Series Site
Join us throughout February, March, and April, at various venues across New York City, for Films for Social Change: Revisited and Expanded! This multi-program series reflects on films that emerged from Leonard M. Henny's 1960s/1970s activist and distribution organization "Films for Social Change," in addition to contemporaneous, adjacent, and related newer works from the Film-Makers' Coop's collection and beyond.
The collection of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative is known for its strong holdings of work from the American Avant-Garde and encompasses significant subfields: the poetic, subjective and the diaristic; modernist films that explore the very nature of cinema (its material qualities, its illusionism); mass and pop culture-oriented work that parodies, interrogates, and emulates the culture of dominant cinema. A less well-explored arena is the world of nonfiction filmmaking from the collection, especially films made in the context of the 1960s counterculture and the emergence of the New Left.
Taking its title and inspiration from another film distribution and advocacy group, Films for Social Change, Revisited and Expanded, offers deep dive into the Coop’s and other distributor’s holdings, unearthing some classic and little-known works of militant, verité, agitprop, and essay filmmaking. Split into eight programs and shown in collaboration with colleagues at Brooklyn’s Light Industry and Harlem’s Maysles Documentary Center, the season highlights a range of important and by-now obscure films from one of the richest veins of independent and underground film history.
Program notes and links will appear on this site as they come live, and we will be offering a zine-style publication on the series with an extended essay and program notes later on in the season.
The catalog of Leonard M. Henny’s 1960s/'70s activist and distribution organization Films for Social Change is the inspiration for this multi-program series, which will run throughout February, March, and April.