criterionforum.org

December 3rd

Over the past twenty years Bill Morrison has built a filmography of more than thirty projects that have been presented in cinemas, museums, galleries and concert halls worldwide. His work often makes use of rare archival footage in which forgotten film imagery is reframed as part of our collective mythology. Morrison's films are scored by the cream of US underground / avant garde music scene.

This double-disc collection makes Morrison's acclaimed films available in Europe for the first time. The set includes his renowned 2002 feature Decasia (67 mins) as well as the evocative Spark of Being (67 mins), How to Pray (11 mins), Light is Calling (8 mins); The Mesmerist (16 mins), Ghost Trip (23 mins), Outerborough (9 mins); Who by Water (22 mins) and Trinity (12 mins)

I'll probably snap this up anyway, but a Blu-ray would be amazing.

I hope they've cleaned up Decasia this time round - the print they used for the old DVD was in just about the worst condition imaginable. There's some boxing footage where you can't even see one of the fighters!

MichaelB wrote:I hope they've cleaned up Decasia this time round - the print they used for the old DVD was in just about the worst condition imaginable. There's some boxing footage where you can't even see one of the fighters!

I found Decasia got a little wearing at feature length, though that shot of the boxer almost almost literally fighting against the deterioration of the film he was in is a justly celebrated sequence! I also like the scene from Decasia with the fairground ride, where the people riding a whirling contraption briefly appear from and dive back into the decay.

Light Is Calling is absolutely stunning though - mournful and ghostly but also with some great moments of beauty underneath the bubbling, melting celluloid. I particularly like the moment at the five minute mark where the soldier pulls the girl out of the hay, but also out of the decay as well.

I would think cleaning up would be counterproductive in the case of Decasia considering how much it is about rot.

knives wrote:I would think cleaning up would be counterproductive in the case of Decasia considering how much it is about rot.

I think you'll find that Michael's tongue was in his cheek( or maybe someone else's)

To be fair I hadn't had any coffee yet when I posted.

There's always one...

AlexHansen wrote:I'll probably snap this up anyway, but a Blu-ray would be amazing.

It would indeed. There is one Morrison film available on Blu (and it won't be included in this set): Tributes: Pulse. His signature work really benefits from high definition, since it's all about the texture and detail of decay, but then there are those pesky economics to consider. . .

I have an irrational fondness for Outerborough, so I'll be snapping this up.

I snapped up the Tributes disc during one of the B&N sales. Felt the film was rather blah, but lordy lordy did it look lovely. Same goes with the Hepworth & Stow version of Alice in Wonderland included on the BFI's Švankmajer disc.

And I'll agree with Colin about Light is Calling. Just watched it via Fandor the other day, and found it quite enthralling. Morrison is definitely benefited by shorter runtimes.

AlexHansen wrote:I snapped up the Tributes disc during one of the B&N sales. Felt the film was rather blah, but lordy lordy did it look lovely. [. . .]

Morrison is definitely benefited by shorter runtimes.

I agree completely. The Tributes disc was the most wonderful kind of rancid eye candy, but the film itself didn't make much of an impression.

n/a

zedz wrote:rancid eye candy

Yes, nicely put! But also delicate, melancholy, and conceptually deep--more so than many people give him credit for, perhaps because his simple methods are too often mistaken for gimmickry. The celebrated boxer fighting his own image's imminent demise is nearly a burlesque gag for being so on-the-nose, but there are other moments--the tiny shadow of a plane seeming to hover in a sky being consumed by decay, e.g.--that are paeans to fragility, the abyss of being forgotten, and the collision between mimesis and a truly accidental chemical intrusion that is suddenly brought to life not only by light and frame rates, but also by its placement beside a representational image. This odd dance of rot wouldn't be as effective if it were intentionally formed, particularly as it works against/with a dervish or an amusement park ride. Fans of late Brakhage might view the figure or object's presence as evidence of not trusting the rot to speak for itself and the cosmos, and Brakhage's work, at any rate, was most definitely not ready-made for the editing suite. The found-art element of Morrison's work is crucial, and in this respect, totally unlike Paolo Gioli's superimpositions, which, I agree, are gorgeous and fascinating in their own way (at least those that I've seen). But found or not, Morrison's choices are astonishingly poignant. Also, I have to add that unlike jonah.77, I think Michael Gordon's score to Decasia is fantastic, providing a vertiginous glissando counterpoint to the popping, frenetic activity of the nitric acid. Although the length of Decasia has never been a problem for me at all, I do agree with others on this thread that Light Is Calling may be Morrison's best (again, at least among those that I have seen). Years ago, I saw a program that included this and Martin Arnold's Passage à l'acte on a huge screen; I have never been the same since!

Any update on this set? Amazon's done it's usual "release date out of a hat" routine. With Icarus' Decasia Blu (which I finally got around to watching a couple of weeks ago), I wonder if the delay has to do with this set being upgraded. *fingers crossed*