Probably the most memorable film yet made by the prolific experimentalist James Fotopoulos, whose career-long debt to David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD is most evident in MIGRATING FORMS. Completed in 1999 and released to the festival circuit in 2000, it won the Best Film award at the New York Underground Film Festival, and can be viewed as one of the more interesting Lynch wannabes that littered arthouse screens in the 1990s (see also THE GROCER’S WIFE, THE NORTHERNERS, PEEPHOLE, JO JO AT THE GATE OF LIONS, ASHES AND FLAMES, etc.). It was popular enough on the underground circuit to receive a DVD release (by Facets Video) at the height of that format’s popularity (2002), together with Fotopoulos’ other early features ZERO (1997) and BACK AGAINST THE WALL (2002).
Beginning with a strobe effect a la Tony Conrad’s experimental classic THE FLICKER (1965), the film quickly settles into an ultra-grainy black and white lensed account of an unnamed man (Preston Baty) and woman (Rebecca Lewis) who meet in the former’s nondescript apartment and have sex (or something). She returns several more times with further carnal demands (“I want you to fuck me up the ass!”) and develops an ugly cyst on her back.
When not acceding to her dictates the man, whose main personality trait is bored disaffection (in direct contrast to the woman’s neediness), lounges around his apartment staring at the walls, and dreams of a creature that somewhat resembles the ERASERHEAD baby, but with teeth. It’s not long before the man develops a cyst of his own on his right shoulder. And the mutations keep coming, with the woman sprouting another cyst on her forehead.
Inevitably the attraction starts to wane, with the man refusing to even kiss his lover. She takes off and he, after finding the corpse of his pet cat in the hall outside his apartment, invites another woman to his place, only to immediately throw her out. The man, it seems, is completely turned off to all forms of physical intimacy, and given the ugliness of the surroundings it’s hard to fault him.
Fotopoulos visualizes this film through distorted lenses, dissolves, close-ups of ugly looking wall spackle and crashing water (which can symbolize any number of things). It’s all tied together by a loud nails-on-a-chalkboard score by Tom Nicholl, and performances that are as unnervingly nondescript as the minimalistic apartment (whose furnishings consist of featureless white walls, a table and a bed) where much of the film takes place. Enhancing the creepiness is the fact that the main performers (neither of whom are movie star-caliber in appearance) spend a great deal of their screen time completely nude.
The result of all this is a highly repetitious and often downright tedious film, but one that lingers in the mind. Its evocation of bodily dissociation and disgust is worthy of David Lynch, whose famous description of the aforementioned ERASERHEAD as “a dream of dark and troubling things” applies equally well to MIGRATING FORMS.
Vital Statistics
MIGRATING FORMS
Fantasma Inc.
Director/Producer/Screenwriter/Editor: James Fotopoulos
Cinematography: John Wagner
Cast: Preston Baty, Rebecca Lewis, Kiele Sanchez, Edward Flynn, Mimi Marks, Michelle Ziantanorski