Rotting Cellulose as Art
At the beginning of 2022, Glasstire ran its Spring Preview. I check this list out every season to get ideas about what art exhibits I might want to see over the next few months. One that caught my eye was an exhibit by filmmaker Bill Morrison in Austin. I knew nothing about Morrison when I heard William Sarradet talk about the show. Sarradet’s enthusiasm intrigued me, so I decided to do some research (a minimal amount, to be honest) about the show. It was opening later in January, and included several film screenings. I looked into that and saw one, Decasia, was playing later that month and that Decasia featured a soundtrack by composer Michael Gordon, one of the founders of Bang on a Can, which has been a minor obsession of mine recently. Also, my sister lives in Austin, and it would be a good excuse to go visit her. I contacted her and told her about the movie, and she agreed to accompany me.
It showed at the Austin Film Society theater, which is amazing. Located in a crappy mall on I-35, it shows an incredible lineup of art films and, in the case of Decasia, experimental films. I remember when Houston had theaters like this. The AFS was formed in 1985 by Richard Linklater. I remember reading an interview with Linklater when someone asked him about film school. He said that what a filmmaker needed was a way to study films and practice, and that it might be a college, or it might be a club. In Linklater’s case, he dealt with the idea of a film club by founding one. And it’s still going.
We showed up for the screening and got our seats. Everyone was masked. My sister told me it was the first movie she had seen in a movie theater a long time. Morrison was in attendance and spoke briefly before the movie.
Bill Morrison is primarily a filmmaker. He studied painting and theater at Cooper Union in the mid 80s. Has a relationship with experimental filmmakers who reused existing footage in their work, for example Stan Brakhage and Ken Jacobs. The viewing and listening experiences were intense.
Michael Gordon wrote a seventy-minute symphony for Decasia for a “detuned” orchestra. The “detuned” nature of the music reflects the damaged quality of the film. The film itself is a compilation of damaged film clips. They are pieces of film filmed on nitrate film. Nitrate film was used for movie film in the early part of the last century, and is made of plant matter. On of its properties is that it is extremely flammable—so much so that it is basically an explosive. Storing it is very problematic for that reason. It also tends to rot. Morrison found this decayed quality very poignant. Decasia was his first full-length film.
The damaged quality of the film pieces in Decasia is quite varied. At some points, it is as if someone poured acid along the length of the film, messing up each frame individually so that when we see it, each frame has its own distinct damage. This causes it to have a strobing effect—our minds are trying to engage in persistence of vision, but what we see is changing drastically 24 times a second. The image you see, on the relatively undamaged parts, is perceived more-or-less smoothly buy the viewer, but the damaged part appears to be strobing. They have to give a warning to viewers about that. My sister found that part of the way through the movie, she had to shut her eyes.
But not all the damage we see feels like that. Sometimes, the damage seems to interact with the images, as if the rot affected the light and dark parts of the film differently. One gets areas that appear solarized, so a light area turns dark and appears to have an electric glow. Sometimes the images will appear smeared. In an interview about the movie conducted in 2013, Morrison said, “Two things were happening at once: the spirit is trying to transcend the body even as the body was rotting underneath the spirit.”
These are represented by people engaging in worship (the image of a Sufi dancer spinning is used at the beginning of the film and towards the end) or in athletic activity. The image of a boxer sparring with a jumpy, decayed blob—where there was apparently a punching bag—is an especially potent image of physical activity as a means to combat bodily decay. But I think Morrison is talking about how physical activity can lift you out of the mundane bodily world into a different state of being.
And the music was a key part of the viewing experience. They played it very loud in the theater and I sensed that Gordon was influenced by minimalism—there is an insistent throb to the music that gives it a feeling of something about to happen. But unlike, say, Philip Glass’s scores for Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, there is a lot of dissonance. It felt urgent and a little scary. It was like Philip Glass crossed with the Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.In other words, Gordon has synthesized at least two streams of modern classical music in this composition.
The combined effect of the image and the poundng music was shattering.
The next day, I went over to the Visual Arts Center on the University of Texas campus. I’ve seen lots of exhibits at the Blanton Museum, but never at the Visual Art Center, which is where art students have classes. The gallery space inside the VAC was small, dark, and set up to show film loops of damaged film on large video monitors. These clips have been digitized, which is the only safe way to preserve them. Morrison works with a lab that soaks the nitrate film and then scans it. (Nitrate film is too dangerous to handle or to transport.) The films here are displayed without music—just short repeating clips. Some of them are images Morrison has used in other films and documentaries.
One sees similarities between these clips and those in Decasia. For example, one clip is from a 1912 film called The Butler and the Maid. In it, the butler stands to the left of the frame and on the right is a squall of jumpy decay, out of which occasionally emerge a woman’s hands (presumably the maid). The butler at first seems pensive, but eventually is ecstatic to see what he can see (which we can’t) to his left.
Many of these clips come from the Dawson City Film Find. Dawson City is a town in the Yukon Territory that swelled up during the Gold Rush enough to support some movie theaters. It was the end of the line for film distribution in early 20th century Canada. The distributors didn’t want them back, so they ended being stored in Dawson. And we know how dangerous it is to store old nitrate films. There was a big fire caused by some stored films in Dawson City, but some of the films had been buried under a hockey rink that was built on top of a disused pool in 1929. They were frozen in the permafrost and rediscovered by accident in 1978 during some construction. Morrison eventually saw all these films and made a documentary about them and Dawson City called Dawson City: Frozen Time.
Some of the film is profoundly damaged, but enough of the original image shows through to be identifiable. For instance, the clip from Polly of the Circus features a young woman laying in bed staring somewhere beyond the camera trapped in a swirling cyclone of film damage.
In A Christmas Accident, four little girls stare at a jumping streak of glowing damage on the right, as if illuminated by it.
But not all the videos are from the Dawson City Film Find. Some are damaged film from the Library of Congress. Blue Dancers shows a group of female dancers in a 19 second loop. The film was black and white, but for some reason has turned slightly blue from deterioration. Unlike most of the other clips on display, the source of this footage is unknown, hence the purely descriptive title.
Even D.W. Griffith is present in a profoundly damaged clip from A Fool’s Revenge. The revenge, it seems, is rot and decay.
There is so much more to Bill Morrison’s career. One thing that is worth mentioning is his frequent collaboration with contemporary composers from the jazz world and the classical world. Michael Gordon appears to be his primary collaborator, but he has also worked with John Adams, Bill Frisell, Philip Glass, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Steve Reich, and many others. Apparently he works closely with them, cutting the film to match the music (as Godfrey Reggio is said to have worked with Philip Glass on their collaborations). I’ve written about the difficulties of contemporary composers finding support, but working with experimental filmmakers like Morrison and Reggio feels like an exception. Morrison has built his entire body of work around rotting film and living composers.
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