January 27-February 2, 2005

movies

Dust to Dust

rage against the dying of the light: An unnamed boxer battles filmic decay in Bill Morrison's Decasia.

Decasia's Bill Morrison on the beauty of disintegration.

by Sam Adams

Given that their days are spent in airtight rooms taking toothbrushes to tiny squares of celluloid, it's no surprise that film preservationists usually toil in obscurity. Nor is it surprising that Bill Morrison's experimental documentary Film of Her (1997), which focused attention on the paper print collection at the Library of Congress, a crucial repository of cinema's earliest years, made him a minor celebrity in the preservation community, establishing friendships critical to a filmmaker whose recent works are composed of footage drawn from archives around the world. But when it came time for him to start researching a feature-length essay on the decay of film he eventually called Decasia, Morrison hit a wall.

"The attitude to begin with was, "No, we don't have any degraded film,'" Morrison recalls by phone. "It took a lot of persistence."

Like many experimental filmmakers, Morrison is fascinated more by the physical properties of film than its use as a transparent medium for the projection of images, an orientation he chalks up to his background in painting. In its pristine state, celluloid is a flat, smooth strip which passes effortlessly through a projector. But as it begins to decay, the celluloid buckles and shrinks and the image-fixing emulsion disintegrates — spectacularly in the case of volatile nitrate stock, which was the industry standard until 1951. Such decomposition is a preservationist's worst nightmare, but for Morrison, it represents a way of disrupting the smooth transfer between images which, 24 times a second, characterizes traditional narrative film. "The idea was that if you differentiate between frames as they go by, they amount to being moving paintings," Morrison says.

Though Decasia, which screens Sunday as part of the Jewish Film Festival (along with Valery Folkin's Russian-language adptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis), doesn't identify its sources, little of its footage seems to have been conceived as art of any kind. A few recognizable fragments (like a snippet of 1914's The Last Egyptian) weave themselves into its fabric, but more frequent are shots like one of a family waving to the camera, blissfully unaware of the menacing black splotches that have bled through their family portrait. Morrison deliberately chose images that would not be recognizable, in order to evoke the sense of movies as "this common dream material that we've somehow forgotten we have." He also narrowed his focus to the early decades of the 20th century, both because footage from that era was more productively decayed and because "in early film, there's this sense that people are being photographed for posterity. When you watch those images now, as they're decaying, the people seem to be ironically fighting that. There really seems to be this struggle with time that goes on right before your eyes."

Not surprisingly, the theme of mortality and the struggle against it runs deep in Decasia and in Michael Gordon's symphony, which Morrison's footage was created to accompany. Massed violins slide slowly down notes like a last breath escaping from a body, motifs churning like Wile E. Coyote pedaling madly in midair. The nuns leading a group of parochial school children become angels of death, while a lovers' embrace blackened by time becomes a rattling kiss of skulls. In an image that Morrison found on his first day of research, a sparring boxer is locked in a life-and-death battle with a vertical strip of decay, which seems, almost magically, to dodge his blows and attach itself to his furiously pumping limbs.

Watch the boxer long enough, though, and a different truth starts to emerge; slowed, like most of Decasia's footage, to half or a third of its original speed, the boxer's movements lose their violence and take on an almost balletic quality. Instead of fighting the decay, might he be dancing with it? You might recall at this point the image which opens the film and serves as a recurring motif: a whirling dervish whose frenzied spinning might evoke a futile struggle but also traces a circular path, explicitly linked to the take-up reel on a film projector and implicitly to an Eastern conception of death as merely a part of the cycle of life. In fixing moments where the decay of film has created an image as beautiful and often more so than the one it consumes, Morrison deliberately counters the notion that decay is something to be feared. The film, he says, "has been taken as decrying the state of our film collections, but it's not. If it has a point of view, it's saying this is the way things are — things decay, they're still beautiful. They go back to their original elements and they form something new. Western civilization's great emphasis is on forming something new, whereas in some of the more ancient civilizations, it was accepted as part of a greater cycle. You can no more avoid it than you can being born."

Metamorphosis and Decasia screen Sun., Jan. 30, 3 and 7 p.m., respectively, $10 for both films, Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., 215-446-3033.