Experimental Filmmaker Bill Morrison
On Thursday, Bill Morrison will be on campus for a screening of his films. Here is some information on Mr. Morrison that I got in an e-mail from one of my professors.
Bill Morrison is a Chicago-born New York based experimental filmmaker renowned for his pioneering reinvention of the found footage collage film and his creative collaborations with composers. Morrison is most known for his multilayered audiovisual artworks, such as Decasia (2002), which reuses decaying nitrate film as the basis for an aesthetic and philosophical exploration of the medium’s material and immaterial associations with life and death. J. Hoberman of the Village Voice described Decasia as “the most widely acclaimed American avant-garde film of the fin-de-siècle,” while the director Errol Morris commented while viewing Decasia that “This may be the greatest movie ever made.” While Decasia has found a popular second life on DVD, most of Morrison’s films were originally screened as collaborative dimensions of theatrical performances including live music. His works expand the film viewing experience to a multisensorial engagement that blurs boundaries between film and the other arts, sight and sound, memory and history. Morrison will be screening for us a program of his recent work that continues his interest in recreating the parameters of ‘archival film.
He will be at UIowa on November 5, at 7 p.m. in 101 BCSB.
I found some of Morrison’s work on youtube, and the first thing I thought was, “how in the hell did he do that?” Take a look.
I think that experimental films get overlooked quite easily. The ones that are done well, to me, are the ones that use the medium to ask questions about the world. I think it is hard to understand that these films are also a sort of documentary. For Morrison, his films are made with found footage, or film that he did not shoot himself.