Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room: Women Filmmakers

Adrienne Mancia was a fearless advocate and personal friend of innumerable women directors who pioneered new and challenging forms of filmmaking throughout the 20th century. A particularly formative experience for Mancia was seeing Maya Deren’s MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943) — now widely regarded as one of the most influential avant-garde films of all time — at a screening presented by Deren herself. As remembered by Ron Magliozzi, Film Curator at MoMA, in a recent interview for Screen Slate:

Meshes of the Afternoon made a huge impression on Adrienne when she first saw it. She went to a screening of the film in the late ’50s or early ’60s, at which [Maya] Deren presented the film. It might have been at Cinema 16. And it made a huge impression on her understanding of what it meant to do an independent film, what an artists’ cinema meant. Particularly how artists’ films and independent films could be liberating. She said… Deren was wearing black slacks and a very blousy white blouse that you could see through, so you could see Maya’s breasts through the blouse when she spoke to introduce the film. Adrienne said people were saying, “You can see her breasts!” You know, whispering in the audience. And seeing the film after having Maya introduce it that way made a huge impression on her, in terms of the notion of making films being a liberation for the filmmaker and for the audience.

This selection of short films, curated by the GME team, highlights the work of groundbreaking women filmmakers Maya Deren, Faith Hubley, Agnès Varda, and Shirley Clarke that Adrienne programmed and championed throughout her career. To view this program in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room, click here.