Trafficking Amidst the Disreputable in MoMA’s “Cinemas of Transgression”

The thematic programs in MoMA’s retrospective commemorating the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Millennium Film Workshop are generally grouped around certain political (“Make Love Not War”), poetic (“Quotidian Pleasures”, “Diaries, Notes, and Sketches”, etc.) and critical (“Seventies Structures” from P. Adams Sitney’s definitions of structural films) resonances, but the “Cinemas of Transgression” (CoT) program is curated in response to an actual movement. Coined by the filmmaker Nick Zedd in “The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto”, it aimed to “openly renounce and reject the...