In 1969, Pola Chapelle founded INTERCAT: The First International Cat Film Festival, which began as a five-hour program of films about cats that played at New York City's Elgin Theatre. Through 1976, INTERCAT reappeared intermittently and toured Boston, Philadelphia, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Sydney, and Winnipeg. Among the numerous feline flicks that screened at INTERCAT in those years were the kitten sequence from François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) and Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s collaboration made three years after Meshes of the Afternoon, titled The Private Life of a Cat (1946). In 2016, the festival was briefly revived at Bard College. 56 years after its original incarnation, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative is proud to bring INTERCAT back to New York City, first in collaboration with Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater, and now with Labocine as part of their October 2025 online issue FELINO.
Chapelle (known, according to a 1976 Boston Globe article, as “The Cat Woman”) was one of the founding members of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the oldest and largest distributor of independent and avant-garde films in the world. Her husband, filmmaker Adolfas Mekas, directed the acclaimed experimental feature Hallelujah the Hills (1963). Adolfas’ brother Jonas Mekas was the Coop’s de facto leader and is widely regarded as the godfather of American avant-garde cinema, a pioneer of the “diary film,” and one of the most important figures in both New York and global underground film culture.
Chapelle’s life and work is often overshadowed by the well-documented lives and oeuvres of her husband and brother-in-law. (Even the countercultural avant-garde has tended to foreground the contributions of its men while overlooking those of its women). Yet, Chapelle was a prolific and multi-talented artist who made a significant impact on the underground film movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. An accomplished filmmaker in her own right, her films Those Memory Years (1972) and A Matter of Baobab (1970) — the latter of which features the Brothers Mekas, Storm de Hirsch, and Louis Brigante among its colorful cast of characters — are among the cornerstone works of the Coop’s 16mm collection. As an actor, Chapelle appeared in a number of her husband’s and brother-in-law’s films. As a singer, she released the album Pola Chapelle Sings Italian Folk Songs in 1961 and sang the theme song for Storm de Hirsch’s only feature-length film, the Rome-set dramatic narrative Goodbye in the Mirror (1964), which was once described by Shirley Clarke as “the first real woman’s film.”
INTERCAT remains one of Chapelle’s most endearing — and enduring — contributions. The appeal is immediate: a festival devoted entirely to films about cats is catnip for any cat lover. Moreover, with INTERCAT, Chapelle forecasted the ubiquity of cat images and videos in the digital age. Dubbed by Thought Catalog as the “unofficial mascot of the Internet,” cats are easily the most-viewed and shared domesticated animal on the net. From the widespread proliferation of cat memes and TikTok videos, to viral feline celebs like Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub, there’s no denying cats’ domination of visual media on the World Wide Web in the 21st century. This phenomenon has even been the subject of the book How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity: A Guide to Financial Freedom, the Museum of the Moving Image’s 2015 exhibition How Cats Took Over the Internet, and the annual Internet Cat Video Festival (of which INTERCAT is an obvious progenitor).
The May 2025 revival of INTERCAT included a number of films from the Coop’s collection that appeared in Chapelle’s original iterations of the festival, as well as cat-themed Coop titles that made their INTERCAT debuts on both 16mm and digital formats. Among the returning films were Chapelle’s own Fishes in Screaming Water (1969) and How To Draw A Cat (1973) — the latter described by Jonas Mekas as “the most perfect film about how to draw a cat” — as well as Joyce Wieland’s Catfood (1968). New additions included Stan Brakhage’s Nightcats (1956) and Max (2002), Tom Chomont’s Ophelia / The Cat Lady (1969), Sarah Jane Lapp’s The Neighborhood Cat (1999), Peggy Ahwesh’s My Cat Gets an Aura Reading (2011), and recent Oscar-nominee Bill Morrison’s feat of GoPro filmmaking, Curly’s Thanksgiving (2020), which can be viewed as a precursor to the recent promulgation of cat POV videos on social media. Concluding the program was a new 16mm restoration print of Roberta Cantow’s If This Ain’t Heaven (1984), another popular cat-themed title from the Coop’s collection. That restoration print, struck by BB Optics, came from the New York Public Library’s Reserve Film and Video Collection and was generously acquired for the May 2025 screening by the Spectacle team.
For Labocine’s FELINO issue, we are proud to present six INTERCAT 2025 titles currently available on digital formats: Pola Chapelle’s How to Draw A Cat, Tom Chomont’s Ophelia / The Cat Lady, Peggy Ahwesh’s My Cat Gets an Aura Reading, Bill Morrison’s Curly’s Thanksgiving, Joyce Wieland’s Catfood, and Roberta Cantow’s If This Ain’t Heaven.
(INTERCAT 2025 was curated by Matt McKinzie and Robert Schneider from The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, in collaboration with Stephen Cappel and the team at Spectacle Theater. Special thanks to Roberta Cantow, Mackenzie Lukenbill, Will Hair, Stephanie Monohan, and Nate Dorr).
About The Film-Makers’ Cooperative: The Film-Makers’ Cooperative (a.k.a. The New American Cinema Group) is the oldest non-profit organization devoted to the collection, preservation, and distribution of experimental film and media art in New York City. Founded in 1961 to support filmmakers and artists outside of the mainstream Hollywood film industry, the Film-Makers’ Coop is a member-run organization that distributes and exhibits work from its ever-growing collection of nearly 6,000 films, videos, and media artworks. Anyone may submit their work to be distributed by the Coop, and all members of the organization retain full ownership of their work. Public accessibility and non-exclusivity have always been the core of our educational mission, as we work to bring both the history and the future of experimental cinema to audiences in New York and around the world. The Film-Makers’ Cooperative was an early safe haven for filmmakers on the margins. In the 1960s, the organization was a pivotal player in the legal fight for the rights of queer expression in art; its underground screenings likewise inspired Andy Warhol to begin his career as a filmmaker. Many of the breakout works from the Coop’s early days — such as Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), Warhol’s Sleep (1964), and John Waters’ Mondo Trasho (1969) — are now classics of avant-garde cinema, and it was the Film-Makers’ Coop who first put these films into distribution and fought for their right to exist.
The Film-Makers' Cooperative offers a diverse exhibition and workshop program curated by an array of in-house and outside experts, curators, writers, artists, and scholars. We partner on programming with (and lend films to) a global network of film and art institutions. In New York City, this includes The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI), the Public Art Fund, Independent Art Fair, Film at Lincoln Center, Maysles Documentary Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Light Industry, Millennium Film Workshop, Spectacle Theater, and Anthology Film Archives, among other venues. The Coop also offers free, public workshops that cover various elements of film craft, and actively supports new work from contemporary makers through grant and production assistance. Furthermore, the organization has a long history of publishing newsletters, periodicals, and books that advocate, historicize, and examine the field of moving image art.
The activities of The Film-Makers’ Cooperative / New American Cinema Group are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Text by Matt McKinzie, Artistic Director of The Film-Makers’ Cooperative and co-curator of INTERCAT 2025.
