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Decasia
Decasia is a film by Bill Morrison with music by Michael Gordon.
The title 'Decasia' is a combination of "Decay" and "Fantasia" and the film is a montage of black and white archive footage that has begun to decay.
To see/hear a short streamed clip Decasia clip
Notes © Marshall Mateer, for RBCs. Last updated January 2004
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Decasia
Archive Film
It is estimated that 80 per cent of our silent film heritage has been lost due to reprocessing, fire, fungus and neglect. Until the 1940's film was made of a plastic called Nitrate which was very volatile and on occasion burst into flame during projection or even as it lay in storage. Film was always stored in round metal containers - "the can". The film image is made of a chemical layer - the emulsion - which rests on the plastic base. Film becomes scratched with constant use and the chemical layer can respond to light, heat, damp or the emulsion simply deteriorates in time.
Making the film
Bill Morrison worked in film archives in American indentifying hundreds of black and white film clips in which decay had taken hold. The decay sometimes looks like mould or lichen; sometimes like an image from a microscope slides; sometimes like crystals, sometimes it solarises the image and presents a viusal experience beautiful, strange, uncertain and sometimes threatening. Being film the images are moving..appearing to grow or repsond to the movement in the image of the film itslef. Morrison choose images that had a 'correspondence' (a word used by the Symbolists and Surrealists) to the remaining part of the film image. He then edited them together to Michael Gordon's music score and developed a narrative about birth, death and rebirth - about the inevitability of decay - about our ephemeral nature.
The music
The score by Michael Gordon is symphonic and thunderous in its scope and scale. "The Bang On A Can score pulsates with a quasi-techno groove that heightens the gravitas of the film's archival footage."" Michael Gordon is a founder member of the Bang on a Can Collective About Michael Gordon.
First performance
The first perfomance in 2001 was staged with the orchestra sitting on a triangular pyramid structure that surrounded the audience. Bill Morrison's film was projected onto scrim (cloth with an open weave you can see through but which also registers a projected image) draping the structure.
The film
The film version was cut to the complete score and released in 2002 since when it has played all over the world in Festivals, Art Galleries and specialist cinemas.
Quotes
"The severe emulsion deterioration reveals the film stock in its basic chemical form and the images are stripped to their most primitive emotional state."
"Decasia is so hypnotically ephemeral and grandiose that its seamless linkage of sound to image suggests a spiritual presence. The Bang On A Can score pulsates with a quasi-techno groove that heightens the gravitas of the film's archival footage."
"Decasia is a mesmerizing film that intertwines the decay of archival film with images of ephemeral human existence."
Visit the Decasia website
http://www.decasia.com/index_mini.html - but it needs the broadband!
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Purchase the DVD from PLEXIFILM
Links for both DVD and CD http://www.decasia.com/html/index.html
Search Amazon, B&N, etc for [Decasia],[Bill Morrison] or [PLEXIFILM]
Purchase the music score on CD from Cantaloupe
Search Amazon, B&N etc for [Michael Gordon], [Decasia], [Cantaloupe - #21008].
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Max Ernst
Decasia has some parallels in the work of the surrealist artist Max Ernst - the collaging of images into a sequence and the presentation of 'decay'.
Max Ernst - 'Une Semaine de Bonté'
Subtitled "a surrealistic novel in collage", Une Semaine de Bonté (A Week of Kindness) is made up mainly of collaged images presented as a book. Ernst made the 182 collages from wood-engraved illustrations from contemporary French periodicals (magazines). He added all manner of fantastic elements that transform each picture into something strange and otherworldly. The
work is divided into five sections, one for each day of the week and each with it's own theme, and prefaced with a quote from a Dadaist or Surrealist writer. In this way Ernst's novel is like a silent film with sequences of images introduced by 'intertitles'. "The sum of these parts is a bizarre, often erotic, and completely fascinating journey into the subconscious."
Ernst collaborated on a film version of his book using the same title. It was directoed by Jean Desvilles, with the narration and voice of Ernst himself and original music by Georges Delerue.
View a clip from the Film The short sequence is introduced by Ernst as "Friday. Element, sight. Example, the inside of sight.". It's an mpeg file. The clip comes form the Roland Collection of Art Film Max Ernst.
Downoad the clip RBCs/LEAs/Schools do not have permissions to re-publish this clip.
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Who was Max Ernst?
Max Ernst was a German artist associated with the Surrealist movement; born 1891 - died 1976. As a young man he was called up and fought in the First World War. His response was to reject all the standards and customs which society had hitherto taken for granted and which had led to the terrible and pointless slaughter and tragedy of the war. If culture and religion had led to nothing better than the past four years of misery and horror, they argued, then it was time to give anarchy and unreason a chance. Some of his paintings create images and texture that are similar to the textures of decay on film shown in Decasia. See paintings such as 'Europe after the Rain' created in 1940-42. UniCalifornia
Purchase the book
Une Semaine De Bonté, a Surrealistic Novel in Collage $16.95 Dover Publications.
Author: Max Ernst ISBN: 0-486-23252-2 CODE: 23252-2 periodical illustrations explores worlds of terror and surprise. Some consider this Ernst's.
Search Amazon, B&N etc
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Fantasia - by Walt Disney
You know - pink elephants, dancing mushrooms, The Rite of Spring, Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, Night on the Bare Mountain, etc.... First released in 1940. Like Decasia, Fantasia was music first, images afterwards. Fantasia used a specially developed early form of Stereo sound 'Fantasound' for its synchronised soundtrack.
The basic facts at IMDB
A Fantasia fansite tells the story. You have to ignore the advert pop-ups.
The Disney Online website.
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Related artists and film makers
Search the WWW for the name and have a look under images as well. Images. Some commercial purchase sites and some 'adult' material .
• Max Ernst - German Surrealist painter, printmaker, sculptor.
• Kenneth Anger - US film-maker - one of the originators of underground film in 1960's.
• Robert Rauchenberg - US Artist - painting/collage/assemblage - linked to Pop Art.
• Joseph Cornell - 3-D assemblages/collages in boxes, USA.
• Stan Brakhage - US avant-garde film-maker
• Graham Gingles - 3-D assemblages in 'boxes', Ireland.
During the late 1960 and early 1907s in US and UK the Light Show became a popular art/performance/music form using mixtures of slides, film and chemical reactions to create abstractions and image presentations. See ICA, Art Colleges, Velvet Underground. Art teachers used the techniques in schools. Anyone still got one of those old Aldis projectors covered in spatters of colured ink?.
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Restoration or Decay?
Many famous works of Art and Archaeology exist in a states that are worn, damaged or decayed. Paintings discolour, their varnish cracks and pieces flake off away and plaster and canvas suffer from fungus. Metal objects rust or patinate and can become encrusted. Stone breaks and wears away due to natural weathering or the added burden of industrial chemicals in the air. Leonardo's 'Last Supper', a mural painted on a wall looks not unlike some of the frames from some of the images in Decasia. Vasari's version of the Last Supper, painted on wooden panels, was severlely damaged in the floods that ravaged the Italian town of Florence in 1966 in which 30 people died. It is now to be restored and experts believe that may take 20 years of work. How do we decide when to 'save' works of art and when should they be left to follow the natural cylce of decay (we could record the process)?
Experts discuss decaying art
Maev Kennedy; Tuesday October 28, 2003.
The Guardian
Recycled Hitchcock takes to the air - plastic paint from old film footage.
Around 80 per cent of our silent film heritage has been lost to reprocessing, fire, fungus and neglect. In September 1937, a correspondent from the Kinematograph Weekly took his pad and pencil to the premises of HA Gregory and Co, a busy industrial plant near Cheshunt. "This," he noted, "is where they perform the last rites over a large proportion of films that once thrilled thousands but have now ended their useful life." A guide led the man from the Kine through the factory gates and past the tottering mountains of circular tins ranged in the yard. Inside the main hangar, they watched overalled workers prise open these tins and feed their contents, 18 at a time, into the ravenous jaws of the stripping machine. Each year at HA Gregory, 200 million feet of film was liquified along with other plastic trash - toothless fake tortoiseshell combs, broken spectacles, discarded Xylonite dentures (false teeth) - and recycled into resin to make waterproof paint. Next time you see a Spitfire in a museum, run your fingers over its skin. You might be touching a missing Hitchcock, or a pair of your great-grandmother's false teeth."
Original newspaper article Matthew Sweet The Independent
Preserving archive film
See Film Preservation (password access only)
and
Search for this clip in the Pathe Archive
HISTORIC FILM (aka NATIONAL FILM ARCHIVES) 21/04/1963 227.07
A look at the preservation methods used by the National Film Archive (UK) in 1963.
Of All the Works of Man
From a poem by Bertolt Brecht, (poems 1929-1933)
"Of All the Works of Man I like best
Those which have been used.
The copper pots with dents and flattened edges
The knives and forks whose wooden handles
Have been worn away by many hands: such forms
Seemed to me the noblest. So too the flagstones round old houses
Trodden by many feet, ground down
And with tufts of grass growing between them: these
are happy works."
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