Decasia

This mesmerising experimental film was originally conceived as a live performance in which a fifty-five piece orchestra performed an avant-garde symphony written by Michael Gordon accompanied by large-scale film and slide projections by Bill Morrison. Morrison extends his original concept in ‘Decasia’ using recordings of the original performances by the Basel Sinfonietta that took place in Switzerland in 2001 as the soundtrack to the film. The film consists of a series of excerpts from badly deteriorated nitrate film drawn from film archives across the United States. Streaked, misted, solarised, bubbled and speckled by blooms of chemical disintegration, the footage covers a wide range of subject matter including imagery of war, progress, colonisation and everyday life. Manipulating the distorted images further through slow motion, strobing and morphing, Morrison creates a hallucinatory canvas where the documentary footage that was intended to provide a permanent record of historical moments for posterity, is swallowed by the decay that has overtaken the nitrate stock. Like the progress of a deadly virus as seen under a microscope, the decay distorts and consumes the images in a haunting, mysterious and beautiful dance of destruction. A meditation on mortality and the ephemeral nature of corporeality, history, and the endeavors of humankind. For further information go to http://www.decasia.com