Millimeter The Professional resource for Production and Post

Decasia The State of Decay
Darroch Greer
Millimeter, Feb 1, 2003


In The New York Times Magazine, reviewer Lawrence Weschler called Bill Morrison’s Decasia, assembled from decaying vintage film and video footage, "ravishingly, achingly beautiful ... a film absolutely of the moment."

A whirling dervish spins slowly to ominous orchestral strains; a geisha sits quietly, her robe and skin bubbling with film emulsion as if radiated by an atomic bomb; a boxer struggles mightily against a mutating, amorphous creature on the verge of swallowing him whole. Such is the tension and beauty of Bill Morrison's Decasia, an hour-long meditation on life and death made with decayed film Morrison found sitting in archives across the country.

“ I've been drawn to old film and film that has some sort of textural interference on it my entire filmmaking career, which came out of painting and animation,” says Morrison. He hit the jackpot when he discovered the archive of Twentieth Century Fox's Movietone newsreels being held at the University of South Carolina. Morrison started assembling the film component for New York-based Ridge Theater's staging of a new symphony by Michael Gordon. Morrison reported his film discovery to the team, and they decided to call their new musical animation Decasia.

“ I realized this was a whole language of decay and that the entire film could be made out of decaying footage,” says Morrison. The main criterion he was looking for was beauty — especially the beauty of decay and how it would interact with the image. In that interaction is the crux of the fim and much of film history.

“Nitrate film is, among other things, made up of nitric acid and cotton, and these two things want to separate again. Over time, the cotton is becoming unglued from the nitric acid. That's an oversimplification of what the chemical reaction is, but that's the gist of it.” There is also a difference in the chemical make up of film stocks as to what they look like when they decompose. For instance, World War II footage is generally of a much poorer quality than pre-World War I footage, which is 30 years older, because the Allied effort needed nitrate for explosives. Also, the conditions under which film has been stored are so varied, that “what makes something smear versus solarize versus bubble and splatter is sort of anybody's guess,” says Morrison.

Morrison didn't handle the nitrate himself. In fact, nobody wanted to deal with it because no insurance company would cover such a risk — except John Allen of Cinema Arts in Angels, Pa. Allen optically printed each frame because the shrunken sprocket holes of the old print didn't match the new stock. From much of the material, Morrison got first generation master prints. But that was not always the case. “Sometimes we'd go back to the same nitrate negative and there was nothing left. The VHS reference tape that I saw showed me this incredible decay, but that was decay that was on that negative six years ago, and when that same negative got shipped off to John Allen, he'd say, ‘You know what? There's nothing on that roll anymore.’ Or, ‘That's a hockey puck now.’” Several times, when he couldn't live without a scene, Morrison had to resort to U-matic 3/4in. tape for his master.

After stabilizing the material, Morrison had it stretch-printed, optically printing each frame two, three, or sometimes four frames to slow the film down and show off the beauty of the decay. Nothing was printed at the original frame rate because it ran at almost 18fps. Morrison, an Avid editor by day, put together his 35mm workprint on a KEM. “I'm sure the edit reflects the fact that I worked on a KEM, and I'm very pleased with the edit that came out of it. [But] it was a grueling affair, and one I don't hope to revisit anytime soon.”

His finished film survives as an ironic testament to man's attempts to freeze time for posterity. Of all films made before 1950, 50% have disappeared, and the survival of much of man's aesthetic seems by no means guaranteed today. Morrison has made a fascinatingly beautiful film. “What's interesting is to see the battle between an image that is even more pristine than something we can photograph today. It has higher silver content and higher definition — it makes the decay even more ravaging.”

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