https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/framework/
Framework explores a variety of topics in film, media, art, politics, and cultural studies. The journal publishes valuable and innovative work with a wide international range and promotes theoretical and avant-garde approaches from its contributors.
“This is a very special double issue devoted to the work of MM Serra: Film-Makers’ Co-operative Executive Director Emeritus, teacher, mentor, and artist. That list of titles and roles hardly indicates the extraordinary breadth of MM’s work, art and interests, her long friendships, rich artist networks, and commitment to diversity, to outsiders, to the flourishing edges. Framework’s celebratory double issue includes testimonials, art pieces, memoirs, biographies, and conversations from friends and colleagues, stitching together a multi-perspectival, layered collage of MM’s life work.”
—Drake Stutesman and Susan Potter
“From My Mouth to Your Ear”: Recounting a Life in Art and Cinema
MM Serra with Lynne Sachs
Introduction
MM Serra is a powerhouse New York City cinema visionary and a beloved friend since the late 1980s. As Executive Director of the Film-Makers’ Coopera- tive, Serra (as I have always called her) asked me to join the Cooperative’s board of directors in 1997, soon after I moved to town with my partner filmmaker, Mark Street, and our daughters, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs. Over the course of the next 17 years, we worked together on innumerable projects including: a 2006 anti-war exhibition (fig. 1) and DVD entitled For Life Against the War . . . Again (US, 2007), currently distributed by the FMC (fig. 2 and 3 For Life Against the War . . . Again photos); a PS1/ MoMA children’s film series entitled “Cinema of the Unusual,” curated by Maya and Noa (fig. 4 and 5 “Cinema of the Unusual” with Maya and Noa Street-Sachs photos) in 2008 and 2009; and many FMC benefits at locations like the then crumbling nineteenth-century synagogue at the Angel Orensanz Foundation in the East Village (fig. 6 and 7 Film-Makers’ Cooperative Benefit photos) and other venues around town. Together in the Coop office on Leonard Street or later on Park Avenue South, we toiled over grant applications, usually meeting their deadlines with only minutes to spare. In 2009, I co-edited the 51st issue of Millennium Film Journal (fig. 8, 9, and 10 Millennium Film Journal photos) which featured writing on the then burgeoning genre of experimental documentary and included Serra’s essay on her film Chop Off (US, 2008).