Decasia

Archival film stock becomes a transcendent work of visual poetry in the hands of veteran avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison. Decasia, Morrison's first feature-length film, which made its premiere at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, is found cinema art. Morrison collected movies, all early nitrate film stock, from film storehouses around the world. The gathered whole of Decasia transcends the individual, often exotic images, creating a singular viewing experience that's beautiful, complex and inventive.

Composer Michael Gordon's minimalist score, performed by the Basel Sinfonietta, is a stark, steady stream of low, vibrating hums. It's one of the more subtle orchestral scores you'll ever hear, and it matches perfectly with Morrison's non-narrative film.

Images of birth, school, work and death are all represented in Decasia: A baby is delivered in a hospital, school children line up, film rolls off a factory assembly line and workers handle the long strips of film. Scenes from a long-ago amusement park merge with camels crossing desert hill, mountain climbers and silent western film star, William S. Hart.

The art of editing film is what transforms Decasia into something beautiful. It's about Morrison's choices and how he pieces the found images together. The images are ordinary, yet playful. When grouped together, they create something fantastic.

Disintegration, the slow death of the nitrate films, is the theme that unites the found footage. Decasia is as fluid as a Stan Brakhage or Chris Marker film. Clouds of fog and smoke roll across the screen and people enter and exit the hazy decay. A boxer punches against the film's blurry border. The images dissolve into one another, and the experience is one of listening to random thoughts.

Morrison, a New York-based artist, has four avant-garde films to his credit: Night Highway (1990), Footprints (1992), The Death of a Train (1993) and The Film of Her (1996). But the feature-length Decasia is easily his most ambitious work.

Throughout Decasia, Morrison continuously returns to the core symbol of the film: a whirling dervish who manages to keep his fez atop his head despite his constant spinning. It is the recurrent image in the film, one of far off exotica and a past world that only exists on fragile, quickly disappearing film stock. With Decasia, Morrison shows a world that's collapsing, no different from the crumbling film fragments that make up the film.

Decasia, as stunning a film work as you're likely to see, is engrossing, beautifully silent and soulful. Morrison is as much a poet as he is a film artist and auteur. Nine years after the centenary of cinema, Morrison creates a dream show worthy of its heritage. The richest discoveries come with repeat viewings of Decasia; something that makes its arrival on DVD all the more momentous.