Migrating Forms 2009- Wrap Up and Festival Top 5

More than a week after the festival is over, and still dragging my feet to write about the 17 works I saw over the five days (if I weren't a slacker, it would have been a few more), Migrating Forms 2009 is still taking shape in my mind. Intent on expanding the cinematic framework, whether into home videos, gallery pieces, or projection performances, Migrating Forms, if nothing else, shows that Cinema, whatever it is, is alive and well in 2009. Though I skipped a couple of the seemingly better received works in the festival (Ponytail, Canary) in favor of another feature and a shorts program which ended up featuring a couple of my favorite works in the festival, I was more than happy with what I got, even if I found the majority of the features quite underwhelming and the shorts programs hit or miss. And while some better organization would have been helpful (not to be hyper critical, but not one of the programs I went to started, or was even seating, within 15 minutes of its start time, and, typically, patrons stood around the lobby perfectly happy to be chatting with friends, but confused about seating and start times), Migrating Forms was a celebration of important works that all too often go unrecognized and unseen, especially in a theatrical context. Its intent focus on challenging viewers perceptions of cinematic spaces, at least in the best works, fit into a framework of migration that can, and should, keep this festival going as our media continues to expand and ask questions of who, what, and where cinema is headed. Kudos, kudos, and more kudos.

While I didn’t end up writing about nearly as many movies as I originally planned, I hope to make up for that a little bit here by highlighting some of the works that made some impression on me throughout the festival. Plus, its been over four months since top ten lists came out. It’s about time for another list, don’t you think?

First things first. Or rather, last things first. The festival’s Closing Night Feature, Michael Gitlin’s The Earth Is Young, was the keynote address for the festival’s focus on religiosity. Interviewing Young Earth Creation supporters who have turned to “science” to find a justification behind their theories, The Earth Is Young pretends to let these people speak their minds while Gitlin uses formal techniques to highlight the incoherence of such arguments. Most of the Young Earth Creationists are introduced as a blurry image, their dialogues with Gitlin get cut off by the editing, leaving their floating heads moving without actually speaking anything, much less anything of substance. While The Earth Is Young undoubtedly proves its point, the material is perhaps not as challenging or thoughtful as Gitlin might propose. He is, after all, only going to be speaking to the a-g community, his own choir, which makes The Earth Is Young go down a little too easy. If Gitlin is only out to prove Young Earth Creationists wrong and showcase real science versus morally driven science, The Earth Is Young does succeed, but who is it really convincing – or even trying to convince? Similar to another disappointing (yet more pointedly ambitious) festival entry, Erin Cosgrove’s sporadic, slapdash animated feature What Manner Of Person Art Thou?, The Earth Is Young tackles naivety behind aggressively religious groups, working just as hard to justify themselves in fields they probably do not belong, yet both movies buckle under their ideological restrictions ultimately challenging neither the audience nor themselves.


Rigorous modesty, on the other hand, went a long way for two festival bright spots – Lee Anne Schmitt's California Company Town and Sharon Lockhart’s 1998 video Goshagaoka. (Side note: I wonder why Lockhart’s much discussed new feature, Lunch Break, was not a part of the festival. It seemed a fitting venue for the New York premiere, but maybe I’m too hopeful). While the works couldn’t be more different, they both illustrate a mastery of special identity. California Company Town, a documentary about old towns in California which have evaporated for one reason or another in Hegelian Bush-era capitalism, finds a mythic beauty in dead towns. If nature corresponds to a state of mind, as a quotation from the film states, California Company Town works to illustrate this by refusing a selective memory and passing from one town to the next, finding a story, discovering a space, and looking for signs of life as the economic war between the government and private sector continues to rage on in the form of uninhabited places. Goshagaoka uses a single space, a high school gymnasium, as an actively involved location filled with fixed positions and punctuated with its fixed camera. In just a few very long, static shots of a high school volleyball practice, Goshagaoka finds lines that can and cannot be broken while it identifies a perfect form of movement, communication, and togetherness – a harmonious dreamscape of the haunted spaces featured in California Company Town.

Unique spaces were prominent in the best short works of the festival. Ben Rivers’s stunning piece The Origin of the Species tracks the evolution of life from immaterial goo into a world of wilderness and isolation. Having seen the film only once, I feel like I can’t describe the experience or the work very much at all, so I’ll default to Michael Sicinski’s wonderful review. Needless to say, The Origin of the Species struck me in an equally powerful way and I’m still thinking about it weeks later.

There were plenty of other works that I saw – some very good (Naomi Uman’s Kalendar), some underwhelming (Jessica Oreck’s Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo) – but Rivers is a good place to end. The species and the festival progressed into something beautiful no matter the form it took.



Migrating Forms 2009 Festival Top 5 Works
(note: since Lockhart’s work was not new, I decided not to include it on this list…)

1. The Origin of the Species (Ben Rivers)
2. DDR/DDR (Amie Siegel)
3. Kalendar (Naomi Uman)
4. Passing (Robert Todd)
5. Dialogues (Owen Land [George Landow])
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Migrating Forms 2009: "DDR/DDR" (Amie Siegel)

by James Hansen

Eventual winner of the Best Long Form (i.e. Best Feature) Award at the inaugural Migrating Forms Festival, Amie Siegel’s DDR/DDR was a fitting winner as it seemed to encompass many of the festival’s obsessions (religion, national identity, “new media”’s relationship with cinema), while it also offers formal challenges to the documentary form sure to puzzle as many viewers as it enthralls.

DDR/DDR, previously shown in New York at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, takes as its main focus the failed East German state, most namely the Stasi organization. Excavating Stasi archives, Siegel uncovers a strange past and examines the modern relationship that former citizens have with their East German heritage. In both instances, the lines, walls, and barriers between the state and its citizens are constantly challenged, as, the work argues, the lines between victim and perpetrator are never clear.


DDR/DDR traces these problems by tracking the discursive nature of media technology – both through East Germany’s obsession with the Western genre (leading to odd works such as The Sons of Great Bear (1966) which DDR/DDR examines in depth) and Siegel’s own attempts to correctly convert the video’s own message from one spatio-temporal period to the next. The centerpiece of DDR/DRR is a long set of interviews with former East Germans who have created their own Indian commune. Siegel works with these “Indian Hobbyists” to explore their identification with, and removal from, the East German state. Here, the “hobbyists” can perpetrate, as the video argues, their continuing role as a victim in a German society that split half its existence.

The camerawork of the interviews, almost always medium or long shots, keeps DDR/DDR at an appropriate distance from the people and their own cultural identities in order for Sigel’s meta moderating commentary to play with its own “free associative” structure and ultimately allow it to conceptually discover its own identity. This, of course, all plays out in a striking manner. The balance between fact and fiction is iterated formally, similar in many ways to more recent work by Jia Zhang Ke, with a mix of staged and scripted interviews, as well as Siegel’s addition of an overtly reflexive questioning of the work’s processes, functions, and techniques.

With its own focus on the migration of culture, identity, and history, DDR/DDR positions itself in many places at once, while highlighting the fine line between the conclusions it draws and previously established modes of historical identification. A true summation of a Migrating Form, DDR/DDR is a uniquely meditative work with no specific identity as a documentary, fiction, or gallery piece – a perfectly fitting, successful assemblage that reasserts its own communicative strategies and structural challenges. Like its title, DDR/DDR feeds back into itself in nearly every manner, while questioning each movement along the way.
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Migrating Forms 2009: "Dialogues" (Owen Land [George Landow], 2009)

by James Hansen

If ever there were a work that, in the immortal words of one Missy Elliot, “put [its] thing down, flip it, and reverse it” (truly “tiesreverdnapilfnwodgnihttupi”) it might be Owen Land’s [George Landow] newest work Dialogues. The opening night work for the Migrating Forms Festival, currently taking place at Anthology Film Archives, Dialogues is a self-proclaimed parody of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and “concentrates on the events of Owen Land's life in 1985, when he returned to Los Angeles after spending a year in Tokyo, Fukuoka, and Okinawa, Japan. […] It was a time for much soul-searching about his relationships with women (and with strippers).” If Dialogues took place in 2003 rather than 1985, Missy Elliot undoubtedly would have been a part of the wide ranging soundtrack (as her repetitive lyrics, rhythms, and pitches would work in conjunction with those similarities in Land’s work) featuring period pop hits that instate the works’ cyclical structure feeding into other pieces from Anger, Deren, Brakhage, Snow, Rainer, Joyce, Voltaire, and Mutt and Jeff.

Dialogues does “Work It”, perhaps a bit too much at times, in order to become a fully immersive aggregate of allusions, illusions, and ugh-llusions. Using various vignettes/short scenes/short videos (take your pick of what to call them) Owen, God, and, more often than not, naked women have various dialogues on random subjects, typically shifting in time, space, and location depending upon the moment. And while it often feels a need to make its over-abundant referents a bit more clear, using character’s dialogue to call out any work it feels like mentioning, the melancholy editing technique and structures of sound vs. image (which require a second viewing for me to assuredly say anything) recalls, if anything, Hollis Frampton’s Critical Mass in the form of Plato’s Phaedo. (Quite perfectly, when scenes from Dialogues were shown in LA in March, Frampton’s work was shown prior).

By rotating the predominant sound or image (I noticed three varying structures: music overtakes dialogue, music and dialogue work on top of one another, intertitles replace spoken dialogue) Land challenges the effectiveness of the literal dialogue by highlighting the formal dialogic properties behind it. Although the repetition and never-ending material makes the draining 120 minutes overly sufficient for its purposes (the length only makes things irritating rather than artfully reinforcing much of anything) Land continues to show the playful humor, biting wit, and complex wordplay that recalls his classic work from the 60s and 70s. Dialogues often recalls a quotation from Yvonne Rainer about creating a new kind of narrative cinema (wish I had written it down...) and, if nothing else, Dialogues is a dedicated miasma of these principles, restructuring cinematic dialogue from the tits up.
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Migrating Forms Festival Trailer

From the ashes of the New York Underground Film Festival comes the Migrating Forms Festival. Presenting five days of new experimental film, Migrating Forms is a must attend event for any film fan in the New York area. The festival takes place at (where else?) Anthology Film Archives from April 15-19. The festival trailer is posted below and you can visit the website with all the details here.



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