Decasia The State of Decay

In The New York Times Magazine, reviewer Lawrence Weschlercalled Bill Morrison’s Decasia, assembled from decayingvintage film and video footage, "ravishingly, achingly beautiful ... afilm absolutely of the moment."

A whirling dervish spins slowly to ominous orchestral strains; ageisha sits quietly, her robe and skin bubbling with film emulsion asif radiated by an atomic bomb; a boxer struggles mightily against amutating, amorphous creature on the verge of swallowing him whole. Suchis the tension and beauty of Bill Morrison's Decasia, anhour-long meditation on life and death made with decayed film Morrisonfound sitting in archives across the country.

“I've been drawn to old film and film that has some sort oftextural interference on it my entire filmmaking career, which came outof painting and animation,” says Morrison. He hit the jackpotwhen he discovered the archive of Twentieth Century Fox's Movietonenewsreels being held at the University of South Carolina. Morrisonstarted assembling the film component for New York-based RidgeTheater's staging of a new symphony by Michael Gordon. Morrisonreported his film discovery to the team, and they decided to call theirnew musical animation Decasia.

“I realized this was a whole language of decay and that theentire film could be made out of decaying footage,” saysMorrison. The main criterion he was looking for was beauty —especially the beauty of decay and how it would interact with theimage. In that interaction is the crux of the fim and much of filmhistory.

“Nitrate film is, among other things, made up of nitric acidand cotton, and these two things want to separate again. Over time, thecotton is becoming unglued from the nitric acid. That's anoversimplification of what the chemical reaction is, but that's thegist of it.” There is also a difference in the chemical make upof film stocks as to what they look like when they decompose. Forinstance, World War II footage is generally of a much poorer qualitythan pre-World War I footage, which is 30 years older, because theAllied effort needed nitrate for explosives. Also, the conditions underwhich film has been stored are so varied, that “what makessomething smear versus solarize versus bubble and splatter is sort ofanybody's guess,” says Morrison.

Morrison didn't handle the nitrate himself. In fact, nobody wantedto deal with it because no insurance company would cover such a risk— except John Allen of Cinema Arts in Angels, Pa. Allen opticallyprinted each frame because the shrunken sprocket holes of the old printdidn't match the new stock. From much of the material, Morrison gotfirst generation master prints. But that was not always the case.“Sometimes we'd go back to the same nitrate negative and therewas nothing left. The VHS reference tape that I saw showed me thisincredible decay, but that was decay that was on that negative sixyears ago, and when that same negative got shipped off to John Allen,he'd say, ‘You know what? There's nothing on that rollanymore.’ Or, ‘That's a hockey puck now.’”Several times, when he couldn't live without a scene, Morrison had toresort to U-matic 3/4in. tape for his master.

After stabilizing the material, Morrison had it stretch-printed,optically printing each frame two, three, or sometimes four frames toslow the film down and show off the beauty of the decay. Nothing wasprinted at the original frame rate because it ran at almost 18fps.Morrison, an Avid editor by day, put together his 35mm workprint on aKEM. “I'm sure the edit reflects the fact that I worked on a KEM,and I'm very pleased with the edit that came out of it. [But] it was agrueling affair, and one I don't hope to revisit anytimesoon.”

His finished film survives as an ironic testament to man's attemptsto freeze time for posterity. Of all films made before 1950, 50% havedisappeared, and the survival of much of man's aesthetic seems by nomeans guaranteed today. Morrison has made a fascinatingly beautifulfilm. “What's interesting is to see the battle between an imagethat is even more pristine than something we can photograph today. Ithas higher silver content and higher definition — it makes thedecay even more ravaging.”

For more informaton and a listing of screenings, see www.decasia.com.