Throughout the 1970s, the Chicano arts collective Asco created a series of very short super-8 films, much of it documentation of their performances and street theater.  Better known for their “No Movies,” still photographs that purport to document scenes from what are in fact non-existent films, their super-8 shorts—fragments, really—offer glimpses of the group’s radical blend of activism, performance and conceptual art making in public spaces, though there is also at least one attempt at creating a short absurdist narrative.   In spite of the recent scholarly interest in the collective, Asco’s films remain essentially unstudied.  Part of this neglect can be explained by the scarcity of primary documents, the result not so much of the lack of adequate preservation efforts as it is the inevitable result of an active and conscious practice of destruction of unique materials Harry Gamboa, Jr. tells of periodically burning film reels, negatives and other unique materials in his mother’s backyard.  I would like to engage Asco as filmmakers, by reading their super-8 films through the practice and promises of mural painting.  Muralism emerges not so much as a recurring theme or point of reference as it is an obsession, so much so that we might think of their super-8 films are not simply the documentation of otherwise ephemeral performances, but as a filmic response to muralism.

Jesse Lerner is a documentary film and video maker based in Los Angeles.  His short films “Magnavoz” (2006), “T.S.H.” (2004) and "Natives" (1991, with Scott Sterling) and feature-length documentaries “Atomic Sublime” (2010), "The American Egypt" (2001) "Ruins" (1999) and “Frontierland" (1995, with Rubén Ortiz-Torres) have won prizes at film festivals in the United States, Latin America and Japan, and have shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Sydney Biennale and the Sundance Film Festival.  He has curated film and photography exhibitions for the Robert Flaherty Seminar, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Alvarez Bravo in Oaxaca.  His books include "F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing" (with Alex Juhasz), "The Shock of Modernity" and the forthcoming "The Maya of Modernism".  He teaches in the Intercollegiate Media Studies Program of the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, California.