Migrating Forms Festival of Film and Video 2012
Fill out the online application form HERE
or:
Early Deadline: February 15, 2012
Regular Deadline: March 1, 2012
Late Deadline: March 15, 2012
Festival: May 11-20, 2012 at Anthology Film Archives, New York, New York
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)
There are no cash prizes or predetermined awards at Migrating Forms. Instead, a panel of artists, curators and critics devises written distinctions according to whatever criteria they feel most relevant to the program as a whole, indicative of unique achievement, and/or beneficial to the filmmakers.
The 2011 jury was comprised of Karen Archey, Mark McElhatten and Michael Robinson.
BEST LONG FORM WORK: THE OBSERVERS by Jacqueline Goss
BEST SHORT FORM WORK: CRY WHEN IT HAPPENS by Laida Lertxundi
BEST SPECIAL PROGRAM: George Perec Double Bill: SERIE NOIRE and UN HOMME QUI DORT
SPECIAL MENTIONS:
Nostalgia (Omer Fast)
Tokyo/Ibisu + Shibuya/Tokyo (Tomonari Nishikawa)
In the Absence of Light Darkness Prevails (Fern Silva)
The Artist (Laure Prouvost)
Glauber Rocha
by Gabe Klinger
How many times can you say “Glauber” without wondering where such a funny name comes from? A Google experiment (try just typing in “Glauber”) shows that the Brazilian filmmaker is as famous today as his namesake, the German scientist Johann Rudolf Glauber, discoverer of Sodium Sulfate. It was Dona Lúcia, Rocha’s mother and until this day a tireless supporter of her son’s legacy, that gave him the odd name. It wasn’t the only thing that made him stick out, 20-odd years later, when, surrounded by the Walters, Luizs, and Joaquims, the Nelsons, Leons, and Paulos, he became one of the great filmmakers of his generation.
Widely heard-of though seldom seen, Rocha’s films are among the hardest to place in the canon of new cinemas from the 1960s. A tricontinental artist – he made films not just in Brazil but in Europe and Africa – Rocha was the victim of his own transience; he revelled in contradictions, in his aggressive theorising and self-attributed “aesthetic of hunger” – which took him from third-world-isation to the forefront of international filmmaking. From Terra em transe (1967) on, Rocha’s films resemble the didacticism of Godard’s Dziga-Vertov period, but damn if they were ever as detached from their causes as those films, so stilted in their narration, so caught in their time that – as the years have proved – they’ve barely moved forward at all. When Rocha made films, they were to reach Brazil in depths that no one had yet dreamt of…(read more)
Compilation Nation
By Tom McCormack
According to Know Your Meme—an increasingly important database of meme histories that recently sold for an undisclosed seven-figure sum to Cheezburger Networks, a company that, despite or perhaps because of its absurd name, is starting to gain a lot of power on the Internet—the term supercut was first used by blogger Andy Baio in April 2008. Baio’s post ruminates on this montage created from ABC’s Lost.
Wrote Baio:
This insane montage of (nearly) every instance of “What?” from the LOST series started me thinking about this genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage.
For lack of a better name, let’s call them supercuts.
The post was prescient. Know Your Meme also says that the first supercut to go super-viral, Rich Juzwiak’s I’m Not Here to Make Friends, went up in June 2008, after Baio’s post. Juzwiak, who maintains the popular entertainment blog fourfour, stitched together a full 3 minutes and 20 seconds of reality show contestants exclaiming, “I’m not here to make friends” or variations thereof. The compendium simultaneously draws attention to the proliferation of the generic expression while highlighting minor differences between iterations. We laugh at the ridiculous banality of Juzwiak’s video even as we become connoisseurs; by the end we notice the idiosyncrasies in attitude, pacing, setting. The repeated phrase creates Steinian cadences, losing significance and turning into pure sound before reversing course and gaining a surplus of mysterious meaning. Halfway through, the characters become self-aware: “That is so typical, so cliché of an answer,” “I mean, I don’t want to be a cliché, but…” The chasm between subject and viewer opened up by our ironizing mockery collapses; there’s a joke, and the contestants seem as aware of it as we are, or more so…(read more)
More Liza:
There’s Nothing More International Than a Pack of Pimps: A Conversation between Pierre Clémenti, Miklos Janscó, Glauber Rocha and Jean-Marie Straub convened by Simon Hartog in Rome, February 1970.
Simon Hartog: Well, as a way of beginning, Rossellini once said that the cinema is dead. What do you think, Glauber Rocha? (laughs)
Glauber Rocha: I don’t agree. For me … I don’t know what Straub thinks. (laughs)
Miklos Jancsó: You’re right, it’s a personal question. Maybe the cinema is dead for Rossellini … unfortunately. Because he did some wonderful things.
Rocha: Really there is a lot of discussion on this problem. In terms of the cinema, and the theatre too. Pierre Clémenti was telling me last week about his idea of dropping the cinema for some other activity … but it’s a problem.
Hartog: Well, in your opinion, what function does the cinema fulfil?
Jean-Marie Straub: I think the cinema will only begin when the film industry is dead. I’m waiting for it to go all the time, but it’s going to hang on for at least another twenty years. And in this sense I agree with Rossellini…(read more)
Cinemeteorology
By Serge Daney
What do John Travolta and Jean-Marie Straub have in common? A difficult question, I admit. One dances, the other doesn’t. One is a Marxist, the other isn’t. One is very well-known, the other less so. Both have their fans. Me, for instance.
However, one merely has to see their two films surface on the same day on Parisian screens in order to understand that the same worry eats away at both of them. Worry? Let’s say passion, rather — a passion for sound. I’m referring to BLOW OUT (directed by Brian DePalma) and TOO EARLY, TOO LATE (co-signed by Danièle Huillet), two good films, two magnificent soundtracks…(read more)
Serie Noire at 7
Un homme qui dort (introduced by Harry Mathews) at 9:30
Reading Georges Perec
By Warren Motte
Georges Perec is the finest French writer of the twentieth century. There. I’ve wanted to stake that claim, in print, for the last twenty-five years. And it seems to me finally, now, as we listen to bleatings from every quarter telling us that the twentieth century is well behind us, that the time is ripe to do so. I can already hear the howls of righteous outrage from the Proustians, the Sartrians, the Durassians, and a variety of other battle-happy literary partisans. But tant pis! My choice is Perec. And don’t forget: you heard it here first. In CONTEXT, that is (appropriately enough). Allow me to say just a few words about Perec’s life, before turning to his works. He was born in Paris in 1936, the only son of Polish-Jewish immigrants. His father enlisted in the French army at the outbreak of World War II, and was killed at the front, shortly before the French surrender in 1940. His mother was arrested in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz; Perec was never able to learn whether she died during the journey or after she arrived at the camp. Perec himself spent the war years in a Catholic boarding school in the south of France, and after the war he went to live with the family of a paternal aunt. He studied sociology at the Sorbonne, and later worked as a public-opinion pollster and a research librarian, until his literary activity allowed him to support himself financially. He died of cancer at the age of forty-five in 1982.
Georges Perec is perhaps best described as a literary experimentalist, one who was intrigued by the question of form. He produced a score of major works, each one quite different from the others. Although he is best known for his novels, he also wrote plays, poetry, essays, filmscripts, opera librettos, and many other texts which confound traditional generic categories. “My ambition as a writer,” he explained to an interviewer in 1978, “would be to traverse all of contemporary literature, without ever feeling that I am retracing my own steps or returning to beaten ground, and to write everything that someone today can possibly write.” He once suggested that his work was animated by four major concerns: a passion for the apparently trivial details of everyday life, an impulse toward confession and autobiography, a will toward formal innovation, and a desire to tell engaging, absorbing stories. Anyone wishing to read Perec today may consider those four concerns as paths that may be followed through his otherwise labyrinthine oeuvre…(read more)
Oxhide
by Shelly Kraicer
The most important Chinese film of the past several years—and one of the most astonishing recent films from any country—doesn’t come from the so-called Sixth Generation, formerly underground Chinese rebel directors whose output has fed Western film festivals regularly since the early 90s (e.g., Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Zhang Yuan). Nor does it come from the newly anointed masters of the Fifth Generation, whose leaders, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, are busying themselves these days crafting media content, cinema morphed into blockbuster-ready marketing opportunities. The film is called Oxhide (a literal, though pleasantly strange direct translation of the Chinese title Niupi ), and it comes from young female first-time director Liu Jiayin…(read more)
Michael Bell-Smith’s Art Tape: Live With/Think About
Catch up with a few videos from last weekend’s programs online!
Melanie Gilligan’s Popular Unrest
Oliver Laric’s Versions