Boston Premiere of UNBOUND a new film by Abigail Child

UNBOUND: Scenes from the Life of Mary Shelley.
2013, 69 mins, 16mm, sound.

In Rome for a year at the American Academy, I created imaginary home movies of scenes from the life of Mary and Percy Shelley. I was attracted to these authors — their life of poetry, politics and sexual invention—and inspired by my previous fictionalizing of home movies in Covert Action and The Future is Behind You. I worked with non-actors, the seasons and the extraordinary architecture and landscapes of Italy where the Shelleys were in exile for six of their eight years together.
The result was a feature film A Shape of Error, gorgeous, emotional and harnessed to the narrative. I wanted to go further and abetted by digital technology, I have ‘exploded’ the film. The result is UNBOUND, digressive, looped, unpredictable, symphonic, spontaneous, messy—like life and memory. Music by Zeena Parkins.

Filmmaker Abigail Child in attendance.

“gorgeous… ahead of the curve …. mixing narrative, avantgarde and expanded cinema. ….I loved the images, the swish pan of tree tops and the backwards fireworks; the hallway images of the pregnant Claire. And it’s shot in film! The whole piece just amazed me. It was one of the most satisfying cinematic experiences I’ve had in a long, long time….” —Tina Wasserman
UNBOUND is at once a mischievous scuttling of BBC costume drama and the creative anachronism of home movies before the invention of film. The results are of a kind that only Child could achieve: a playful mastery of form, and never-wavering attention to the past’s connection with the present. —Jim Supanick
” beautiful without being sentimental; abstract without losing a profound sense of humanity; critical while also singing. The film has the spontaneity and inevitability of great music.” —Danica Mill
“You took me back to the sunstruck crushed-velvet early 1970s, where I lolled and loved and lusted with just these sort of people, though studiously avoiding getting anybody pregnant.” — Michael Walsh
UNBOUND: Scenes from the Life of Mary Shelley, a film that transforms the earlier feature, A Shape of Error, exploding time and memory in Child’s signature style. The result as Adeena Karasick describes it is an inversion of narrative, a co­optation—”full of rupture, rapture scapturous apertures constantly re­siting romanticism through an infinitely caressing yet explosively luxuriant lens.”

Selected Exhibitions: 2012: Rotterdam Film Festival; CCCB (Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona) Spain; BIM (Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento), Argentina; Starz Denver Film Festival • Directors’ Pick; 2013; The Indie Fest, La Jolla Cal • Award of Excellence; Keats Shelley House, Rome, co-sponsored by The American Academy in Rome; Seattle Film Festival; Anthology Film Archive NYC.