To win a pass to all five days worth of Migrating Forms screenings, see instructions at the bottom of the post, after the jump.

Around this time last year, I wrote a preview of the final installment of the New York Underground Film Festival, in which I quoted a memorial to the 15 year downtown institution published in the Village Voice by former festival organizer Ed Halter. Halter had painted a picture of an event that inspired protests and counterprotests, that hosted a raw meat fashion show, that was locally known as a peddler of “fucked-up shit” … and which eventually evolved into a showcase for the work of artsy-cool artists like Bill Brown, Miranda July and Deborah Stratman, who rarely had “fucked-up shit” on the agenda. Based on the portion of the program of the last NYUFF that I screened, I was disappointed that it seemed like the pendulum had swung too far away from the festival’s subversive roots. I wrote:

Times change, and whatever local transgressive spirit that might have fueled a downtown Manhattan arts event in the mid-90s has now been apparently fully squashed by the area’s total, generally dispiriting gentrification. I’ve seen several films on this year’s program, and I wouldn’t call any of them “fucked up”…And there’s a disappointing art school austerity to the fest’s closing night film, The Juche Idea, a textual coldness that belies the satire…

A year later, times have changed once again. Within a New York playing field leveled just a little by economic unrest, where underground screening series are popping up left and right to fill the gaps left by the demise of sometime institutions like the Pioneer Theater, the remains of the NYUFF have been refashioned into Migrating Forms, a 5 day festival beginning at Anthology Film Archives tomorrow night, devoted to showcasing “new experimental film and video.”

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