Monday September 23, 7:30pm
Emotional Archives and Corporeal Interiors:
Films by MM Serra and Stephen Broomer
Curated by Devon Narine-Singh
Still from “Real to Reel Mama” (1982) by MM Serra – Image courtesy of the artist
We are very pleased to present a screening program of films by MM Serra and Stephen Broomer curated by filmmaker and curator Devon Narine-Singh. The evening will include a selection of five films by MM Serra shown in their original 16mm format – from her 1982 “Reel to Real Mama” following a first-generation Italian woman immigrant and factory worker, to her 2002 “Double Your Pleasure”, a film featuring sound by Jen Reeves that was part of “Ad It Up”, a series of works that parody commercials – followed by the New York debut of Broomer’s “Resurrection of the Body” (16mm transfer to digital).
Narine-Singh says about the relationship between the two artists and their works:
“This program will pair together filmmakers MM Serra and Stephen Broomer’s work to create a dialogue regarding notions of the body, that focus less on its ephemeral qualities, and more on the spiritual and emotional reactions. Also to be consider is the idea of the archive: What does it mean when a work such as Broomer’s is both a sequel, tribute and remembrance to a passed filmmaker? Could an archive be a single work, a work to be discovered within a production as theorized by Hannah Frank? Serra’s Real to Reel Mama is an archive on a family’s history. This question will also be tied to Serra and Broomer’s own work as archivists connecting links between Archives of Emotion and films of celluloid bodies that focus on its psychic nature.”
Narine-Singh and Serra will be in attendance and available for a Q&A following the screening.
General admission $8
Students & Members $6
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Stephen Broomer is a filmmaker and writer from Toronto, Canada. His work has screened at the Anthology Film Archives, the Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts (Harvard University). He is the author of Hamilton Babylon: A History of the McMaster Film Board (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and Codes for North: Foundations of the Canadian Avant-Garde Film (CFMDC, 2017).
Devon Narine-Singh (b.1997) is a filmmaker, curator and scholar based in Long Island and Queens. His works have screened at Microscope Gallery, UltraCinema, The New School, The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival and the upcoming 2019 Wrong Biennale . He has presented screening and presentations at NYU Cinema Studies, The Film-Makers Coop, and Maysles Cinema.
MM Serra is an experimental filmmaker, curator, author, educator and the Executive Director of Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York, the world’s oldest and largest archive of independent media. Her first five films (NYC, 1985, Nightfall, 1984, Framed, 1984, PPI, 1986, Turner, 1987) were preserved and digitized by Anthology Film Archives Preservation series Re-Visions: American Experimental Film 1975-1990. Her film Chop Off, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and screened among others at the Tribeca Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight Series in 2009. Serra’s film Bitch-Beauty premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2011 in the “Views from the Avant-Garde” section, and her Breathe Deep (2012) was awarded the Directors’ Choice prize at the Black Maria Film Festival. In June 2012, Serra had a retrospective of her film work at Anthology Film Archives, and in 2013 she was a recipient of the Kathy Acker Award for Lifetime Achievement of Excellence in Avant-Garde Art. She teaches in the Media Studies program at the New School for Social Research on topics such as horror films, sex and gender (until 2016) as well as Avant-garde and Moving Image. Serra lives and works in New York.
Program:
Turner (1987)
By MM Serra, 16mm film, sound, 3 minutes
Colorful, energetic, delicate and sensual, this early short by M.M. Serra presents her unique vision of eroticism and poetic cinema in a fast-paced collage of dreamlike imagery. Fragments of a poem by C. Breeze are read and manipulated in a manner recalling the tape experiments of Steve Reich. Rich reds and deep blues stutter and sparkle along with her descriptions of love and “canine sex.” TURNER is a brief glimpse at Serra’s roots in the New York avant-garde and the Film-makers’ Cooperative. – Stela Jelincic
Nightfall (1984)
By MM Serra, 16mm film, 1 minute 30 seconds
Soi Meme (1995)
By MM Serra, 16mm film, sound, 6 minutes
Sound composition by Zeena Parkins.
Erotic dance performance by Goddess Rosemary.
Double Your Pleasure (2002)
By MM Serra, 16mm film, sound, 4 minutes
Sound by Jennifer Reeves
Part of the “Ad It Up” series of shorts that are parodies of commercials.
Real to Reel Mama (1982)
By MM Serra, 16mm film, sound, 20 minutes
“[Real to Reel Mama] portrays the views of a first generation Italian-American woman though her life experiences as immigrant, factory worker, and as the ’emotional heart of the family.” – Fabrice Ziolkowski
Resurrection of the Body (2019)
By Stephen Broomer, 16mm to digital, sound, 38 minutes
In memoriam. Man in pieces. You have the lovers, remade by funhouse mirrors; you have the symmetries, undone, bent and curved; and you have the model, the bag on her head filling with carbon dioxide. Who owns your life? Testimonial and demonstration, a most ominous trade show. An experiment in therapeutic cinema. A speculative sequel and conclusion to John Hofsess’s “Palace of Pleasure” (1967). – SB
Still from “Resurrection of the Body” (2019) by Stephen Broomer – Image courtesy of the artist
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Microscope Gallery Event Series 2019 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).