Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media

This response to the vagaries of human existence, the weakness of the flesh, especially female flesh, gave me pause for thought. It indicated on the one hand, that the Virgin Mary knew much better than God the ins and outs so to speak of human nature, what we were up to, and that she had a tolerance and intelligence and humor that was perhaps missing from the male godhead.

—Diane di Prima²

In 1991, MM Serra made Mary Magdaline³ with three of her longtime collaborators, Peggy Ahwesh, Abigail Child, and Tom Chomont. Lauded by Stan Brakhage as "one of the very few and one of the most important films on child abuse that has been made in the history of cinema,"⁴ Mary Magdaline shows Serra vulnerably, yet boldly, reclaiming autonomy through the excavation of childhood trauma. This record of three therapeutic sessions displays painful reenactments, eliciting confessions from Serra's abusive past through a distinctive lens described by Child as "a successful voyeurism."⁵ The film is at once an intimate examination of Serra's early life and a testament to a woman and artist asserting control over her personal narrative. In 2017, Serra made a second film by (nearly) the same name called Mary Magdalene—spelled with an "e" rather than an "i"—forgetting she had used the title twenty-six years earlier. Reflecting on the figure of Serra's namesake as an embodiment of the woman-as-flesh, Mary Magdalene (US, 2017) brings together the analogue and the digital in this layered meditation on the fluidity and contingency of gender and personal mythology. Serra attributes the misspelling in the first film to an error on her birth certificate. She believes whoever was responsible for writing her legal name must have splattered the ink, creating a small dot or imperfection between the "l" and "n," rendering ambiguous the vowel in question. Unfazed by this discrepancy, she has remarked, "I spelled my name wrong, don't worry about it … it's hard to remember, it's only through my films that I remember."⁶ [End Page 32]

Cases of multiple identity are not uncommon in Serra's life, nor is it uncommon for the minute details of her life to slip through the cracks. Known as Mary Magdalene Serra, MM Serra, or simply MM to peers, collaborators, friends, and loved ones, she is impossible to reduce to a single impression. Even the name MM—which fittingly corresponds to the abbreviation for millimeters (mm) in the measurement of film gauge—appears inconsistently, sometimes written with two periods (M.M.) and sometimes without.⁷ There are many MMs, as she maintains that "the single most important thing for [her] as an artist is a resistance to categorization."⁸ This sentiment resonates most upon closer examination of the polymorphous expanse of her life's work. Perhaps known best as the Executive Director of the Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York City for over 30 years, MM is a fixture of the experimental filmmaking community. She has curated dozens of programs, globally, and her work has been shown at MoMA, the Louvre, the National Gallery of Art, Tribeca Film Festival, and numerous other institutions. Her films, over 34 and counting, have been entered into Anthology Film Archives, Film-Makers' Co-op, and The Library of Congress. She has received several awards, including two Kathy Acker Lifetime Achievement Awards for Avant-Garde Filmmaking, and most recently a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant (sponsored by Millennium Film Workshop) for her work in and around New York City's community gardens. She has taught courses on cinema as an adjunct professor at The New School since 1998 and published her writings in Millennium Film Journal, Framework, and contributed a chapter entitled "Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann" to Robin Blaetz's Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks published by Duke University Press in 2007.

In inhabiting these many roles—filmmaker, curator, Coop director, professor, author, and more—MM has evolved into an enduring and vital figure of the American avant-garde, yet only traces of MM's early life and her creative output in the years predating her career as a filmmaker are visible outside of her own films. Although her oeuvre offers an infinitely rich and extensive biographical tapestry, documenting decades living in New York City's Lower East Side among prolific artists, intellectuals, neighbors, and friends, this history offers an alternative yet comprehensive view of MM's world. Serving as a testament to the integral role she has played in the lives of many who have passed before her camera, stood behind it alongside her, or set foot into the archives or into the classroom with her, this piece aims to be not only a "successful voyeurism" but a contribution to her archive so that it is not only through the films that we remember.

Mary Magdalene Serra was raised in a working class, Roman Catholic family in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, a small factory town in the state's Southwest [End Page 33] corner. Her grandfather, from Northern Italy, worked in the coal mines with her father, who was a union organizer. Her mother Josephine, whose life is the focus of one of MM's earliest films Real to Reel Momma (US, 1982), was a factory worker and a first-generation immigrant from Abruzzo, Southern Italy. MM's mother named her Mary Magdalene after her grandmother and for the only woman disciple of Jesus in the New Testament. To MM, this was a prescient gesture, bestowing her with a sense of possibility and duality, born from the mythology of the double life of Mary Magdalene. From a very young age, she has felt keenly this sense of dichotomy—of the virgin and the whore—instilling in her an innate curiosity about the capaciousness of identity, what it means to be a woman, and what it means to have a body. She suggests this has colored every facet of her life, propelling her towards the iconoclastic, the marginal, and to think in queer terms. In an interview with Josie Willems, MM describes the prophetic power of her name: "It was a name that empowered me to choose an identity, to think about my identity."⁹ In a conversation with her mother at the age of four, MM first experienced this sense of otherness when her mother asked her, "Do you know what your problem is, Mary Magdalene? You're queer."¹⁰ Since then, MM has asked herself, "What is queer?" or, what does it mean to be queer? MM argues that living a queer lifestyle transcends sexuality and encapsulates the many possible ways of resisting convention: "'Queer' allows you to be alternative, to be outside of the culture, analyze the culture, think about it—and not only the culture but the politics, the myths, the religion, the iconography."¹¹ For MM, the pervasiveness of these images, tropes, stories, and her queer relationship to them has greatly informed her sense of self and shaped the character of her work.

She attributes her fascination with photography from a young age to the powerful influence of her mother's gold-leaf, leather-bound Bible. MM has memories of poring over vivid reproductions of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and asking herself, "What does Heaven look like?" as these images began to stir the first pangs of a wild imagination. She details "seeing the God-like, the muscular God, touching fingers, touching the power of that electricity,"¹² and feeling entranced by the potential of the otherworldly and the visual image. Even at a young age, she felt instinctively "that's what art should be: of another world, another expanding vision, an expansion rather than a formula or standardization."¹³ Today, she understands this impulse as fundamental to her creative process. In her piece for a previous issue of Framework, "The Films of MM Serra: Art(core) and the Explicit Body," MM describes wanting to be Michelangelo. Yet she suggests this thinking was also fundamentally rooted in the desire to represent her own corporeal reality "using photography and filmmaking, creating not just the celestial bodies, but the body in all of its [End Page 34] manifestations: the queer body, the transgressive body, the body that exposes to the public the deeper recesses of its psychological nature." MM characterizes this drive as "wanting to frame the world," namely, her world—and "the camera became a way of framing that world, of picking it up."¹⁵

The apparatus of the camera itself held an allure from early on. MM saw her first 35mm camera in high school, when her uncle gave one to her cousin Joey as a Christmas gift. She remembers the night a fight broke out between her cousin and his father, an imposing figure with a violent temper, when her cousin began to photograph his mother in their living room. Angered at the boy's insistence on taking his mother's picture while ignoring his request to photograph the other men—"the drunk mafia guys up at the bar!"¹⁶—her uncle smashed the camera on the floor, shattering it. As MM's father, whom she cherished dearly, attempted to calm her uncle, MM fled up the stairs with her mother and her aunt. MM recalls gazing, transfixed, at the fragments strewn on the floor, thinking, "I want that camera." She wanted to see its insides, to dissect it, to study the pieces. She suggests that in that moment, the camera was transfigured into an elusive, precious object, and every part of the photographic process began to fascinate her.

MM also recalls the first time she ever picked up the camera, shortly after. Upon receiving her own 35mm camera in high school, she was too shy to turn it on other people. She explains that in her childhood household, the key to survival was to become invisible, to minimize oneself. In her modesty, rather than seek out a subject in others, she—rather paradoxically—turned the camera on herself. She began to experiment with taking nude photographs and exploring her own body with the lens, before her mother found them soon after and threw them out in a rage. In these earliest experiments, the body and the camera became inseparable for MM, setting the scene for the fundamental, and deeply personal, understanding of corporeal aesthetics that would ultimately form the basis of her "Art(core)" philosophy, decades later.

Newly equipped to better explore the world through her lens, MM enrolled at Temple University in Philadelphia to study photography and became an active participant in the student union at the height of the student protest movement of the late 1960s. After graduating in 1970, she trekked alone, cross-country, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to study under Beaumont Newhall, who ran the History of Prints and Photography program in the University of New Mexico's Art History department from 1971 to 1984. Known for his pioneering textbook The History of Photography, his role as curator of the Department of Photography at MoMA in the 1940s, and his tenure as the second director of the George Eastman House in 1958, Newhall was a major figure who attracted graduate students interested in photographic history. Although MM was never [End Page 35] formally enrolled in his course, she remembers meeting with Newhall, who was the first to show her rare prints and daguerreotypes. Newhall recommended she learn to make slides and take a photography class with Bill Jay, who had studied under Newhall and Van Deren Coke, and went on to start the program of Photographic Studies at Arizona State University.

In the spring of 1979, while enrolled in one of Jay's classes, MM befriended the only other woman, a student named Carla Breeze. Together, the two conducted a series of actions called "Nudes Out of Context" for their final review. Breeze would also go on to contribute the lyrical soundtrack to MM's dreamlike collage film Turner (US, 1987), appearing amid sweeping gestural camerawork as the blonde bombshell star, poetically narrating a dream in which she participates in "canine sex" with her dog, Turner. The "Nudes Out of Context" series showcased the women appearing naked in a variety of public spaces. MM and Breeze posed before the camera in locations around the University campus: the chapel, the Jewish cemetery, the library, a classroom in the Architecture school, and in Carla's kitchen. They opted for spots they felt would shock their audience, places they felt that had significant meaning, and posed a challenge to the sexualization of the naked female form. The duo would scout the spaces in advance, do the framing, set up the camera, study the light, pick the time of day, and then return another time, in kimonos or robes they could easily get in and out of, lock the door, and begin to shoot their action in the nude.

They began with the chapel. At one point during their first shoot, a member of the janitorial staff unlocked the door and stumbled onto the scene. MM recounts the two girls scrambling to reassure him they were students at the university, while in his shock, he sat in the aisle and began to laugh. Eventually, he let them stay and finish the shoot, yielding exquisite results. The resulting image hearkens to the alluring scenes from MM's mother's Bible, which captivated her as a young girl. She suggests the poses were directly inspired by Michelangelo's paintings, offering a study of the human form that is sensual, divine, and as MM argues, not pornographic—a distinction that was significant to the two women in 1979. MM and Breeze stand playfully yet triumphantly on the altar, framed by the light pouring in through the windows behind them. A banner with the word "Holy," embossed in gold, hangs from the altar below their feet offering a cheeky double-entendre. Although the series was met with utter shock from their professor and fellow students—"they were speechless … I thought my damn professor would faint!"¹⁷—MM and Breeze received a solo exhibition at the school after the final review. MM claims the only time their action garnered a negative response was while the two were trespassing outside an abandoned building downtown, when they heard a woman stumble onto the property and call out, "Whores!" at the sight of their naked bodies. [End Page 36]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Figure 1.

"Holy." Self-portrait by MM Serra and Carla Breeze at the University of New Mexico, April 1979. Courtesy of MM Serra.

MM speaks fondly of her years in New Mexico, which proved to be an incredibly fruitful, creative period, yielding a number of still photography series and astonishing experiments in daguerreotyping. She found a studio out in the middle of nowhere that allowed her to experiment with more adventurous, and often dangerous, processes that few others were interested in replicating. After meeting Tom Bissonnette, an architect, the possibility of recreating the demanding nineteenth-century process of daguerreotype became a reality. With his help, MM collected materials at metal shops, instead of photo labs, directly approaching various tradesmen who were willing to collaborate, rather than fellow artists. She showed them the daguerreotypes she had begun collecting during her travels, and textbooks documenting the daguerreotyping process she studied at Temple and at the University of New Mexico with Newhall and [End Page 37] Jay. Through the tradesmen, MM heard stories of an eccentric chemist living out in the middle of the desert and hunted him down so she could get access to mercury, gold, and various chemical toners. After showing him what she was working on, the chemist sold her liquid mercury in a glass bottle and taught her how to use it. As an architect, Bissonnette had direct access to metal shops, vendors, and tools. He helped her acquire perfectly smooth, 100% pure silver-plated copper to form the base of the daguerreotypes. Bissonnette also hand-built wooden boxes for MM to do the processing in, which are used to contain the mercury fumes. "I'm amazed I have brain cells!"¹⁸ MM still marvels at her gall in younger years, having executed the entire process unsupervised.

The whole endeavor was a matter of constant trial and error. She would begin by pouring a single drop of the liquid mercury onto a spoon, holding it over an open flame, and allowing the fumes to rise and treat the silver-plated copper surface. After the silver-plated copper became light-sensitized by the mercury fumes, MM would expose the photographic negative—shot on her large format field camera with Kodak Professional film stock—searing it onto the surface. She would work on cheap scrap metal to keep costs low as she battled air bubbles and discoloration. At one point, believing she had spilled liquid blue flame on herself, she had to run out of the darkened studio to drop and roll on the ground in an attempt to put out the invisible fire, which luckily hadn't caught. After numerous tests, MM finally got the desired result. Her first daguerreotype shows the young MM, nearly fifty years ago, sitting in the middle of a river, posing with arms and legs crossed, somewhere in the New Mexico wilderness. Having taken her 4x5 camera out on a backpacking trip, she set up a tripod on the riverbank and climbed out onto the rocks to get the shot. In this image, she captures herself as an adventurer, an outsider, a do-it-yourself-er, and a pioneer, offering an as yet unseen vision of the artist that would come to define her artistic career.

Some years after, her intrepid spirit and newfound devotion to the daguerreotype method led her on a road trip back across the country to participate in a class with Harvey Zucker, a prominent figure in the Daguerreian landscape and the founder of the legendary New York City bookstore A Photographer's Place, once located at 133 Mercer Street in Manhattan. At the recommendation of Newhall, MM had joined the Society of Photographic Educators where she first learned of Zucker's vast personal collection and the instructional workshops held at his Soho studio. MM attended his lessons on the daguerreotype process and can still envision the piles of countless, gorgeous landscape works at Zucker's home in Staten Island. She recalls thinking, in those moments with Zucker, that the daguerreotype was the ideal photographic technique for its capacity to produce only one unique plate at a time. With this method, no [End Page 38] reproductions could exist. She was moved by the delicate nature with which these one-of-a-kind pieces were historically treated, often framed in glass and housed in little cabinets made of leather, velvet, gold embossed, anything precious, that could last for hundreds of years.

In an effort to preserve her own original daguerreotype, MM used fixative spray, intended for charcoal drawing, to prevent fading and oxygenation. She suggests that the downside of using the sealant is that it can also darken the image and make it less brilliant. When asked how it has remained so pristine over nearly five decades, she simply remarked that she had forgotten about it as it sat among her vast personal archive at the Film-Makers' Coop. Yet the careful framing of her first daguerreotype suggests the preciousness with which MM has always approached the medium. It evinces a kind of reverence for the camera apparatus itself. Her self-portrait is housed in a beautiful copper frame, etched with immaculate detailing, via a process of silkscreen printing, to look like the original 4x5 camera with which MM captured her self-portrait. In this framing, the daguerreotype sits in the middle of the would-be-lens, with MM looking out of the barrel of her own camera. In a final documentary gesture to process and materiality, she mounted the copper frame into the Kodak box the original film stock came in. Until now, MM's daguerreotypes have never been exhibited or published, although she periodically shows them to her students, just as her mentors exposed her to the unique process decades earlier. MM still appreciates the daguerreotype's unique ability to generate a singular work, and experiments with many different forms of analogue photography, preferring it to digital. She has joked that it is, perhaps, no accident that in her quest to produce enduring, one-of-a-kind images, she has also managed to create an "unbreakable camera" with the copper cast of her precious tool. She muses that, unlike that first beloved camera she had longed for, "this one can never be destroyed!"¹⁹

By the early 1980s, MM made her way to Los Angeles and was living in an apartment on Wilmer Boulevard while working at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). When she heard the legendary Shirley Clarke was teaching a class on one-minute 16mm films, MM leapt at the opportunity to work with her. Although she was not technically a student at UCLA (a recurring theme in MM's life as the ever-curious, eternal student), she showed up to Clarke's class, which was already overenrolled. Pleading her case to Clarke, MM described herself as an underdog, the daughter of coal miners who couldn't afford to formally enroll at the university, but that she was moved by the incredible narratives Clarke could construct in her short films. MM recounts, "Shirley made incredible stories; she was an incredible storyteller. And she would make a one-minute film that was an entire story. I told her I wanted to learn to tell stories too."²⁰ In class, Clarke preached the philosophy that if you could get to [End Page 39]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Figure 2.

Self-portrait by MM Serra. Daguerreotype in copper-plated silver frame, New Mexico, 1980s. Courtesy of MM Serra.

the essence of what you wanted to say in under a minute, then you could make a feature-length film. Clarke allowed MM to attend the class, if she could remain relatively under the radar, giving her the security code to the studio building. Clarke encouraged her to use the equipment at night when other students weren't around. Unfailingly scrappy and resourceful, MM obliged, sneaking into the studio at unpopular hours to take advantage of university resources. In Clarke's course, MM began work on these short exercises in "light and shadow and movement," which would eventually become her first five films. Created over a five-year period and completed in 1987, Nightfall (US, 1984), Framed (US, 1984), NYC (US, 1985), PPI (US, 1986), and Turner (US, 1987) set the tone for the lyrical and sensual exploration emblematic of her later works. MM sold her kitchen table in order to pay for a visit to a professional photochemist [End Page 40] and to a studio to add professional sound to the five films, as she could barely afford to complete them properly. In 2016, Jonas Mekas selected these first five films for digitization and preservation as part of Anthology Film Archives' series Re-visions: American Experimental Film 1975–1990, which pays tribute to significant experimental film artists who emerged after the official publication of Anthology's "Essential Cinema" repertory in 1975.

Around the same time, while working for the Motion Picture Academy in L.A., MM would sift through the trash at work to collect 16mm outtakes and scraps of B-roll. She would bring them to a lab, correct the exposure, and incorporate the found footage in her own works. She refers to a culture of exchanging and sharing recycled footage among other filmmakers and projectionists working in and around L.A. She mentions making trades with the independent archivist Dennis Nyback, who owned and operated the Dennis Nyback Film Archive—a collection of over 13,000 16mm short films—while he was working as a projectionist. MM says she was fond of one particularly phallic Chiquita Banana ad that accompanied some of the 35mm feature films sent to Nyback's theater and offered to take it off his hands.

It was through this greater community of L.A.-based filmmakers, artists, curators, archivists, and others that MM began to find her footing as a programmer, filmmaker, and public figure throughout the 1980s. MM cites many of the screenings she attended at the Lhasa Club and at Los Angeles Filmforum (formerly the Pasadena Filmforum) during this time as greatly influential in both her work and personal relationships. The Lhasa Club, a small 100-person capacity club in Hollywood, was opened by the club's founder Jean-Pierre Boccara in 1982 and closed its doors at the end of 1987, when the rent doubled. At once a venue for punk and new-wave bands, poetry, comedy, cabaret, dance, film screenings, the venue had a guerilla approach to performances, with artists doing their own projections and putting on some of the first multimedia shows. MM remembers David Bowie showing up from time to time and a young Todd Haynes coming through as "the guy who showed up from Brown University to show an early version of Dottie Gets Spanked" (Todd Haynes, US, 1993)²¹. She saw Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (FR, 1967) for the first time, which became a major influence. MM put on a few screenings for the Lhasa Club and claims that the venue hosted the very first public screening of her films. She reminisces about feeling a unique sense of freedom when it came to programming at the Lhasa Club, in particular. MM explains that "being a woman, the Lhasa Club was not as sexist, it was more open, more fluid."²² She felt it operated outside of the context of the relatively narrow experimental canon that she would later encounter in the small circles of New York's avant-garde film scene.

Earlier, during the Pasadena years of Filmforum, which spanned from 1975 [End Page 41] to 1983, MM befriended numerous women filmmakers, like Chick Strand, and saw Shirley Clarke (before she was her teacher) present a series of Andy Warhol films. She attended some of the hundreds of programs put on by Filmforum's founder Terry Cannon, who programmed lectures and in-person screenings with the likes of Marjorie Keller, Barbara Hammer, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, Holly Fisher, and dozens of others. MM also believes it was her exposure in these particular circles that prompted Barbara Hammer to include her in the "Filmmakers" chapter of the collection Yesterday and Tomorrow: California Women Artists, edited in 1989 by Sylvia Moore. In "Filmmakers," Hammer writes of MM as a newcomer with exceptional potential: "M. Serra has produced a remarkable series of very short films (one and two minutes long) within a few years. Her cinema is marked by a lush sensuality, a concern for light, play and artfully woven soundtracks."²³

After Filmforum moved to the Wallenboyd Center in downtown L.A., MM met Carolee Schneemann at one of her screenings in 1984. Instantly, MM felt an affinity with Schneemann after she showed Plumb Line (US, 1968–72), Fuses (US, 1964–67), and long strips of outtakes from later films. MM was enamored with Schneemann's work: "It was explicit. I loved it … it was stunning—and that's what I remember most."²⁴ She can still envision how Schneemann had cleverly taped the outtakes to the wall next to the film projection, so the audience could simultaneously watch the film and pull the ribbons out. Schneemann's approach was to create an interactive experience with the outtakes, which urged the viewer to dismantle the exquisite images, reducing them to the bare material of the film strip. Following their meeting at Filmforum, MM struck up a decades-long friendship with Schneemann, punctuated by creative collaborations and countless programs curated by MM, featuring many of Schneemann's works. MM has warm memories of visiting Schneemann and her cats at her house upstate in New Paltz, New York, and taking photographs together. MM looks back fondly at one particular series they co-directed called She's A Cunt, inspired by the cover art of Björk's 2004 album Medúlla.

Schneemann first introduced MM to the filmmaker Maria Beatty at a party in Schneemann's Garment District loft, shared with her former partner James Tenney (known for Fuses). Beatty had seen MM's visceral 1992 found-footage meditation on Sadomasochism (S/M), L'Amour Fou (US, 1992), and wanted to know if MM was interested in collaborating on a film about women engaging in the practice of S/M. "I'll give you the lesbian S/M film, for real!"²⁵ Beatty promised her. Today, Beatty's collaborative video experimentations with Schneemann still remain relatively underrecognized, and MM suggests that Beatty was one of the first people to transfer Schneemann's films to video. MM also entered Beatty's Imaging Her Erotics: Carolee Schneemann (1993) into [End Page 42]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Figure 3.

MM Serra with Carolee Schneemann at Schneemann's birthday party in New York City, 1990s. Courtesy of MM Serra.

the Film-Makers' Coop catalog. Throughout her career, MM has been an avid champion of Beatty's work, taking great pains to program more of her films and draw attention to her widely overlooked oeuvre. She and Beatty have maintained a longstanding working and personal relationship, having collaborated on the S/M film A Lot of Fun for the Evil One (US, 1994), featuring a score by the composer John Zorn, which was cataloged at The Library of Congress in David Meeker's Jazz on the Screen filmography. MM has recounted stories of visiting Schneemann and Beatty upstate in New Paltz and tells tales of the two women swimming together in the river behind Schneemann's house upstate.

Perhaps even more pivotally, however, it was through her relationship to Clarke that MM became acquainted with Jonas Mekas. It was Clarke who first exposed her to his films and his writing, as well as his work at Anthology Film Archives. MM has alluded many times to Mekas's profound influence as a model and mentor to her as a filmmaker, curator, and programmer. Clarke had assigned swathes of Mekas's writing in her UCLA course, having established the New American Cinema Group (later the Film-Makers' Coop) alongside Mekas, Ken Jacobs, Flo Jacobs (née Karpf), Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, and sixteen others in 1961. MM quickly became enamored with Mekas's fantastic descriptions of Smith's Flaming Creatures (US, 1963) and the stories of Mekas and the Jacobs's arrest—and subsequent obscenity charges—for the [End Page 43]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Figure 4.

MM Serra at Carolee Schneemann's burial in New Paltz, NY, 2019. Courtesy of MM Serra.

distribution and exhibition of the film at the New Bowery Theater in 1964. After the class ended, Mekas's enthusiastic writing and passion for the provocative inspired MM to make her first pilgrimage to Anthology to see the films mentioned in his diaries. She still remembers opening the door to Anthology's Courthouse building amid construction to the sight of Mekas with his cherubic smile, and a stoic P. Adams Sitney, sitting side by side in the lobby. MM recalls, "I thought, Jonas had such an angelic face and kindness and enthusiasm … I went in and introduced myself and said, 'I studied with Shirley Clarke; I'm interested in helping you.'"²⁶ MM says Mekas promptly gave her a tour, showed her his office—which MM describes as an unruly mess of papers—and told her about the work they needed done in and around the facility. MM illustrates a serene vision of Mekas, reminiscing about the calm, peaceful energy he cast over Anthology, "He'd come sit with a glass of wine, and I would just listen and try to learn."²⁷

In the weeks following Jack Smith's death in September 1989, MM was among the group of people who brought a significant part of his personal archive from his apartment into Anthology. She overheard discussions between [End Page 44] Jim Hubbard, an archivist at Anthology and the co-founder of the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival (now MIX), and Mekas to the effect of "Jack has died, we need someone to go in and take his films out."²⁸ After the acquisition, MM spent months helping with the process of identifying, listing, and cataloging his albums in the archives on a volunteer basis, alongside her independent studies at New York University (NYU). Almost immediately, in those first few days after his death, MM knew she wanted to document Smith's space, even at the risk of trespassing. The resulting footage, with the addition of narration by Penny Arcade, would comprise perhaps one of MM's most well-known films to date, Jack Smith's Apartment (US, 1990). MM got Larry Fessenden, known for his work on independent horror films, to do the cinematography. She warned him the shoot would have very poor lighting, as the electricity had been turned off. They had one chance to shoot, having to quickly get in and out unnoticed, knowing they would only be able to visit the apartment once.

According to MM's account of the filming, "we went in, just the two of us, with a flashlight, and we were looking around, the walls, the floors … the mattress was on the floor, the place smelled. I didn't even wear gloves."²⁹ Although she never knew Smith personally, MM immediately felt the sense that the apartment was a microcosm of his vast, beguiling world. She felt the space was an exercise in Smith's defining his identity, with thousands of books and scripts posted all over the walls. MM imagines it must have been a lot like peering directly into Smith's mind, "When you walk through his space, when you look at the walls, it's all like you're inside some kind of dream, that's why I wanted to film it."³⁰ The exact instructions she gave to Fessenden on that day offer perhaps the most evocative distillation and apt illustration of her cinematic ethos. She directed Fessenden: "Your lens is a tongue, lick all the surfaces."³¹ She recalls, "He just walked around and got really close up, as the camera is kissing and licking the spaces of Jack Smith's apartment. That's how I thought of the camera."³² From her many vivid, tactile, sumptuous films, it is evident that MM understands the camera primarily as an extension of the body, a sensory tool of free expression, capable of roving, provoking, sensing, and seducing. And yet, for all its jouissance, its celebration of the body, beauty, and sex, MM has never shied away from examining the darker side of corporeal existence—decay, illness, and death.

Although Jack Smith's Apartment never makes explicit mention of Smith's cause of death, many of her films are tinged with a keen awareness of mortality, particularly during the AIDS years. She reflects, "I made the conscious decision to not say that he's died of AIDS, I don't show the mattress on the floor, I don't show the urine jars, I don't show the long, slow death and smell, I show the [End Page 45] glamorous walls, the blue, the mustard colors, the fantasy and imagination of Jack Smith's apartment."³³ Her choice to explore the affirmative side of Smith's sexuality, work, and life echoes a similar decision made during the filming of L'Amour Fou with Ken Chomont. By the time they had finished shooting, Chomont had received a terminal AIDS diagnosis. Suddenly, this document of sexual practice, which MM intended as an "exploration of sadomasochism, domination and submission, the joy of sexual freedom, its influence on childhood, who you are, your identity, your integrity,"³⁴ also had to grapple with the role of illness and fatality. MM says that at the end of the project, Chomont requested, "Don't turn my sexual practice into death … keep it, but don't mention AIDS."³⁵ MM believes she was able to honor his request. She feels it serves as a kind of documentary of Chomont defining his identity within the world of queer S/M and celebrating his existence.

MM came into contact with New York's queer BDSM scene through Ken and his brother Tom Chomont, both of whom became her close friends and collaborators. Tom was a fellow Coop member and prolific filmmaker in his own right, known for his trance-like, erotic, and mystical short works. MM first saw Tom Chomont's Razor Head (US, 1984) when he submitted it to the Millennium Film Workshop and still maintains it's one of the "hottest" films she has seen to date. Chomont, who was both HIV positive and grappling with Parkinson's disease later in life, would film his epileptic seizures, documenting the wild gestures. MM was moved by Chomont's utterly unique exploration of the physicality of his illness and its intersection with S/M sexual practice. Chomont's films articulate the contradiction of "keeping your identity, establishing it as part of your sexual practice, and maintaining it through the course of your life,"³⁶ a theme MM also has explored consistently across her oeuvre that informs her development of Art(core). With the added layer of Ken's personal history in L'Amour Fou—much like Tom's examination of his own diagnosis in his films—"it becomes about investigating … it becomes a question of categories, it expands that category, of going from porn to what he's doing, to performance, to how he performs his sexuality and how his sexuality actually leads to his death … it's merging thanatos and eros."³⁷ MM notes how the discussion of illness and diagnosis has shifted in her own work, referring to her 2021 film Endless Possibilities: Jack Waters and Peter Cramer. In the film, Waters and Cramer openly discuss the experience of receiving an HIV positive diagnosis: "It's there, it's in your face, it's tied to their artistic practice … death is part of life, it's tied to the worms in the earth, we're all gonna die."³⁸

By 1990, firmly enmeshed in New York's queer underground, MM had met one of her dearest friends, Chris Straayer, an associate professor in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University (NYU). The [End Page 46] two met when Straayer contacted her to rent Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures for a class he was teaching at NYU, immediately piquing MM's interest. In true MM fashion, she managed to work her way into his class, calling and refusing to hang up the phone until he let her join. MM jokes that in auditing so many courses on queer cinema and history with Straayer, she practically earned a PhD in Sexual Representation—though she did ultimately leave NYU with an advanced degree. MM speaks often of Straayer as a significant influence, asserting that whatever he was programming at the time, she had to see, which shaped her artistic and professional trajectory profoundly. In the summer of 1990, Straayer and Professor William Simon (NYU) helped MM secure an internship at the British Film Institute (BFI), leveraging her six years of previous experience at the Motion Picture Academy. She spent a significant portion of the time looking at films from the Soviet Union that the BFI was beginning to acquire and restore, like Larissa Shepitko's Krília/Wings (SU, 1966). She evaluated the print, despite her lack of Russian language skills, and remembers feeling touched by Shepitko's striking images of Maya Bulgakova as the middle-aged Nadezha, a once-celebrated World War II fighter pilot taking flight. At the conclusion of the internship, MM applied for a job to stay on at the London Film-Makers' Coop, as the director was retiring, but ultimately returned to New York. Later that year, Saul Levine invited her to join the Board of Directors at the Film-Makers' Coop, and by 1993, she was selected as the Executive Director.

During her approximately thirty-year tenure as the Executive Director, the role with which she is perhaps most readily identified, MM secured non-profit status for the New American Cinema Group/Film-Makers' Cooperative. The non-profit designation was significant, permitting the organization to begin archiving and preserving earlier film and video work from the Coop's many members, cementing its status as the largest and oldest independent media archive in the world. She personally oversaw hundreds of restorations, including Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (US, 1954), José Rodriguez Soltero's Lupe (US, 1966), Cathy Cook's The Match That Started My Fire (US, 1991), and numerous other films by Storm de Hirsch, Edward Owens, and collaborations with the Stan VanDerBeek estate. At the Coop and beyond, MM's curatorial mission has always focused on expanding the avant-garde repertoire, and in breaking open the experimental canon. Of this curatorial ethos, MM asserts, "I want to ferret out diversity from the collection, its underground, its outcasts, its explorers."³⁹ MM has recounted the many challenges that come with locating artists beyond the main institutional channels, and in seeking out artists more likely to be subject to discrimination for their age, race, class, or gender. Often, MM connected with other filmmakers through women's collectives or by making personal studio visits over many years, establishing intimate [End Page 47] relationships with many artists. She features both artists who have managed to successfully find a foothold in the art world alongside those who have remained in relative obscurity.

In many ways, MM has served as a kind of bridge between generations of women artists. In 1993, she co-curated the Film, Video, and Performances section of the exhibition "Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-plicit Art by Women" at the David Zwirner Gallery alongside Ellen Cantor, Maria Beatty, and Julie Tolentino, a co-founder of the Clit Club. She sought to foster dialogue between two generations of women's erotic art—the charged, explicitly political feminism of the 1960s and early 1970s, from artists like Louise Bourgeois, Carolee Schneemann, and Hannah Wilke, and the younger generation of artists, like Annie Sprinkle and Candida Royalle, whose work ventured to elicit sexual excitement in its exploration of autonomy through pleasure, arousal, and pain.⁴⁰ The success of the "Coming to Power" show prompted MM to begin a series of regular screenings, curating the sexually explicit feminist works from artists like Barbara Hammer, Yoko Ono, Candida Royalle, Annie Sprinkle, Cicciolina, Trash, Carolee Schneemann, and others—works that she would come to describe as Art(core).

Shortly after, in collaboration with Peggy Ahwesh and Abigail Child, MM filmed Soi Meme (US, 1995), which documents, in close-up, the act of masturbation and female ejaculation by the performer Goddess Rosemary (Rosemary Delain). In the same year, Goddess Rosemary and Maria Beatty collaborated on the erotic short film The Elegant Spanking (US, 1995), which portrays a vampy dramatization of the real-life relationship between Rosemary, the seductive and punishing mistress, and Beatty as her submissive maid, Kitty. Indeed, Beatty delivered on her promise to show MM a "real" lesbian S/M film. Having previously witnessed Goddess Rosemary perform the ejaculation at a fundraiser for MIX, MM wanted to film a reenactment in the style of Barbara Rubin's bacchanalian extravaganza Christmas on Earth (US, 1963). Through the manipulation of the image via hand-processing, MM created chemical flares and discolorations, to abstract and deconstruct the sexual narrative. MM suggests that in its attention to formal technique—in addition to its emphasis on the erotic, embrace of the visually stimulating, and meditation on identity and the self—Soi Meme is emblematic of her Art(core) philosophy. The film, like the many others MM locates within the category of Art(core), "is explicit but has aesthetics of textures and lighting, and it searches not only for bodily pleasures but the unified body, the body and the soul as one."⁴¹

Drawing from a kaleidoscopic, vast array of influences, MM has developed this theory of "Art(core)" over multiple decades, as a more holistic and inter-sectional approach to contextualizing the relationship between sex, eroticism, [End Page 48]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Figure 5.

MM Serra at Lucien in New York City, 1999. Courtesy of MM Serra.

identity, the image of the body on screen, and the self. Art(core) initially took shape over many years but was first outlined in writing when MM was invited by Lynne Sachs to contribute to the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of Millennium Film Journal (No. 51). Since then, MM has been invited to give her talk, entitled "Art(core): The Explicit Celluloid Body," at the Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Lecture at Indiana University in 2015, and as the 9th Annual Experimental Lecture at NYU's Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies. Additionally, MM was awarded a New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) grant in 2015 for the continuation of her work on Art(core). In 2020, a DVD compilation of her films and writings, entitled (Art)core, was released by Re:Voir, as part of the New York Film-Makers' Cooperative Collection.

Fundamentally, Art(core) aims to locate "the explicit in the cinematic body … explor[ing] the abject body in all its messy physical glory—in its pleasure [End Page 49] and its pain."⁴² MM charts a wide range of influences, culled from decades of reading, watching, listening, and studying across genres, modes, disciplines, and periods. She cites a fascination with everything from the mind/body split in Christian theology to an interest in the history of screen projection in Paris brothels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She enjoys the essays of Montaigne and the auto-fictional novels of Marguerite Duras. She cites Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (IT, 1975), Barbet Schroeder's French sex comedy Maîtresse (1976), and Buñuel's Belle de Jour as formative films, all of which manage to complicate the boundary of pornographic filmmaking. Additionally, she names the aforementioned works of Barbara Rubin, Jack Smith, and Tom Chomont as consistent with the Art(core) philosophy. She mentions reading gender theory of the 1980s and early 1990s such as Robert Stoller's 1985 book Observing the Erotic Imagination and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. Theories introduced in Linda Williams's Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible, particularly her categorization of pornography as a formal, historical genre—as well as Williams's delineation of the anti-porn/anti-censorship debate—resonate with MM's interest in the history of censorship of sexually explicit cinema. MM asserts that her personal stake in the censorship debate, as well as her adamant rejection of the pornography/not-pornography binary, stems from a long history of censorship of her own creative work. Numerous times, her work has been withheld, censored, or criticized for its various explicit depictions of the body, nudity, and sex acts. MM further suggests the seeds of her budding Art(core) theory were planted decades ago during a conversation she once had with Mekas upon showing him an early iteration of L'Amour Fou. MM claims that when she asked him what he thought, Mekas turned to her and said, "It's porn!" Today, she muses that perhaps he was merely too uncomfortable with being turned on. But for MM, all manner of arousal, whether intellectual, physical, or emotional, are inextricably linked—and not necessarily pornographic. Rather, Art(core) proposes "who you are, your identity, and your physicality is as much a part of your body as your mind, they're not separate, they're unified."⁴³

After her retirement from the Film-Makers' Coop, MM is still propelled by a constant need to create. She never works linearly, often dabbling in multiple projects at once and following various threads of research however and wherever they manifest. She is driven first and foremost by her innate sense of curiosity. In 2023, MM began research and production on a project tentatively titled "Liquid Light," made possible by the Emily Harvey Foundation artist residency. The project interlaces the lives of three radical women artists—Peggy Guggenheim, Veronica Franco, the sixteenth-century poet and courtesan, and Marchesa Luisa Casati Stampa, the nineteenth-century muse, patron of the [End Page 50] arts, and performer—via a retracing of their movements through the architectural and historical landscapes of Venice. Additionally, in 2024, through the Monira Foundation's "Open Book" presentation, MM and Michael Mangieri, an interdisciplinary artist and chef, will revisit Helen Hill's Recipes for Disaster: A Handcrafted Film Cookbook. MM and Mangieri will offer an update to Hill's DIY compilation of handmade filmmaking techniques, instructions, and tips from 37 experimental filmmakers, with particular emphasis on sustainability and environmentalism. Furthermore, MM received a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant (sponsored by Millennium Film Workshop) for her work in community gardens around the city, for a project tentatively titled "Turtle Ponds, Community Gardens, Urban Ecosystems," forthcoming in 2025.

MM is a member of three community gardens around New York City where she films, hosts screenings, and works with neighborhood gardeners. In 2022, along with Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, MM hosted Possibilities: A Garden Screening to showcase her two short films, Endless Possibilities (US, 2021) and Divine Possibilities (US, 2003), both portraits of the Lower East Side community she has inhabited for four decades. Many of MM's films offer a snapshot of life in and around downtown Manhattan from the 1980s to now, from Jack Smith's apartment to the gay BDSM club "Paddles" in L'Amour Fou. Whether showcasing these community gardens or the affectionately named Chateau Ludlow, the Ludlow Street apartment MM has called home for almost 40 years—depicted in Notes from the Lower East Side: The View from Ludlow Street (US, 2003–13), with Peggy Ahwesh—MM's oeuvre is an essential record of New York life. When asked if she still is interested in documenting the city today, MM responded, "Yes, but the future of the city is in its gardens."⁴⁴ For MM, the garden is the ultimate site of collaboration and community, a place worth capturing and inhabiting. On the significance of her forthcoming work, she says, "It's not going to give me a car, it's not going to get me a house … but it's going to give me a desire to live and keep living, it's like fertilizer, like composting."⁴⁵

MM operates, much like the many pioneering artists she has platformed throughout her career, at the intersection of eros and exploration. For MM, eros is an affirmation, essential to her filmmaking and the key to a worthwhile existence: "It's a pleasure in living, it's a joy in living, it keeps people and animals on the planet! It's life-affirming."⁴⁶ As she begins to look back on the many decades spent among some of the most prominent figures of the avant-garde, MM recognizes a version of herself in the poetry of Diane di Prima. In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, di Prima writes, "To be artist: outcast, outrider, and explorer. Pushing the bounds of the mind, of imagination. Of the humanly possible, the shape of a human life. 'Continual allegory.' Of a woman's life, pushing [End Page 51]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Figure 6.

MM Serra in the Marble and Milkweed Studio in New York City, 2024. Photograph by Michael Mangieri. Courtesy of MM Serra.

the limits. Opening endlessly to the image, words."⁴⁷ MM takes pride in her embodiment of the "outrider" figure. And in many ways, she still inhabits this role of the outcast artist. MM was born an outsider, to a family of coal miners and factory workers, and independently built a life for herself in New York's Lower East Side where she remains a pillar of the community. To this day, she lives as a scout on the fringes, seeking the new, the forgotten, the unruly, and the uncategorizable. Yet in combing through the finer details of these dominant histories, MM appears—if relatively obscured—time and again as an essential figure. From her decades at the Film-Makers' Coop shaping the cultural imprint of the cinematic avant-garde to her many creative collaborations with fellow pioneering artists, colleagues, mentors and mentees, friends, and loved ones, [End Page 52]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Figure 7.

MM Serra in the 6th Street and Avenue B Community Garden, New York City, July 2024. Photograph by Annie H. Berman.

she too has been a fertilizer of sorts, nourishing the landscape of experimental film and encouraging it to thrive.

MM has embodied these dualities and contradictions from the start of her life to now. Yet perhaps nowhere is this dichotomy between outrider and insider more evident than in Notes from the Lower East Side (2003–2013), when MM reflects with Peggy Ahwesh on the filming of Soi Meme (1995). MM recalls that during that initial MIX performance, as Goddess Rosemary completed her masturbation, "the ejaculation shot out into the audience, and all the men leaned forward and all the women leaned back."⁴⁸ MM distinctly remembers saying, "Oh, I wish I had my camera!"⁴⁹ After asking Rosemary if they could record another ejaculation, MM filmed Soi Meme with Ahwesh, who shot on film, and [End Page 53] Child, who shot in digital. At the end of the taping, they noticed Rosemary's submissive crawling on his hands and knees, cleaning up. As Ahwesh describes, "Afterwards there was a bowl of this ejaculate on the floor and the guy came in and drank it."⁵⁰ Child was dubious as to whether the contents of the bowl were urine or ejaculate, citing the pressures on women to perform sexual arousal in a patriarchal society. As a response, Rosemary offered them a taste. Although they ultimately refused, Ahwesh and MM maintain it didn't smell like urine. For MM, the camera held far greater exploratory potential than her taste buds. This sensory excavation, of the erotic and corporeal—both the explicit and the mystifying intricacies of the human body, sexuality, and identity—has always been the impetus for her work. It is common to find MM working among known and unknown artists alike, diving into unfamiliar territory in peculiar settings, probing them with an intimate eye. To this day, MM continues to view the world through the lens, gazing, touching, tasting—leaning in to lick all its surfaces when the rest of the world leans back.