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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Migrating Forms, the festival formed out of the ashes of the now-defunct New York Underground Film Festival, has announced the lineup for their first installment, to take place at New York’s Anthology Film Archives next month. In addition to new works by Sharon Lockhart and Owen Land, Forms will present two films we’ve covered previously, Alejandro Adams‘ Canary (right; we interviewed Adams when the film debuted last month at Cinequest) and Jessica Oreck’s Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo (see our SXSW preview interview). I’d also be excited to check out Impolex based on the catalog logline alone (”An unjustifiable blend of the bare-bones realism of John Ford’s WWII documentaries and the glorious stupidity of Abbot and Costello”), even if it wasn’t directed by sometime SpoutBlog freelancer Alex Ross Perry.
You can download a PDF of the full schedule at the Migrating Forms website, which is scheduled to relaunch on April 1.
The 15th edition of the New York Underground Film Festival opens tonight with a film we’ve covered extensively since its Toronto premiere, Suroosh Alvy and Eddy Moretti’s Heavy Metal in Baghdad. The fest runs through April 8, and when it’s over, it’s over: though co-directors Kevin McGarry and Nellie Killian are said to be working on mounting a new event with a similar spirit, the NYUFF as we know it will cease to exist after this run.
Ed Halter ran the festival for ten years, taking it over for co-founder and future Old School director Todd Phillips (yes, seriously). Halter has an obit of sorts at the Village Voice, in which he makes it clear that NYUFF isn’t ending because it has to financially. “It’s a conscious decision: There’s no rent hike to point to, no defunding agency to blame…True to its indie-rock genealogy, the NYUFF has always functioned more like a band than a traditional arts organization…Sometimes, a band just decides to call it quits—and hopes to go out in style, while it’s still got the knack.”
That said, NYUFF may not have worn out its welcome, but––to extend the indie-rock metaphor––this fest ending in 2008 is sort of like Pavement shutting down after Terror Twilight: things haven’t become embarrassing yet, but the enterprise has started to drift somewhat from what its core audience fell in love with. The way Halter describes NYUFF’s glory days, it’s apparent that it’s an event that was pegged to (and helped disseminate) a zeitgeist that may no longer really exist:
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