The Residue of Vanished Lives: Bill Morrison's "darker"
At the recent Nitrate Picture Show, Robert Stinner witnessed a special screening. He reports back with a review of the master of corroded celluloid Bill Morrison's latest film, "darker".
In addition to his excellent dispatch from the Nitrate Picture Show, Robert Stinner also reviewed a special screening on the first day of the festival of Bill Morrison’s new film darker. While it may not be from a special nitrate print, Morrison’s career makes him ideally suited to the Nitrate Picture Show environment. It was a pleasure to learn about this haunting film. Hopefully there will be more opportunities for people to see it soon.
— Chris Cassingham, newsletter editor
In an introduction for Bill Morrison’s new film darker, Nitrate Picture Show festival director Peter Bagrov joked that when archivists and preservationists come across reels of decomposed nitrate film, they frequently want to send them straight to Morrison. Decomposing celluloid, after all, is Morrison’s aesthetic signature and favorite subject matter. In the past he has used this material as the basis for essayistic documentaries, as with perhaps his most famous film Dawson City, Frozen Time. darker, however, sees Morrison following more experimental, non-narrative impulses.
darker has previously been screened with live performances of Morrison collaborator David Lang’s composition, though its screening at the Nitrate Picture Show was its premiere with a pre-recorded track. In his own introduction to the film, Morrison noted Lang’s claim that the roughly hour-long composition does not repeat, yet even if the score carries minor variations, it certainly sounds repetitive and cyclical to the untrained ear, full of tensile chords that constantly circle back on themselves and never fully resolve.
Morrison has curated a series of film fragments in various states of decay to accompany this unsettling score. While he does not provide explicit context for the fragments, resonances emerge between them that suggest careful thematic intent. Many scenes feature dancers, and by highlighting movement intended to be fluid, Morrison places special aesthetic attention on how the meeting of choreographed gestures and decompensating film stock creates blur and illegibility. The eerie effect also gives these dance sequences a ritualistic, even macabre quality, which recurs elsewhere in the film. In one of the relatively clear scenes, we see a child in a dissociative state, attended to by an adult man and woman. It is only when the woman compels the child to start writing at a furious pace that we realize the adults have induced the child’s trance for the purposes of a spiritualist ritual.
Morrison’s invocation of the macabre and metaphysical at the level of form and content suggests that his usage of decomposing film as a medium has a supernatural purpose in itself: He never lets the viewer forget that the film fragments are hazy communications from a long-past time. To that end, much of the film material Morrison repurposes is decomposed to the point of illegibility. The lines between content and form dissolve, eliciting formal surprises and subtextual mysteries. When the subjects become abstracted, the medium itself becomes the focus—at alternate points during the film, I confused indistinct human figures with decomposing celluloid, and discerned faces within signs of chemical degradation. When human figures intermittently emerge, vivid and clear, from the ever-shifting blur, it is close to a shock, like suddenly waking from a dream.
When two people—middle-aged, perhaps a couple, standing on either side of a porcelain sink—stare directly into the camera, then fade back into visual static, one feels the weight of witnessing the residue of vanished lives. Hypnagogic and haunting, darker lulls the viewer into a subconscious rhythm and way of seeing, where glimpses of figurative clarity surface just long enough for their meaning to remain tantalizingly out of reach.
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