Tube Time is tonight at 10:30. Teams led by Triple Canopy’s Sam Frank, Rhizome’s Ceci Moss, dump.fm’s Ryder Ripps and filmmaker Jessie Stead present their most overboard online finds of the year, week or moment for this annual, tournament-style screening. Hosted by Gabe Liedman.
Meet the teams:
Sam Frank, William Smith, Adam Helms and Jim Laakso
Ceci Moss, Brian Droitcour, Ed Halter and Charles Broskoski
Ryder Ripps, Stefan Moore , Scott Ostler and Jeanette Hayes
The artist Ed Ruschahas long flirted with the movie business in his paintings, evoking the title cards of early films in his word constructions, for instance, and returning again and again to satirize Hollywood’s famous sign. And his recent starring role in a Doug Aiken film is far from his only experience with celluloid itself. In the 1970s, Ruscha also made a series of largely unknown short movies, which will be presented at Anthology Film Archives this Friday as part of the Migrating Forms film festival… (read more)
Triple Play, Richard Brody on 3 Recent Films by Jean-Marie Straub, via The New Yorker
The three recent films by Jean-Marie Straub (one of which, “Itinerary of Jean Bricard,” is the last that he made together with Danièle Huillet, who died in 2006) that were shown Saturday evening at Anthology Film Archives in the Migrating Forms series ought to have been in the New York Film Festival last year, for the simple reason that the works, which were released together as one program in Paris in April, 2009, were doubtless among the best films released anywhere in the world last year (and were certainly better than much that was in fact screened there). Nonetheless, better late than never, and it was good to see a full house (and some friends) at Saturday’s event… (read more)
Now in its sophomore year, Migrating Forms has expanded. This successor to the New York Underground Film Festival winds up its 10-day run this weekend with a bounty of unclassifiable work in every kind of visual format. Rarely seen 16mm films by the California painter Ed Ruscha? Check. A mini-retrospective of documentaries by Jean-Pierre Gorin, including a collaboration with a Samoan gang? Check. A program devoted to the trove of found-art that is YouTube? Check. Promising premieres include “A Grammar for Listening,” British filmmaker Luke Fowler’s three-part film about the aesthetics of noise, and Los Angeles artist Stanya Khan’s intimate video portraits. The latter features a first-person narrative in which the performer is bandaged and visibly scarred after an accident. The title: “It’s Cool, I’m Good.”
No one knew where to find him. Thoroughly unlisted and well below the public radar, I never figured that I’d score an interview with Ernie Kovacs. A household name way back when, Kovacs stood straight up and walked right out of the spotlight in 1962. He simply stopped producing his popular television broadcasts without providing any reason or rationale. Poof, smoke, he was gone; Ernie had pulled the best disappearing act in showbiz history. While Kovacs may remain a hazy, half-remembered name for most, his legacy is indisputable as a certified cult hero and a canonized TV pioneer. Quite strangely, however, his current whereabouts are largely unknown. It took copious research and a friend of a friend—who is a personal assistant to a power ful talent agent in LA—to dig up an address. Of course, the 10 million dollar question here is: What has Ernie been doing for the last for ty-five plus years?… (read more)
Tonight at Anthology Film Archives in New York, Migrating Forms—the art-meets-cinema form born from the former New York Underground Film Festival—returns for its second annual year.
Migrating Forms opens with Kevin Jerome Everson’s Erie (2010), a collection of single-take shots depicting black American life in communities around the Great Lakes. The festival closes on the May 23 with new videos by Stanya Kahn that examine the artist’s relationships with her mother and a friend, and finally, herself (Sandra, 2009; Kathy, 2009; It’s Cool, I’m Good, 2010)… (read more)
There are gems like Stephanie Spray’s As Long As There’s Breath, an unpretentious portrait of a Nepali family anticipating the return of their son, Kevin Jerome Everson’s opening night film Erie, a series of rich black and white long takes of African-American life along the titular lake, and Sharon Lockhart’s Podworka, a half-hour series of commentary-less vignettes capturing the post-industrial courtyards of Lodz, Poland, where children turn landscapes of urban decay into sites of play. The latter seems to stand in for Migrating as a whole: observing what others might regard as disintegration and discovering the resurgence within it… (read more)
This coming Friday, May 14th, the second annual Migrating Forms film festival kicks off at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. Rather impishly scheduled to run concurrently with the Cannes Film Festival, the fest surveys film and video art the world over, collapsing the walls between the museum and the screening room, and in its own eclectic way is becoming just as essential as its burly French counterpart…It’s an invigorating mix of old and emerging masters, so I don’t feel bereft in missing Cannes for the 29th year in a row. The revelation for me, though, has been the Opening Night film, Kevin Jerome Everson’s Erie…
Everson is not a passive observer, but a silent tinkerer, constructing oblique narratives out of the lives of his participants. The image on the billboard is an invention of Everson’s, an image of his uncle from when he was stationed in West Germany in the 1960s. I only discovered this after reading [Ed] Halter’s article – while viewing, I accepted it as a retro-chic car ad without any question. There are constructed notes like this in all of the shots – social realist images that contain layers of performance and theatricality. These subjects are both representing and performing their identity… (read more)
Straddling the museum installation and movie-movie worlds—a dynamic epitomized by a screening of painter Ed Ruscha’s 16mm works. Migrating Forms’ 10-day lineup is fairly crammed with “a broad spectrum of contemporary film and video projects,” including the annual “Tube Time!,” a team showdown of outré online found footage. [Jaime] Davidovich—whose Anthology show places Dada, ’50s TV experimentalists like Ernie Kovacs, and YouTube along the same continuum—might approve.
The best of MF is Petition, a tattered, vital documentary by Zhao Liang, another of the ballsy new Chinese image-smugglers who’ve cropped up to bear witness to the transformation of their country. Zhao reveals the 21st-century equivalent to the purgatorial Chancery Courts of Dickens’s Bleak House… (read more)
The Mad Songs [of Fernanda Hussein] focuses on the irreparable effects of the first Gulf War in 1991 on three separate powerless people in New Mexico (which is where the film in its entirety was shot). Profit Motive [and the Whispering Wind] focuses on the grave sites of several dozen heroes of progressive struggles throughout American history.
These topics are of course quite different, yet the differences between the films aren’t nearly as substantial as they might initially appear to be. Both are predicated on and filmed around subjects that are physically absent — the Persian Gulf in The Mad Songs, the dead heroes of Profit Motive— and ones that viewers are invited to imagine, think about, and mourn in some fashion. In fact, I think both films are enhanced and complicated immeasurably as soon as one sees them in relation to one another rather than as separate and isolated forays. Both films are dedicated to examining political struggles in the U.S. and how these struggles are emotionally, intellectually, and historically assimilated… (read more)
Fandom, obsession, objectophilia and love, both romantic and divine, have all formed part of Norwegian artist Lars Laumann’s ongoing project, exploring people and phenomena that exist on the margins of contemporary society. His latest installment, the documentary video Shut up Child, This Ain’t Bingo (2009), examines the relationship between Norwegian artist Kjersti Andvig and her artistic and romantic partner Carlton Turner, a prisoner on death row in Texas. Laumann’s previous film, Berlinmuren (Berlin Wall, 2008), focused on Eija-Riita Eklöf-Mauer, a woman who describes herself as ‘object sexualist’ and is married to the Berlin Wall – a love in which their ‘souls will be entwined for eternity’ – because she believes objects feel emotion like humans. Laumann’s subjects are often in situations where the object of love is unobtainable, to be adored from afar, fuelling fetishization and delusion. However, he does not position himself as a critic or social commentator; like his subjects, he too seems to be consuming something he is slightly in awe of. His empathy and reluctance to judge can seem frustrating and creates feelings of ambivalence, as he simultaneously draws you in, whilst the extraordinary stories fuel cynicism… (read more)
