BILL
MORRISON
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The Art of Destruction: Back to Nature
By J. Hoberman
March 19 - 25, 2003
Decasia, Anthology Film Archives
Bill Morrison's Decasia is that rare thing: a movie with avant-garde
and universal appeal, occasioning two separate features so far in
The New York Times. Morrison is not the first artist to take decomposing
film stock as his raw material, but he plunges into this dark nitrate
of the soul with contagious abandon. Few movies are so much fun
to describe. Heralded by a spinning dervish, Decasia's first movement
seems culled from century-old actualités: Kimono-clad women
emerge from a veil of spotty mold, a caravan of camels is silhouetted
against the warped desert horizon, a Greek dancer disintegrates
into a blotch barrage, the cars for an ancient Luna Park ride repeatedly
materialize out of seething chaos.
Decasia is founded on the tension between the hard fact of film's
stained, eroded, unstable surface and the fragile nature of that
which was once photographically represented. Michael Snow contrived
something similar in the chemical conflagration of his 1991 To Lavoisier,
Who Died in the Reign of Terror—in which he purposefully distressed
new footage. But Morrison is far more expressionistic. A second
opposition arises between the lushly deteriorated images and composer
Michael Gordon's no less textured, increasingly ominous drone. (Unlike
Philip Glass's scores, Gordon's never overpowers the visual accompaniment—even
when it escalates to wall of sound.) A third opposition might be
termed ideological.
On one hand, Decasia—like Dutch filmmaker Peter Delpeut's
less abstract, more literal Lyrical Nitrate—can be taken as
a cautionary advertisement for film preservation. Indeed, Anthology
is showing Decasia with Morrison's 1996 short The Film of Her, an
imaginary romance about the preservation of paper prints in the
Library of Congress, celebrating what the archivist Paolo Cherchi
Usai calls the "monumental necropolis of precious documents."
On the other hand, Decasia is founded on a deep aesthetic appreciation
for decay. ("Cinema is the art of destroying moving images,"
per the gnomic Cherchi Uchai.) The solarization, the morphing, the
lysergic strobe effects on which the movie thrives, are as natural
as the photographic image itself.
As Decasia continues, the calligraphy of decay grows increasingly
hallucinatory and catastrophic. The sea buckles. Flesh melts. A
boxer struggles against the disintegration of the image. Wall Street
is half consumed in flames. A dozen little parachutes dot the cracked
sky. A group of nuns traverse a courtyard that frames an Italian
landscape in severe perspective, evoking a Renaissance vision of
the Last Judgment. Japón has been termed Buddhist in its
contemplative acceptance of change; Decasia seems more Hindu in
its awesome spectacle of violent flux. The film is a fierce dance
of destruction. Its flame-like, roiling black-and-white inspires
trembling and gratitude.
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