The films and collaborative efforts of MM Serra and Jennifer Reeves

     This past Friday evening (June 28th), The  Filmmakers Cooperative set up shop in Willamsburg,  Brooklyn at Spectacle, the volunteer-run microcinema known for electric and rarely screened programming. Spearheaded by Katie Bradshaw, the night centered around works by Coop mainstays and collaborators MM Serra (its Executive Director) and Jennifer Reeves, two filmmakers with an interest in the avant garde and, as per the night's screening list, sexually explicit and sexually-liberating material. Equipped with enthusiastic fans (with the seats filled, incoming moviegoers happily sat on the aisle floor) and 16MM prints, the one hour, five film program provided a brief sample of thankfully challenging works; MM Serra, on hand to inform and inspire, gave an introduction prior to the screening which can be found to the left. Here's to many more in the future. 

Covered below are the films in the order in which they screened.

     To my eye, The Girl's Nervy proves Jennifer Reeves as a student of Stan Brakhage, as frames are painted an aqua blue, later seen through the form of an iris. While the eyeball-shaped framework takes shape, a stream of lines make their presence known, giving off the appearance of veins, skeletal x-rays, and tree roots. Reeves later cross-cuts between these images and footage of actual flowers and their stems, furthering the impression of cinematic connecting tissue. As fingers lay across a close-up of a typewriter, stems/veins appear within the keys and the fingers, morphing one into or rather onto the other.

     MM Serra's Soi Meme features a woman by the name of Goddess Rosemary dancing nude in her apartment. If the tagline of Richard Donner's Superman was "you'll believe a man can fly,"Soi Meme's could appropriately be "you'll believe a woman can ejaculate," a common disbelief that this film confronts and attempts to quiet. Both a piece of performance art and a performance invitational, Rosemary begins to finger her pierced genitalia as her vaginal fluids stream out, the film cells turning fiery red around her body and providing provocative background coloring. As drone-like sounds appear on the soundtrack, Rosemary pulls down some leaves to obscure herself; this show's curtain has descended.

     Darling International, a co-directed and self co-starring film by Serra and Reeves is a black-and-white nonlinear urban tale about fulfilling women's fantasies. Featuring audible dialogue, jazzy music, and recognizable New York sights (NY Meat Market, Bergen Street train station, Katz's deli, and a feline-loving Taylor Mead), the film follows these women, Reeves with her short hair and Serra with her dark sunglasses and dark gloves later on, surveying the night through subway train moments of reflection and elusive downtown bar-hopping; a deer head featured in one such establishment looks over all. Light comes and goes; bright street, store, and automobile lights quite literally amplify the darkness around them as the film progressively builds to a shot of the sun peering out over the city. The sexually explicit moments are well documented, as the woman-on-woman cunnilingus on hand caused quite the stir upon its release.

     Like a sequel to The Girl's Nervy, Reeves' Fear of Blushing is a multi-colored frame exhibition incorporating sounds of stones and rocks trembling (as if in preparation for a volcanic eruption) as film cells give off the impression of aged, crackling granite. Certain dialogue is played on a furiously intense loop and drawings of Herculean soldier-type men appear as the film's parts amount to a difficult-to-identify-but-not-appreciate whole.

     Influenced by the lack of female-on-female kissing apparent in Andy Warhol's film, Kiss, Serra's Double Your Pleasure, closing the evening, defiantly features two woman making out across a bed of doughnuts, the mirror to the side of them making the scenario more hypnotic if not caloric. It's equal part sensual and comedic. Not necessarily food porn, Double Your Pleasure's women briefly interrupt their saliva-swapping to feed a doughnut to one another, the film camera capturing the events made visible via a reflection in the mirror. As the film concludes, we hear the words "delicious, delicious, delicious, ecstasy," providing Double Your Pleasure with commercial value and the ultimate case for feminine passion and food as sexual enhancement.