Migrating Forms opens today at Anthology Film Archives in New York and runs through May 23; in other words, practically concurrent with Cannes. "This is the second edition of the festival that rose from the grave of the New York Underground Film Festival, straddling the museum installation and movie-movie worlds — a dynamic epitomized by a screening of painter Ed Ruscha's 16mm works." Nick Pinkerton in the Voice: "Migrating Forms' 10-day lineup is fairly crammed with 'a broad spectrum of contemporary film and video projects,' including the annual Tube Time!, a team showdown of outré online found footage."
R Emmet Sweeney for TCM: "Expanding from five days to ten this year (my report from the inaugural edition is here), fest directors Nellie Killian and Kevin McGarry have added mini-retrospectives (of Jean-Pierre Gorin and Kerry Tribe), and invited guest programmers to take over a few nights (including a rare screening of David Cronenberg's Stereo (1969) in the May 15th program Soziale Plastik I curated by Brian McCarthy). There's also lots of exciting new work on display, including a trio of Jean-Marie Straub shorts, and films by Lucien Castaing-Taylor (co-director of Sweetgrass), John Gianvito (Vapor Trail (Clark)), Lav Diaz (whose Evolution of a Filipino Family made Cinema Scope's best-of-the-decade list), and New York Film Festival holdovers from Harun Farocki and Ben Rivers. It's an invigorating mix of old and emerging masters, so I don't feel bereft in missing Cannes for the 29th year in a row. The revelation for me, though, has been the Opening Night film, Kevin Jerome Everson's Erie. Everson's work is new to me, and I direct everyone to Ed Halter's great essay in Artforum for a crash course in his style."
Michael Joshua Rowin has an overview in the L Magazine and celebrates "the return engagement of emerging filmmakers exploring the furthest regions of narrative and form.... The image lodged most poignantly in my mind comes from Kamal Aljafari's straightforward depiction of national despair, Port of Memory, in which the filmmaker's clan is forced to abandon their Jaffa home. At one point a hokey Jesus movie plays on television, a family cat lounging on top of the monitor as the triumphant savior appears to John the Baptist — like the dancing chicken of Herzog's Stroszek, it's a great metaphor for God only knows what."
Image: Erie.
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