Prefaces Is This What You Were Born For? (Part 1)1981

"Like ORNAMENTALS, PREFACES is an abstract work which plays with formalist elements in a wide range of images on color and negative stock. It becomes a kind of 'preconscious' of the two completed films to follow, whose scope and image bank are more narrowly defined. The rapid-fire cross cutting of the images is extended to the construction of the sound track, which is also a dense panoply of fragments. What results is an impressive musique concrete composition, a collage of 'female' sounds interwoven with others: snippets from vocal music, conversations, poetry reading etc. Child plays with memory, not only her own and the world's, but also cinema's: its conventions, polarizations (man/woman) and hierarchization of images." – Robert Hilferty, New York Native