Decay, loss and impermanence are the themes of Bill Morrison’s excellent documentary movie Decasia – The state of decay which I watched today.
Made in 2001, this is a hymn to the slow process of decomposition in movie archives. With analogue film, this is a gradual process whereas with digital there is no deterioration, just loss when ‘1’s becomes zeroes.
The connection is a human one; the film stock is degraded to the point that it all but completely destroyed. Out of organic, amoeba-like blobs you glimpse shots of places and people without any context – the only link between the images is that they are all decaying before our very eyes.
In many ways it’s like a visual equivalent of William Basinski’s ‘The Disintegration Loops’, where magnetic audio tape was destroyed while being transferred to a digital format.
The score to Morrison’s film couldn’t be more different , however. It is a pulsating, mesmerising work by Michael Gordon vaguely reminiscent of Philip Glass’ score for Koyaanisqatsi.
The film is well worth seeing if only as a reminder that what survives can only be properly understood by what is lost.
“In many ways it’s like a visual equivalent of William Basinski’s ‘The Disintegration Loops’…”
On Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone just now on BBC 6 Music, a long excerpt from the latter was played, and when the host mentioned the decomposition involved, I thought, “Hey – that remnds me of ‘Decasia’, which I saw at the end of 2002, on Turner Classic Movies I think, after reading in The New York Times Magazine this profile by Lawrence Weschler of the film and its maker:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/magazine/22DECAY.html?pagewanted=all
“I saw [Decasia] at the end of 2002, on Turner Classic Movies I think…”
Looks like it was, per the TCM web site and the Weschler article, shown that week on The Sundance Channel, not TCM. I recall phoning the folks at DirecTV to add the Sundance Channel to my parents’ satellite-channel roster for maybe a day or less just so I could watch it.