'Migrating Forms' Presents Its 4th Annual Festival

Details

Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Friday, 27 April 2012 21:37

Written by Joanne Choi

Migrating Forms presents its 2012 full line-up for the fourth annual festival running from Friday, May 11-Sunday, May 20 at the Anthology Film Archives in New York. An annual, 10-day festival dedicated to new film and video, Migrating Forms grew out of the New York Underground Film Festival, which ended in April 2008.

Led by the former directors and programmers of NYUFF, Nellie Killian and Kevin McGarry, Migrating Forms continues the tradition of presenting a diverse program of film and video each spring at New York's historic Anthology Film Archives.

The first three festivals have included works by:

Stephanie Barber, Neil Beloufa, Patty Chang, Phil Collins, Lav Diaz, Barry Doupé, Redmond Entwistle, Bradley Eros, eteam, Kevin Jerome Everson, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, Jim Finn, Luke Fowler, Cao Fei, David Gatten, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, John Gianvito, Michael Gitlin, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Barbara Hammer, Susan Hiller, Liu, Jiayin, Stanya Kahn, Andrew Lampert, Owen Land, Oliver Laric, Laida Lertxundi, Dani Leventhal, Zhao Liang, Jeanne Liotta, Sharon Lockhart, Josephine Meckseper, Pavel Medvedev, Shana Moulton, Deimantas Narkevicius, Tomonari Nishikawa, Lucy Raven, Ben Rivers, Michael Robinson, Glauber Rocha, Amie Siegel, Fern Silva, John Smith, Jean-Marie Straub, Kerry Tribe, Naomi Uman, Erika Vogt, and many more.

This year’s program contains new works from over 50 artists in film and video, screenings, as well as special events. Numerous films from around the globe will be screened representing 25 different nations:

• Algeria
• Argentina
• Austria
• Bangladesh
• Canada
• Chile
• China
• France
• Germany
• Haiti
• India
• Israel
• Japan
• Lebanon
• Lithuania
• Mexico
• The Netherlands
• Norway
• Palestine
• Philippines
• Poland
• Portugal
• The United Kingdom
• The Ukraine
• the United States

Migrating Forms brings artists' moving image works from a broad range of venues — festivals, biennials, microcinemas, galleries, etc. — into the common context of the cinema. This year's fest includes the work from 54 artists such as:

• Gabriel Abrantes
• Masao Adachi
• Cory Archangel
• Trisha Baga
• Yael Bartana
• Eric Baudelaire
• WangBing
• Madison Brookshire
• Jacob Ciocci
• Phil Collins
• Benjamin Crotty
• Ximena Cuevas
• Josef Dabernig
• Khavndela Cruz
• Lav Diaz
• Redmond Entwistle
• Nicolas Geyrhalter
• Sylvain George
• Beatrice Gibson
• Jean-Luc Godard
• Jean-Paul Gorin
• Benjamin A.Huseby
• Chuck Jones
• William E. Jones
• Fritz Lang
• Lars Laumann
• Laida Lertxundi
• Dani Leventhal
• Mark Lewis
• Sebastian Lingiardi
• Guthrie Lonergan
• Jesse McLean
• Natasha Mendonca
• Anne-Marie Miéville
• Naeem Mohaiemen
• Shana Moulton
• Deimantas Narkevicius
• Raymond Pettibon
• Ben Rivers
• Raul Ruiz
• Daniel Schmidt
• Amie Siegel
• Fern Silva
• Chick Strand
• Gina Telaroli
• Leslie Thornton
• Gonçalo Tocha
• Naomi Uman
• Erika Vogt
• Tashi Wada
• Koji Wakamatsu
• Emily Wardill
• Akram Zaatari

Highlights of this year's program are listed below:

2012 Opening Night

The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images
(66 min, France/Japan, 2011)
dir. Eric Baudelaire
The political and personal epic of the Japanese Red Army is recounted as an Anabasis, a journey that is both a wandering towards the unknown and a return towards home. From Tokyo to Beirut amid the post-1968 ideological fever, and from Beirut to Tokyo at the end of the Red Years, the thirty-year trajectory of a radical fringe of the revolutionary left is recounted by two of its protagonists. May Shigenobu, daughter of the founder of the small group, witnessed it closely.

Born in secrecy in Lebanon, a clandestine life was all she knew until age 27. But a second life began with her mother’s arrest and her adaptation to a suddenly very public existence. Masao Adachi, the legendary Japanese experimental director, gave up cinema to take up arms with the Japanese Red Army and the Palestinian cause In 1974. For this theorist of the fûkeiron (a movement of filmmakers who filmed the landscape to reveal the ubiquitous structures of power) his 27 years of voluntary exile were without images, since those he filmed in Lebanon were destroyed on three separate occasions during the war.

It is therefore words, testimony, memory (and false memory) that structure The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images. Two intersecting accounts, mixing personal stories, political history, revolutionary propaganda and film theory. Thirty years of self-invention in which the recurring theme is the question of images: public images produced by the media in response to terrorist operations planned for the television era, and personal images that are lost or destroyed amid the chaos of the struggles. Adopting an experimental documentary format, the accounts of May Shigenobu and Masao Adachi overlay new fûkeiron images, filmed in Super 8 in the contemporary landscapes of Tokyo and Beirut. (Baudelaire)

2012 Special Events

Retrospective: Neïl Beloufa
The French-Algerian artist will present a selection of his films and installations. The Ann Arbor Film Festival writes, “In his practice Neïl Beloufa demonstrates a persistent interest in dichotomies; reality and fiction, cause and effect, presence and absence, all of which he communicates through mediums ranging from sculpture, video, installation and conceptual photography. Through his construction of dichotomies Neïl Beloufa is able to deconstruct our perceived ideas of truth and fantasy, thus posing fantasy as truth.”

Fritz Lang's Indian Epic
Migrating Forms is proud to present a rare 35mm revival of Fritz Lang’s penultimate films, The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb. Patrick Friel writes, “The Indian Epic is spectacle, adventure, and romance and nearly borders on camp...Throughout his career, Lang took populist forms, generic conventions, and pulp sensibilities and consistently found ways through his style to arrive at larger universal truths and ways of looking at the world than are found in his films’ narratives alone. While for some The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb play only as Saturday-matinee escapism, for others they are rather remarkable films about the clash of cultures, modern Western civilization vs. “outmoded” Eastern tradition/superstition/ religion. They raise implicit questions about the very idea of cultural identity and defining an individual identity within a culture.” (Cineaste)

n+1 presents Prison Images
As a point of departure for his ongoing research and writing on the subject of prison abolition, n+1 associate editor Christopher Glazek will present a screening of Harun Farocki’s 2001 film Prison Images (aka I Thought I was Seeing Convicts) and speak about anti-prison propaganda, the role that images play in this, and the difference between art images and political images. Farocki’s film explores the similarities between the surveillance states of prison, the factory and the supermarket, focusing on surveillance footage of the murders of unarmed inmates at California’s Corcoran prison.

Remembering Raul Ruiz
Described by J. Hoberman as “the Godard of the '80s, Mister nearly-Borges-plus-middle- period Welles, a Barthesian Bunuel, the Edgar G. Ulmer of the European art film, a Third World H. Rider Haggard, the Garcia Marquez of French TV,” Migrating Forms will host an evening dedicated to the life and legacy of Raul Ruiz (1941-2011), one of the most innovative and inspirational filmmakers and film thinkers of the last 40 years.

A screening of Ruiz’ 1982 feature On Top of the Whale will be followed by a program of rare Ruiz shorts and readings from Poetics of Cinema presented by artists and curators including Jeanne Liotta, Mark McElhattan, Keith Sanborn, Elisabeth Subrin, and more. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes of On Top of the Whale, "One of Raul Ruiz’s best features, this is also one of his looniest...The putative SF plot concerns a French anthropologist and his Dutch wife who are hired to study the indecipherable language spoken by two members of an Indian tribe; in fact, this is a dazzling intellectual goof, with an average of one striking visual idea per shot, a lot of gags involving the pretensions of anthropologists and psychoanalytical theorists, and other forms of nonstop invention.” (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Ed Halter presents Un filme de Diane Chambers
Critic and curator Ed Halter presents an illustrated lecture on fake experimental films as seen in mainstream movies and television, where they have often been used to ridicule the very notion of artistic practice or counterculture. Taken together as their own motley tradition, these parodies can provide a shadow history of the avant-garde, showing how popular narrative has policed itself against any other possible forms that cinema might take.

Electronic Arts Intermix presents Raymond Pettibon's Sir Drone
EAI is pleased to present Raymond Pettibon’s Sir Drone (1989), featuring Mike Kelley. Pettibon's highly idiosyncratic pen and ink drawings have taken him from L.A. cult status to the international artworld. With Kelley, Pettibon was close to the West Coast punk bands of the late 1970s and early 1980s. His deliberately crude, low-tech video narratives are irreverent tales of 1960s and '70s West Coast radical subcultures. These wildly ironic, deadpan dramas feature an ensemble of luminaries from L.A.'s post-punk underground. In Sir Drone, Kelley and Mike Watt play two teens struggling to create the right image for themselves, debating aesthetic and ethical issue of starting a punk band, and strategies to avoid being “rinky dink.”

Screening with Cory Arcangel’s Insectiside (1992-03) and Message my Brother Justin Left Me on my Cell from the Slayer Concert Last Week (2004).

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.

Chuck Jones Centennial
Creator of dozens of seven minute Merrie Melodies masterpieces, Chuck Jones influenced everyone from Matt Groening to Jean-Pierre Gorin. The epitome of termite art, Manny Farber writes, “Jones is out to make you laugh, bluntly, and as it turns out, cold-bloodedly...the whole sphere of man’s emotion and behavior simply as a butt for humor, no matter what it leads to.” Featuring Duck Amuck, One Froggy Evening, Ali Baba Bunny, For Scent-i-mental Reasons, Rabbit Fire, Rabbit of Seville, No Barking, Rabbit Seasoning, There They Go-Go-Go, Rabbit of Seville, Le Beau Pepe, and What's Opera, Doc?

Tube Time!
Our annual found footage competition returns. Hosted by irl-internet crossover sensation (and former Tube Time! champion) Ben Coonley, this year will feature all star teams of youtube crate-diggers throwing down their most outrageous and/or inspirational video finds.

Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War
(71 min, Japan/Palestine, 1971)
dir. Masao Adachi & Kôji Wakamatsu with
Ici et Ailleurs 
(53 min, France/Palestine, 1976)
dir. The Dziga Vertov Group (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Anne-Marie Miéville)
Presented in conjunction the screening of his The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images as Opening Night and Naeem Mohaiemen’s The Young Man Was (Part 1: United Red Army), Eric Baudelaire has curated a program of two treatises on political filmmaking to contextualize Masao Adachi’s work. In 1971, Adachi & co-director Kôji Wakamatsu stopped at a Palestinian military training camp on their way home from Cannes. Combining newsreel agit-prop with the fûkeiron style of political landscape filmmaking, Red Army/PFLP stands as seminal work of radical filmmaking. Screening with The Dziga Vertov Group’s 1974 unfinished investigation into the ethics and limitations of political image making, Ici et Ailleurs.

Migrating Forms
Friday, May 11 - Sunday, May 20, 2012

Anthology Film Archives
New York

• < Prev
• Next >