2008/12/05
OCA Semesterplan – WEEK 50 – M. M. Serra
M.M. Serra
Art(core)
A film presentation and talk by M.M. Serra,
Director of New York City's Film-makers' Cooperative
Among films to be premiered
Christmas on Earth (1963), dir. Barbara Rubin
and films by George Kuchar, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Peggy Ahwesh,
Scott-Free, Martha Colburn and M.M. Serra
Saturday, 13 December / 17:00
Nedre gate 7
M.M. Serra, filmmaker, curator and director of the New York based Film-Makers' Cooperative curates a gender – and sexuality-bending film program of older and recent works drawn from the collection of The Film-Makers' Cooperative. This one and a half-hour program explores the explicit body in the experimental film genre. Reflecting three major trends within the alternative film scene, the program starts in the mid-1960s with Classics of the Underground that have influenced the filmmakers of the Cinema of Transgression, followed by films of Alternative Queer culture. All of the works express the views of filmmakers who broke the taboos and censorship of the mainstream popular culture of the United States.
About the films
Christmas on Earth (1963, 29.15min, 16mm, double projection) is Barbara Rubin's rarely screened, double-screen projection 'happening'. It is the filmic record of an orgy staged in a New York City apartment in 1963. This double projection of overlapping images of nude men and women clowning around and making love is one of the first sexually explicit works produced by the American postwar avant-garde. Christmas on Earth premiered at Warhol's Factory, then titled Cocks and Cunts with the Velvet Underground performing live. Rubin was 19 years old and an energetic force creating, who, according to Andy Warhol was 'one of the first people to get multimedia interest going around New York'.
The film programme also include Double Your Pleasure by M.M. Serra, an homage to Andy Warhol's Kiss and a camp masterpiece by George Kuchar titled Hold Me While I'm Naked that inspired the films of John Waters. Transgressive works by Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Scot-Free reflect the East Village club culture. Tessa Hughes-Freeland's Baby Doll is a docu-portrait of dancers in The Baby Doll strippers club. Scot-Free's Strange Love is a portrait of a jaded Lower East Side couple starring Nick Zedd, writer of the Transgressive Cinema Manifesto. Art(core) also includes three short films embracing alternative sexualities: Peggy Ahwesh's Color of Love, James Fotopoulos's Drowning and the fantastic animation of Martha Colburn's Spiders in Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical. All films on the program are explicit and embrace an alternative perspective on gender and sexuality.
About the Speaker
M.M. Serra is a filmmaker, educator, curator and Director of The Filmmakers' Co-operative. Her film Art Parade premiered in 2007 at the Womanizer Film program at Deitch Projects in Soho, New York, USA. She was featured in Profiles from the Edgein Swoon Magazine in 2007 and her own work, as well as her curated programs, have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of the Moving Image in New York; The Centre Georges Pompidou and the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, France; The London Film Festival, UK; The Sundance Forum, USA and The Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Germany. In December 2007 she curated New York Experimental Cinema for the Kulczyk Foundation and the Warszawa Kinolab in Poland. In August 2008 she programmed ART(CORE): The Avant Garde and the Cinematic Body at The Pleasure Dome in Toronto, Canada. Serra teaches Media Studies at The New School for Social Research, where she lectures on genre and sexuality in the moving image.
Office for Contemporary Art Norway
The Office for Contemporary Art Norway is a private foundation and was founded by The Norwegian Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs and The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in fall 2001. The main aim of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway is to develop collaborations in contemporary art between Norway and the international art scene. The Office for Contemporary Art Norway aims to become a key contributor to the discourses of contemporary art.