Migrating Forms 3. Lineup

David Hudson

Migrating Forms has just revealed the full program for its third edition, running May 20 through 29 at Anthology Film Archives in New York. And it's pretty impressive, so we're going to go the quickest route here and reproduce the release below the jump.

 

SPECIAL EVENTS

 

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. "The only Thompson adaptation to truly express the author's deeply personal darkness." - Moving Image Source

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. 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. Followed by a screening of Curt Hanks epic Star Wars: Chewbacca Supercut (2011) "Chewbacca Supercut is a bizarre visual analogue to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966); 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); Antônio das Mortes (O Dragão da Maldade Contra o Santo Guerreiro) (1969).

Electronic Arts Intermix 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.

Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet: Too Early, Too Late (Trop Tot, Trop Tard)
 
A one-night revival of Straub and Huillet's 1981 color documentary [image above] 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

Jim Finn, director of The Juche Idea (2008), 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 will be 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.

 

2011 OPENING NIGHT

Migrating Forms announces the United States premiere of Melanie Gilligan’s Popular Unrest opening night screening of the 2011 festival. 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. Gilligan was the recipient of the 2010 Present Future Prize at Artissima 17 in Turin and was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York from 2004–2005. Popular Unrest has been previously exhibited at Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Center, Banff, Alberta; Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; and Chisenhale Gallery, London.

“Taking inspiration from both David Cronenberg’s ‘body horror’ and American television dramas CSI, Dexter and Bones, where reality is perceived through a pornographic forensics of empirical and visceral phenomena, Popular Unrest is a multi-episode drama set in a future much like the present. Here, however, all exchange transactions and social interactions are overseen by a system called 'the Spirit.' A rash of unexplained killings have broken out across the globe. They often take place in public but witnesses never see an assailant. Just as mysteriously, groups of unrelated people are suddenly coming together everywhere, amassing new members rapidly. Unaccountably, they feel a deep and persistent sense of connection to one another. The episodes explore a world in which the self is reduced to physical biology, directly subject to the needs of capital.” (Gilligan)

 

FULL SCHEDULE

 

Friday, May 20

8:30pm - Opening Night
Popular Unrest (60 min., Canada/UK/USA 2010) dir. Melanie Gilligan

Saturday, May 21

2:30pm
The Tiny Ventriloquist (48 min., Canada, 2011) dir. Steve Reinke   
Reinke’s collection and organization of images and sounds seem casual at first, but ultimately reveal themselves to be heavily mediated and orchestrated. This new series of works is another chapter in the Final Thoughts series, an ongoing project intended to be continued until Reinke’s death, concerning the limits of things: discourse, experience, events and thought.

3:45pm 
Group Program 1
The Yellow Bank (30 min., USA, 2010) dir. J.P. Sniadecki, Tokyo-Ebisu (5 min., Japan, 2010) dir. Tomonari Nishikawa, Track One (2 min., Taiwan/USA, 2011) dir. eteam, Shibuya-Tokyo (10 min., Japan, 2010) dir. Tomonari Nishikawa, In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails (14 min., Brazil/USA, 2010) dir. Fern Silva   

5:15pm 
Group Program 2
Untitled. Dedicated to Sengai (6 min., Russia, 2008) dir. Olga Chernysheva, Fragments (7 min., USA , 2010) dir. Darrin Martin, It, heat, hit (6 min., UK, 2010) dir. Laure Prouvost, Hearts and Trump Again (9 min., USA, 2010) dir. Dani Leventhal, Monolog (13 min., UK, 2009) dir. Laure Prouvost,  Trashman (7 min., Russia, 2010/2011) dir. Olga Chernysheva, Rigamarole Reversal (10 min., USA, 2010) dir. Andrew Lampert   

6:45pm   
The Last Buffalo Hunt (76 min., USA, 2010) dir. Lee Anne Schmitt   
Documentary essay film about the culture and industry around buffalo hunting in Southern Utah.

8:30pm
Holidays in the Sun: Cynthia Maughan (70 min., USA) Work by Maughan and her influences. Drawing from 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, Maughan's videos rarely screen.

10:00pm
Holidays in the Sun: The Hills Have Eyes (90 min., USA, 1977) dir. Wes Craven   
“They wanted to see something different, but something different saw them first...”

Sunday, May 22

2:00pm   
The Observers (67 min., USA, 2011) dir. Jacqueline Goss   
The land and sky of Mt. Washington, New Hampshire, form a frame for a meteorologist as she goes about the solitary and steadfast work of measuring and recording the weather.

3:45pm
Group Program 3
History Minor (19 min., USA, 2010) dir. Ryan Garrett, And Again (56 min., Canada, 2010) dir. Adele Horne   

5:30pm   
Color Series (74 min., USA, 2010) dir. Madison Brookshire   
Six films that form one work. Each fades between colors. They are made without a camera, using only the lights of the printing process at the lab. The subject of the work is duration and color is the medium through which we experience it. The converse is also true: the subject is color and duration is the medium.

7:15pm 
Musical Numbers from the Juche-Oriented Socialist State of Korea  
Filmmaker Jim Finn shows clips from his favorite North Korean movies and reads excerpts from Kim Jong Il’s On the Art of the Cinema.

9:15pm   
Group Program 4
The Writer in Residence (3 min., UK, 2010) dir. Stephen Sutcliffe, Art Tape: Live With / Think About (3 min., USA, 2011) dir. Michael Bell-Smith, I, Popeye (6 min., USA, 2010) dir. Takeshi Murata, Your Life/Your Language (7 min., USA, 2010) dir. Jacob Ciocci, The Galactic Pot Healer (9 min., USA, 2010) dir. Shana Moulton, The Artist (10 min., UK, 2010) dir. Laure Prouvost, Versions (9 min., Germany, 2011) dir. Oliver Laric 

Monday, May 23

7:00pm
Primary Information presents: Destroy All Monsters   
A program of videos tracking the legendary Detroit "anti-rock" band founded by Mike Kelley, Niagara, Jim Shaw and Cary Loren.

9:30pm
Los Labios (105 min., Argentina , 2010) dir. Iván Fund & Santiago Loza   
Hybrid fiction-documentary about three women traveling through rural Argentina as aid workers.

Tuesday, May 24

7:00pm   
Oxhide (110 min., China, 2005) dir. Liu Jiayin   
A family plays fictionalized versions of themselves in a cramped Beijing apartment in one of the most important Chinese films of the past decade.

9:15pm
Oxhide II (132 min., China, 2009) dir. Liu Jiayin   
Liu Jiayin returns to the family apartment, staging intricate dramas around the dining room table.

Wednesday, May 25

7:00pm   
Serie Noire (77 min., France, 1979) dir. Alain Corneau
Perec wrote dialogue made-up almost entirely of cliches and aphorisms for this adaptation of Jim Thompson's A Hell of a Woman.

9:00pm  
Un homme qui dort (111 min., France, 1974) dir. Georges Perec & Bernard Queysanne
Structured as a filmic sestina, Perec and Queysanne re-imagine the framework of the novel while maintaining much of the original narration (read by Shelly Duvall in the English version!).

Thursday, May 26

7:00pm
Too Early, Too Late (100 min., France, 1981) dir. Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet   
Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s structural investigation of revolutionary history and landscape in France and Egypt.

9:15pm   
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. Followed by a screening of Curt Hanks epic Star Wars: Chewbacca Supercut

Friday, May 27

7:00pm   
Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (115 min., Brazil, 1964) dir. Glauber Rocha   
Considered one of the greatest Brazilian films of all time, Deus e o Diabolo follows a young man and his wife as they travel through Brazil encountering mystics and soothsayers, robbing and killing to get by in a corrupt and violent landscape.

9:30pm
Tube Time!
Online found video presentations by Matt Wolf and Kelly Rakwoski (Teenagefilm.com), Benjamin Graves (toysandtechniques.blogspot.com), and Mary Manning (unchangingwindow.com)

Saturday, May 28

2:00pm
A Formal Film in Nine Episodes, Prologue & Epilogue (51 min., India/Germany, 2011) dir. Mario Pfeifer   
A contemporary Asian Metropolis through an observational, anthropological lens. The scenery depicted portrays landscape, architecture, interiors or humans from rural communities to factories, medical facilities or ancient and religious sites. Slowly establishing two characters, the film leaves its’ documentarian nature and progresses into a narrative.

3:15pm  
Group Program 5
BZV (32 min., The Republic of Congo/ Netherlands/USA, 2010) dir. Kevin Jerome Everson, Crosswalk (19 min., USA, 2010) dir. Jeanne Liotta   

4:45pm   
Group Program 6
The Green and the Blue (14 min., USA, 2010) dir. Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, Horizon Line (1 min., USA, 2009) dir. Katherin McInnis, Threshold (1 min., USA, 2010) dir. Katherin McInnis, Last Resort (2 min., USA, 2010) dir. Katherin McInnis, East Wind (10 min., China, 2011) dir. Cao Fei, Meer  (4 min., USA, 2010) dir. Robert Todd, Inaudible (4 min., USA, 2006/2010) dir. Jenny Perlin, Leads (6 min., USA, 2009) dir. Jenny Perlin, Shadow Life (10 min., China, 2011) dir. Cao Fei, Servants of Mercy (14min., Portugal/USA, 2010) dir. Fern Silva   

6:30pm
Nostalgia (45 min., Germany/UK, 2009) dir. Omer Fast  
"Three-part film and video installation that continues Fast’s fascination with exploring configurations of fact and fiction through narrative and filmic constructions, intertwining modes of documentary and dramatization." - The Whitney Museum of Art

7:45pm
Group Program 7
The Future will not be Capitalist (19 min., Austria, 2010) dir. Sasha Pirker,  Untitled (15 min., Algeria/France, 2010) dir. Neil Beloufa, In Free Fall (32 min., Austria/Germany, 2010) dir. Hito Steyerl, Burrow Me (12 min, UK, 2009) dir. Laure Prouvost  

9:30pm
Terra em Transe (106 min., Brazil, 1967) dir. Glauber Rocha
Set in the fictional country of Eldorado, an idealistic and anarchist poet is deeply entangled in a political contest between a populist governor and conservative president with revolutionary support.

Sunday, May 29

1:30pm
Group Program 8
A Movie (12 min., USA, 2010) dir. Jennifer Proctor, Coming Attractions (25 min., Austria, 2010) dir. Peter Tscherkassky, Despair  (16 min., UK, 2009) dir. Stephen Sutcliffe, Misty Suite (6 min., UK, 2009) dir. James Richards, These Hammers Don't Hurt Us (13 min., USA, 2010) dir. Michael Robinson   

3:15pm 
Group Program 9 
Brune Renault (17 min., France, 2009) dir. Neil Beloufa, Rosalinda (43 min., Argentina, 2011) dir. Matías Piñeiro, Cry When It Happens (14 min., USA, 2010) dir. Laida Lertxundi  

5:00pm   
Antônio das Mortes (100 min., Brazil, 1969) dir. Glauber Rocha
One of the most influential revolutionary films of all time, Antonio das Mortes is an epic allegorical folk tale about a legendary warrior turned hired gun on the Brazilian plains.

7:00pm   
Recent Work by Nicolas Provost
Stardust (20 min., USA, 2010), Storyteller (7 min., USA, 2010), Long Live The New Flesh (14 min., USA, 2009), Plot Point (15 min., USA, 2007)

830pm
You All Are Captains (78 min., Spain/Morocco, 2010) dir. Oliver Laxe   
A meta-documentary charting the director’s disintegrating relationship with his collaborators: a class of middle-school Moroccan filmmakers in Tangiers.

For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @thedailyMUBI on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.

Don't miss our latest features and interviews.

Sign up for the Notebook Weekly Edit newsletter.

Tags

Migrating FormsGeorges PerecGlauber RochaStraub-HuilletJim FinnNews
0
Please sign up to add a new comment.

PREVIOUS FEATURES

@mubinotebook
Notebook is a daily, international film publication. Our mission is to guide film lovers searching, lost or adrift in an overwhelming sea of content. We offer text, images, sounds and video as critical maps, passways and illuminations to the worlds of contemporary and classic film. Notebook is a MUBI publication.

Contact

If you're interested in contributing to Notebook, please see our pitching guidelines. For all other inquiries, contact the editorial team.