Event
NYUFF is Enough, part 3
As the festival passed the 10-year mark with a new-found stature owed in part to the mainstream success of some of its filmmakers, audiences naturally began to reconsider the underground currents. Reviews of the event in these years went something like this: "Been Underground So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me;" "Alternate Realities;" and "Look Out Below." The question was raised, again and again: what is underground, anyway?
Filmmakers too were trying to figure this out as media art gained popularity within visual arts circles. Meanwhile, new possibilities for online exhibition and distribution raised the question of whether festivals were needed at all (while dozens more set up shop). Video artists like Cory Arcangel, Michael Bell-Smith and Seth Price established dual practices, advancing the medium in Chelsea as well as at Anthology. They straddled the online and offline worlds too, mining Internet culture for popular media in order to restructure it, often with a self-aware humor, for consumption on the larger, original screen.
Political activism needed a game change, and an era of paralyzing neo-conservatism provided filmmakers with new material and focus. Brian Boyce mocked the herd mentality of tunnel-vision Bush patriots in his super-short animation, Americas Biggest Dick; Kent Lambert remixed images of popular TV shows and 1980s video games to provide an abstract portrait of war-time media in Hymn of Reckoning; and by reediting coverage of the 1980 Carter-Reagan campaigns, Jim Finn gave a terrifying history lesson/reality check with Decision 80. Beyond politics, Figures in the Landscape, Serendipity 1967 and Interplay pointed outward to a swiftly changing American landscape.
But by many means, the festival remained unchanged, a staple for friends and filmmakers who returned each year for a good time. When 2007's closing night fell on April Fool's Day, one organizer pulled a doozy of a trick by confiding to another that the host from the previous night's event had died at the afterparty; and in its various incarnations, the black humor of the NYUFF early years lives on.
2004: Figures In the Landscape, Thomas Comerford, 16mm, 11mins
2004: Decision 80, Jim Finn, Video, 10 mins
2004: private_eyez.mid, Frankie Martin & Cory Arcangel, Video, 3 mins
2004: Rejected or Unused Clips, Seth Price, Video, 10 mins
2005: America's Biggest Dick, Brian Boyce, Video, 3 mins
2005: Hambone, Steve Hall and Cathee Wilkins, Video, 3 mins
2004: Cats and Pants, Jennifer Matotek, Video, 1 min
2006: Hymn of Reckoning, Kent Lambert, Video, 7 mins
2005: It Only Takes a Second, Found Footage Festival, Video, 4 mins
2006: Serendipity 1967, Aaron Valdez, 8mm on video, 6 mins Oh Daniel, CC & BN, Video, 3 mins
2007: Interplay, Robert Todd, 16mm, 7 mins
2005: Harmony, Jim Trainor, 16mm, 12 mins
2006: Chapters 1-12 of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously, Michael Bell-Smith, Video, 5 mins
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LocationAnthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10002
United States
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