Decasia

Chicago-born Morrison specialises in requiems for the instability and evanescence of the film frame. His short The Film of Her focused on the recovery of hundreds of rolls of pre-celluloid paper-print films deposited in the Library of Congress. Decasia dives into the primordial soup of such imagery. Exhumed from the vaults, a dervish dances his whirligig anew; camels resume their passage across the desert. Simultaneously, dirt and splashes infiltrate and corrode the scene; smudges and scratches claw into the frame and paw at the face of the image; representation does battle with the intrusive surface of the film. Spurred by Michael Gordon's sliding, entrancing orchestral score, merry-go-round vessels erupt out of a whorl of celluloid turbulence; a boxer vies with a blizzard of blotches; a man's head dissolves into a flickering X-ray of his skull. A hands-on, shamanic archaeologist, Morrison digs into the distinction between film as visual agent and artefact, the limbo state of memory. Unsurprisingly, he can hardly bear to bring it to an end.