The Coop Quarterly: Members' Newsletter No. 1

The Film-Makers' Cooperative is pleased to resume its quarterly newsletter, a long-standing tradition that allows the organization to keep all of its members informed. Through it, we hope to build a more transparent and open dialogue with our community—sharing updates, opportunities, and reflections that celebrate the ever-evolving spirit of the Coop!

August 11, 2025

A Message from the President

Emily Singer, President, Board of Directors

I hope everyone’s been enjoying their summer! I’m excited to share a few important updates in key staff positions. Please join us in welcoming our new Distribution Manager, Julia Petrocelli, who brings fresh energy and a strong commitment to supporting our artists and expanding the reach of the FMC collection. We’re also thrilled to announce that Matt McKinzie, who many of you already know, has accepted the role of Artistic Director, and is now overseeing the Coop’s daily operations while implementing important new initiatives—a development we’re incredibly excited about as we continue to grow and evolve.

We’re also pleased to resume our quarterly newsletter, a long-standing tradition that allows us to keep all of our members informed. Through it, we hope to build a more transparent and open dialogue with our community—sharing updates, opportunities, and reflections that celebrate the ever-evolving spirit of the Coop!

Editor's Note

David Schwartz, Board Member, Newsletter Co-Editor

As a long-time film programmer, mainly at Museum of the Moving Image, where I was Chief Curator for more than 30 years, I have always relied on the Film-Makers' Cooperative for its astonishing collection of works exemplifying film as a form of personal expression. The Coop feels as essential today as it was when it was founded in 1962; in fact, I drew on the FMC collection for two recent programs at MoMI. In April, A Weekend with Tom Gunning: The Attractions of Cinema included essential films by Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Peggy Ahwesh, and Ernie Gehr, and in late July, I was very happy to present Ragtag and Desire by Giuseppe Boccassini, recent films by the Berlin-based Italian experimental filmmaker. Boccassini has said that his practice, which involves working with found footage, and uncovering revelatory moments in film noirs, international melodramas, and other existing films, was influenced by the work of Ken Jacobs. It is a perfect example of the way that contemporary artists and viewers can draw inspiration from the essential works in the Coop collection. Here’s a terrific short essay about Ragtag, written for Screen Slate by Tom Gunning.

I want to take a moment to recognize the tremendous legacy of P. Adams Sitney and Flo Jacobs, who died in June. They were monumental figures in the history of avant-garde filmmaking, both deeply connected to the Film-Makers’ Cooperative for its entire history. An unparalleled scholar, P. Adams was a champion and exegete of the movement, and his mind-expanding book Visionary Film, published in 1974, remains the definitive study of American experimental cinema. It is no exaggeration to say that Flo, who will forever be associated with her husband and creative partner Ken Jacobs, was universally beloved, and an artistic powerhouse and iconoclast behind a deceptively gentle demeanor. Both will be deeply missed, and both leave behind enormous and essential legacies.

It is a great honor to serve on the Coop’s Board of Directors, and I’m especially pleased to help relaunch the Newsletter, keeping our growing and evolving membership informed during this turbulent and transformative time. Like the Coop itself, the Newsletter will grow and evolve. Please feel free to contact me with your suggestions and thoughts as david@cinemaprojects.net.

Office Management Updates

Julia Curl, Vice-President, Board of Directors

I’m here to report on the Coop’s significant improvements in office management over the past few years. Since 2023, the FMC has progressively increased all staff salaries by a minimum of 30% across the board, and has doubled its paid leave/vacation days for all employees. All full time FMC employees are now also eligible for employer-match 401k benefits.

In the past quarter, we have overhauled, streamlined, and modernized our distribution systems. Previously, we relied on an outdated 1990s-era database—the Media Tracking System (MTS)—and stacks of handwritten forms to manage film distribution. In April, the FMC fully transitioned to Artlogic, a much more user-friendly web-based platform that lets us generate invoices and process payments much more quickly than before. (Many thanks to my brother, Wesley Curl, for successfully downloading and decoding all of MTS’ data—a feat that some said was impossible!). We also moved to an all-digital internal organization system, eliminating redundant steps in the booking process to increase efficiency. Now, at maximum speed, the FMC can fully process digital bookings (from initial request to invoice sent to payment received to file delivered) in less than an hour. This makes life easier for our staff and renters alike, which in turn generates more income for our artists. Partly because of these workflow improvements, in Q2 of this year (April-June), the FMC quadrupled its booking income over the previous quarter. While financially the FMC had a difficult 2024 and Q1 2025, this increase in distribution revenue in Q2 2025—alongside initiatives led by our new Artistic Director, Matt McKinzie—has stabilized the Coop’s finances, and we are currently breaking even.

Our next big database project is to develop a system for automatically generating annual royalty statements and payments for Coop artists, saving our filmmakers the headache of having to ask. We’re aiming to roll this out at the start of 2027. All of these upgrades, from the MTS data export to modernizing our distribution systems and developing a new filmmaker royalty database, are the result of major ongoing volunteer efforts and our dedicated staff.

Greeting from the Artistic Director

Matt McKinzie, Artistic Director

For those of you who I haven’t met yet, I am a writer, filmmaker, and curator who has served as the Coop's Artist Liaison for the past year. In that role I worked closely with filmmaker-members and friends of the community to welcome new films into the Coop's collection and to program screenings and events in-house and at various venues around New York City, while also managing the Coop's public-facing facets, including our website, social media, and newsletter. Previously, I worked as the Coop's Social Media Manager after first joining the team as an intern in 2022. I became a filmmaker-member of the Coop in 2018, while a 16mm filmmaking student of longtime Coop member Mary Filippo at Emerson College. I have dreamt of working at this organization since becoming a member at the age of 19, and feel honored and humbled to assume the role of Artistic Director at The Film-Makers' Cooperative beginning this month.

2025 has been a busy and exciting year for the Coop. We have hosted a number of sold-out in-house screenings, including films by longtime members Donna Deitch, Abigail Child, Henry Hills, and Jennifer Reeves, as well as showcases of new work by recent members with the 12th Annual New Year / New Work Festival in April, and solo showcases by Heather Landsman and M Woods. In the spring, we went viral with our revival of INTERCAT: The International Festival of Cat Films, which was first started through the Coop by one of our founding members, Pola Chapelle, in 1969. The excerpt we shared on social media from Chapelle's 1973 film How to Draw a Cat amassed over 180K likes and over 2 million views, and led to two sold-out shows of INTERCAT at Spectacle Theater. In the new fiscal year, we look forward to exciting programming opportunities and new collaborations, including partnering with Bread and Puppet, the Rockaway Film Festival, and the Institute for Public Architecture for a series of outdoor screenings around New York City.

In addition to our recent programming and community collaborations, the Coop has been working this year to digitize the films of three of our longtime members: Warren Sonbert, Caroline Avery, and Tom DeWitt. Four of Sonbert's films premiered in May as part of Love and Joy, Warren Sonbert, our collaborative program with Metrograph and Gartenberg Media Enterprises. The event was a resounding success and heralded the return of Sonbert's early films to distribution at the Coop on digital formats. Stay tuned for forthcoming announcements regarding the public premieres of Avery's and DeWitt's digitized films later this year!

In 2025, we have also streamlined our membership system. Members can now submit work to the Coop's distribution database via an entirely electronic interface. I am pleased to report that this new system has led to an exponential increase in new filmmaker-members joining the Coop's collection.

I am deeply honored to serve our rich and vibrant community of filmmakers and moving image artists, and look forward to working with you all in the new fiscal year!

Exhibition Update

Julia Petrocelli, Distribution Assistant

It has been an exciting first half of 2025, with bookings from theaters, museums, and galleries around the world, along with a number of screenings and exhibitions presented in collaboration with the FMC.

Spectacle Theater in Williamsburg hosted a revival of INTERCAT, a festival of feline films last programmed in 1976. The screening was such a hit it sparked a follow-up event just weeks later at Pittsburgh Sound + Image. Meanwhile, back at our Park Avenue screening room, we had the pleasure of welcoming writer-director Donna Deitch for a rare presentation of her early works—some preserved in our archive, and others brought from her personal collection.

Our longtime collaborators at the Museum of Modern Art have played a major role in our 2025 distribution and programming activities starting with a career retrospective of long-time Coop member Larry Gottheim, presented as an FMC collaboration. Shortly after, our former director MM Serra returned to curate Queer and Uncensored, a series that drew from our collection of prints and digital titles by queer filmmakers. We also continue to regularly supply prints to Anthology Film Archives as well for their Essential Cinema series and other programming.

Internationally, Faith Hubley’s Who Am I was screened at the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, a space that is converted into a climate shelter during Spain’s hottest months—offering refuge from extreme heat for immigrant children. In Singapore, the National Gallery hosted a special screening of Recuerdo of Two Sundays and Two Roads That Lead to the Sea by Bibsy M. Carballo—a national premiere attended by Bibsy’s friends and family, many seeing the film for the first time. In Beijing, HeyTown Arts Center recently wrapped a two-week program (July 12–27) featuring a range of Coop prints, including Ken Jacobs’ Opening the Nineteenth Century, shown with his iconic 3-D-creating Pulfrich filter.

The Museum of the Moving Image just welcomed the Berlin-based Coop member Giuseppe Boccassini to present his film Ragtag and the New York premiere of Desire, followed by a conversation with film scholar Tom Gunning. More screenings are on the horizon, both at home and overseas—including ongoing bookings at venues including the Enzian Theater, 25 FPS Film Festival in Croatia, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

MoMA's Queer and Uncensored

Jack Waters, Coop Member

MM Serra, longtime head of the Film-Makers' Cooperative, and FMC member Erica Schreiner, were the guest programmers for the MoMA series Queer and Uncensored, which ran from May 28 through June 27. The series was composed of twelve thematic programs: Transcendence, Art (core), Contemporary Performance, Trespassive, Activism (In Honor of Jerry Tartaglia), Pestilence, Bottom and Top, Queer Adjacent, Bodyscapes, Beth B’s Exposed with shorts by Carolee Schneemann, Maria Beatty, and Tessa Hughes-Freeland, and On Stage. The only program featuring work by a single maker was Michele Handelman's prescient BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism (1995). Film-Makers' Coop alum, the late Jerry Tartaglia's wealth of films inform the Queer experimental canon by virtue of his foundational presence at the NY Lesbian And Gay Experimental Festival (renamed MIX NYC). Following his 2022 death, Tartaglia's body of cinematic work was acquired by MoMA. Aside from the program presented in his honor, Tartaglia was only represented in the series by his seven-minute 16mm film Amnesia (2000). The reason given was that his films have not yet been fully preserved. It should be noted that MIX NYC stands foremost as a precursor in the field in its landmark definition of the very notion of Queer experimental film, with few avowed examples of outspoken and continuous international arbiters of LBGTQIA+ cinema before its time. Many, if not most of the titles shown in this series had their premieres or early screenings at MIX NYC. The series might be viewed as a stealth operation in light of its slowly unveiled appearance to public awareness with limited promotion in comparison to other MoMA film series of similar impact. The subtle reveal is especially significant considering the three years that passed from the time of MM Serra’s initiation and the development of the project. With the extreme rarity of clearly pronounced, and truly uncensored Queer-themed presentations by major museum institutions, the relative boldness of this programming made it a watershed. It was organized by Ron Magliozzi, Curator, and Carson Parish, Associate Producer, Department of Film, MoMA, with the help of Steve Macfarlane, Department Assistant, and Aditi Prasad, Intern, Department of Film. The Queer Adjacent program underscored the series’ challenge of the controversial exploration of what the notions of Queer have been, how the consensus of these definitions are currently understood, and what the understanding of Queer could yet be. The pairing of fluidity and precision in this curation was exemplified by the example given by Serra’s mentor, NYU Cinema Studies Associate Professor Chris Strayer: that, while opinion may be a perspective, opinion in itself is neither historical nor analytical.

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