15.12.2014 Nick Pinkerton on the 6th Migrating Forms festival at BAMcinématek ­ artforum.com / film

http://artforum.com/film/id=49431 1/2

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Melissa Anderson onSerge Bozon’s Tip TopNick Pinkerton on the 6thMigrating Forms festival atBAMcinématekMelissa Anderson on 3Women and the RobertAltman retrospective atMoMAMelissa Anderson on TheBabadookMelissa Anderson on“Nastassja Kinski: Onefrom the Heart” at FSLCMelissa Anderson on AGirl Walks Home Alone atNight

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TRYING TO DEFINE the parameters of the Migrating Forms festival, I’m tempted to say that, more thanany other New York fest, it imagines what cinema will look when and if it wholly leaves behind thetwentieth­century definition of “cinema.” Making such a statement, however, would ignore some essentialthings about MF, now in its sixth year and its second at BAMcinématek, like the importance of film history tothe fest, which has established a tradition of important retrospectives—for Jean­Pierre Gorin, GlauberRocha, and Anne Charlotte Robertson previously, and of William Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: TakeOne, Still a Brother, The Fight) and Rolf Forsberg this year.

So whatever Migrating Forms is exactly is hard to put a finger on, but it isn’t boring—the same might besaid for the baffling work of Gabriel Abrantes. Abrantes’s thirty­two­minute Ennui, Ennui, here in one of thefour dedicated shorts programs of eighteen programs overall, imagines global politics in terms ofdysfunctional parent­child pairs—a husky Afghan teenager reluctantly cast as a warlord by his overbearingmother; the princess he’s meant to kidnap and her touchy­feely father; a French Libraries Without Bordersvolunteer and her brittle diplomat mother (Edith Scob); and Barack Obama and his “daughter,” a militarydrone named Hellfire Destroyer #503027. I was recently dumbstruck by Taprobana, Abrantes’s “biopic” ofthe Portuguese poet Luís Vaz de Camões, and Ennui, Ennui is another unapologetically high­polish longshort full of gross­out gags appropriate to a direct­to­DVD American Pie sequel, disarmingly tender andstunningly bratty.

Not all of Migrating Forms’ political content is so irreverent—The Irish Tapes (1974), for example, has theblunt force impact of its iconic image, a bloodied Belfast woman blinded for life by a British rubber bullet.Originally shown as a twelve­monitor installation, The Irish Tapes is the result of John Reilly and StefanMoore’s visits to Ulster between 1971 and 1973 with a then state­of­the­art Sony Portapak video camera,the texture of its black­and­white half­inch tape adding a particular ghostly quality to footage of an IRAtraining camp, a Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City, and Catholic mothers visiting their sons indetention. Presumably because of a shared focus on prison culture, The Irish Tapes plays on the samenight, Sunday December 14th, as Field Visits for Chelsea Manning, an essayistic travelogue in whichdirector Lance Wakeling narrates his visits to the periphery of the various detention centers where Armywhistleblower Manning was held in Kuwait; Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia; Ft. Leavenworth,Kansas; and Ft. Meade, Maryland. Wakeling’s original drive­by footage from off­ramp America isinterspersed with transcripts from Manning’s hearings, Google Maps cartology, and anecdotes referring tothe history and present (inextricable, as ever) of the surrounding areas.

Wakeling gives us some indication how to interpret his findings in an early reference to “mosaic theory,”defined thusly: “disparate items of information which individually have no utility to their possessor can takeon added significance when combined with other items of information.” A more compelling expression of thisidea—likewise concerned with the presence of the past within the present—can be found in The Airstrip—Decampment of Modernism, Part III by Heinz Emigholz, who has been making films since the early 1970s.(In the company of the artists presenting new work here, this makes him downright venerable—Abranteswas born in 1984, and Wakeling is only a few years older.) Beginning with sculptor Reinhold Begas’s 1901Prometheus, read as an allegory for the self­image of Germany under Wilhelm II, then shuttling to Rome’sPantheon, Emigholz traces the interleaving histories of modernist architecture and twentieth­century politicalcatastrophe, photographing buildings by Viktor Sulčič, Eladio Dieste, and Luis Barragán, while pursuing awending route from Normandy to South America to Saipan, where Fat Man and Little Boy were loaded for

Heads in the Cloud12.10.14

John Reilly and Stefan Moore, The Irish Tapes, 1974, video, black­and­white, sound, 58 minutes.

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15.12.2014 Nick Pinkerton on the 6th Migrating Forms festival at BAMcinématek ­ artforum.com / film

http://artforum.com/film/id=49431 2/2

delivery to the Empire of Japan. All the while, Emigholz elaborates and frustrates the elusive connectionbetween what one US veteran, quoted in on­screen text, describes as “that indescribable cleanliness whichone feels with bombs away” and a new cleanliness of design.

If it’s not the bomb, then it’s the Internet that will bring us together. I did not have the opportunity topreview Mario Pfeifer’s Approximation in the digital age to a humanity condemned to disappear, though thetitle encapsulates the rapture/horror at the imminent singularity evident in many of the works here.Wakeling, unable to purchase an analog map in a gas station, muses on the “transition of physical markersto digital coordinates,” while Jacob Ciocci’s The Urgency begins with the words “DEDICATED TO ALL THEPEOPLE WHO HAVE HAD THEIR LIVES WRECKED BY COMPUTERS, THE INTERNET, OR SOCIALMEDIA.” If Ciocci is actually convinced that we’re locked in a digital dance of death, he seems to find thebeat quite catchy—the video is an apoplectic montage of YouTube nuggets, messageboard­trawling finds,and shopworn memes, set to a mash­up soundtrack by Ciocci’s band, Extreme Animals. Cory Arcangel hasgenerally gravitated toward an unapologetic gee­whiz tech­Utopian line, and I can detect no satirical intentin his Freshbuzz (www.subway.com), a sixty­minute screenshot in which Arcangel wields his cursor like atorch to explore the catacombs of the Subway restaurant website (and ancillary brand tie­ins on Facebook,Twitter, YouTube etc.), without yielding significantly more interesting results than a viewer could getspending an hour of his own time. A more abrasive approach appears in the refrain image of Jon Rafman’sMainsqueeze—a washing machine spinning itself into overdrive self­destruction, evoking center­will­not­holdentropy—which is broken up with “verses” of passed­out­at­party pics, crushing fetish videos, and moshingJuggalos. Speaking to this publication before a solo exhibition of his work at the Contemporary Art MuseumSt. Louis earlier this year, Rafman called Mainsqueeze “beautiful and ironic, or postironic,” that ironyevident perhaps in his counterpoising of the hoary clichés of the Tumblr­puke aesthetic (c. 2012 “seapunk”dolphins, Grimes) with certain staples of Renaissance painting.

Rafman is Montreal­based, and Mainsqueeze plays as part of a program of Canadian work, alongsideJeremy Shaw’s Quickeners, which also, after a fashion, addresses what Web 2.0 hath wrought, but with aquite original sci­fi vintage tack. Quickeners sets its scene in a future where so­called “Quantum Humans”are all connected to a network called the Hive and have attained a sort of rational enlightenment. It isdesigned to appear as a documentary on an atavistic outbreak of illogical religious ecstasy in Area 23, “adeserted and derelict region once known in the late age of human civilization as the Americas,” per thepublic school­accent voice of an English narrator. This is imagined through repurposing footage from PeterAdair’s 1967 documentary on a snake­handling Pentecostal church in West Virginia, Holy Ghost People,cutting the dialogue into an indistinguishable garble that sounds like hillbilly patois, while providing subtitlesthat tell his original story.

I like Shaw’s film, which reconfirms prejudices about intractable American religiosity while seeming tocelebrate it, although it fits within a certain tendency in contemporary art which deems only the mostextreme varieties of religious experience as suitable for consideration. An interesting contrast is provided bya sidebar devoted to the work of eighty­nine­year­old Rolf Forsberg, a son of Chicago best known for thesponsored, or “industrial,” films that he made for various Christian organizations. The program is the samefour­film selection that played the UCLA Film & Television Archive last year on the occasion of Forsberg’sParable being selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry. Commissioned by The Protestant Councilof the City of New York for the Protestant and Orthodox Center at the 1964 World’s Fair, the silent­save­for­music Parable tells the story of Christ through the misadventures of a sort­of Pierrot clown in a travelingcircus. Forsberg is drawn to such high­concept premises: His Ark (1970), set in a thoroughly­despoiled post–environmental apocalypse future, follows one man who has made it his life’s mission to recreate the before­the­fall world in a pond in a controlled greenhouse environment—a modern Noah, in a kind of WaldenTerrarium. Before arriving at a genuinely paining climax, Ark offers a design for living in the physical worldonce all of humanity has been raptured into the cloud­life.

— Nick Pinkerton

“Migrating Forms” is curated by Nellie Killian and Kevin McGarry and runs Wednesday, December 10–Thursday, December 18 at BAMcinématek in Brooklyn.

Heinz Emigholz, The Airstrip—Decampment of Modernism, Part III, 2013, color, sound, 108 minutes.

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