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December 12, 2014 – Review
The 6th Annual Migrating Forms
Genevieve Yue
“Migrating Forms” is easily New York’s most eclectic film festival. A glance at the program, now in its sixth year, can be dizzying: a half-inch videotape documentary from the seventies here, a Korean art film there, and all manner of experimental film and artists’ film in between. Instead of theme, we get range. The festival bills itself as innovative and inclusive, and it is. It’s a kind of weathervane sample of the past year’s moving image work, not tied to any particular culture, whether avant-garde film, the art world, or the subcultural connotations of its predecessor, the New York Underground Film Festival. Forms, as it were, are able to migrate freely, often in delirious and unpredictable ways.
But it’s unclear whether such movements—across histories, institutions, and media practices—actually are that easy. Left unanswered is the question of what it means to serve up these various forms as if flipped through in the manner of a restless channel surfer—a metaphor all the more fitting for the festival’s ongoing emphasis on television, as evident in the accompanying sidebar program “Tube Time” showing at Anthology Film Archives. There’s undoubtedly value in creative disassociation, of stepping from Cory Archangel’s Freshbuzz (2014), a mesmerizing plunge into …