Cinematic decay

Film, as a medium, has clearly undergone some radical transformations since its inception. To think that we’ve gone from the early short works of Thomas Edison to High School Musical 3 in just a little over a century is dizzying and, frankly, kind of scary.

Filmmaker Bill Morrison, though, is more interested in what happens to film itself, the physical artifact, as time goes by: how it deteriorates and decays. This Tuesday, the Northwest Film Center will be hosting an evening with Bill Morrison, which will include six of Morrison’s short films, each with an introduction by the director.

Morrison, a Reed College graduate who now resides in New York, has received a great deal of attention for his unique experiments in film collage. In his most famous works, Morrison resurrects ancient archival footage that has suffered from severe chemical decomposition. When projected, the various flaws and blemishes of the film stock are transformed into gorgeous, abstract patterns of shifting shape and light.

Two of the films showing this Tuesday, The Mesmerist and Light is Calling, cull images from the 1926 film entitled The Bells, starring Boris Karloff. The original is a silent-era tale of murder and guilt, but in Morrison’s revision of it, the narrative arc is not so important. In this case, the form, a badly damaged print of an old movie, becomes the content.

The Mesmerist moves from scene to scene in a fairly nonlinear fashion. The opening shot of a man asleep in a chair soon fades into a bustling street scene, where a crowd is gathering to watch the mesmerist of the title. Later on, we see a murder take place in the midst of a swirling snowstorm, but all of the action takes a back seat to the film stock itself, which almost appears to be alive. The warped, pockmarked frames flicker and dance hypnotically as they progress.

In Light is Calling, this effect is even more pronounced. Ghostly images of a horse-drawn carriage and a woman occasionally float to the surface, but the film is so badly damaged that most of the images are a blur. We’re left with a sepia-tinged tableau of constantly changing patterns, like sand in the wind.

Not all of Morrison’s films lack a traditional narrative, though. The Film of Her, which will also be showing, makes use of a documentary format and is based on a true story. It features narration from a former copywriter at the Library of Congress, who single-handedly managed to save rolls and rolls of ancient paper film from certain destruction. It’s revealed that this act of heroism was inspired by an unrequited love affair the narrator had with a certain female of the silver screen.

Another piece, called Ghost Trip, is the only film Morrison will be presenting that isn’t comprised of archival footage. Moody and meditative, Ghost Trip brings to mind the stark minimalism of early Jim Jarmush. It also reveals Morrison’s versatility as a filmmaker—one who is very much attuned to his particular medium.