September 28, 2003

BY JOHN MONAGHAN
FREE PRESS SPECIAL WRITER

When Bill Morrison started scouring the national film archives, curators likely thought him as unstable as the footage he was gleaning. His stated goal: to find those magical moments where image responded to deterioration in an ironic or informative way.

His resulting "Decasia" strings together the most spectacular footage, all of it beyond restoration, then slows it down to create a meditation on the beauty and inevitability of decay.

Morrison, 38, says his movie follows a logical progression, with birth and death, the creation of industry and the conflict between eastern and western culture. Still, the movie succeeds most through individual images: an amusement park rocket emerging from an undulating blob of ectoplasm, a boxer jabbing away at what could be death itself.

Most interesting is the way different films, most produced on nitrate stock before 1950, go sour. Lines form around figures and faces stretch. Jagged fingers of frost creep into an image of falling water. Aside from boosting the contrast on some of these images, Morrison says he found them this way.

For Detroiters, who live with the grotesque beauty of crumbling architecture, "Decasia" should have special significance. Morrison, who grew up in Chicago, certainly can relate. "I lived in Hyde Park, where these once beautiful mansions now made for this tragic, ironic spectacle of decay," he says.

Like "Fantasia," which Morrison sampled for his title, "Decasia" began with a music score -- a 70-minute symphony written by Michael Gordon -- that Morrison cued his images to. Expect a lot of banging, a lot of repetition, a cacophonous cross between the Alloy Orchestra and Philip Glass if their instruments started to crumble along with the celluloid.

The experimental feature had its second U.S. showcase at the 2002 Ann Arbor Film Festival and has since shown up on the Sundance Channel. The DFT screening will be an event, with Morrison appearing with the film and also screening a 12-minute short, "The Film of Her," which focuses on the earliest films preserved only through images on paper.

"Decasia" arrives with many accolades, and while documentary director Errol Morris' claim that it may be the greatest movie ever made might stretch the point a bit, you can understand the reason behind it. Audiences need whatever it takes to lure them into this hypnotic and unforgettable experience.


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