CHAIR Ronald Gregg ~ Columbia University
CO-CHAIR Drake Stutesman ~ Framework: Journal of Cinema and Media
MM Serra ~ Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York City ~ Reflections on Her Filmwork, Curating & Admin Work
Vera Dika ~ New Jersey City University ~ MM Serra’s Influence on Erotic, Feminist Exp Film
Chris Straayer ~ New York University ~ MM Serra: Working Class Artist/Arts Administrator
Anne Hanavan ~ Independent Filmmaker and Performance Artist ~ MM Serra and the Lower East Side Avant-Garde Scene
Ger Zielinski ~ Toronto Metropolitan University ~ MM Serra’s Prolific Legacy at Filmmakers’ Coop
SPONSORSHIP Film and Media Festivals Scholarly Interest Group
Beyond the mainstream narrative of LGBTQ+ rights, there are many unspoken truths within the queer community. Yet we rarely hold space to unpack the dialogues on how we live, survive, and often struggle. This film screening and panel discussion focuses on topics such as sex work, addiction, and classism. The films, by MM Serra and Devon Narine-Singh (who will also moderate), present a range of styles from narrative film to experimental. Often narratives around queerness do not hold space for the in-between moments and the internal struggles within the community. The goal of this screening and discussion is to create a nuanced space for students to feel both safe and able to reflect.
In Venice, MM Serra (with Susan Salinger) will begin pre-production and production: researching the multi-textured, historic Venetian locations, documenting the luminous visions, reflections, within Venice’s waterways, soundscapes, and landscapes through its architecture. Our content will weave the lives of Venetian women, past and present, who saw the city as a sanctuary and a vehicle to reinvent themselves. Women such as Peggy Guggenheim who dedicated her life to her modern art collection, turning her life into a living museum: Veronica Franco, the 16th century prostitute & poet, who created a hospice for courtesans and their children, and defended herself against the accusation of witchcraft before the inquisition, a common accusation levied against prostitutes: Marquise Luisa Casati Stampa, the 19th century androgynous cultural icon, who declared herself a living, walking art piece, the ultimate performance artist.
Experimental Woman is a curation of five rarely-seen films by the renowned New York filmmaker and art star, MM Serra. MM has been essential to the landscape of the underground film scene in New York City for several decades. This very special screening will be followed by a discussion with the artist and the curator of this show.
Installation of the 9th annual New York University Lecture (2018) and a screening of Jack Smith's Apartment at Program - 23 in Paris - May 2023
Venue: Café des Arts (in the backyard of Cité internationale des Arts, Paris)
Dates: 28.03., 18.04., 16.05.2023
"Jack Smith's Apartment is a truly important work---this is the sort of thing that needs to be preserved by art museums, yes, but I would argue Historical societies as well! You dared to preserve something beautiful which was at the risk of destruction and loss to time---this is one of the highest purposes that cinema is capable of. Watching it on the big screen at MoMA welled up feelings in me that what we do is part of a legacy of art in this city that's so unfathomably bigger than any of us and lives forever if we strive to keep it alive."
--- Joe Wakeman
This program was curated by MM Serra and Joe Wakeman for Millennium Film Workshop and Roxy Cinema New York. Special Thanks to Azazel Jacobs, Illyse Singer (Roxy Cinema), Tom Otterness and Millennium Board Secretary Coleen Fitzgibbon.
FILMS:
TWO WRENCHING DEPARTURES (2006, 90 min)
OTHER URBAN LIVES (2023, 6 min)
TWO WRENCHING DEPARTURES: Life ended, for separate health reasons, for two “underground” avant-garde filmmakers: Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith, a few days apart in late 1989. The two had been cinema-mad cohorts of film-artist Ken Jacobs in pre-fashionable Lower East Side, NYC in the 1950s. Jacob’s seminal BLONDE COBRA is founded on remaining footage, shot by Fleischner of Smith, which survived a fire in Smith’s apartment. TWO WRENCHING DEPARTURES, is a tribute to the life-force of Jacobs’ fellow artists and a digital version of the his live Nervous System film-performance presented at The American Museum of the Moving Image weeks after they died. At first, Fleisher is seen hopping and skipping toward the camera on a back street in lower Manhattan, happily jittering in a back and forth, energetically overlapping, staccato etude. Jack then takes over, lordly and absurd. This digital rescue of the transient theater-piece was assisted by Flo Jacobs and Erik Nelson.
Memorial for Jonas Mekas
"From Light to Light"
Venice Italy - April 2023
BrickFlix and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative co-present this lush selection of erotic films. Dripping with tension and corporeal pleasure, these films explore the human body through a wide range of sexual expression: self-love, forbidden love, the carnal subversion of norms, and the dangers of sensuality will all be on display here, caught in the act of mechanical reproduction!
Programmed in conjunction with Filmmaker’s Co-op and Museum of Sex.
“The Deadman charts the adventures of a nearly naked heroine who leaves the corpse of her dead lover in a country house, goes to a bar and sets in motion a scabrous free-form orgy before returning to her house to die. The film manages to approximate the transgressive poetic prose of Bataille (a mixture of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor) while celebrating female sexual desire without the usual patriarchal-porn trimmings.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader Made with Keith Sanborn. Featuring performances by Jennifer Montgomery, Roman Quanta la Gusta, Scott Shat, Diane Torr and Leslie Singer.
A series of holiday- and winter-themed films selected collaboratively by our staff! Tonight we will be focusing on community, the changing of the seasons, and the whirl of images on film.
PROGRAM:
Marie Menken, LIGHTS (1966, color, silent, 6.5 min)
Storm De Hirsch, WINTERGARDEN. HUDSON RIVER DIARY BOOK: III (1973, color, sound, 5 min)
Faith Hubley, VOYAGE TO NEXT (1974, color, sound, 10 min)
Heather McAdams, HOLIDAY MAGIC (1985, color and B&W, sound, 7 min)
Howard Everngram, HOLIDAY (1960, color, silent, 4 min)
Jerome Hill, MERRY CHRISTMAS (1969, color, sound, 3 min)
James Livingston, THE HOLIDAY SPIRIT (1981, color, sound, 21 min)
Stan Brakhage, BLACK ICE (1994, color, silent, 5 min)
Shirley Erbacher, SNOW (1965, color, silent, 3.5 min)
TALK WITH BROOKLYN RAIL
Alchemy, the Metaphysical, and Psychic Automatism with MM Serra, Ann McCoy, Olga Spiegel, and Andrew Woolbright
Hosting Recycled Images Pratt Institute
with Ethan Spigland - November 2022
TALK WITH BROOKLYN RAIL
Alchemy, the Metaphysical, and Psychic Automatism with
MM Serra, Ann McCoy, Olga Spiegel, and Andrew Woolbright
A screening and gallery exhibition of work by artists who use the outdoors as a tool.
Films by MM Serra, Peter Cramer, & Jack Waters
Endless Possibilities and Divine Possibilities by MM Serra (2021/2003) TRT: 24 minutes
Two shorts by MM Serra. Artist portraits of the Lower East Side and the community activism that has been long a part of it.
Polaroid installation from my East village garden and Bellville Paris; curated by Holly Overton
Summer Screening Series:
Marie Menken and Charles Henri Ford
curated with MM Serra of FMC - July 2022
Program:
Marie Menken’s Lights (1966)
Marie Menken’s Glimpse of the Garden (1957)
Charles Henri Ford’s Poem Posters (1967)
Screening from Black Hole
Cinema atelier MTK
and Film-Makers Cooperative
at Braquage in Paris - June 2022
On the centennial anniversary of the birth of Jonas Mekas, the Monira Foundation will present a year-long celebration of the pioneering filmmaker’s works and life at Mana Contemporary’s Jersey City location.
Tales of Visions of Community with MM Serra: To Jonas, with Love - Curated by MM Serra
"Jack Smith's Apartment is a truly important work–-this is the sort of thing that needs to be preserved by art museums, yes, but I would argue Historical societies as well! You dared to preserve something beautiful which was at the risk of destruction and loss to time–-this is one of the highest purposes that cinema is capable of. Watching it on the big screen at MoMA welled up feelings in me that what we do is part of a legacy of art in this city that's so unfathomably bigger than any of us and lives forever if we strive to keep it alive." –- Joe Wakeman
Programmer of "The New York City Symphonies of the Millennium Film Workshop, February 16 - 17, 2022
Screened April 26th, 2022 at Rhode Island School of Design as part of Ecosystems curated by Devon Narine-Singh
To Jonas with Love presented at Survival curated by Devon Narine-Singh - November 2021
St Michaels and Hughes-Freeland will be part of the panel discussion, as well as MM Serra, filmmaker and director of the New American Cinema Group aka Film-Makers’ Cooperative, New York City. This event is the continuation of an exhibition co-curated by Hughes-Freeland and St Michaels in Gothenburg, Sweden, in February 2020.
Extending from the time of the 60s sexual revolution to the current decade, the films illustrate how an array of aspects of sexuality is represented in different forms and cinematic styles by women filmmakers including MM Serra, Beth B, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, Gunvor Nelson, Johanna St Michaels, Maria Beatty, and Tessa Hughes-Freeland.
One person show curated by Devon Narine-Singh of MM Serra’s portrait work, centering garden, life. care and abstraction Held at Sixth and B Garden in the Lower East Side.
Online exhibition
James Fuentes Gallery
55 Delancey Street New York, NY 10002
To Jonas with Love presented at Survival curated by Devon Narine-Singh - November 2021
MM SERRA presented a lecture and screening at the Louvre auditorium in Paris, France on December 1st, 2019. It was held as the Petit Galerie in the Louvre as part of their cycling exhibitions highlighting Renaissance artists such as DaVinci and Michelangelo. The exposition, “Figure d’artiste,” focused on the cinematographic self portrait found in documentary, experimental, and avant-garde film. Serra’s emphasis in the lecture,Visionaries: Self-portraits by experimental filmmakers Marie Menken, Storm de Hirsch, Carolee Schneemann and MM Serra, was on women, literature, and self-portraits in the avant-garde pantheon. Filmmakers and speakers included Raymond Bellour, Pip Chodorov, Ross McElwee, Boris Lehman, and Agnes Varda.
Fábio Andrade, critic and filmmaker
Last September, the department of Cinema Studies at NYU held its ninth annual Experimental Lecture, focused on M. M. Serra. I was familiar with Serra’s work in the Film-Maker’s Cooperative, but I had yet to see her films, which cover a vast range of materials and styles—from found footage to reenactment, from documentary to performance—in their kaleidoscopic exploration of the body. Much of her work is available on Vimeo, and I recommend starting here. Her lecture that night was an enactment of an ethos, inscribing filmmaking into a broader practice of archival excavation, creative interaction, intellectual elaboration, cinephilia, preservation, distribution, and exhibition, and moving seamlessly from self-reflection to self-projection. Serra closed the evening with a surprise screening of Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963), with a dual 16 mm projection. The projectionists interacted with the film, coloring it in real time and holding filters in front of the light beam, and reanimating Rubin’s daring approach to the body and the camera as a unique cinematic orgy. The reality of cinema as a chain of bodily interactions never felt this palpable.
Click here to view the lecture
Click here to view MM’s article “The Films of MM Serra: Art(core) and the Explicit Body” (Frameworks Vol. 59, No. 2)
Refusing to rationalize the female body and the phenomenological experiences found within, the films in this program aim to provoke both desire and fear. Moving between identifiable locations like the Lower East Side and the pure fantasy of ritual, what may appear everyday and mundane can change quickly into the unrecognizable. Propelled by belief in the mystical, the power of melodrama, and the overriding influence of affect, a gothic sensibility imbues these films’ ambiguous territories and their strange discoveries.
Make, Believe generates a dialogue between the work of artists in The Maslow Collection and artists working with the moving image. The films and videos of Basma Alsharif, Nazlı Dinçel, Julie Harrison & Neil Zusman, David Haxton and M.M. Serra all, in their respective ways, interrogate the notion of the acceptance of reality.
