The Migrating Forms Film Festival by R. Emmet Sweeney
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)