New Beginnings for the New Year features a selection of Sadie Benning’s proto-riot grrl PXLvision cine-confessions, Peggy Ahwesh’s documentary-styled verité melodrama Martina’s Playhouse (1989) and Nina Fonoroff’s The Accursed Mazurka (1994), an epic collage consideration of spiraling mental illness, recovery and identity.
Much critical attention to women’s avant-garde filmmaking of the 1970s and 1980s focused on East coast and European feminist filmmakers, the critique of visual pleasure and the notion of the male gaze in cinema. In San Francisco, a new generation of feminist avant-garde filmmakers were emerging with a very different approach to questions of gender and pleasure in cinema.
For the second installment of Eye on a Director, MAD highlights the collection of the legendary film distributor and archive Canyon Cinema. In the late 1950s, Canyon Cinema brought together independent film artists whose work reflected a remarkable diversity in style and content. Variously called avant-garde, underground and experimental, these artists shared a vision of filmmaking as a form of personal expression, free from the demands and constraints of commercial conventions.
