Grow Live Monsters and Clear Day presented by Cary Loren tonight at 7pm!

2011 Kickstarter Campaign

Producing a film festival in New York City is expensive—and we do it on a very lean budget! Not only that, but the vast majority of the funds we spend stays directly within the film and art communities of which we are a part.

You can help support Migrating Forms by contributing to our Kickstarter campaign today. Our goal is to raise $5000 by May 30, and every bit counts.

Click here to donate:

http://kck.st/MigratingForms2011

Your support will help Migrating Forms pay for a variety of expenses: filmmaker travel, print rentals, artists’ fees, equipment rental, professional dubbing, shipping costs, brochure printing, theater rental, insurance, advertisements and the list goes on.

We are offering a rewards for giving at different levels, but donations of any size are welcome. If you live outside New York City, but would like to support the festival from afar, please consider giving $10—the cost of a single ticket—as a show of solidarity.

$15 = 1 free ticket to any screening
$25 = 2 free tickets to any screening
$75 = An all access pass to the 2011 festival,
including free admission to all screenings

(All Kickstarter transactions are processed via Amazon.com and thus are fully protected and secure.)

Help spread the word and Tweet, Facebook, etc. our Kickstarter URL: http://kck.st/MigratingForms2011 (case sensitive)

Tom McCormick in Alt Screen:

“Migrating Forms, now in its third year, escorts viewers from the humdrum of the East Village into a subterranean world of ghostly apparitions and material mayhem. Forms grew out of the New York Underground Film Festival, and it expands upon that fest’s interest in bringing together heterogeneous material: the celluloid revival of the American avant-garde, the rough-hewn outer edges of the European art-house, old curios, New Media, the academy, the grindhouse, and the gutter. As a result, Forms has some of the most unpredictable and interesting—and some of the best—programming of any US festival.”

Interview with Nelle Killian and Kevin McGarry in The Brooklyn Rail:

“At what other festival are you going to encounter a filmmaker like Jim Finn sharing “clips from his favorite North Korean movies and reading excerpts from Kim Jong Il’s On the Art of the Cinema”? If a traditional narrative is what you’re after, look elsewhere; but if you are intrigued by the sound of Jacqueline Goss’s unorthodox portrait of a meteorologist (The Observers), or Straub and Huillet’s 1981 “structural investigation of revolutionary history” (Too Early, Too Late) this gem of a fest should not be missed.”

Ricky D’Ambrose in Slant:

“This year’s installment of Migrating Forms pursues relationships between time and space that are complicated and vibrant; it is also a cross section of a cinema with a taste for landscapes and selves transformed.”

Earlier: Reviews in The L Magazine and The Village Voice

Michael Bell-Smith’s “Art Tape: Live With/Think About”
By Karen Archey

While “Live With / Think About” may initially seem funny at the expense at others’ ignorance to some (i.e. we find ironic humor in the simplistic desire of Detective Eames to throw a Monet up in her house because it’s nice to look at, and the posturing rejoinder of Goren that there’s more to art than wallpaper), arguably the video reaches far beyond wry amusement with pop culture. Bell-Smith effectively explicates the colossal divide between the production of modern and contemporary art (which often takes popular culture as fodder) and the popular reception of modern and contemporary art as illustrated by mainstream media. Bell-Smith’s “Live With / Think About” brings to mind the paradoxical functionality of contemporary art: if a major tenet of art is to promote or enact social change within society at large, how is this possible for art as we know it today if its basic understanding is entrenched in bourgeois education and extremely distanced from the world in general? While the answer remains to be seen, it’s refreshing to see such concerns brought forth in an art world context…(read more)

Takeshi Murata

The Creators Project: Much of your work centers on the appropriation and distorting of things to the point that they’re entirely something else. I was wondering how you feel about this on a larger scale with something like the internet, where everything is just floating out there in an open space without regulation. Do you feel that, overall, it’s beneficial to art or does it make it easier for people to claim other people’s ideas as their own?
Takeshi Murata: It’s great. I see a lot of things online that inspire me greatly. One of the things I’ve learned as my work has become more public is that knowledge can go in any direction. It could be selling dog food or something, and you have to be open to that and see where it goes. It’s a cool thing. But I love sharing techniques and ideas and whatever else I’m doing. The people I talk with are really open and have taught me a lot. The internet is great for technical things.

Does this overarching online community give your work more context?
Yeah. People who don’t work with computers aren’t sure about people like me. They might think a computer made the whole thing and I just pushed a button. Ultimately, I hope that the work inherently shows that there’s a human behind it and that people can have an emotional response from watching it. When people are working and sharing ideas and sharing techniques online, it does give it a context and does allow people who might not be into computers to see the work more clearly—that there’s a community behind it. As time goes by it becomes older technology and the same thing happens. I think about stuff from the 80s—at the time it must have looked like it was coming from Mars, but now we understand those things in a different light…(read more)

Dani Leventhal: Everyday Institution
By Rachel Wetzler

In this interview, artist Dani Leventhal talks about her video 54 Days this Winter, 36 Days this Spring for 18 Minutes (2009), which she conceived as a site-specific installation for MoMA PS1′s Greater New York 2010 exhibition. Created with a small handheld camera, this work juxtaposes disparate imagery, functioning as an archive of the artist’s interests, desires, concerns, and insights. Imposing a rigid structure on her working process, the artist shot exactly six minutes of footage each day for fifty-four days during the winter months, and for nine minutes each day for thirty-six days of spring. She then subjected this substantial repository of material to a rigorous editing process, condensing hours of recorded footage into a jarring montage of incongruous imagery that collapses temporal and spatial boundaries…(read more)

The Object Whisperer
By Brian Droitcour

Found objects have had a place in art for nearly a century, but the practice has seemed particularly pervasive in recent years, as approaches from both contemporary and historical perspectives have attempted to redefine it as appropriation, nonmonumental, unmonumental, or “combining crap with crap.” Fascination with old or overlooked marginalia could be regressive melancholia spawned of the Bush era’s resigned cynicism, or sympathy for the poor objects in spite of high-tech consumption. Whatever the case, the sensibility saturates Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines, a series of videos and performances. While sculptural assemblage clusters objects in space, Moulton spreads her thrift-store and gift-shop finds over time. Rather than tracing the artist’s web of references through stationary contemplation, the viewer of Whispering Pines is led through the process as Cynthia, the heroine, interacts with the things she has chosen to surround herself with. A Magic Eye 3D poster transports her to a zone of free movement. A swamp-colored facial mask opens a green-screen gateway to a forest clearing. If, in a readymade or sculptural assemblage, the artist endows objects with totemic power by isolating and emphasizing their formal properties (or the subjective associations they evoke for her), then Moulton gives that principle a radically literal interpretation in Whispering Pines, where objects’ properties and associations acquire the power to shape the narrative.

Moulton gets inspiration for episodes from her finds rather than “casting” them in predetermined storylines. Objects drive the plot. Wonder at a thing’s appearance can be a narrative hook that doubles as a more conventional dilemma, and ultimately offers a key to an episode’s insight. At the beginning of Whispering Pines 3, Cynthia is composing a diary entry about her runaway cat and a newly acquired knickknack that baffles her with its twisted script. “I found a wonderful wall hanging today,” she says in a voiceover. “I really like its texture. But I can’t understand what it is trying to say.” Next Cynthia is in a forest, chasing her cat with a butterfly net, when she spots her wall hanging, turned on its end in the gnarl of a tree. Cocking her head, she can suddenly read it: “Towels?!”… (read more)

Motion Studies
By Viktor Misiano

Once is never enough. Not, at least, in the work of Olga Chernysheva, whose imagery slowly unspools in time, elapsing via repetition or successive transformation. Indeed, Chernysheva is literally an animator. Trained in the discipline at the Soviet All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, she traffics in both static and moving pictures as well as the blurred region between them–with resonant implications for media, art history, and the larger cultural scenes in which they unfold. In the video Untitled. Dedicated to Sengai, 2008, for example, a woman stands in a crowded Moscow square, selling children’s magnetic drawing tablets. The camera is fixed on her lucid, almost beatific gaze; it also lingers on her hands as, trancelike, she demonstrates the pad for mostly indifferent passersby, incessantly sketching an interlocking triangle, circle, and square–the titular Zen monk’s symbolic depiction of the universe–before erasing the figure and beginning again. The scene might seem innocent enough. But Chernysheva also seems to be repeatedly restaging the end of easel painting (so triumphantly proclaimed by wave after wave of twentieth-century Russian artworks, from Kazimir Malevich’s black square to Aleksandr Rodchenko’s primary-hued monochromes) with a mystic doodle on a plastic, primary-colored toy. And so abstraction here takes on a second life as a wry shopping-mall spiritualism, whose absurdity is played up by the sound track’s twinkling new age Muzak.

Such impressions build upon one another in Chernysheva’s work with wit and serial force–in much the same way that the post-Soviet present layers and lingers over the Soviet past, recalling film stills superimposed above and beneath a cataclysmic social event. The artist seems to insist on asking once more: How might one continue making art in the aftermath of catastrophe? How does one imagine both a before and an after?… (read more)

On Migrating Forms, and What We Mean When We Call a Film “Experimental”
By David Phelps

Benefits of a festival as useful as Migrating Forms are as much sociological as cinematic. I’ve seen 16 of its 45 or so hours of shorts, presentations, and retrospectives, a knot of video essays, flipcam body-horror, and “color series” from 5+ continents; even the title of the series deliberately evades classification. Older works are stalwartly documentary and avant-garde both: Straub-Huillet’s Too Early, Too Late, a Glauber Rocha mini-retro, and, rarest, a double-feature of Georges Perec scripts: Alain Corneau’s Série Noire, with a Warren Oates-type killer who reinvents his character as he tip-toes around a slummy French town, and Bernard Queysanne’s Un homme qui dort, a late city symphony of an empty, Atget Paris in fragments, filmed fluidly as a continuous work of architecture beyond time. Chicly existential, it’s now clearly one of the last gasp of city-maze films, alongside Wheel of Ashes and Blast of Silence, with solitary walkers and second-person voiceover, as dérives were still popular ways of losing one’s sense of physical place —in physical places. That there are other means of doing so now is a recurring theme elsewhere in the program.

The impossibility of generalizations is a key generalization: eschewal of classification’s particularly current. As Hollywood becomes as marginalized as the avant-garde from New York consciousness, the hearts of critics seem to swing to the fiction-documentary “hybrid film” of Costa-Gomes-Alonso-Haroun-Reichhardt-Porterfield-Serra-Denis, and one of Migrating Forms’ specialties, alone among New York festivals, happens to be passive portraiture of disenfranchised nomads, bodies without voices traipsing through the daily coordinates of dramatic lives… (read more)

Migrating Forms: A Fest That Defies Definition
By Nick Pinkerton

This is the third year for Migrating Forms, the film/video/whatever shindig that once was called the New York Underground Film Festival. There’s no card-carrying Underground anymore, and this isn’t strictly a Film Festival—but whatever it is, the amorphous Forms proves uniquely responsive to new permutations of moving-image consumption… (read more)