A spectral collection of decaying film stock held together by an ambient
score of dissonant chords, "Decasia" is a mesmerising meditation on life,
death and cinema that recalls the heyday of the 60s avant-garde.
Trawling through thousands of cinema archives, filmmaker Bill Morrison has
spliced together 70 minutes of footage shot on cellulose nitrate base
film stock during the pioneering early days of cinema. Over the decades, the
highly combustible film stock has begun to decay, distorting and ruining the
images it contains.
Watching this remarkable film is quite an experience. The footage - silent,
black-and-white documentary films of boxing matches, missionaries and
anthropological expeditions, as well as the odd fictional drama - is blotted
and stained by cancerous blobs of nitrate decay that look like weird
Rorschach patterns.
As people and places appear and disappear from underneath the veil of this decay, it's almost like watching some cinematic primordial soup out of which images are born, flicker briefly, then die.
Morrison says his aim was to capture the transience of life itself,
focusing on footage - from death-defying heroism to the birth of a baby -
where the deterioration of "the film seemed to belie the images portrayed on
it".
Staring at life (and death) through a lens, "Decasia" proves to be an
avant-garde confrontation with mortality that often seems to owe as much to
the horror movie. It brings to mind the cursed videotape of "Ringu", as do the 60s
cinematic experiments of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage.
The American preacher Billy Graham once claimed that the devil lurked
(literally) in every frame of the negative of "The Exorcist". In "Decasia" one can't help wondering if the film is party to some almighty presence, as the film's poetic of life and death takes us on an exhilarating, yet terrifying journey, through being and nothingness.
Decasia (2003)
