MM Serra Presents Notes from the Lower East Side: Redux

Figure 1.

Freeman Alley, New York City. Photograph, MM Serra.

Figure 2.

Freeman Alley, New York City. Photograph, MM Serra.

I became aware of a drastic tornado-like dark cloud settling into my life personally, professionally, creatively, and eventually I was aware that the entire city, country, and world were enveloped in a virus like the Bubonic Plague of the 14th century. It happened so quickly. Starting March 13, when The New School where I teach was closed for classroom teaching and required online learning and offered two weeks of Zoom workshops to its faculty. At first I was concerned because it was so foreign to me, but Zoom became an important communication and creative tool both for teaching and for creative projects.

With New York City in lockdown, opportunities became available to actually work on other various creative projects. A long-time friend and filmmaker Susan Salinger invited me to participate in TEN-ISH.com. TEN-ISH.com is a digital platform for women in the arts to present examples of their work, ideas about the art-making process, or art in general. For my site, I decided to participate by asking my insightful colleague and close friend Lynne Sachs to interview me, focusing on my filmmaking for the past 40 years. With the time limitations of the web, we selected to excerpt six of my films to explore together. The result was surprising because we were in quarantine, in two different locations, and yet we were able to have an intimate discussion of my films.

After our virtual conversation, I decided to prioritize a work-in-progress now that I was in quarantine. Since 2016, I have been shooting, in various formats, an experimental documentary about the Lower East Side creative, collaborative partnership Allied Productions, which is composed of artists Jack Waters and Peter Cramer. Jack's decade-long multimedia opus Generator (Pestilence Part 1) was produced for a week at La MaMa Theater starting at the end of February and concluding March 1. The work dealt with out-of-control disease, bodily fluids, rats, blood, dying, worms, mythology, and ended in faith in regeneration. The cast and band members wore face masks and hazmat suits.

Figure 3.

TEN-ISH.com interview with Lynne Sachs and MM Serra.

Figure 4.

Jack Water's Generator (Pestilence Part 1) dress rehearsal for work-in-progress film. MM Serra.

Figure 5.

Jack Water's Generator (Pestilence Part 1) dress rehearsal for work-in-progress film. MM Serra.

It was a premonition of what was to come the following weeks and months and perhaps years.

Filmmaking is a process that involves a community. For collective activity—for production, for distribution, exhibition, installation, education, and archiving. For me the most important organization in my life has been The Film-Makers' Cooperative.

Since 1990 I have been Executive Director and on the Board of Directors at the Film-Makers' Cooperative. The FMC is a living presence because of the films, media, filmmakers, educational outlets and year-round programming. Only during 9/11/2001 was the FMC closed while the downtown was repaired for two months due to the terrorist attacks.

In the current crisis, FMC's office staff started working remotely from March 20 to now. As a result of the worldwide plague, all of our rentals, sales, exhibitions, everything everywhere were canceled. Films that were out of the country were held and suspended in time. It was like running against a brick wall.

So what do we do now? We established a digital rental system for our website that listed every film that was digitized in our collection. In addition, we established a collection of Vimeo on Demand for personal viewing. Working with filmmakers like Abigail Child, Mary Filippo, Saul Levine, Larry Gottheim, etc., these and other filmmakers embraced the digital world because...