Together Again
By Nicolas Rapold
Artforum
In the characteristically diverse, experimental lineup—drawn from festivals, archives, and galleries (some of the films in the festival related to concurrent exhibitions elsewhere, e.g., Cao Fei and Olga Chernysheva)—a number of works took for granted a self-consciousness about vision and cognition, in a stance sometimes liberating, sometimes unsettling, and often both…(read more)
Blurred Boundries: Selections from Migrating Forms 2011
By Jason Livingston and Colin Beckett
The Brooklyn Rail
Melanie Gilligan’s Popular Unrest (2010) opened this year’s Migrating Forms with a pointed set of questions: Is it relevant to render human stories in a traditional moving-image format? (Arguably not.) Can a movie portray the abstractions of capital amidst an increasingly global, savage monetarization of physical life? (It’s worth trying.) And, more broadly, what about the international outbreak of hybrid practices? (Right, what about them?) The remaining ten days of the festival unfolded like a contemporary countercultural procession… (read more)
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
by Genevieve Yue
Reverse Shot
Even in something as expansive and variously defined as experimental film, it’s possible to find oneself suddenly stranded in a cinematic hinterland; indeed, that’s kind of the point, the sharpened edge of the avant that the practice aspires to, at least in theory. In this way, Migrating Forms, formerly the New York Underground Film Festival, allows itself considerable experimental drift, programming an impressively broad range of contemporary avant-garde films, vintage video art, schlocky revivals and remixes, and esoterica to satiate the rarest of cinephagic appetites… (read more)