Decasia

Bill Morrison's "Decasia: The State of Decay" is not a film-it's an experience. A haunting symphony of decay, this experimental documentary transcends traditional storytelling to become a visceral meditation on impermanence, memory, and the relentless passage of time. Composed entirely of decaying nitrate film stock and set to a dissonant, pulsating score by Michael Gordon, "Decasia" is as much a requiem for analog cinema as it is a mirror reflecting our own mortality.

The film unfolds as a collage of forgotten fragments: flickering images of carnival dancers, laborers, children, and landscapes, all consumed by the corrosive embrace of chemical rot. Morrison transforms the degradation of celluloid into an eerie art form. Faces melt into abstract swirls, landscapes crumble like ash, and once-vivid scenes dissolve into spectral shadows. The film's decay is not a flaw but its essence, rendering each frame a battlefield between preservation and oblivion. The visuals, both beautiful and grotesque, evoke a dreamlike trance, where the viewer is forced to confront the fragility of human legacy.

Michael Gordon's score-a relentless, atonal orchestral storm-amplifies the unease. The music throbs with urgency, its dissonant strings and clashing harmonies mirroring the chaos onscreen. At times, the soundtrack feels like a dialogue with the imagery, as if the orchestra is racing against the disintegration of the film itself. Together, sight and sound create a hypnotic rhythm that lulls the audience into a state of sublime disquiet.

Thematically, "Decasia" is a profound exploration of entropy. The decaying film becomes a metaphor for all transient things: civilizations, memories, even our own bodies. Morrison unearths a paradox-the very medium meant to capture moments in time is itself succumbing to time's ravages. In one haunting sequence, a nun spins endlessly in a void of emulsion blisters, her motion both eternal and futile. Such imagery lingers long after the credits roll, prompting reflection on how all creation inevitably trends toward dissolution.

While "Decasia"'s avant-garde approach may alienate viewers seeking narrative coherence, its power lies in its abstraction. It invites interpretation as a tone poem or a visual installation, closer in spirit to Stan Brakhage's "Mothlight" or Godfrey Reggio's "Koyaanisqatsi" than conventional cinema. This is not passive viewing; it demands surrender to its sensory and philosophical currents.

In the end, "Decasia: The State of Decay" is a masterpiece of impermanence. It is a film that stares unflinchingly into the void, finding eerie beauty in collapse. For those willing to embrace its challenging, meditative pace, it offers a transcendent reminder: art, like life, is rendered poignant precisely because it cannot last.

A mesmerizing, if demanding, journey into the abyss-essential for lovers of experimental art, but approach with an open mind and a tolerance for the sublime grotesque.

Bill Morrison's 2002 experimental feature just has to be seen to be believed.

From thousands of decaying archive prints, he's selected the most baroque examples of negative decay in which the nitrate-based film stock has degraded to the point that its images melt into one another or are partially obscured under whirling vortices of psychedelic disintegration.

The finished effect is simply stunning.

A boxer unleashes a flurry of blows at the spot where his opponent once stood but which is now obliterated by a seething column of celluloid magma.

Nuns escorting a crocodile of schoolchildren are thrown into a near-photo negative contrast, making them look more like daunting sentinels herding their captives.

A kissing couple attain a sense of heightened reality in a world rendered in shimmering tones of silver by the process of decay.

Phantom faces and objects swim momentarily into lucidity from images now transformed into a kaleidoscope of amoebic distortion and static.

In a courtroom scene, the elderly female witness shifts in and out of certainty as her features are pulled and warped like gum into monstrous facades suggestive of liquefying skulls while the judge delivers his verdict from the writhing face of a nightmare.

These images insinuate themselves into the imagination like bad dreams recorded directly from the subconscious and imperfectly reassembled via primitive technology.

They feel as if they might have been the ancient television broadcasts of some impossibly distant alien culture, plucked out of the cosmos by radio telescope and translated for human eyes.

To complete and reinforce the experience, Michael Gordon has contributed an astounding soundtrack, likened elsewhere to the sound of a plane crashing in slow motion and calling to mind the more haunting industrial works of Philip Glass, rescored for an apocalyptic funeral mass. You could turn off the sound and play the film to, say, something delicate by Debussy for a totally different experience but that would only deny you the awesome, hypnotic power of the visuals and music working in harmony.

Morrison's selection of material appears to be far from random and he's evidently chosen images of permanence and stability for the ironic effect of watching them transformed by inevitable corruption.

This remarkable project works on so many levels – as a slice of cinematic history from the earliest days of the medium; as a study in the nature of decomposition; as a rococo piece of visual and aural entertainment for the chemically enhanced; even, perhaps, as the most authentic science fiction film ever made.

If the function of cinema is to transport its audience into another reality via the willing suspension of disbelief, to show them things they've never seen before and to create a compelling emotional state from a synthesis of sounds and visions, Decasia: The State Of Decay must qualify as one of the most accomplished examples of the form produced to date.

Guaranteed, you've never seen anything else even close to it.

This film was put together in order to be a visual accompaniment to a somewhat atonal, machine-like symphony. On that level, this film doesn't work for me. The pulse that is needed to synchronize with the pacing of the film is never there; it's just meandering along annoyingly on the soundtrack, which gives one the sensation of trying to go into a trance to random sounds of traffic. The experience of trance is certainly one that is the objective of any viewer watching this film. The film is even bookended by visions of a Sufi dancer in order to set that theme. `In this film' his ghostlike image tells us, `we are going to voyage through varying kinds of oddness in a dizzying slow motion that is pulsated by the rhythm of the effects (the effects are made up of scratches, blotches, warping, and other manipulations done to the film)'. The images are astounding, mostly consisting of stock footage of turn-of-the-century images. One has to guess how much of the footage was already partially damaged by age, and how much of it was manipulated by the filmmaker. Doesn't matter. Whether the images are haunting, humourous, beautiful or obscure, the voyage is a fascinating one. BUT... only with the right music to accompany it. I would suggest that those who view this film try out different music to see what works for them. That may be ‘sacrilegious', and certainly, I would never replace a score of most films I watch (I did that once accidentally when I happened to turn on `The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T' while listening to some acid jazz. What a trip that was!). Call it post-modern revisionism, or just call it audience participation. Whatever works for you: techno, ambient, classical, jazz, or acid jazz... I personally had some terrific experiences with Massive Attack and Primal Scream, but I'm anxious to try out lots of different kinds of music in future viewings. Art isn't a product or an object; it's a vehicle that transports its observer to another state of mind. I'd say this film is a nifty little spaceship/time machine. Don't ask what it means, just set the appropriate music for your course and have a nice trip!

I have seen a few films regarding the decay of old film stocks, but this one really brings out the beauty of such images. The slow moving images presented with this progressive avante-garde soundtrack brought back memories of the old school industrial musical movement of the late 70s and early 80s. But when it continues onwards to the scene of the Geisha girl lost in a soup of decay and stains and the music rose with its intensity I felt as if I was witnessing wonderfully horrific. I could actually feel my heart beginning to race with the onslaught of the images and sounds mixing together, moving faster and becoming more agitated and excited.

I recommend anyone looking for the modern "art" in films to give this one a try.

I was unlucky enough to catch this film at the Boston Independent Film Festival. Upon reading the description of the movie, I was intrigued as I have always had a passionate love and fascination with old photography and films. The notion of seeing a collection of old decaying films artfully woven together sounded wonderful on paper, the actual film however leaves MUCH to be desired.

The film's "score" (if it can even be called a score) is a painful melange of long drawn out sharps and flats that are akin to having a gremlin in one's head scratching a blackboard with their claws.

This seemingly neverending barrage of ambient noise is the number one thing that is wrong with this film. I found myself squeezing my hands to my ears in the fashion of the "Hear no Evil" monkey and wishing that the theatre speakers would just give out.

The film would have improved by 150% if the "music" had been exchanged for absolute silence, or the whir of a film projector. Aside from being beastly torturous to the ears, the score also had the unfortunate affect of changing the way you perceived what you were seeing on the screen. Because of the dreadful hopeless sound of the "music" it influenced your perception of the film dramatically and made you see all of the hopelessness in the film's subject matter.

Some of the imagery used in the film was quite beautiful, the shapes and patterns created by the decaying celluloid could have been displayed separately as works of natural art on their own.

There were a few noteworthy film sequences, a boxer who appears to be fighting against a pulsing column of nothingness, patrons at an amusement park who appear to be jetting out of the wavering nothingness of a black hole in roller coaster cars, a solarized man and woman going out for a stroll. However, it was the segments themselves that brought the small bit of beauty that there was to the film, there was nothing that the director did which in any way enhanced or did justice to the visuals that he collected.

All in all this film seemed to me to be a selfish piece of art wherein the artist forcefully inflicts his own interpretation of his piece onto the entire audience and doesn't leave them any freedom to make their own judgments. The music told you how you were supposed to feel about the decaying films and the disintegrating characters shown in them. "Despair in the shortness of life and in the fact that death and decay is an unavoidable inevitability! Despair at the frailty of our existence!" The director got that message across within the first twenty minutes of the film, the rest could have been edited extensively and we all would have left the theatre much happier. The phrase beating a dead horse comes to mind, after twenty minutes of disintegrating celluloid and ambient noise, 50 more minutes of the same thing isn't going to do much good.

And interesting side note, after the film was finished, not a single member of the audience applauded, so I imagine that I was not the only viewer who felt unimpressed by Decasia. Unless you are a rabid historical film buff with a taste for insanity-inducing musical scores, philosophizing on the futility of life and endlessly long and repetitive imagery, skip this film.