Dying films will be reborn on screen tonight with filmmaker Bill Morrison.
By Greta Hagen-Richardson
greta-hagen-richardson@uiowa.edu
Film archives keep locked behind their doors images and stories that cannot be preserved and maintained forever, even with the abundance of modern digital media.
Among these dying reels of film, New York City artist Bill Morrison discovered many of the images that later he featured in his films.
At 7 p.m. today, he will discuss and screen his work in 101 Becker Communication Studies Building as part of the Fall 2009 Proseminar in Cinema and Culture, Lost and Found: Archival Film. Admission is free.
Morrison is the savior of many old types of films. In the 1950s, nitrate film, composed of an unstable and inflammable chemical combination, became illegal and was replaced by other forms of 35-mm film. Many of the relic nitrate prints have been placed in facilities that are temperature-controlled and monitored. As time goes on, these films are subject to erosion, and they eventually decompose. One of his most well-known pieces, *Decasia*, is composed of snippets of black-and-white silent-era films in various stages of decay.
“[These films] were considered dead or sleeping soundly and, in a way, I woke them up to be shown to a new audience,” he said. “It is a type of regeneration and rebirth after a deep hush.”
Morrison began his career as a painter, originally in Chicago. After moving to New York City and working with animator Robert Breer, he moved his focus onto the moving image.
“Painting is something that you work on for a long time meditatively and slowly. And then it is something someone might spend a minute looking at unless it is considered important,” he said. “In film, you can control the audience environment. Breer talked about how film is like 24 paintings a second.”
With his work *The Film of Her*, Morrison constructed film as a collection of images melding into one another. Each of the separate images goes through a pattern of apparition, existence, and eventual dissolve on screen. This visual process seems to involve the idea that film is, in fact, alive.
Paula Amad, an associate professor of cinema and the instructor for the Proseminar who brought Morrison to the UI, believes Morrison expands our vision of living film with degrading film.
“The film is in the process of dying as he reassembles it and that says something about the organic, material dimensions of film itself,” she said. “It is a living entity. This explores and opens the broader aesthetic, poetic, and philosophical parameters of film.”
Something else that sets Morrison apart from his contemporaries is his ability to merge various artistic media. Many of his films are presented as multifaceted productions complete with live musicians. Amad said he is renowned for working with important composers.
“His films are made to be screened in a live context,” she said. “During the Proseminar, we will see them in a different context, but they still apply to theater, film, visual art, poetry and music. They have broad appeal.”
Among the films on tonight’s roster is Morrison’s personal favorite, “Light is Calling.” The original one-minute, 47-second archival footage was a gift. He extended the images four times in length, edited them, and set them to a score by Michael Gordon.
“It is absolutely gorgeous that the film had decayed in that way. I am still amazed by it,” Morrison said. “When a film has decayed that much, you can’t really unroll it anymore. [That project was] an effortless and graceful convergence.”
