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Monday 10:30am - 5:30pm Tuesday 10:30am - 5:30pm Wednesday 10:30am - 5:30pm Thursday 10:30am - 5:30pm Friday 10:30am - 5:30pm

The Film-Makers' Cooperative

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The Film-Makers' Cooperative

Est. 1961. "The coolest film organization in the world." —John Waters

The Film-Makers’ Cooperative is the largest archive and distributor of independent and avant-garde films in the world. Created by artists in 1961 as the distribution branch of the New American Cinema Group, the Coop has more than 5,000 films, videotapes, and DVDs in its collection.

07/21/2026

Made with the assistance of the National Endowment of the Arts, Stan Brakhage’s THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS is a collage entirely made of mountain zone vegetation. As the title suggests it is an homage to (but also an argument with) Hieronymus Bosch. It pays tribute as well, and more naturally to The Tangled Garden of J. E. H. MacDonald and the flower paintings of Emil Nolde.

On Saturday, July 25th, at 8:30pm, join us at Le Petit Versailles Community Garden for a program of avant-garden films curated in collaboration with Allied Productions and Zoe Beloff! Spanning 1915 to 2010 and sourced predominantly from the Coop’s collection, these films invoke vernal imagery and public spaces to comment on the distinct yet often intersecting issues of class, immigration, q***r identity, HIV/AIDS, and capitalist exploitation.

07/17/2026

Lawrence Jordan’s OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE is a one of a kind collage work based on the Bardo Thodol, known in the west as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Utilizing cutouts of antique line engravings, Jordan creates a frenetic atmosphere reflective of the struggle between death and rebirth, antiquity and modernity, and much more.

Come see OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE on Saturday, August 1st, at 7pm, where Non Films will be presenting a fascinating mini-retrospective of the films of Lawrence Jordan, consisting of 16mm prints culled entirely from the Coop’s archive!

07/15/2026

“We are not joining together to make money. We are joining together to make films. We are joining together to build the New American Cinema. And we are going to do it together with the rest of America, together with the rest of our generation. Common beliefs, common knowledge, common anger and impatience binds us together—and it also binds us together with the New Cinema movements of the rest of the world… We don’t want false, polished, slick films; we prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive. We don’t want rosy films, we want them the color of blood.” —The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group

On this day in 1961, the New American Cinema Group, soon to be known as The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, was incorporated.

Happy 65th birthday to the FMC!

07/14/2026

“A lyric, tender, intensely subjective exploration of a flower garden, with extreme magnification, flashing color harmonies.” – Cinema 16

Marie Menken’s GLIMPSE OF THE GARDEN she delicately explores the layers of a spring garden, shifting between various vignettes of all shapes and sizes. She pastes together images that illuminate hidden details and texture within the greenery that surrounds her.

Come see GLIMPSE OF THE GARDEN and many other films about plants at ‘Come to My (Avant-)Garden’ at Le Petit Versailles Community Garden on June 25th!

07/13/2026

Happy birthday to the one and only Joan Jonas (Joan Jonas)! A pioneer of video and performance art and a longtime friend and supporter of the Coop, Joan is a living legend, and we were thrilled to honor her in February with the Marie Menken Award at our 65th anniversary gala celebration at Judson Memorial Church.

Photo by Krista Schlueter Krista Schlueter.

07/11/2026

The original poster for John Waters’ THE DIANE LINKLETTER STORY (1970), circulated by The Film-Makers’ Coop and bearing our imprint! Featured in the 2023 coffee table book JOHN WATERS: POPE OF TRASH, published by The Academy and DelMonico Books.

Did you know the Coop was Waters’ first distributor? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, we were the first organization to circulate 16mm prints of MONDO TRASHO, DIANE LINKLETTER, and his first major work, MULTIPLE MANIACS. We were honored to present Waters with the Jack Smith Award at our 65th anniversary gala celebration earlier this year.

Be sure to check out Conor Williams’s (who we collaborated with last month on our BAM Film show!) interview with Waters for Los Angeles Review of Books, published today, ahead of DESPERATE LIVING and HAIRSPRAY’s induction into the Criterion Collection.

07/09/2026

On THURSDAY, JULY 30th at 7pm, join us at the Waterfront Museum for a screening of two 16mm prints of Stan Brakhage’s A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea and Water for Maya.

These films are just a small sampling of the Coop’s vast Brakhage collection. Many of their Brakhage prints are rarely screened, and many aren’t available anywhere digitally. This screening series highlights the best of this underseen trove of Brakhage’s films.

A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea, the first film in Stan Brakhage’s “Vancouver Island Quartet,” is a feature-length ode to the childhood of his second wife Marilyn. Shot around British Columbia where Marilyn spent her early years, Brakhage uses techniques from across his filmography to capture images of the sea that paint a vivid picture of adolescence and memory. Water for Maya is a short hand-painted tribute to Maya Deren and her love of water.

06/26/2026

This Filmmaker-Member Friday, we are highlighting the work of experimental filmmaker and video artist Rrose Present ( Rrose Present )

Rrose was born in Barcelona. She graduated in Fine Arts at the UB, Master of Philosophy in Contemporary Art at the UAB. In her work she writes in images from a critical “poetic” gaze, with a double sense of reality: the PRESENTIAL, using the body as a tripod for her emotions, and the RE-PRESENTATIONAL, with the series of “video ‘without-camera” images,’ reinterpreting a camera-world “.

Pictured above are stills from her 2019 work BLOOD ROOTS. Here is Present’s description of the film:

“This project is not exactly experimental, if we understand it without narrative. Although any experiment with new approaches leads to new narratives or new ways of thinking and looking at the real / imagined (as Barnett would say). This project lives in that contradiction (pointed by Liada) between the experimetal tradition, always narrated by men, where the structure of language is what gives the meaning and the forms that arise from the need to shape an emotion or fiction.
Here I have needed to put images to some emotions of a true story. This truth is stranger than fictionand, to avoid falling into the drama, I have adopted the form of a story explained with titles inspired in the silent movies.
The story-tale allows us to stand back from reality and to universalize the experience by approaching the mythical or archetypal language that speaks to our individual / collective emotions. In this way I could explain my father’s life-death using elements of experimental language emotionally to show as a fiction a true story.“

Check out BLOOD ROOTS and many more of Present’s works on the Film-Makers’ Coop website today!

06/22/2026

Next Wednesday, on July 1st the Filmmaker’s Coop is proud to present a screening of THE HART OF LONDON by Jack Chambers in honor of Canada Day!

Come see this Canadian masterpiece about place, depersonalization, and the aesthetics of representation projected on 16mm at the Filmmaker’s Coop screening room.

“Jack Chambers is one of Canada’s most famous and greatest living painters. Why then have his films been as neglected as they have been? I feel that it is because his films do not arise as an adjunct to his painting (as is true in the case of most other painter film-makers) but that, rather, Jack Chambers has realized the almost opposed aesthetics of paint and film and has created a body of moving pictures so crucially unique as to fright paint buffery: thus his films have inherited a social position kin to that of the films of Joseph Cornell in this country. The fact is that four films of Jack Chambers have changed the whole history of film, despite their neglect, in a way that isn’t possible within the field of painting. There are no ‘masters’ of film in any significant sense whatsoever. There are only ‘makers’ of film in the original, or at least medieval, sense of the word. Jack Chambers is a true ‘maker’ of films. He needs no stance, or standing, for he dances attendance upon the coming-into-being of something recognizably new: (and as all is new, always, one must question the veracity of all works, whatever medium, which beseem everything but that truth).” – Stan Brakhage. Perception is a sensory communication that occurs at a primary level between organisms; through the skin to the core and back through the skin again into the exterior world. HART OF LONDON is that kind of film.

We will have Maple Taffy and some Labatt Blue at the screening for all Canada lovers who show up.

Address

475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor
New York, NY
10016

Opening Hours

Monday	10:30am - 5:30pm
Tuesday	10:30am - 5:30pm
Wednesday	10:30am - 5:30pm
Thursday	10:30am - 5:30pm
Friday	10:30am - 5:30pm

Website

http://www.film-makerscoop.com/, http://linktr.ee/filmcoop

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