PREVIEW
MM (nee Mary Magdalene) Serra is an important figure of the New York avant-garde film community. For over 30 years she has been the Director of the Filmmakers Cooperative, and she is also a filmmaker in her own right. Speaking from a queer perspective, Serra is the author of nearly 40 films, selections from which were recently screened in a retrospective at the Millenium Film Workshop. In one of these films, she recounts her own sexual violation as a young child.
The human body in MM Serra’s films does not appear in neutral form. It is not always submerged behind the illusion of the film image, or by the complexities of conventional narrative, or even within the comfortable boundaries of gender difference. Rather, it becomes exposed as sensate matter. It is a queer cinema, on many levels, but here too Serra breaks established norms, now from the 1960s and 1970s male dominated avant garde film. One needs only to think of the celebratory and astounding films of Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol to note that Serra’s films are not a rejection of those past works. Instead, they are an addition, by way of a new sensibility. Serra is a women making queer cinema, and the results are different in kind, tone, and in effect. Or, as Serra’s working-class mother told her when she was a 5-year-old child, “Mary Magdalene, you are queer….
For the full article please visit this link to Quarterly Review of Film and Video
