Senses of Cinema, Bérénice Reynaud ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Berenice Reynaud is the author of Nouvelles Chines, nouveaux cinemas (Paris, 1999) and Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness (London, BFI, forthcoming). She teaches film history and theory at the California Institute of the Arts. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sundance 2002 - the "post-9/11" festival... From the outset, a few things had changed, whether the main cause was the state of the US economy or the state of world affairs. Sundance no longer has to prove itself as the most successful marketplace for US films ­ in the last few years, some dissident voices had expressed fears that the Festival might be losing its more adventurous edge. The screening of Gerry should quell their anxiety. Decasia Still in the "frontier," another case in point was Decasia (2002), the latest opus of New York-based Bill Morrison, who works at finding, collecting, re-photographing and collaging early found footage, building an archeology of our culture's mores and foibles in the last century, with its mishaps, auto-da-fes (one of his films shows a spectacular, end-of-Citizen Kane-like shot where unwanted paper prints, onto which images of early films were deposited for copyright reasons, are burning in a huge oven), gaps, erasures and lost treasures. In a previous work, The Film of Her (1996), Morrison paid homage to the archivists who rescued the paper print collection of the Library of Congress and transferred it to celluloid. Decasia is a splendid meditation on another aspect of the survival of films: their decay. The film starts with abstract images floating on the screen, that fleetingly reveal, behind the ravages of time that affected the original nitrate print, the serene face of a Japanese woman playing music, then walking by a paper wall partition, followed by a shot of a traditional Japanese landscape (rocks by the sea). The next image is that of a waterfall, whose drops have almost been solidified by the damage done to the emulsion, then that of a very liquid geyser, and, finally, the mineral beauty of a desert landscape, with a retinue of camels profiled at the horizon. Morrison focuses on the grain of the film stock, on the dialectical tension between the now-damaged surface of the medium, the illusionary depth of the representational image and the materiality of the film strip itself. He is indebted to both the Brakhage tradition of scratching and painting over the filmstrip and the work of other found footage artists such as Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi (of From the Pole to the Equator [1987] fame). Yet, unlike the former, he only includes accidental alterations of the filmstrip (as Duchamp incorporating the cracks of the Large Glass into the piece itself). Unlike the latter, he does not seek to recontextualize the footage within a political history of the Western gaze. Morrison's approach, however, is not strictly formalist, as some images resonate more than others ­ the recurring shot of dancing dervishes in an unidentified Asian setting; little Native American girls shyly walking in line under the stern, aloof gaze of missionary nuns. As viewers, we want to see more than this decaying, truncated footage will allow, we substitute our narratives, our tentative answers to the questions they raise. The other fascinating aspect of Morrison's work is his ongoing relationship with the Ridge Theater - a loose collective of performance artists ­ and other "live" collaborators. Decasia was originally a performance, and played to a live rendering (by the Basel Sinfonietta) of an original music piece composed by Michael Gordon (now transferred to the film soundtrack). If early cinema is something that we, as modern viewers, have lost, and can only be reconstructed through its imperfect, yet magnified, traces, then a metaphorical approach makes sense, as well as the desire to re-embody these images of a dead past into the fleeting present of our physical existence. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ©Berenice Reynaud, February 2002 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to main page