Review by All Movie Guide
All Movie Guide
liked it.
Aesthetically, the entire issue of "found" film is a fascinating conundrum: Who's the author? Which of its multiple purposes are predominant? If avant-gardists like Craig Baldwin or
Bruce Conner scramble old industrial/educational/government footage into new and ironic forms, fine -- but what about Ken Jacobs' Perfect Film (1986) and
Hollis Frampton's Works and Days (1969), which took unchanged original film of, respectively, scrap news footage taken after Malcolm X's assassination and an old documentary about planting a garden, and simply retitled them? Are they new films? The latest major grenade tossed into this cultural argument is Bill Morrison's Decasia, a feature predicated entirely on the issue of nitrate stock decay. In fact, it could be seen as a documentary
about nitrate decay, just as the early Edison and Lumière films are now commonly used as documentaries about the origins of cinema, although Morrison's film merely presents the evidence and elucidates nothing. But maybe it's about how bewitchingly beautiful the rotting images are, and how heartbreakingly ephemeral all movies are. The footage Morrison uses is of virtually any variety and from any source -- he hunted the world's lesser archives for ill-preserved film that had begun to dissipate: travelogues, old Asian serials, home movies, test shots, circus footage, etc. The images are all compromised by decay in varying ways and to varying degrees, and although a
fin de siècle boxer may seem to throw jabs at a metamorphic column of liquidy rot, for the most part the film is a series of fairly typical silent-film images that virtually dissolve away before our eyes, like fading memories. The upshot to this can be very unsettling, an effect multiplied by
Michael Gordon's deliberately dissonant orchestral score, which was actually composed first. In any case, Morrison's film is a trip to watch, but also a hall of mirrors to ponder: he's rescued these images in order to make them erase their own initial purpose and express their neglected decay. If they hadn't decayed (or decayed enough) would they have any purpose at all? Can scrapped cultural detritus naturally beset by chemical entropy become art just because someone says it is? What is cinema, except chemically apprehended memory? ~ Michael Atkinson, All Movie Guide