9th Annual Experimental Lecture
“Art(core) and the Explicit Body:
The Films of MM Serra”
by MM Serra
“Artcore is the explicit in the cinematic body.... (it) explores the abject body in all its messy physical glory… in its pleasure and its pain” . This writing experience lead me to further develop Art(core) and to search for my own cinematic history.”
Millennium Film Journal No. 51 Spring/Summer 2009
WHAT IS ART(CORE)?
● Coined term to describe explicit films that resist the commodification of the body enacted by the sex industry.
● Exemplified by experimental filmmakers who utilize innovative formal strategies to represent or reframe erotic content, approaching the body from an alternative aesthetic viewpoint.
● It’s my search to expand language outside the limitations of “the pornographic.”
● Art(core is rooted in a historical preoccupation of the American Avant-garde
● Censorship persists today through ongoing commodification and labeling of the body
In June 2018, in response to Stormy Daniels’ allegations, Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said:
“I respect all human beings. I even have to respect criminals. But I’m sorry, I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career women or a women of substance or a woman who has great respect for herself as a women and as a person and isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation.”
Turner (1987)
History of Counter Culture Cinema:
The New American Cinema Group
● The New American Cinema Group (NACG) was created as part of the global counter culture movement.
● Formed as a reaction to Hollywood’s motion picture production code that censored what could be shown in commercial theaters.
● NACG distributed and exhibited Flaming Creatures (1963) by Jack Smith.
● This film was censored as obscenity for its explicit depictions of gay content, drag, and subversive sexual practices.
● NACG artists Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, and Flo Karpf were arrested for exhibiting the film at the New Bowery Theater on March 3, 1964.
● Drag was illegal during this time until 1973 when the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders took it off the list of perversions.
New American Cinema Group (NACG) founded in the 1961 by a group of 22 artists.
Flaming Creatures (1963)
Christmas on Earth (1963)
Darling International (1999)
Court document from
Flaming Creatures trial
Bodily Happenings:
Christmas on Earth (1963)
● A performative poly-sexual stew. Barbara Rubin’s Christmas On Earth is a filmic record of an explicit happening staged in a New York City apartment in 1963.
● The film uses an innovative dual-projection format that presents images of painted nude men and women as an overlapping film within a film, with one image projected at half-size in the center of the other image.
● Each projection is a performance, featuring live radio playback, color gel manipulation, and the chance interaction between two projected images. The film emphasizes contingency, unpredictability, and audience participation, so no two screenings are alike.
● It is one of the first sexually explicit films created by the postwar American avant-garde cinema, and was produced by Barbara Rubin when she was a teenager. But its depiction of sexuality is subversive, polymorphous, and queer.
● The title derives from the last lines of “Morning,”the 8th of the 9 chapters that compose Arthur Rimbaud’s sensory epic A season in Hell(1873)
Shock Value:
The Cinema of Transgression
● In 1985, the “Cinema of Transgression” emerged out of the No Wave cinema, a Colab-sponsored movement(1976-1985) in underground filmmaking on the Lower East Side that was part of the punk/no wave music scene.
● Cinema of Transgression is a term coined by Nick Zedd to describe the work being created by a community of filmmakers including himself, Richard Kern, Beth and Scott B., Vivienne Dick, Nan Goldin, and others.
● This movement emphasized an aesthetic that combined explicit sexual imagery with violence and humor.
“We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possessed the vision to see through this charade.”
- Nick Zedd from The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto
Art(core)
● Over 3 decades of filmmaking, my films have often been labeled “pornographic” because of their explicit content
● In my films, I desire to create an alternative language and alternative images of the body, of sex, and of intimacy – images that are about individuality and freedom of expression, rather than standardization and profit.
● Bitch Beauty (2011) explores drug addiction and prostitution, the cathartic effect of art to help Anne Hanavan, the film’s subject, to recover from her addiction.
● Art that is creative expression of the core of oneself, that expresses the complexities of politics and gender, not art as commodity.
Bitch Beauty (2011)
MM Serra
Art(core) and the Explicit Body
2018
Enduring Ornamate (2015)
Soi Meme (1995)
Chop Off (2009)
