the village VOICE

The Art of Destruction
Back to Nature

by J. Hoberman
March 19 - 25, 2003

Decasia, Anthology Film Archives

Bill Morrison's Decasia is that rare thing: a movie with avant-garde and universal appeal, occasioning two separate features so far in The New York Times. Morrison is not the first artist to take decomposing film stock as his raw material, but he plunges into this dark nitrate of the soul with contagious abandon. Few movies are so much fun to describe. Heralded by a spinning dervish, Decasia's first movement seems culled from century-old actualités: Kimono-clad women emerge from a veil of spotty mold, a caravan of camels is silhouetted against the warped desert horizon, a Greek dancer disintegrates into a blotch barrage, the cars for an ancient Luna Park ride repeatedly materialize out of seething chaos.

Decasia is founded on the tension between the hard fact of film's stained, eroded, unstable surface and the fragile nature of that which was once photographically represented. Michael Snow contrived something similar in the chemical conflagration of his 1991 To Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror—in which he purposefully distressed new footage. But Morrison is far more expressionistic. A second opposition arises between the lushly deteriorated images and composer Michael Gordon's no less textured, increasingly ominous drone. (Unlike Philip Glass's scores, Gordon's never overpowers the visual accompaniment—even when it escalates to wall of sound.) A third opposition might be termed ideological.

On one hand, Decasia—like Dutch filmmaker Peter Delpeut's less abstract, more literal Lyrical Nitrate—can be taken as a cautionary advertisement for film preservation. Indeed, Anthology is showing Decasia with Morrison's 1996 short The Film of Her, an imaginary romance about the preservation of paper prints in the Library of Congress, celebrating what the archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai calls the "monumental necropolis of precious documents." On the other hand, Decasia is founded on a deep aesthetic appreciation for decay. ("Cinema is the art of destroying moving images," per the gnomic Cherchi Uchai.) The solarization, the morphing, the lysergic strobe effects on which the movie thrives, are as natural as the photographic image itself.

As Decasia continues, the calligraphy of decay grows increasingly hallucinatory and catastrophic. The sea buckles. Flesh melts. A boxer struggles against the disintegration of the image. Wall Street is half consumed in flames. A dozen little parachutes dot the cracked sky. A group of nuns traverse a courtyard that frames an Italian landscape in severe perspective, evoking a Renaissance vision of the Last Judgment. Japón has been termed Buddhist in its contemplative acceptance of change; Decasia seems more Hindu in its awesome spectacle of violent flux. The film is a fierce dance of destruction. Its flame-like, roiling black-and-white inspires trembling and gratitude.

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