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  • Orpheus of Nitrate:The Emergence of Bill Morrison
  • Scott MacDonald (bio)

This interview took place between December 2015 and January 2016

Bill Morrison has been a filmmaker since 1992; he made films before this, but until Footprints (1992), he had not devoted himself to filmmaking. He has been prolific: the filmography on his website currently lists thirty-nine films he calls his own—though most of the films have been collaborations with composers/musicians. This distinguishes Morrison from nearly all other filmmakers, both as an artist-making-films and an artist-in-the-world. In many instances, others have instigated what become Morrison’s filmmaking projects: the Ridge Theater group in Manhattan, early on; the composers/musicians he has worked with; and, more recently, programmers who commission Morrison and a composer to produce a work for a specific occasion. In recent years, the collaborations have involved interaction from the conception of projects through (often after) their premieres. These collaborative works are as likely to premiere at music events as at film festivals.

The other major element of Morrison’s work that distinguishes it from nearly all other cinema is his fascination with the process of film decay and its results and opportunities. Morrison is of course not the first filmmaker to be interested in decayed films; his seeing Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1991) at New York’s Film Forum in 1992 revealed to him how decay might function as a contribution to the production of a new kind of found-footage cinema. In general, Morrison’s films combine the montage approach of recontextualizing earlier imagery—pioneered by Esfir Shub, Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner, and Raphael Montañez Ortiz—with the alteration of found images over time through chemical transformation. [End Page 116]

That is, most of Morrison’s films involve at least two collaborators: whichever musician/composer he’s working with and Time itself (in recent years he has also needed the collaboration of the technicians who make digital versions of the original material he decides to use, and, of course, since he has usually worked with found materials, the original filmmakers were unknowingly collaborating with Morrison long before he was born).

Though Morrison’s work feels less like fiction film and documentary than like what is usually called “avant-garde” or “experimental” cinema, he is often not understood as a significant contributor to this tradition. For some cineastes, critics, and programmers, the collaborative nature of Morrison’s work and the fact that he neither shoots his own footage nor is responsible for the look of the footage he uses seems to problematize the idea that he is a “filmmaker.” Where is Bill Morrison in these works? But just as Bruce Conner’s films resonate Bruce Conner, Morrison’s films have been distinctive at least since his first major foray into working with film decay: Decasia (2002; inducted into the National Film Registry in 2013)—even though, like Conner’s films, Morrison’s vary considerably in subject and tone.

Ultimately, Morrison can be understood as a cine-alchemist who transforms trash into cinematic gold, or as a mad scientist who creates new beings from the shards of past cinematic “bodies,” or as a magician who reverses the process of decay, bringing what looked to be dead back to momentary life. Of course, as soon as Morrison has completed the transformation of a represented past into a new present, his cine-reincarnation reenters the process of decay: even if digitization has allowed emulsion-based motion-picture imagery to transcend its physical origins, the cine-reincarnation enters that giant cloud where in time it too will disappear from memory. Ultimately, Morrison’s confrontations with film decay function both as demonstrations that, as Gunvor Nelson has said, “There is beauty in decay,” and as metaphors for the quest, shared by artists and nonartists alike, to transcend mortality: in Morrison’s work it is clear that the inevitability of decay is the instigator of imagination and creativity.

This interview focuses on Morrison’s background, his early evolution as a filmmaker, and his emergence as a major figure in American independent filmmaking (other sections of my interview, focusing on more recent work, have been...

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