https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9061-celebrating-the-film-makers-coop
By David Hudson
The Daily – Feb 10, 2026
“The official cinema all over the world is running out of breath,” declared the New American Cinema Group in 1962. “It is morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring.” Cofounded the previous year by twenty-two New York artists and filmmakers, including Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Ken and Flo Jacobs, and Jack Smith, the NACG had decided to create their own distribution arm, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
According to Mekas, “the signal that something had to be done” came when Cinema 16—“at that time the most advanced avant-garde/independent film distribution organization”—rejected Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night (1958), a groundbreaking work that heralded “a totally new, subjective cinema.” Currently distributing work from a collection of nearly six thousand films, videos, and media artworks, all of them non-exclusively owned by their makers, the Coop will celebrate its sixty-fifth anniversary with a benefit gala on Friday at the Judson Memorial Church in New York.
Curator David Schwartz—who wrote a lovely tribute to artists and filmmakers Ken and Flo Jacobs last November, not long after both had passed away—notes that when Ken Jacobs was asked what the Coop meant to him, he said, “It’s like asking how do you feel about oxygen. It’s a connection with the world. Fortunately there are other outlets now, but this is the pioneer.” And there will be another tribute to the Jacobses at the gala.
There will also be awards as well as screenings. Nan Goldin, whose perpetually evolving project The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is currently on view at Gagosian in London through March 21, will receive the Jerome Hill Award.
For decades, Goldin was known primarily for her photography, but in 2022, Laura Poitras shifted the spotlight to her activism—specifically, her battle against the Sackler family over their role in the opioid crisis—with the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which won the Golden Lion in Venice. Goldin’s support of Palestinians has drawn fire in Berlin and led to infighting and resignations at the Art Gallery of Ontario after the institution canceled the acquisition of Goldin’s moving-image work Stendhal Syndrome (2024), which is now on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery through April 6.
The Coop’s Marie Menken Award will go to Joan Jonas. “Few artists can claim to have initiated a new form of art,” writes Mitchell Herrmann for the Museum of Modern Art. “Joan Jonas, however, was crucial to the formation of two—video and performance. Beginning in the late 1960s, Jonas melded diverse influences (ranging from silent film to magic shows) and new technologies (such as portable video cameras and TV monitors) to explore the entanglement of the human body and its recorded image.” The exhibition Joan Jonas: The More-Than-Human World is on view at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, South Korea, through March 29.
The Maya Deren Award will be presented to Lynne Sachs. “At the center of Sachs’s work,” wrote Kat Sachs (no relation) for Notebook in 2021, “is often Sachs herself: her body, her voice, her words. And with those come the subjects that preoccupy her: family, feminism, language, place, and being. Over thirty years of making films, collage and installation art, writing prose and poetry, and orchestrating performances, often in conjunction with her moving-image work, Sachs has centered herself insomuch as she’s looking out at the world that encircles her, viewing it thoughtfully yet from a studied distance.”
Filmmaker M. M. Serra, the recipient of the Shirley Clarke Award, had been the Coop’s executive director for thirty years when she was succeeded by Tom Day in 2023. Serra oversaw the Coop’s certification as a nonprofit organization in 1993, steered it into the digital era, and, as the Coop notes, “was instrumental in the restoration of countless films, including the works of Edward Owens, Maya Deren, Storm De Hirsch, Cathy Cook, and multiple collaborations with the Stan VanDerBeek Estate. She successfully guided the Cooperative through four relocations and countless changes over the years.”
The Jack Smith Award will be presented to filmmaker, novelist, art collector, and raconteur John Waters. “Starting from breathtakingly smart-ass stunts,” writes Howard Hampton, “like staging a home-movie reenactment of the John F. Kennedy assassination in the short Eat Your Makeup (1968, with Divine, of course, as Jackie Kennedy), Waters assembled a photogenic stock company of dropouts, delinquents, and weirdos. Building on the anarchic playpen wallow of his first feature, Mondo Trasho (1969), and the more cultivated acid-trip finishing school that was Multiple Maniacs (1970), by Pink Flamingos [1972] Waters had developed a viable aesthetic: rattling, spasmodic, and expressively incongruous.”
The Jonas Mekas Award will honor the Jack Smith Archive, which was saved by artist Penny Arcade and critic J. Hoberman before it was sold to Gladstone Gallery in 2008. Writing for Artforum in 2011 about Thanks for Explaining Me, the Gladstone exhibition of Smith’s work, Hoberman noted that the “terminally underground, wildly uncommercial photographer, filmmaker, performance artist, and all-around difficult personality’s resistance to a show such as this was . . . part of the show.”
Before the evening gala, the Coop will present a series of screenings on Friday from eleven in the morning to three in the afternoon. The program: Serra’s NYC/Turner/Nightfall/PPII/Framed (1984–1987), Sachs’s House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), Jonas’s Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), Goldin’s You Never Did Anything Wrong (Part 1) (2024), Ken Jacobs’s Little Stabs at Happiness (1960), Smith’s Hot Air Specialists (1980), and Waters’s Multiple Maniacs.