High Angle Magazine Decasia (Bill Morrison, USA, 2001) Initially commissioned by the Europaischer Musikmonat as a live event for the Basil Sinfonietta, Decasia is a stunning and powerful experience that not only forces you to reassess the possibilities of the cinematic medium, but is a case in point that experimental, non-narrative cinema can be just as engaging and satisfying as anything that the mainstream has to offer. The film consists of about 70 minutes of nitrate archive footage collected by Morrison that has been naturally damaged and decayed by the process of time. Set to a powerful score by Michael Gordon (Bang On A Can), the film is a meditative and hypnotic rumination on life, death, cinema and history. The film seems to circumvent meaning and is open to interpretation and the lack of narrative guidance makes it an invigoratingly active experience for the viewer. Opening with a shot of a Sufi dancer, whirling in slow motion and then cutting to oscillating rolls of film in a processing laboratory, the link between the image and the medium is made clear from the very beginning. In the second sequence, badly deteriorated shots of the sea and what seems to be a Japanese woman, dressed in traditional clothes, fight for prominence over the film's decay which resembles Rorschach ink blots that slowly float around the screen. This merging of the image recorded on film and the deterioration of the physical medium itself is not only stunning to watch but is also incredibly moving. It takes a few moments to realise that not only everybody shown in the film is dead; but also that the nitrate decay mirrors the process of corporeal decay that affects us all. Decasia also shows how reliant we have become on explicit narrative meaning being presented for us in the form of story. Although there is a structure and movements to the film (which are explained in the interview with Morrison below), Decasia does not rely on devices such as captions or intertitles to segregate the different parts of the film. It instead relies on a deeper, more subconscious level of understanding that may only become explicit after several viewings and may be different for each viewer. The decay of the film not only prompts metaphorical analysis but, on a more superficial level, is an art-form of its own - the visual results of the organic process of decay is like animation - albeit without human interaction. Whether the film stock has been damaged by water (in the early sequences mentioned above) or by the slower but no less certain process of natural ageing, the results are quite beautiful. Morrison has carefully chosen footage that not only attempts to elucidate our relationship to death and dying (or overcoming the constant subconscious fear of death), but has also picked pieces of film that make the most of the interaction between the films decay and its original content. In one shot, a boxer inhabits the left hand side of the frame whilst the right hand side is decayed beyond recognition. He punches the damaged area of the frame, seemingly desperate to stave off the creeping process of disintegration. In another sequence, a woman is arguing with a Judge, gesticulating passionately. The film warps, stretching her features in all directions and increasing her sense of menace. Although these scenes are interesting in themselves, they are not indicative of the film as a whole. Decasia is more of a cumulative experience - one that slowly and imperceptibly grows into something far greater and more profound than its individual parts. A mammoth work of complexity and power, Decasia is not only a logical extension of Morrison's earlier work but is also a profound and thought-provoking experience that was one of the highlights of this years Edinburgh International Film Festival. Review by Barnaby Welch Decasia is showing at London's Institute Of Contemporary Arts on September 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th. For more information, visit the ICA website here. Michael Gordon's soundtrack to the film is available from Cantaloupe Music. Two of Bill Morrison's short films, Footprints and The Film Of Her can be seen here. Interview with Bill Morrison 1) DECASIA started life as a live event with colour projections. How does the film version differ from the performance version? The version of Decasia that was projected during the live performances in Basel in November 2001 was the first edit. I was working with a scratch soundtrack of the symphony as recorded on Michael Gordon's MIDI computer. I knew that the sync would be approximate at best, and that I would re-cut the film once we had a live recording of a performance by the Basel Sinfonietta. So that version was more atmospheric - the shots were longer, and less dependent on the changes in the music. There were two subsequent re-edits - one that was completed before Sundance in January 2002, and the final version, which was finished in April 2002. 2) You have said that your previous shorts culminated in THE FILM OF HER. Is DECASIA a further extension of these ideas or the beginning of something more detailed? I guess we always like to see our most recent work as the culmination of everything that has gone before. When I made The Film of Her I had been working on found footage and archival material for five years, and I wanted to make the subject of the film about the archives themselves, the repositories for these images. There was a voiceover that was telling a story that the images were supporting, and so they had to come at a rhythm that was dictated by the narration. With Decasia, I have re-entered the archive and given myself the liberty to stretch out, examining each frame, and giving the viewer space to get lost in the images. So in this respect, and because by that token it was a longer work, Decasia broke new ground for me. Ultimately I would like to combine both forms, giving the viewer someone to walk them through the piece (a function the music serves in Decasia) while allowing them the freedom to explore on their own as well. I think many of the ideas that were central to the Film of Her are present in Decasia as well. The most basic may be comparing the images to the material on which they are printed. There are also consistent ideas concerning the Archive as Memory, The Discovery of Unseen Films, the Mortality of Humans vs. the Mortality of Films, the Fleeting Nature of Life as Manifested by Film, to name a few. I'm sure I will always have elements of these ideas in all my films. 3) How did you go about choosing the footage that would be included in the film? I made lists of activities that I felt had the potential to show humans in some race with death. So these included religious activities, daredevils, pilgrims, spiritual seekers, lovers, etc. I would submit this list to archives and they would usually say something like "Wow, that's quite a list!" But they could also locate films showing deterioration, from which I could select those that also had images on my list. I looked at many hundreds of titles of films, some of them on their last legs. I tried to select those that fit my narrative and also showed an interesting interaction between image and decay. 4) The film has a remarkably powerful score by Michael Gordon. Was the music written after the film was edited or did you try and match the images to the music? Decasia was originally commissioned by the Europaischer Musikmonat as a new symphony by Bang On A Can co-founder Michael Gordon. I work with a theatre company in New York, Ridge Theatre, which had been staging operas by Bang On A Can composers. We (Artistic Director Bob McGrath, Visual Designer Laurie Olinder and myself) were asked to give a visual component to Michael's as yet unwritten symphony. I had recently found what were to become the seed images of Decasia - the nun sequence and the boxer - while rummaging through an archive in South Carolina. I suggested that we make decay the theme of the piece, and that the piece be called Decasia. Michael took this to musical extremes I couldn't have dreamed of, writing a decaying symphony. He played us 15 minutes of it a year and half after that first meeting, and shortly thereafter I gave him a rough assemblage of the images I had been collecting. As I explained in question 1, I cut to first his MIDI output, and then twice to the live recording. 5) Could you tell us a bit about the different "movements" in the film? Movement 1: Creation This film is the meditation of a Sufi dervish dancer, the feed reel. It opens with the laboratory. I think of this as a type of heaven, where Gods examine our lives as they are played out on various films. One is examining this film. This film is the dream of a Japanese goddess. There are first just clouds of gas and then revealing earth, sea, life and various migrating species, including Man. Movement 2: Civilization Man sets up civilization and creates religion. He fears Death. Time passes, and man imitates God, turning wheels as God turns the wheels of the film he is printed on. Modern Man is born in a caesarean section shot by Eisenstein. He grows up and goes to school, the frontier. He invents Cinema in his likeness. Emotions are served up for mass consumption. Artifice becomes indistinguishable from reality. He pursues Women, first playfully and then aggressively and violently. Movement 3: Conundrum In the name of advancement and industry, he has created a nightmare world of mines and machines and cities full of scourge. His world collapses and his efforts to transcend it seem hopeless. Movement 4: Disintegration and Rebirth But he is ultimately delivered. He disintegrates into that which is essential and indivisible and reforms into something waiting to be re-born anew. The Japanese goddess awakes from her dream. The Sufi continues to whirl, the take-up reel. 6) In certain parts of the film, the decayed footage seems almost like animation (without human interaction). Is this an interest of yours and a logical extension of your work as painter and animator? Absolutely. Each frame is printed at least twice so that the viewer may better examine each frame, and make the subliminal observation that they are watching 24 paintings every second. The idea follows thematically that the present is unknowable as it exists fleetingly and then is relegated to the past. The present is also the only thing that exists objectively, as once it is relegated to the past it becomes part of our (subjective) ordering of the world. 7) Although the film is open to interpretation, some viewers may watch DECASIA and search for a narrative thread. When making the film, were you conscious of trying to offer a preferred meaning? Yes (as in question 5) but I am open to other interpretations of the film's meanings. 8) DECASIA has been explained as "an apocalyptic vision of the end of things" but there are some images in the film that seem to suggest the beginnings of things - the shot of the birth of a baby for example. Could you comment on this? I don't see the film as apocalyptic. Rather it is a celebration of the way things in fact are. These films decayed on their own, organically. I am presenting them to as an analogy for our own relationship to living and dying. We need to ignore the fact that we are dying in order to live. This is what enables us to live. This is what makes seemingly impossible feats possible. Decasia seeks to show cycles. The cells and butterflies at the beginning are paralleled by the parachutes at the end. As outlined above, the birth scene, while more literally a birth, is also a rather tense moment on the music, and to me anyway, symbolizes the birth of a new type of being separate from the old one. 9) One of the last sequences of the film is a lengthy shot of parachutes slowly descending towards the earth. It seems to be the longest shot in the film. Apart from the fact that it is a remarkable shot, was there any other reason to place it at that point in the film and at, what seems, one of the climaxes of the score? As indicated above, the parachutes represent a type of spiritual rebirth. They seem to look almost like floating spermatozoa. Man has escaped the airplanes and he floats safely back to earth. They are to me souls waiting to re-enter new bodies. I was editing the first cut of the film in lower Manhattan in the days directly after September 11th 2001. The events of 9/11 informed the structure of the end. The airplane sequence, which I always thought would be a key part of the film anyway, got moved to the climax. There were other scenes which had been informed by the events (the trapped miners, the collapsing building, the bedlam on lower Broadway being filmed by a newsreel photographer, etc.) The parachutist seem to combine the melancholy of the passage of time with a beautiful hope for Man's enduring spirit. That they descend onto two twin silo towers remains symbolic of 9/11 to me. But these are subjective readings of the footage. 10) Your films seem be interested in the relationship between film, history and filmic representation of history. Could you comment on how you see this relationship? When you watch a film, you are watching all the pictures go by. In your mind you create a continuum, but they are in fact individual moments, which are unperceivable as such. In a way, this is a model for our own relationship to our histories. Our lives are an accumulation of images and moments that our consciousness has constructed into a reality. No sooner have we grasped the present, it is relegated to the past, where it only exists in this subjective history of each individual. Cinema speaks to the impossibility of possessing the present, and the highly mutable nature of what we call history. Back to main page