Press Quotes "One of the top ten films of 2003... Bill Morrison's Decasia is that rare thing: a movie with avant-garde and universal appeal... The film is a fierce dance of destruction. Its flame-like, roiling black-and-white inspires trembling and gratitude." -J.Hoberman, Village Voice, 3/25/03 "Already a cult classic" -Herbert Muschamp, New York Times, 2/7/04 " **** A fantastic symphony of decay (Decay + Fantasia = Decasia), simultaneously heartbreakingly beautiful and exquisitely sad, pieced together from snippets of old films on the verge of oblivion" - Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide "I popped Morrison's video into my VCR and within a few further minutes, I found myself completely absorbed, transfixed, dumbstruck, a pillow of air lodged in my stilled open mouth, which I don't think I thereupon managed to close for the next seventy minutes." -Lawrence Weschler, New York Times Magazine, 12/22/02 "A pure poetry of deliquescence. The images are at once haunting, mysterious and incredibly beautiful. A definitive work of art. And a new kind of documentary. A documentary documenting the decay of itself." -Errol Morris, filmmaker "This radical, experimental masterwork feels like the first film, and feels like the last film." -Andrew Lewis Conn, Time Out New York, 3/27/03 "Bill Morrison's extraordinarily mesmerizing 'Decasia' is a stunningly beautiful... ode to creation and decay." -Shari Frilot, catalog notes for the Sundance Film Festival " Decasia is what has happened already to so many silent movies, newsreels and the like. The unexpected thing is that its dying, in this shower of black-and-white psychedelia, is quite beautiful... a truly original work" -Anita Gates, New York Times, 12/27/02 " Decasia" captures the wearing away of the very documentary images that were supposed to stop time. Film is as mortal as anything else. Georg Simmel, the German sociologist, once observed that the processes of natural decay do "not sink the work of man into the formlessness of mere matter," but rather create new form, "entirely meaningful, comprehensible, differentiated." That seems to be the message of “Decasia” There is a new order coming. What will it be? -Sarah Boxer, New York Times, 12/03/02 "A hallucinatory canvas of images... succeeds as a pure exercise in visual stimulus, its narcotic effect much amplified by Michael Gordon's thunderous, dissonant orchestral score." -Dennis Harvey, Variety "A wondrously macabre anti-Fantasia set to an apocalyptic score by Michael Gordon... the sad hallucinatory poetry of decay" -Dennis Lim, Village Voice "One of the more interesting and impressive films at Sundance... combines the image with an amazing symphonic score" -Adam Roffman, The Georgetowner "Compelling and disturbing! Swimming symphonies of baroque beauty emerge from corrosive nitrate disintegration as rockets of annihilation demolish cathedrals of reality." -Kenneth Anger, filmmaker "Unbearably beautiful. It's a work of suggestive genius." -Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine "Magnificent... the festival's most beautiful work." -Erik Piepenburg, reporting on the Cleveland International Film Festival in Indiewire "The majestic Decasia…stunning work... an ecstatic gesture." -Steven Seid, Pacific Film Archives curator, from the catalog notes for the 45th San Francisco International Film Festival "A mammoth work of complexity and power…a profound and thought-provoking experience." -Barnaby Welch, Highangle, (UK) "A work of nihilistic energy and harsh, uncompromising beauty, capable of sustaining multiple readings and interpretations. It is, in short, a work of real art. There are precedents for this sort of thing but nothing remotely of this scale, much less power. The final coup is a genuinely transformative and unforgettable experience." -Shane Danielsen, catalog notes for the 56th Edinburgh International Film Festival Back to main page