you this evening for what I had hoped would be a spirited conversation with Abby after the screening. Across several decades, we have discussed her films onstage at MoMA (New York), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Pesaro Film Festival (Italy), and the Athens Film Festival (Greece). The audiences at these venues have found our conversations very engaging. All I can say is that Abby has a brilliant mind, and I will miss furthering our dialogue tonight.  Nevertheless, I feel confident that you will be as engaged tonight as I have been with multiple viewings of The Suburban Trilogy.