Swallow The logo for the latest edition of Migrating Forms, which ran this past December, features a thumb resting in a giant nostril. The ubiquitous “thumbs up,” associated with Roger Ebert and Facebook likes, turns into an uncouth intruder (you try shoving your thumb up your nose in public) and a signifier of unhinged digital representations of the body. The perplexing image comes from Even Pricks by Ed Atkins (who also made this year’s official trailer), and somehow it served as an apt emblem for the festival’s offerings at BAMcinématek, a departure from its previous base at Anthology Film Archives. Now in its fifth year, the successor to the New York Underground Film Festival continued its strong showcases of contemporary experimental work with an international scope alongside varied revivals (Sandra Bernhard, Johnnie To). Programmers Nellie Killian and Kevin McGarry embrace an expansive understanding of cinematic work, which adds up to more than just an eclectic mix. Migrating Forms deserves recognition for its dedication to bringing work culled from biennials and gallery exhibitions into a cinematic space. Surprise Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost’s Swallow, which deploys hypnotic exhortations (“This image is undressing you, you drink the image”) and resembles an ancient fresco of water nymphs come to life, was one of many such works. In the theater, Prouvost’s use of sounds of breathing (which Benjamin deemed “the mode most proper to the process of contemplation”) were especially affective, and the work succeeds in leaving ample room for ruminations on its epicurean frolics. While Migrating Forms continues to serve as a reminder of the vibrance and potential of cinematic space in an age of medium and platform agnosticism, many screenings underlined the necessity for a sustained critical investigation that reverses the terms of the usual discussion by focusing on the exhibition of contemporary art in the cinema.
CENTER JENNY The opening screening of the works of Ryan Trecartin heralded the festival’s array of human (and inhuman) figurations and relationships with the camera. Of the four videos Trecartin made for the 2013 Venice Biennale and presented here, three imagine the radical offspring of our media-suffused and brand-saturated moment. Trecartin’s shambolic works display a laudable drive to comprehend the contradictions of contemporary society: they’re as much pseudo-anthropological investigations as they are network overloads. In Trecartin’s mythology, these chattering posthuman reality stars comprise a brood that has returned to a recognizably human form after becoming “animated.” “Animation” is used as a catchall term for society’s increasing virtualization. (Repeated references to the evolution of dinosaurs into birds reinforce the loosely defined developmental narrative.) These are dispatches from a present-day future in which the mediation of everything from food to history has mushroomed with a dizzying dominance. In CENTER JENNY, one of the many Jennys describes sexism not as a phenomenon but as a good look. “Enough time has passed,” someone chimes in, satirizing our own faith in historical distance. Departing from the settings of the other three works, Trecartin’s Junior War looks instead at a recent past but provides perhaps the clearest demonstration of the artist’s genealogical impulses. In Trecartin’s hands, early-2000s footage of amped-up, mischievous high-schoolers becomes the rampage of a suburban war machine, depraved yet innocent. But if it’s release and destruction these kids are seeking, they’re always denied, and not only because they’re hassled by the cops. In one memorable sequence, a well-pummeled mailbox fails to bend to the force of restless youth. (It’s eventually deemed “fucking indestructible.”) The “warfare” begs the question: what hostilities are they rehearsing for? Revolution might be a generous analysis. While last year’s Migrating Forms felt like a response to political upheaval, Junior War suggests a sense of political frustration instead of emancipation.
The Salad Zone The mailbox that wouldn’t break was echoed in Saudi artist Sarah Abu Abdallah’s The Salad Zone, when two burqa-clad figures beat tools against a television’s glass face. A subtitle early in the video reads “There is so little room for abstractions”—yet through self-documentation Abdallah is able to find space to traffic in abstraction, as in one shot in which she makes herself so small as to fit into a large cooking pot. One of the strongest in the shorts programs, the film follows Abdallah and mixes diary footage with mysterious activities. From monotonous scenes of mundane action—chasing a cockroach through the living room with the camera—to discreet performances in public and domestic spaces, Abdallah’s film suggests that, even in a repressive society, transgressions are relative (tellingly, the TV eventually breaks). The poignant work of Super-8 diarist Anne Charlotte Robertson, grounded in her manic and therapeutic relationship with the camera, received a mini retrospective. Two films from her “Five Year Diary” project—A Breakdown and After the Mental Hospital (82) and Emily Died (94)—show her acerbic wit as well as a deep sadness and longing. In a voiceover layered with other sounds, we hear of her love for Doctor Who’s Tom Baker, her compulsive appetite, and her depression (Robertson was diagnosed as bipolar with post-traumatic stress disorder). Her fear of breakdown reaches a fever pitch in Emily Died, in which Robertson mourns the death of her young niece and returns to the liveliness of her garden for solace and reminiscences. These films (along with 1990’s Apologies, a work of frenetic penance) are a small part of the extensive collection left to the Harvard Film Archive after her death in 2012. Certain materials won’t be available for a decade, meaning that there’s yet more to come of Robertson’s work.
Merce by Merce by Paik Taking centerstage for one packed single screening was Without You I’m Nothing , the 1990 film of Sandra Bernhard’s one-woman show. Bernhard gives a marvelous performance. Directed, like the stage show that preceded it, by John Boskovich, the act is set at an L.A. nightclub with an African-American audience that’s constantly rolling their eyes at her shtick. Amidst her long-winded comic routines, in which she skewers herself while maintaining an ineffable poise, Bernhard leaves room for musical numbers ranging from Burt Bacharach medleys to Nina Simone and Prince. Her dexterous impersonations and identities may feel a bit dated (at least for this young viewer) but her intrepid style is anything but. In one of many canny programming decisions, Without You I’m Nothing complemented the program “Merce Cunningham for Camera,” which featured two works from the collection of regular Migrating Forms collaborator Electronic Arts Intermix (previous EAI screenings include Raymond Pettibon’s Sir Drone and works by Cynthia Maughan). Cunningham’s collaborations with Nam June Paik and Charles Atlas showed the unique degree to which Cunningham worked with the camera as a choreographic interlocutor—a dynamic equally palpable in Bernhard’s film.
From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf Fresh possibilities for documentation emerged in From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf from the Indian collective CAMP. The artists gave cell-phone cameras to sailors working on boats crossing the Arabian Sea, and the result offers a salient and engaging look at the lives of globalization’s precarious workhorses. If Leviathan epitomizes the sensory potential of radically unfastened cameras, CAMP’s project looks more deeply into the politics of who picks up the camera. Similarly rooted in an intricate editing process, From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf looks for meaning in this politicization and finds new cultural values in the oft-maligned camera-phone. From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf is refreshing: humanizing without being mawkish and shot through with spontaneous expressions of joy from sing-alongs to dolphin-spotting. If how we are ourselves—and perhaps how we are selves at all—changes in relation to our technologies of representation, Ed Atkins’s melancholy animations move into the realm of newer media. If Trecartin’s evolutionary mythology portrays humans after their “animated” stage, Atkins might be investigating the missing link. “Once upon a time a couple of people were alive who were friends of mine,” we hear in Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths, setting the ghostly tone. Atkins’s HD protagonists are like walking carcasses—an excess of pixels with nothing underneath, leading to a crisis that the subjects of his works labor to express. His unsettling attention to the details—hair, eyes, mouths—that animation studios typically labor over in pursuit of naturalism lends the images an unsettling, morbid quality. Even Pricks, a newer work with a surfeit of clean phallic thumbs, takes an even more somber stance. “THIS SUMMER, DESTROY YOUR LIFE” reads the mock-action-movie-trailer titles that appear throughout. Ian Cheng’s bbrraattss, which recasts Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd as twitching three-dimensional figures burdened by inconvenient doubles, also dwells on the figurative possibilities provided by motion-capture technology. Cheng’s unstable creations are abandoned to their vigorous spasmodic activity, ultimately getting nowhere; likewise, Atkins’s dead-eyed heads remain suspended in their depressive state.
bbrraattss Yet as João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva can attest, digital media is not the only home of the bizarre. Shooting on 16mm film, Gusmão and Paiva capture scenes that harken back to earliest cinema’s possibilities for new forms of vision: the tough rind of an elephant’s trunk as it squirms in the difficulty of sucking up a few peanuts, the revolutions of an egg (in a sequence reminiscent of Hollis Frampton’s Lemon), three albinos joking by a fire, a bright-faces cassowary wandering before a painted forest backdrop. Yet whether these sights merely amount to nostalgic consumption is a question the films fail to ask. By contrast, Laida Lertxundi’s Utskor: Either/Or—graceful 16mm chronicles of a Norwegian landscape far from her usual Californian locale with cues ranging from Bobby Bland to Frederick Engels—gently inquires about the relevance of analogue technologies while making the medium feel thoroughly contemporary. Other works at Migrating Forms contended with the contemporary circulation of images. Jon Rafman’s Popova-Lissitsky Office Complex and Juan Gris Dream House—an offshoot of his ongoing Brand New Paint Job series of stills—move through architectural models decorated with modernist artworks. Rafman uses architectural allegories to remind us of modernism’s truces with industrial society. The videos become a sardonic sales pitch, accompanied by appropriate muzak and completed with frozen miniatures depicting ideal foot traffic. Rafman’s use of a corporate mode—the simulation of yet-to-be-built, saleable spaces—is formally interesting at a time when artists continue to concern themselves with questions surrounding late capitalism’s failures and excesses. The models are eerily still, but the moving images based upon them evoke the constant activity of culture, finance, and real estate. Tomonari Nishikawa’s 45 7 Broadway and Gina Telaroli’s Amuse-gueule #1: Digital Destinies also feature media looking at other media, with an emphasis on transformative processes. Nishikawa’s multilayered film works with Times Square’s hallucinatory thicket of digital signage, while Telaroli transmutes a sequence from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies into explosions of light and sound. The routinely elaborate manipulation of images is the ostensible subject of Digital Destinies—a text accompanying the video details the reframing steps taken to produce it, from HD to Vimeo—but the piece delights in the potential for a sublime aesthetic experience while ironically undercutting it.
45 7 Broadway Two more disparate works of compilation were James Richards’s Not Blacking Out, Just Turning the Lights Off and Shambhavi Kaul’s Mount Song. Not Blacking Out journeys through footage culled from the Web, while Mount Song assembles a variety of sinister and exotic studio sets. Both works choose suggestive atmospherics over rigorous scrutiny. Kaul draws our attention to cinematic spaces in which we are not meant to linger, while Richards revels in combinations of sound and image that veer from congruity to dissonance. In a similar vein, Andrew Lampert’s intriguing archival thought experiment El Adios Largos posits a past in which Robert Altman’s languorous The Long Goodbye is a mythical lost work, a cinephilic dream. The fictional backstory: after finally surfacing in Mexico, the film was subject to a botched restoration. The result is the unfamiliar experience of a counterculture classic with pop-art colorizations and dubbed Spanish voices that feel detached from the bodies of Elliott Gould and even his cat. What if this had been the cultural object we’d inherited? With that experiment, El Adios Largos might be the most succinct explication of Migrating Forms at its best: it makes the cinema a space where we reimagine our history as much as our future.
title: “Festivals Migrating Forms” ShowToc: true date: “2024-04-25” author: “Yvonne Beringer”
Sitting Feeding Sleeping The simple act of moving video art from the gallery to the big screen can focus attention. And the finely detailed work of Rachel Rose, who will present an evening of her work on December 11, rewards a closer look. The three films on the program invent something like an archaeology of mortality. Sitting Feeding Sleeping (13) was Rose’s response to a bout of creative paralysis, what she described to Mousse magazine as “deathfulness: being alive, but feeling dead.” She traveled to a cryogenics lab, a zoo, and a robotic perception lab, all places of mediated living or lifelike simulacra. As she speaks about cryonics and Edison’s Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) in a lifeless auto-tuned voiceover, she associatively edits together images from all three sites, with graphical intrusions from her Adobe Premiere software.
Palisades in Palisades An even more spectacular smash-up of organic-artificial-technological occurs in Palisades in Palisades (14), a kind of molecular history of the New Jersey park. Her camera zooms into a Revolutionary War-era painting of the park, pushing closer until it blurs out of focus, then dissolving into the pores of a woman’s skin and then again into a map of the park. Then we see the woman herself sitting in a wooded area, her eyelids fluttering, the soundtrack a heavy industrial hum with orchestral strings floating above. Everything is layered and connected, as the wrinkles of her clothing become the folds of George Washington’s pants in a portrait made during battles fought on the same location. Her body is part of a continuum of Palisades Park, her flesh and fabrics channeling and mingling with the flesh of the past. Rose’s most recent work, A Minute Ago, continues these layered investigations, this time taking a freak hail storm on a summertime Russian beach and merging it with Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, everything breaking down into precipitation-sized pixels.
Freshbuzz (www.subway.com) Cory Arcangel’s Freshbuzz (www.subway.com) is a prankish guided tour of the secret byways of the chain’s content-overloaded website and social media accounts. Arcangel is teasingly methodical, clicking on every single sandwich variation, which reveals a short video of plasticine meats. The same camera move is repeated in all, and becomes a kind of corporate incantation—starting in extreme close-up, then arcing backward as if overwhelmed by the deliciousness on display. It’s worth waiting for when he delves into the “nutritional” videos hosted by the improbably named “JJ Virgin,” who cheerfully relates how Subway sandwiches can help cure depression.
The Midnight After There is no calming the unfortunate souls who board the minibus in Fruit Chan’s The Midnight After. Chan is a cult figure in Hong Kong cinema, a chronicler of the handover-to-China malaise, most famously in 1997’s Made in Hong Kong, a howl of discontent shot with nonprofessionals on leftover film stock. The Midnight After returns to similar thematic ground with its story: following a plague, the population of Hong Kong literally disappears, as if the Chinese takeover has rendered its population invisible. It’s a Twilight Zone scenario adapted from a popular web serial written by message board writer known as “Pizza.” Lam Suet (a jolly axiom of Johnnie To films) is a bus driver shuttling a ragtag group of passengers to Tai Po, including a pompadoured Simon Yam (gleefully dirtying his debonair image). As they drive through a tunnel, the rest of humanity disappears: Tai Po is a ghost town, and their phone calls go unanswered. A mysterious disease then begins picking off the bus riders one by one. The initiating event is left unexplained, borrowing from free-floating anxieties like the SARS virus, but it’s ultimately a parable of disappearance. As the characters wander through the emptied-out city, The Midnight After becomes a mournful eulogy for the city that was, and, Chan intimates, will be no more.
The Airstrip – Decampment of Modernism, Part III Heinz Emigholz’s The Airstrip – Decampment of Modernism, Part III is another urban journey colored by loss, though this time in a rigorous documentary form. It is the 21st installment of his Photography and beyond series, in which the filmmaker attempts to “look at architectural spaces that . . . have been sorely neglected by ‘architectural history,’” as well as how they function and feel in the communities they serve. In The Airstrip, he focuses on modernist structures, capturing them in a series of comprehensive long takes and taking in the surrounding neighborhoods and the populations that course through them. The instigating factor is Emigholz’s obsession with the Northern Mariana Islands, launching pad for the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The film opens with an epigraph about “The time between the bomb’s release and its explosion”—neither the future nor the past, but a suspended state of absolute nothingness. Emigholz travels through Europe to Latin America to the Marianas, and ends in Germany, at Berlin’s neo-baroque Neptune Fountain, erected in 1891. Its frolicking prewar nymphs stare across the street at the Rotes Rathaus (the “Red City Hall”), a former residence of Joseph Goebbels.
Quickeners The world imagined in Jeremy Shaw’s Quickeners is a dream of what never was. Enchanted with footage of West Virginia revivalist snake handlers (taken from the 1967 documentary Holy Ghost People), Shaw decided to layer an invented sci-fi narrative atop it. The story takes place in a future world of “quantum humans” who live as hive minds linked through neural networks. Some people suffer from “human atavism syndrome” and resurrect ancient rituals of prayer and dance, claiming it helps them to “transcend” the neural web. Shaw’s fiction taps the primal power of this 40-year-old religious gathering, building to a psychedelic shudder.
Here’s to the Future! For more chilled-out group activities, look out for Gina Telaroli’s Here’s to the Future!, which captures the camaraderie that emerges during a movie shoot (full disclosure: I am friendly acquaintances with Telaroli and others in the film). A group of pals get together to film a scene from Michael Curtiz’s 1934 film The Cabin in the Cotton that features class tension and a seduction. The same scene is blocked and shot over and over, with different actors cycling in and out of roles, each personality imbuing the scene with a different vibe. It plays as menacing or blackly comic, resigned or filled with rage. Jacques Rivette once proposed that every film is a documentary of its own making, a tenet which Telaroli embraces and pushes to its extreme limit, encouraging the crew and actors to bring their own cameras to the set. The resulting movie is a patchwork of HD, cell phone, and webcam images, as egalitarian with its pixels as it is with its crew members. That open-minded attitude is representative of the Migrating Forms festival at large, which gathers an eclectic group of image-makers who come from vastly different backgrounds and exhibition spaces to see how their ideas ping off of each other and the screen. Each program demands new ways of seeing, the series a constantly shifting perceptual challenge. Migrating Forms runs December 10 to 18 at BAMcinématek.
title: “Festivals Migrating Forms” ShowToc: true date: “2024-05-14” author: “Carl Moore”
The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images The first uncategorizable object they screened was the opening-night film (take a deep breath): The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images (2011). Director Eric Baudelaire interviewed filmmaker and former Japanese Red Army member Masao Adachi, and May Shigenobu, the daughter of a Red Army leader. Their voices are looped over contemporary images of Beirut and Tokyo, the twin poles of their former existence. These smoothly tracking images act as a setting for the duo’s reminiscences, as documents of the changed present, and as glimpses of films that Adachi might make in the future. Since his arrest in Lebanon and subsequent extradition to Japan in 2000, Adachi is not allowed to leave the country, and he asked Baudelaire to shoot specific images of Beirut for use in his own work. Each shot is charged with these collisions of past-present-future, all which indicate losses: of political movements, artistic practice, and entire lives. Landscapes abound in the program—as sites of contemplation (Traveling Light), as exercises in narrative play (Slow Action, Agatha), as witnesses to dying traditions (It’s the Earth Not the Moon), and as subjects of critical anthropology (Abendland). Traveling Light (2011) was the most sensuously pleasurable, a hypnotic document of a train ride from New York City to Pittsburgh. After originally attempting to shoot the movie as a scripted drama, director Gina Telaroli stripped away all the dialogue and retained only brief glimpses of the actors, to produce a nonnarrative sensorium of a lonely Amtrak ride. Playing off the dual meaning of the title, the film captures the experience of “traveling light,” without baggage or company, idly staring out of windows and at other passengers. But what the passengers stare at is how light travels as it filters through the train’s cabin in kaleidoscopic variations.
It’s the Earth, Not the Moon Where Traveling Light is a precise and intimate travelogue, It’s the Earth, Not the Moon (2011) is sprawling: a three-hour immersion in the tiny Portuguese island of Corvo, the westernmost point in Europe. Director Gonçalo Tocha arrived with his sound man and a single guiding purpose: “We are going to film everything we can.” Tocha opts for an anecdotal history of the island by asking the locals to re-create dead traditions (hat-knitting, lock-carving), while still capturing the ambivalent tenor of their daily lives through coverage of the local elections. All of this takes place against an unearthly volcanic landscape, which is slowly being overrun by bird-watchers and dance-group retreats, making Tocha’s project of historical reclamation all the more urgent. In Slow Action (2010), there is no such urgency, since the worlds Ben Rivers puts on display are utopias. Rivers shot in four far-flung locales (Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands; Gunkanjima, Japan; the island nation of Tuvalu; and Somerset, England) in hand-processed B&W, and overlaid with a narration of imaginary histories, written by science-fiction writer and cultural critic Mark von Schlegell. Using the enunciatory power of voiceover, as in Anabasis, Rivers forces the viewer to grapple with intensely detailed oral narratives while contemplating emptied-out imagery. In the section shot in Tuvalu, where abandoned husks of cars dot the tropical landscape, the narrator speaks of the island’s “sublime unfathomable dimension” as local villagers pick their way through garbage-strewn paths. The ensuing sections collapse the distance between voice and image; the spoken histories become more elemental, describing worlds of “ruins of ruins.” The film concludes in “Somerset,” inhabited by a tribal culture marked by violence and “imminent, recurring, or just suppressed revolution.” For the first time, actors illustrate the voiceover’s visions, emerging in primitive straw masks as emissaries from a disturbingly retrograde future. Killian and McGarry paired Slow Action with Agatha (2012), another experiment with voiceover. Filmmaker Beatrice Gibson renders a dream by British composer Cornelius Cardew about an expedition to a planet inhabited by color-changing creatures. Gibson made the film amidst the gray slate and neon-green moss of North Wales’s Snowdonia Mountains, captured with the tactile richness of 16mm. The aliens wander about in retro-futuristic homemade polka-dot outfits while the planet-hopping narrator recounts an episode of unrequited love. This is a gentle, DIY Solaris, and the narrator’s advances towards Agatha, her shapeshifting tour guide, end with a repeated sense of absence. For Agatha is a spectral embodiment of the land itself, impossible to embrace in a single grasp. Ultimately, the actors cease pretending to be aliens and simply laze about the greenery, content to be lonely without the benefit of the story.
A similarly potent landscape, or landscape as agitator, is seen in the greatest film in the festival’s lineup, Duck Amuck, shown to commemorate Chuck Jones’s centennial. In the 1953 short, a rogue animator keeps changing the background behind Daffy Duck, swapping in a medieval castle, a country farm, and ski slopes, until Daffy (like the actors in Agatha) drops the performance and becomes himself, namely a neurotic with anger-management issues. Projected in a gorgeous 35mm Technicolor print, there is no better illustration of how landscape can become a character, and influence the actions of the people (and ducks) it contains. Nikolaus Geyrhalter allows his compositions to speak for themselves in Abendland (2011), in which clinical, geometrically composed shots of landscapes simply reflect his gimlet-eyed view of 21st-century Europe, seen at night. He shows a continent obsessed with controlling its borders as well as its own amusement. The most terrifying images depict an orgiastic beer hall during Oktoberfest, and an equally decadent dance-music concert in the Netherlands, in which entertainment is doled out on a massive, homogeneous scale.
On Top of the Whale Anything but homogeneous, Migrating Forms once again proved itself to be a small but wildly diverse program that has among the highest revelation-per-event ratios of any festival in New York. Capturing the spirit of the whole affair was the tribute to Raul Ruiz after a screening of his colonialist fever dream On Top of the Whale (1982). Some passages from his Poetics of Cinema were read, and a few former associates, among them producer Jodi Torrent and filmmaker Michael Almereyda, told stories about their experiences with him. To a crowd of tens (including Willem Dafoe), Almereyda related one of his brief encounters with Ruiz (who “looked like Saddam Hussein’s cherubic brother”) at the Torino Film Festival. He asked Ruiz what he was working on, and the gnomic Chilean director responded, “Escapeology, Houdini’s book about getting out of tight spots.” When Almereyda said, “So you’re working on a film about Houdini?” Ruiz replied simply, “No.” Houdini never wrote a book by that title, but Ruiz could not resist spinning a new story. The anecdote was intimate, strange, and revealing, much like Migrating Forms.
title: “Festivals Migrating Forms” ShowToc: true date: “2024-05-20” author: “Audra Mccormick”
Even Pricks In his 1956 manifesto “User’s Guide to Détournement,” Guy Debord exalted the potential role of the Situationist mode of artistic and theoretical production. Far from encouraging mere parody, détournement called for, as Douglas B. Holt put it, “turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself.” This year’s edition of BAMcinématek’s Migrating Forms was full of contemporary attempts at keeping Debord’s transgressive spirit alive. Showcasing a number of videographic works that defy labels and generic conventions—as well as a mini-retrospective on Haskell Wexler—Migrating Forms may resist any simple cohesive thread but the impetus to unleash the critical power of moving images was undeniable. The work of Ed Atkins, the artist collective known as GCC, and James N. Kienitz Wilkins, in particular, used the smorgasbord of images around us to puncture the insidious corporate and capitalist ideology that our current visual culture so thrives on. Atkins’s Even Pricks (13), for example, uses the now ubiquitous image of the thumbs up to stage a conversation about digital intimacy. Long a derided parody of film criticism and now a social media stand-in for affective reactions, the hyperreal 3-D model of the thumbs up in Atkins’s piece gets decontextualized (you see it up someone’s nose, in another’s belly-button, deflated as if it were a balloon) even as it is framed within that most shared of contemporary short-form films: the promo video (“This Summer… Destroy Your Life,” the tagline reads). Atkins uses hyperreal animation that place us squarely in the uncanny valley, making us aware of our own non-simulated reality. His happy christmas.mp4 (15), for example, features two CGI human characters mid-embrace who raise the eerie factor as they remain immobile for over three minutes even as one talks directly at us. A Primer for Cadavers (11) uses modernist stream-of-consciousness monologues to make us aware of our own sensory perception, asking us an unanswerable question, “Can you smell that?”
Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) Similarly, the central tenets of the GCC collective—the acronym echoing that of the intergovernmental political and economic union, the Gulf Cooperation Council—are based on faithful mimicry of the type of corporate imagery that pervades the discourse around modernization and globalization. The voiceovers heard in many of their works (“The time to plan for a 21st-century future is now”; “Quality is not a goal but a lifestyle”) mock the empty rhetoric of brand management that has taken hold of the official discourse in the region. For their Migrating Forms program, GCC interspersed actual, risible videos made by governments and tourism offices that tout the burgeoning economy of places like Dubai. In their dazzling l’Air du Temps (15), originally conceived as a projection on a circular screen, a roving camera surveys an opulent Louis XVI estate that’s decked out with modern symbols of luxury. The work stands on its own as an indictment of a culture enamored and hypnotized by luxury, but its juxtaposition with borrowed footage from the real Dubailand advertisements (“Welcome to a land that shows the world what can be achieved when you have the courage to dream”) suddenly makes you keenly aware of the ludicrousness of both real and fake footage. The collective’s clipart and digital renderings only underline how these aspirational fantasy cannot actually be realized in the region. This type of sociopolitical commentary made itself felt in other offerings, most touchingly in Abbas Fahdel’s Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) (15), which turned home movies shot weeks ahead of the U.S. occupation of Baghdad into a powerful indictment of American foreign policy, and in The Event, Sergei Loznitsa’s reconstruction of the Soviet Union’s dissolution in St. Petersburg (part of a small program devoted to the director). Their model, of remixing and recontextualizing old footage—the moving image as a politically inflected mirage—was at the heart of James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s triptych work. Shot in sequential video formats (BetaSP, MiniDV, HD), these short films piece together the bizarre tale of Andre: a thief, a murderer, a filmmaker who remains an elusive figure that becomes a way for Wilkins to discuss modern recording technology.
B-ROLL with Andre In each film, a different part of Andre’s exploits is rendered: a Dashiell Hammett–inspired voiceover connects Andre to a possible police investigation in TESTER (16); an anonymous prison mate recounts what he knows of the now escaped convict in B-ROLL with Andre (15); and an account from someone who may have been one of Andre’s victims in Special Features (14). Confounding our ability to distinguish between real images (the found footage from a videotape that makes up TESTER), stock footage (the B-roll from the same-titled piece), and the sit-down interviews in Special Features (all of which appear to be actors reading a script via a teleprompter), Wilkins has crafted an ouroboros of a project in which the recorded image falsifies and validates at the same time. His pieces exist in a liminal place between fiction and reality, mediated and transformed by the camera. The very process of image-making (all three pieces lay bare how they were created) becomes a way of interrogating how we live. Andre, we are told, “had this thing about resolutions and digital cameras, like there’s a moral reason to pursue the higher resolutions.” The play on words is apt. Here, the screen becomes a postmodern mirror whose editorial process enhances our own perception even as it muddles it further. In 1956, Debord suggested that “it is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its greatest effectiveness and, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty.” The selections presented this year at BAM’s Migrating Forms certainly live up to this promise, having made images old and new, fabricated and repurposed, bristle with a self-awareness fit for a 21st-century audience that so often looks without really seeing.
