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The Moving Image 5.1 (2005) 143-147


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Decasia: The State of Decay (2002)
Directed, produced, and edited by Bill Morrison
A Plexifilm DVD release

Bill Morrison's Decasia is a rich and visceral cinematic experience, one of astonishing beauty and inexhaustible levels of meaning. Originally commissioned by the Europäischer Musikmonat as the visual element of a live event performed in Basel, Switzerland, in November 2001, Decasia has since screened worldwide at more than one hundred venues—including as the stage backdrop for popular roots-rock band Wilco on their 2003 tour. This global desire to see what most would label an avant-garde film is a testament to Decasia's accessibility, its bewitching images and powerful meditation on essential themes: the mortality of human beings and the creation and decay of art.


Click for larger view		 Figure 1

Decasia assembles fiction and nonfiction footage from nitrate prints in various stages of decay, culled from major archives and a few private collections. The work was conceived with Bill Morrison's discovery of two badly deteriorated yet fascinating sequences from the Fox newsreel collection at the University of South Carolina. One shows a boxer punching away at what is now a column of deteriorated emulsion; another shows spectral nuns presiding over children at a mission school. These images became the foundation of the film and the inspiration for Bang on a Can cofounder Michael Gordon's densely layered, original symphonic score. By all accounts, the world premiere performance, presented in association with New York's Ridge Theater (Morrison's regular collaborators), was spectacular to behold: a fifty-five-piece orchestra was stationed on a three-story triangular scaffolding that surrounded the audience; the film and slides (by Laurie Olinder) were projected onto all three sides of the structure. The stand-alone composite 35mm print, with a soundtrack of the live recording, is no less remarkable for the scope and intensity of its images and sound.

This is not the first time Morrison has enlisted archival footage to reflect on the film medium's ephemeral nature and its presence in the collective unconscious. For his short The Film of Her (1996), he delved into the Library of Congress's treasure trove of early films made from paper prints, coupling them with other found footage to create an experimental narrative. Morrison's unnamed protagonist is based on Howard Walls, the copyright clerk credited with rescuing thousands of paper print rolls from incineration. In twelve minutes, what the clerk christens the "whole beginning of cinema" rushes past us, as if a cinephile's dream. This speed might brand The Film of Her the formal opposite of Decasia's fetishistic slow motion, but thematically, it is the perfect complement. Both works ruminate on the creation and fragility of a recording medium. Both resurrect moving images "restored to the present time," as the lyrical voiceover in The Film of Her expresses it.1

Following in the footsteps of those who saved the Paper Print Collection, Morrison, in making Decasia, effected both the preservation of nitrate films on the verge of extinction and the re-presentation of this footage. Much like the transfer of paper prints onto celluloid, the selections for Decasia were rephotographed [End Page 143] on an optical printer, frame by frame. Some of the material matching Morrison's criteria (above all, that the deterioration be dazzling to behold) was still available on nitrate negative. However, in cases where the original elements no longer existed or were inaccessible, safety prints—or even U-matic videotape versions—supplied his desired images of decay. The assemblage of natural breakdown on display is a veritable primer in categories of film damage: water stains that cause loss of emulsion; shifting emulsion re-adhering elsewhere in the frame; crazing (cracked emulsion due to film shrinkage); blistering bubbles from corrosives attacking the picture structure; twisting and bobbing images as a result of warped and shrunken film that would not remain flat in the printer gate when rephotographed; solarization (in which light and dark areas are reversed, glowing almost radioactively); fading and discoloration; splotches...

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