Though Bill Morrison doesn’t make traditional narrative films, stories are told through the film clips he assembles. A graduate of Cooper Union School of Art, Morrison has made a career of working with footage found in archives throughout the world. Due to the nature of their source material, his films were always concerned with history, memory, and the passage of time. But an encounter with Peter Delpeut’s 1991 film Lyrical Nitrate, which incorporated damaged nitrate film, caused him to reflect further on the ephemeral nature of film and its visual record of life in the 20th century.
“That was a eureka moment for me, to see how the narrative changed when the distress occurred on the film,” Morrison says. “I’d already applied corrosive material to film and distressed it myself in other ways, but when I saw what time had done without the aid of a human hand, that was very inspiring to me.”
The result of this epiphany was Decasia, a film composed entirely of nitrate, a highly unstable film stock prone to decomposition and combustion when not stored properly. Morrison says he selected film clips in which deteriorating portions of the image seem to be interacting with people within the frame. The most widely-known image from the film is that of a boxer striking out at a punching bag that is no longer there. As Morrison puts it, he “looks like he’s fighting the void.” It’s an eerily beautiful film, created as a meditation on mortality, and it remains the filmmaker’s most heralded work. This may change as Morrison’s latest film, The Great Flood, gains more exposure.
The Great Flood comprises archival footage from the 1927 Mississippi River flood, which submerged 27,000 square miles of land, mainly throughout the South but as far north as Illinois. Much of the film uses original 35mm nitrate negative that had never been viewed before. It’s a captivating assemblage of images documenting both the destruction the flood wrought and the perseverance of the people caught up in it. Time and humidity have rendered a weathered, ragged look to some of the footage—a perfect, if disquieting, fit for the subject matter.
Lately, there’s been an abundance of established musicians scoring classic silent films. Morrison was in the vanguard of matching silent images with creative musicians—he’s worked with John Adams, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Michael Gordon, and Johann Johannsson. He usually edits films to existing scores, but for The Great Flood he wanted a soundtrack that was more fluid and improvisational. So he turned to one of his heroes, guitarist Bill Frisell.
“Unlike other composers I’ve worked with, I went on the road with Frisell and his band when they were developing this music in 2011,” Morrison says. “We went through the same region as the flood, through the Deep South, up through Missouri and Illinois. I don’t know if you recall, but the Mississippi River was as high then as it had been since 1927. We stood on the levee and felt some anxiety and uncertainty about whether it would hold. It was a palpable and uncanny experience, and I think it probably affected the way he wrote the music.”
Jazz, blues, hymns, and parlor music are all referenced in the score (there’s even a take on “Ol’ Man River,” from the 1927 musical Show Boat), but the music is highly modern. The subtle arrangements for guitar, trumpet, bass, and drums never overshadow the images, though Frisell does allow himself an animated fuzz-laden guitar solo toward film’s end.
Morrison also emphasizes the importance of music in the lives of the displaced citizens, with footage of dancing, singing, and music-making appearing throughout the film. The final image is of a group of dancers on Chicago’s Maxwell Street. The spirited woman in the center of the group seems to be dancing away her worries, at least momentarily. She glances at the camera and audience just before the fade-out.
It’s a potent image that could be representative of Morrison’s oeuvre in general. Though we may find the eventual and inevitable loss of these fading images and the people within them tragic, watching the films we’re also reminded of the impermanence of everything, and that we should perhaps live accordingly.
Bill Morrison and Bil Frisell: The Great Flood • Bijou Theatre • Sunday, March 29, at 5:30 p.m.
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Eric Dawson is Audio-Visual Archivist with the Knox County Public Library's Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, and with Inside the Vault combs the archive for nuggets of lost Knoxville music and film history to share with us. He's also a longtime local music journalist, former A&E editor of the Knoxville Voice and a board member of the nonprofit performance venue Pilot Light.
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