EH: So Serra, how’d you end up here in New York?


MM: One of the reasons I moved to New York was that I wanted to curate underground, avant-garde, off-the-mainstream kind of films. The sort of films that I was making, and films dealing with explicit sexuality. So in 1988, I moved to Ludlow Street.


EH: What were the first shows you organized?


MM: Well I did many at the same time. It was like this sort of guerilla programming where I’m not in one theater but going into places like Max Fish before it opened as a bar and doing an Erotic Festival. Ulli, the owner of Max Fish said to me that I could curate whatever I wanted because it wasn’t a bar yet, it was right before it opened. It was a three-day festival called “XXXXX” and I curated it with Bradley Eros.


This was something I did outside of Conspriacies. Conspiracies I did for 10 years. It was new works in avant-garde cinema. Short films. Avant-garde films. I did it with Abby Child the first year at RAPP Art Center. What happened with underground short films is that they were shown once at Millenium--Anthology wasn’t around then--and then you wouldn’t see it again. And Conspiracies also was meant to be political.


EH: Political in what way?


MM: Political in that it was a diversity of personal visions. In terms of Hollywood, there’s a homogenization of cinema: what it is, what it’s about, how its marketed. So Conspiracies was giving visibility to those who weren’t commodified. It was political in the sense that we live in a capitalist system, and everything has a monetary value, and these are films that are never going to make much money. It’s not even about money. It’s also about exploring your personal visions.


Conspiracies started in 1988 and was a Friday and Saturday night. An experimental film weekend, always in May; it was part of the RAPP Art Festival. It had Bang on a Can and it had theater and it also had film. The first year Abby Child asked me to help her curate with Robert Hilferty and the second year Robert and I did it while Abby was in San Francisco. And each year after that I would ask people to curate it with me, and the last year it was at Exit Art and Mark MacEllhatten curated it. I helped organize it. And it was inclusive. It wasn’t meant to be elitist or exclusive or one particular vision in the avant-garde.


EH: So were most of these filmmakers in the East Village at the time?


MM: Sure, most of them. Pete Cramer, Joe Gibbons, Barbara Hammer, Emily Breer, Kiki Smith, Henry Hills, Keith Sanborn, Leslie Thornton. Uzi Parnes, Lewis Klahr. One or two like Nick Dorsky were out in California.


EH: I see here you even showed a film by Christine Vachon…


MM: Yes, that’s right. And I actually met her. Right, “There’s A Man in your Room” by Christine Vachon. She used to live in the East Village, She still does live in the East Village. And it was an experimental film.


EH: So at this time, what did you think were the main concerns of these artists?


MM: There was a variety. Like Lewis Klahr’s “Her Fragrant Emulsion”--he was fascinated with this B-movie star and he got these images—sort of like Joseph Cornell—and deconstructed it. It’s all about looking at her and the way she moved. It’s not at all about the narrative. And the same thing with Caroline Avery. Her film was also about working with the material properties of the cinema. I’d say that they were experimentations in the material properties of the film, rather than content-driven.


EH: Now when I think of these names, I think of them as constituting a very specific generation of artists. Is there something about them, as a group, that you think was distinctive at the time?


MM: It’s not only the time but the location. The East Village in the 80s and early 90s was a place where artists could come from anywhere in the country and find low rent, find space and jobs they could do so they could have the freedom to form a community of working artists. They could communicate, share ideas. Artists don’t work in isolation. If you look at Paris in the 20s, there were artists sharing and experimenting together. The East Village had this at this time. There was a sense of community, and it wasn’t so much a career place. The East Village wasn’t just a place to shop – it had this gritty glamour. It had that edge, a sense of authenticity, of being on the edge. It had drugs, and bars you could afford to drink in. You can’t even afford to drink in the East Village now. It’s 10 dollars a drink. I can’t shop or drink in my own neighborhood any longer! When money becomes a priority, it’s harder to be creative.


For example, Abigail Child’s films, I discovered when I first moved here. She had just done a great film called Mayhem that I thought was representative of the East Village. Edgy esthetics and political content. It had a sense of film noir which, was like the dark gritty glamour of the East Village. Also the way she edits had the feel, the pace, the hectic--frantic almost--rhythm of life here.


EH: It sounds like another thing about the old East Village was there was the idea sex being a subversive act. When imagine that time, I think about the Mapplethorpe and NEA controversies, sex and AIDS, all this renewed feminist interest in porn and fetishes and so on…


MM: Well when I organized the Erotic Festival, I met Tom Chomont’s brother Ken, who specialized in Sadomasochism and he did a demonstration. I became fascinated by the sex clubs in New York and I started going to places like Paddles and The Hellfire Club and The Vault…it was like a Disneyland for sexual experimentation. You could walk into these clubs and assume any personality or multiple personalities, explore all the different facets of yourself. You weren’t just gendered male or female. You were Jeckyll and Hyde and Pollyanna. At first I just wanted to experiment then I decided to make a film about this. It was an experimental documentary entitled L’Amour Fou (1991). It means “mad love” love without any boundaries. It breaks down marriage, heterosexuality—not just breaking down this binary opposition but expanding it. Because with a name like Mary Madgalene I feel this is one of my missions in life! The Erotic Cinema series inspired me to make it.


EH: So was there any video you showed at this time? Or was it all 16mm, super-8?


MM: It was all 16mm. All of it—Leslie Thornton’s “Peggy and Fred in Hell,” Nina Fonoroff’s “Department of the Interior”—that was was autobiographical, about her relationship with her mother. They were all 16mm and in ’88 people were still making short experimental 16mm films. Now a lot of it is on video. And like the Underground [Film Festival]—what year did the Underground start?


EH: The first New York Underground Film Festival was in March ’94.


MM: Yeah so this was before the Underground. A lot of the new video that I’ve liked I’ve seen at the Underground. And at MIX, and the other lesbian and gay film festivals. But MIX was around at that time; it was a place to see a lot of the new, younger edgy work done in new media.


EH: Also the Downtown New York Film Festival was happening at this time, wasn’t it?


MM: Yes they were in the 80s. Conspiracies started in ’88 and went to ’95. So they sort of overlapped.


EH: Was there also an overlap between other things going on in the East Village at this time and film—like let’s say performance or dance or galleries? Or was it more self-contained as a film scene?


MM: Well there were places like WeBo that had music, that was also a place I showed erotic films. It was sort of gallery spaces or bars that would sort of let people go in with projectors and show films, rather than just using established film theaters. Well, the Robert Beck’s like that now. But there’s fewer places like it.


EH: So there were lots of places doing this at the time? What were some of the places?


MM: RAPP Art Center, the Gas Station, WeBo, Max Fish, Collective for Living Cinema (which was also a theater), the Pink Pony.


EH: When did that start?


MM: The Pink Pony? That was curated by Jane Gang and that was in the 90s. Ulli put a little theater in the back with seats and it had this little curtain around the screen.


EH: Yeah I went to Jane’s show at that time-–that was like ’97, ’98. They were great shows.


MM: In 1998 I started teaching a course at the New School with Michelle Handelman called “Sexual Personae: Representation of Female Sexuality in Film and Video.” And when we couldn’t get a screening venue at the school, Ulli let me bring my students to the Pink Pony and use the theater there without charging us. I believe she stopped using the space because of fire regulations.


EH: The New York Underground also hosted a best of Robert Beck show there in 1999. Now it’s a restaurant.



MM: The thing that was happening then that is not happening now is I think it’s harder because there’s less money and there’s less availability of spaces. The Gas Station is gone, WeBo’s gone, RAPP Art Center’s gone and there are theaters that opened but it’s also harder to get in to do programming—to do guerilla programming or independent programming—because they’ve got curators and schedules and need to plan more tightly and bring in more money. There’s Anthology of course. But because money’s tight, there’s more of a risk. You really have to program, give most places the money or the door or the overhead costs. At that time I would split the door with whoever owned the bar or the gallery.



EH: Well arrangements like that still happen, but perhaps it is more formal than in previous years. Definitely more of the work you see at New York Underground, Ocularis and Robert Beck is from outside New York. There’s not exactly the same sense of ‘subversiveness’ any more, or at least not of the same kind. But if it’s more difficult to do what we do now, I wouldn’t know the difference.


MM: Also New York State Council on the Arts and Film/Video Arts gave grants back then. FVA would give a grant that you could rent films and then you could do a speakers’ fee—the speakers’ bureau, it was called. It wasn’t a lot of money but it was some money. At least the filmmakers were paid.


EH: Speaking of filmmakers getting paid--how did you come to work with the Co-op?


MM: When I lived out in California in the early 80s, I worked in film programming at the Motion Picture Academy, with a man named Doug Edwards who curated Encounter Cinema at UCLA, which was experimental cinema. Before that I worked at Film Forum in Pasadena—minor jobs like working the door, doing some curating, just being all-around staff person. And Doug came to one of the screenings, and he said that he needed an assistant. It would be someone that would assist him in programming at AMPAS, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is like an organ of Hollywood. They do monthly screenings of commercial cinema, for the unions, for people working in the Hollywood industry. So he hired me, and I worked with him for four years. And we did shows in New York. The Academy would do tributes to people like Alfred Hitchcock—which was phenomenal—or the anniversary of Vitaphone, or George Melies. And I would travel, and I loved New York and decided I wanted to live here. I felt that New York had more of the underground and that’s more of what I was interested in.


I also curated some shows at the Pasadena Film Forum and showed some of my films there. On one of my trips to New York, Howard [Guttenplan] saw this package of films from Los Angeles, which included my own films, and he gave me a show at Millenium. Somehow at that time,  I met Saul Levine, and he said you should be on the board of directors of the Film-makers’ Co-op.  So I put films in the Film Co-op, and was on the board. Then Leslie Trumbull had a stroke and a heart attack in 1990 and they needed someone to help. I said I would do it for a couple of months—and that was in May of 1991 and I’m still there.


I never really thought distribution was something I was interested in. I thought exhibition was more exciting because I like putting films together. Curating’s important, people don’t realize it. That is, how you place the film, and in the context, you curate the program. Also, you have the audience there.


But when I started in distribution at the Film Co-op, I realized how important distribution was. It wasn’t just the East Village, it’s global. It also has this political philosophy I like. Because growing up working class in Pennsylvania—well my grandfather worked in the coal mines, in the beginning of the 20th century, before the unions. And my father—while he was in the 6th grade, he’d have school half a day and he’d work at the mines half a day. And he supported himself. He helped form the labor movements. And my dad brought me to these labor meetings as a kid. I would hear all these people, working together, arguing: men, women, all genders and all sexualities. It was more of a community and I really liked the community. I found it exciting, a sense of joining and being motivated together to make changes. And that’s what the Co-op was about, to me, it’s about a collective of artists working together for putting their work out there into the world, and promoting it.


It has an amazing history. Because in ’61 as the New American Cinema Group, and the Co-op was started in 1962 as a division of the New American Cinema Group. When it was started, there was no network for underground, avant-garde, independent films. It’s the oldest and largest. But it was people like Andy Wahol and Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger and Jonas Mekas and Jack Smith. All these amazing personalities. George and Mike Kuchar. They’re different from each other. Like Robert Frank has a different esthetic, its more of a beat esthetic, than say the underground esthetic of George and Mike, but there they are. And people like Marie Menken who made lyrical films like “Notebooks,” and -- I think she’s underrecognized—Maya Deren. I like the history of it. And I also liked the idea of a non-hierarchical form of organization. It’s egalitarian, run by a board of directors, it’s not pyramidical. I think it has a kind of idealism that’s not around in the culture right now.


EH: So you didn’t stop curating when you started working with the Co-op. You did some touring shows, didn’t you?


MM: I did. Actually in the early 90s, I did a monthly screening at Anthology of new works in the Film-Makers’ Co-op as a way of getting people to join and being visible and not just having the films or videos sit there on the shelf. Jonas agreed to that and I did it for four years. Joel Schlemowitz would sometimes curate and one time we did this wonderful series where every board member curated a program. Also in 1994 I took a program of New American Cinema films to Germany. But in 1992 because of my interest in sexual representation, there was this gallery in Soho, the David Zwirner Gallery, and I did a program there with Maria Beatty and Ellen Cantor called “Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually Explicit Art by Women.” And I did five tours to Europe with that program.


EH: Who showed in that? Was it all Co-op filmmakers?


MM: No it was not all Co-op filmmakers. But a lot of them were Co-op. That’s how I discovered Barbara Rubin’s film. I was looking, specifically looking for women who dealt with sexuality. Barbara Rubin’s was a double-screen projection, Christmas on Earth, which was called Cocks and Cunts when it was first shown at Warhol’s Factory. Barbara was only seventeen in the early 60s where she had her friends paint their bodies and pose in front the camera. It’s a double screen projection—the outer screen is close-ups of genitalia, not in a clinical or sex-industry kind of way but exposing the body and just looking and seeing the body. And the inner screen were people with their bodies painted, graphically. And since it was black and white you couldn’t see all the colors. They posed like tableaux vivants of the 19th century. There’s this…I don’t want to say hippie..but a freedom, an optimism. The soundtrack for the film in distribution isn’t a soundtrack at all. You play the radio to a rock and roll station, which includes not just music but the ads and so forth. It was a groundbreaking film because it was polymorphously perverse.


When I curated the Erotic Cinema series with Bradley Eros at Max Fish, one thing I noticed was that there was three times more material by men. So like Tom Chomont, his brother Ken--Ken Chomont did an erotic shaving. An S/M erotic shaving. Ken Chomont did lectures on S/M in mainstream cartoons, he had this compilation and he showed it to me. And he said, “Well why don’t I do an erotic shaving.” And I had never seen one in public. This is in 1988 before Madonna’s book Sex! Anyway he had scaffolding there and he tied him to the scaffolding and tore his clothes off and shaved him. It was amazing to do that in just a regular gallery. That program also had Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera. Nick Zedd did Whoregasm, his amazing double screen projection.


But then I realized that there weren’t that many films by women. One of the things I wanted to look for was, alright let’s see if I can find more work by women.  So Coming to Power was designed to focus on women only because there seemed to be that need to search out and find more women that did work.


EH: So at the time, what did you think was so important about showing sexually explicit films?


MM: I think it’s the most politically subversive thing to do, for women. Since the emphasis is on monogamy and romance and procreation for women within our culture. Especially then in the 80s with the so-called Moral Majority. And this is another reason why I wanted to teach it at the New School… Women have always been able to be funny in romance or melodrama. Robert Stoller, in Observing the Erotic Imagination, he writes that for women, the romance novel is their pornography. When I read this, I thought, this has to be wrong. There has to be more work by women out there that’s more sexually explicit. By curating and making the work and exploring it, it’s a way of educating an audience, and making it visible. Festivals like MIX and the Underground expore these areas for a younger generation. And on television now with programs like Sex and the City.


EH: So what about your own filmmaking?


MM: In my films I try to explore the variety of sexual pleasures—and pain—that is connected to women’s desires. For example, in my film Soi Meme (1992), Goddess Rosemary is a performance artist and erotic dancer who performs a dance and ejaculates for the camera. At the time I had two camerawomen, Peggy Ahwesh and Abby Child, one with video and one with film, because I wanted to capture the spontaneity and the drama of her ejaculating. But when I looked at the footage I decided that it was too clinical, particularly the film, so I hand-processed the film to explore the orgasmic quality of her ejaculation. The title expresses the essence of the piece—“soi meme”, “for one’s self,”not only the physical self but also the soul, the deeper self.


I also did a series exploring sadomasochistic practices…I collaborated with Maria Beatty on a project she stars in called A Lot of Fun for the Evil One (1994). We filmed it at paddles on Beta with a monitor so that we could capture the spontaneity and drama of S and M that is difficult to achieve sometimes on film. The video explores a series of sadomasochistic acts from leather worship to spanking to live flayings to hot waxing. It’s framed as Maria’s masturbatory fantasy of polymorphous perverse pleasures.


I collaborated with Jennifer Reeves on a film called Darling International (2000) in which we create sexual personaes and explore sexual fantasies within the urban landscape of the city. New York itself has always been considered dark, mysterious, dangerous and we wanted to capture this within the texture and the surface of the film so we actually is sexually explicit and we worked on the project for three years and the film won an honorable mention at Sundance which is suprising because we never knew if it would cross over into a larger audience.


I’m currently working on subversive ads. The series is titled “Add it Up.” For example there’s a Johnson’s Baby Powder ad titled “Just for You Girls” and a donut ad set at a donut plant in the East Village called “Double your Pleasure.” Right now I’m working on Chiquita Banana ads from the 70s that were Kinescopes that a friend of mine gave me on 16mm. This series a lot of fun to work because I also feel our culture has commodified sexuality. These are meant to parody that.


EH: So do you think that even with the neighborhood changing so much in the past fifteen years, do you still see the East Village as a vital place for showing experimental film?


MM: I do. I think the East Village still has germinal creativity. Still has creative types there. And I’d say that the East Village is from like 14th street on down, or it’s a state of mind. It still has these people that come from other parts of the country who come here to create, to explore ideas. Coming down the street and seeing Nick Zedd and Reverend Jen shooting a new movie. That still is an East Village thing. It doesn’t happen up on Madison Avenue.


EH: Even though Nick lives in Williamsburg.


MM: Yes! Now this we should say. I think a lot of people are being forced out. It’s not only the fringe theaters that are disappearing, its also housing. The buying up of property. A lot of artists have fled, and Williamsburg really became the new East Village. But what is encouraging is the HOWL Festival. Phil Hartman and Doris Kornish opened the Pioneer, they have a video store, and now Phil Hartman and David Leslie are doing this festival because there is this gradually seeping away or disappearing of this creative energy that made this area so dynamic. And so maybe this would make it visible again. You know there’s a lot of people who have moved here just to shop or drink. So now there’s all these bars – 21 new bars since I moved here! When I first moved here I was afraid to walk down the street at night because there were all these vacant buildings. Now it’s like “Shop New York!”