In almost any year, the recently released compilation of the works of Bill Morrison, 1996-2013, courtesy Icarus Films, would be the cinephile’s most essential home viewing purchase. Adventurous filmgoers will find virtually endless riches here – due to both the quantity of material included (roughly eight hours’ worth, making the $50 retail price look downright generous), but the ineffable depths, artistic and culture, that this particular work affords. Re-purposing archived, found, and even decaying footage into various impressionistic forms, Morrison’s experimental work speaks to things traditional narratives cannot (certainly not with the same sensual and psychological effects afforded by these dreamlike forms): life, death, and the cycles we find ourselves in along the way.
The most famous of Morrison’s films, “Decasia,” begins, fittingly, with the image of a man spinning, and revisits this motif throughout. Here, as elsewhere (notably “Light is Calling,” a personal favorite and one currently available on YouTube), Morrison uses old film stock, the images often corroded by time and mistreatment, and reshapes it into…a tone poem? A thesis on mortality? Indeed, these films are many things. Stock distortion turns a man’s face into a phantom, while a reel that deteriorated down the right side results in the image of a boxer seemingly dueling a static phantom. The nature of these flaws and deteriorations (e.g. scratches, fingerprints, chemical damage) vary almost beyond count, acting like a mental dragnet, catching errant ideas and stoking the fires of the imagination.
The artistic crossroads at play here – between the original material and its new context, between the filmmaker(s) and the viewer(s), and between, inevitably, the past and present – provide countless avenues of interpretation; it speaks innately to life, being as much the result of creation as curation. Themes emerge readily from these ravishing images, even as hard answers (or even hard questions) seem elusive, and that’s partly the point of Morrison’s work, which uniformly courts ambiguity and layered, if not explicitly dual, meanings.
Across the four feature length and 12 short films included, game viewers will find consistently challenging and frequently rewarding visual trickery and entrenched ambition. At the heart of Morrison’s work is the medium itself: how it tells a story, and how those stories are inevitably reshapen beyond the intent of its makers, if not lost outright. The splendor of these works is alone argument for the preservation of film stock; single viewings merely scratch the tip of this iceberg.
Robert Humanick is a contributing writer for slantmagazine.com
Follow Rob on Twitter @rhumanick