"...the film that stays with me the most... “Migrating Forms” has a formal purity and obsessive power that's all too rare these days. It's not a film you'd ever find at Sundance (Blair Witch is a party by comparison). It alone gives the Underground Film Festival a reason for being." — Amy Taubin
We are very pleased to present a screening of James Fotopoulos’ 16mm film “Migrating Forms” in celebration of its 20th anniversary, along with a selection of latex props that appear in the movie as well as drawings and storyboards by the artist, which will be on view for the evening.
A film that shocked New York’s film community and beyond at its first showing at Anthology Film Archives in the context of the NY Underground Film Festival in year 2000, Migrating Forms is a caustic, decadent, life-non-affirming, visionary feature 16mm film made by a then 23-year-old Fotopoulos as though channeling Baudelaire in portraying a love story à la “Les Fleurs du Mal” reframed within a Chicago urban wasteland.
Fotopoulos, in considering the film today, writes:
“Nothing has really changed in how I see it. I made it — and then moved on to the next film — I just put the films out there. When I think of it, I don't think things have changed in terms of how I do things. I make what I feel, what I see at that time I am making it. And I don't think anything has changed in what I think about film itself, in all its elements: a shadow world or dream place, that atmosphere, the fantastic… Meanings have to be in front of the camera to be seen.”
Fotopoulos in attendance and available for Q&A following the screening.
Program:
Migrating Forms (1999)
By James Fotopoulos, 16mm film, b&w/color, sound, 80 minutes
A biological-horror-love story shot in murky black-and-white with a fuzzy crude soundtrack. The tale unfolds under a cat’s gaze: a man and woman repeatedly meet for un-erotic sex in a dark apartment. With each new rendezvous the encounters grow more sexually depraved. As the power struggle between the two lovers progresses, physical deformities grow from them, rodent life fills the apartment and ghostly aliens invade.
"...the arrival of a new and unique vision. Unclassifiable as genre, it suggests elements of the abstract avant-garde, the horror film, 60s soft-core sleazies and 70s psychodrama. Some might glimpse echoes of influences as diverse as Chantal Ackerman or Joe Sarno, but the film never succumbs to today's typically asinine film-school trendiness, and is always beautifully cheap in every good sense of the word." — Ed Halter
_
James Fotopoulos is an artist working primarily with the mediums of moving image, sculpture, and drawing. Among his many notable film and video works, which range from several seconds to over seven hours are Zero (1997), his first feature which debuted when Fotopoulos was just 20, Migrating Forms (1999), Christabel (2001), Jerusalem (2003-2004), The Sky Song (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010), Dignity (2012), and There (2014). His works have screened and exhibited in the US and abroad including at MoMA P.S.1, Walker Art Center, Whitney Biennial, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Arts and Design, Andy Warhol Museum, Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Festival del Film Locarno, Museo de Art Contemportaneo del Zulia, Venezuela, Biennial for Videoart, Mechelen, Belgium, among others. His work has been discussed in Artforum, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Hyperallergic, The New York Post, and others. He is a recipient of a Creative Capital Foundation Grant. James Fotopoulos was born in Chicago, IL in 1976 and currently lives and works in New York.