Post 3. Decasia

What interested me the most about the material this week was by far Bill Morrison’s film ‘Decasia’. If I had to describe the film in three words I would immediately define it as hypnotic, frantic and uncomfortable. The overlapping, fragmented images were beautifully haunting on their own, but, accompanied by the film’s soundtrack (which I later learned whilst researching the film after was complied using a mass of detuned pianos and an orchestra playing out of phase with itself) they became increasingly disturbing. The film is focused on decay, and this itself is true as the different scenes and poor quality of the film is the result of years of natural decomposition. The effect of this is makes the film become perturbed and unsettled in its composition. In particular for me as a viewer there were several scenes that I found extremely grappling in their subject as well as the way they were played onscreen, for example, the scene with the nuns, and the two men pulling themselves out of the water. The faceless figures of the nuns, and the fact only their silhouettes were visible made them seem more like shadows than humans. In this way the film evoked gothic and horror themes, which were heightened by the erratic music. The scene of the spinning man is highlighted in my mind purely as it questioned everything I would deem natural and purposefully re-arranged it to be unnatural. The man spins on and on, whilst behind him the audience can clearly see musicians tapping drums and one can deduce very easily that there is a definite rhythm and yet the soundtrack’s high-pitched notes create a completely alternate connotation, making the scene incredibly discombobulated. Even so, there was a certain beauty associated with the overlapping of the images, the abstraction of one image over the other questioning perspective and subjectivity. This reminded me of Rosalind Krauss’s essay ‘Notes on the Index, Seventies art in America Part 2’ when she compares photography and abstract painting, which, to be honest in my mind could describe the film very well. ‘Nothing could seem further apart than photography and abstract painting, the one wholly dependent upon the world for the source of its imagery, the other shunning that world and the images it might provide/yet, now in the ‘70’s, as paradoxical as it might seem, photography has increasingly become the operative model for abstraction.’ This comment is extremely thought-provoking in relation to the film in the context of manipulation of an image, which is precisely what Morrison was looking to achieve, focusing on the natural decomposition of the film. As well as this, I was also intrigued by Krauss’s perspective on ‘temporal distance in the photographic message. Photography set up, in effect, not a perception of the being-there of an object, which all copies are able to provoke, but a perception of its having- been-there. It is a question therefore of a new category of space-time: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority.’ This notion, of there, and having been there relates wholly to the film, as the scenes are old and evoke similarities in their exhibition as those of old silent films. Morrison used old films from the Museum of Modern Art and in this way it is particularly stirring for the audience as they watch the subjects to know that they are no longer living, except of course within the film itself. This as well, adds to the blood-curdling disposition of the film, where the grainy texture of its actual quality matched that of the people that were filmed.