Italian version
Ê .art
07.01.03 Decasia, a film made of recycled celluloid.
Decasia, by Bill Morrison, is a film made entirely of damaged film material, recovered from several United States archives. The result of the editing is harrowingly beautiful, between the simplicity and the effectiveness of the shots that show wonderful sequences (planes in the air, a child who's being born by caesarian birth, sea waves, a caravan of camels in the desert), all of them in a precarious balance made of stains and dark spots which involuntarily filter the visual contents. The medium which tells about its own illnesses, that is, the celluloid which shows its stains, is both touching and attracting. This operation of aesthetic recycling is all the more worthy because a lot of research went into it: classic, making the author explore the possible sources of material, and contemporary, because it points out the precariousness of (pseudo)magnetic media, used until very recently to accumulate one's own data. The processes of celluloid decaying, especially the one treated with nitrates, which can accelerate its decay... Morrison is fascinated by these aspects, therefore he skillfully extracted from them perfectly contemporary distinctive signs and made them interact with his own creativity. The film is now scheduled to be shown in the next edition of the Sundance Film Festival and in an installation in Basel (Switzerland).