Bill Morrison’s 2002 film, Decasia, is (as art always seems to be) best described as a meditation: as a piece about decay it is a meditation on time and how it inevitably changes what we create into something else, as a representation of “found footage” film it is a meditation on the very notion of the artist as a “creator” and what it means to “create” anything in the first place. Decasia, in fact, can barely be described as a”film” in the traditional sense of the term, in that the footage itself is of essentially no importance. (Describing art also always seems to take an awful lot of quotation marks.)
Like all found footage films (defined by Wikipedia as, “a filmmaking term which describes a method of compiling films partly or entirely of footage which has not been created by the filmmaker, and changing its meaning by placing it in a new context,”) Decasia challenges the idea of the artist as a creator of newness, proving that even a simple rearrangement of the old can be art.
In the end this otherwise disparate collection of found footage is united in shared decay, visible holes and deformations in the film revealing the often forgotten nature of film as a physical object, just as vulnerable to the workings of time as anything else.
More info at http://www.decasia.com/index_full.html
And since I’m not entirely sure that my embedded video works, www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeEzb-0vf7A www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeEzb-0vf7A)
– Alexa Lempel
The decay creates random abstract effects that can be quite interesting, just as a found object (a piece of driftwood, a stone, a rock formation) can create a beautiful image. This is not unrelated to the “random” beauty of an individual’s story (see the post from sueson28 about the story of immigrants.)