Migrating Forms (2000, James Fotopoulos)

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S.

At 26, the astonishingly prolific Fotopoulos has finished six features and a blizzard of shorts, in a remarkable variety of styles, from minimal narrative to pseudo-documentary to near abstraction. But despite good press ? including a Film Comment profile ? and festival screenings, until recently his films have been difficult to see. Luckily, Facets Video just released his first three features ? Zero (1997), Migrating Forms (1999) and Back Against the Wall (2000) ? on DVD.

There's nothing flashy about a Fotopoulos film. He tends to prefer long, static takes, and generally shoots in murky black and white. The most minimal have the feel of surveillance footage, endlessly cycling, waiting for something to happen. Most underground directors treat sordid misery as a pretext for lots of eventful excitement. Fotopoulos does without much in the way of plot, let alone drama. He even minimizes the pointless violence, focusing instead on the grinding tedium that breeds and surrounds it. But while his films can be rough going at first, they gradually deepen into a curiously metaphysical timelessness.

Fotopoulos scored his first big success with Migrating Forms, which won the best feature award at the New York Underground Film Festival (NYUFF) in 2000. Something like an Edgar Ulmer-directed version of Chantal Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle, it's easily the bleakest underground feature in years. A man meets a woman for sex in his tiny, Spartan apartment, then sees her off. Over and over again. Each time she arrives, the ugly cyst on her back gets larger and larger, but the man doesn't seem to notice. They hardly speak, just drink water and smoke, then have sex. Then the woman stops coming, and the man starts to grow a similar cyst.

But Migrating Forms is less a story than the elaboration of an existential metaphor. Fotopoulos posits that while people cannot actually communicate with one another, they still somehow infect the lives of their partners. And he literalizes this pathological relationship by turning it into a physical parasite. In order to represent the paradox of souls brushing up against one another, like ships colliding in the vastness of the ocean, he affixes the ugly consequence to the surface of the bodies they inhabit.

[ http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/ ... round.html ]

"Blair witch is a party in comparison..."
Doesn't fill me with confidence... does it mean this is even worse? :-o

Although I can't exactly recommend it as a pleasurable experience, the film that stays with me most vividly is the feature Migrating Forms, by a young Chicago filmmaker, James Fotopoulos. A kind of stripped-down Eraserhead, shot in low-contrast black and white in the style of cheap '40s porn loops, the film is set inside a single room that looks like the basic set you'd find in an acting class?a table with a chair at either end and a bed. The room is occupied by a stolid-looking guy and his cat and is visited repeatedly by a pudgy woman who strips off her clothes, gets on the bed, and has sex with the man. Sometimes the sex scenes are so softly focused and underexposed you can't tell what's going on. At other times, you see more than you would want. The woman has a large hideous growth on her back (rather like the phallic growth in Marilyn Chambers's armpit in Cronenberg's Rabid). Soon the man discovers a similar growth on his shoulder. Midway through the film, an exterminator knocks at the door. After that, dead insects and rodents put in an appearance. Inevitably, the corpse of the cat turns up as well. 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.

[ http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0010/taubin.php ]

The ritualistic Migrating Forms (1999) opens with a baleful sound blast and a stroboscopic flicker. When it appears, the pockmarked image suggests Videodrome's sinister signal transmitting from the apartment in Eraserhead: A woman enters a barren room and sits at the table opposite a barely responsive man. The desultory, mumbled conversation is a prelude to their going to bed. Anti-erotic in the extreme, this bread-and-water sexual transaction?observed by a pet cat in extreme close-up?forms the basis for a kind of structural film loop in which the woman keeps returning (always in the same dress) as a pustule on her back grows ever larger. Ultimately, her partner discovers a corresponding growth on his shoulder, and before long there are dead bugs all over the bathroom.

[ http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0211/hoberman.php ]

David Lynch and David Cronenberg deserve equal credit for this emphatically disturbing, disease-obsessed winner of the Best Feature award at the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival. It's a sexual-nightmare movie in minimalist black-and-white, in which a laconic loner (Preston Baty) smokes cigarettes, drinks water, and gets jiggy--the camera coming off its tripod at this point--with a woman (Rebecca Lewis) who has what looks like an oversized nipple on her back. Chicago filmmaker James Fotopoulos repeats this stark, drab, poorly miked, borderline pornographic routine several times, adding increasingly strange details such as an inquisitive feline, a bathtub full of bugs, and another nipple-like growth, this time on the hero's arm. And did I mention the Baby Ruth that the man finds in his bed and places in the medicine cabinet, whereupon it begins to take on a life of its own? Migrating Forms is not for everyone, obviously; it's not for me, in fact. But it is an independent film in the old definition of the term, one that makes something, however derivative, out of nothing. (Rob Nelson)

[ http://www.citypages.com/filmreviews/de ... p?MID=2561 ]

I'll give it a shot...if it sucks bad I can always delete....thanks for the share