Migrating Forms Festival - Underground Film Lives
Written by FFestivalTraveler Staff Wednesday, 18 May 2011 00:00
The 3rd Annual Migrating Forms Festival is being held May 20–29, 2011 at Anthology 
Film Archives in New York City.
An annual, ten-day festival dedicated to new film and video, Migrating Forms developed from the New York Underground Film Festival (NYUFF), which ended in April 2008. Led by the former directors and programmers of NYUFF, Migrating Forms continues the tradition of presenting a program culled from a broad spectrum of moving image practices each spring at New York’s historic Anthology Film Archives.
The 2011 program includes new works by more than 48 artists representing a broad spectrum of contemporary film and video practices, retrospective screenings, and special guest curated programs. Migrating Forms is programmed by Nellie Killian and Kevin McGarry.
Migrating Forms showcases films and videos by 48 artists living and working in the USA and 19 countries including
- Argentina
- Algeria
- Austria
- Brazil
- Canada
- China
- France Germany
- India
- Japan
- Morocco
- The Netherlands
- Portugal
- The Republic of Congo
- Russia
- Spain
- Taiwan
- United Kingdom
The Opening Night screening is the US premiere of Melanie Gilligan’s Popular Unrest. Gilligan is a Canadian artist based in London and New York, and director of the 2008 four-part fictional mini-drama Crisis in the Credit System.
Special Programs include:
Georges Perec Double Bill:
Serie Noire
dir. Alain Corneau (1979)
Georges Perec wrote dialogue made up almost entirely of cliches and aphorisms for this adaptation of Jim Thompson's A Hell of a Woman.
Un homme qui dort / The Man Who Slept
dir. Georges Perec and Bernard Queysanne (1974)
Adapted from Georges Perec's novel of the same name, and structured as a filmic sestina, Perec and Queysanne reimagine the framework of the novel while maintaining much of the original narration (read by Shelly Duvall in the English version!).
The Art of the
Supercut:
Re-edit master and pop culture parser Rich Juzwiak (fourfour.typepad.com, VH1) presents a program of his influences and favorites.
Curt Hanks epic Star Wars: Chewbacca Supercut (2011) "Chewbacca Supercut is a bizarre visual analogue to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; both focus our attention on minor characters from major cultural touchstones in order to explore the postmodern feeling of narrative powerlessness. Chewbacca, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is not history's actor. " - Moving Image Source
Tube Time!
Tube Time, the festival’s long-running online found video showcase, trades its tournament format for topical visual culture selections chosen by bloggers from Teenage, Toys and Techniques, and Unchanging Window.
Retrospective: Glauber Rocha
A rare revival of the master of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement's seminal trilogy:
Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol / Black God, White Devil (1964);
Terra em Transe / Earth Entranced (1967);
Antonio das Mortes / O Dragao da Maldade Contra o Santo Guerreiro (1969).
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) presents
Cynthia Maughan: Holidays in the Sun
A selection of Maughan’s work curated by EAI, accompanied by artists and videos that inspired her.
A prolific contemporary of William Wegman, John Baldessari, and Paul McCarthy, Maughan produced nearly 300 direct-camera performances from 1973 through the 1980s. These rarely screened videotapes drew upon her eclectic upbringing in Los Angeles, tempering the grotesqueries of B-movies and pulp fiction with a dry conceptualist wit, and imbuing the hygienic domesticity of lifestyle magazines with a macabre and iconoclastic sensibility.
Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977), an important influence on Maughan, will be screened in conjunction with this program.
The story of an American tourist family that gets stranded in a government nuclear test site in the desert, the promotion for this film says it all: "They wanted to see something different, but something different saw them first..."
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a leading international resource for video and media art whose core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of over 3,500 new and historical video works by artists. This program is a part of EAI's 40 year anniversary celebration.
Too Early, Too Late / Trop Tot, Trop Tard
dir. Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet
A one-night revival of Straub and Huillet's 1981 color documentary made in France and Egypt. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum writes, "There are no "characters" in this 105-minute feature about places, yet paradoxically it's the most densely populated work in their oeuvre to date.
The first part shows a series of locations in contemporary France, accompanied by Huillet reading part of a letter Friedrich Engels wrote to Karl Kautsky describing the impoverished state of French peasants, and excerpts from the Notebooks of Grievances compiled in 1789 by the village mayors of those same locales in response to plans for further taxation.
The especially fine second section, roughly twice as long, does the same thing with a more recent Marxist text by Mahmoud Hussein about Egyptian peasants' resistance to English occupation prior to the "petit-bourgeois" revolution of Neguib in 1952. Both sections suggest that the peasants revolted too soon and succeeded too late."
Musical Numbers 
from the Juche-Oriented Socialist State of Korea
The Juche Idea (2008)
dir. Jim Finn
The director will present clips from his favorite movies and music videos from North Korea, punctuated by excerpts of Kim Jong Il's On the Art of Cinema and the director's own interpretations. Included are excerpts from Girls from My Hometown (1991), Marathon Runner (2002), Urban Girl Comes to Get Married (1992) and others.
Primary Information presents
Destroy All Monsters
A program of videos tracking the legendary Detroit rock band founded by Mike Kelley, Niagara, Jim Shaw and Cary Loren, presented by Primary Information.
Clear Day (1996) is a one-hour video of three live Destroy All Monsters reunion shows from 1995 including appearances in Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Diego (which ended in a riot when the band was unplugged and forced offstage).
The video also includes a short interview with Spin Magazine and is mixed with horror exploitation clips from Mexico, South America and Japan.
Grow Live Monsters (2007) is a selection of 8mm, super 8mm, and 16mm no-budget fantasy footage of the band shot between 1971-1976 by Cary Loren.
Primary Information is a non-profit organization devoted to printing artists’ books, artists’ writings, out-of- print publications and editions. Primary Information was formed in 2006 by Miriam Katzeff and James Hoff to foster intergenerational dialogue through the publication of artists’ books and writings by artists.
For more information about Migrating Forms Festival, go to migratingforms.org.
Migrating Forms Festival
May 20–29, 2011
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue (at 2nd Street)
New York City
212-505-5181
