User reviews

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.

Hour long film made up entirely of fragments from decaying nitrate film. A hypnotic film the film becomes an trip through the minds eye as the unconnected pieces end up joined by the minds ability to impose order. What is the film about? Thats for you to discover as decay infuses the images with eerie, surreal and amusing power. The music is minimalist in the Philip Glass style which adds to the trippiness. At first odd and disconcerting the film slowly sucks you in and remains riveting viewing until almost the very end (images of planes and parachutes go on way past the point of boredom). An amazing film that will send your mind off on an odd trip to piece together what its all about. (One piece I read on the film stated the filmmaker likes to talk to audiences to see what they think its about since other than the idea of decay and rebirth he has no set meaning) Worth a look - especially in a dark room with no distractions

Bill Morrison's experimental "Decasia" does not have a story, per se. It consists entirely of decayed footage from the days of yore, set to music. Some of it is from movies, some looks like footage from newsreels.

In an interview included on the DVD, Morrison basically said that all this decaying footage tells a story just as much as the plots of the included movies do. In this case, it's what happens when art gets neglected. Over time, practically anything will suffer damage if left exposed to the elements. No telling how many stories are lost because there was no way to safely preserve them.

Anyway, it's a movie that will probably on appeal to film buffs. Most people won't be able to relate to it.

Close to 70 minutes of footage that is rotting away, accompanied by a discordant symphony. It sounds like slow torture, and to some, it may be. But to me, it was like looking at visions of a lost civilization. Trying to scry the images out of decomposing footage was akin to reconstructing a piece of pottery from shattered fragments.

The "decaying" music was a haunting accompaniment to the film, complete with detuned pianos and an orchestra that played out of phase with itself. But the visuals hit me the hardest.

This is what happens to film if we neglect it. All those visions of the past are being lost forever to time and the elements. The silver nitrate base of those films decomposes at the same rate as human flesh! To me, the film was both a poetic look at decay, something that happens to everyone and everything, as well as how our cinematic history is vanishing as we speak.

It goes without saying that this film is not for everyone, but if you truly want to step outside the boundaries of conventional cinematography, this is it!

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.

By 'The Accidental Postmodernist' I assume Mr. Hite is referring to himself :P This is a dreamscape of corroded images pulled from decomposing b & w nitrate film stock, set to a Bang On a Can soundtrack that's half Eno and half Steve Reich (both of whom BOAC have covered). At certain moments the two elements collude in blissful, Norman McLaren like serendipity. I'm not on top of the meanings - the main editing trick I noticed was a series of pictures of wheels; the whirling dervish inserted beginning-middle-end is a pretty lazy structure; and I'm not always sure if the Orientalism is being recontextualized or amplified. This could be a hack getting lucky for all I know. But he is very lucky. I am a sucker for the textures that age has unleashed on this 67 minutes of images. The most legendary shot - which turns out to have been the justification for the whole film - is an extended image of a boxer throwing blows from screen left at a giant pulsating blob of mildew midscreen. It's like Cronenberg if the body that was disintegrating were the film itself.

I loved Decasia, but for reasons that might evade others. Hence, I'm not inclined to recommend it.

I get a wonderful, visceral response to extremely complex noise and chaos, and Decasia is nothing if not a rampaging smorgasbord of same. So, I was in heaven, watching it.

I got a kick out of the music. I spent some of my viewing time reflecting on the composer's process. Fascinating!

I suppose I should chime in on the mythic payload. Respectable, seasoned commentators ply a line about the film as a commentary on "morals". Pishposh! If I take away any arc from this piece, it's a running commentary on decay; that chaos deserves our respect. It a powerful idea. It's another reality that, once we face it, pushes us to self- actualization. It reminds me of the aesthetic of John Cage in this regard.

One of my disappointments (strange to say, in light of what I said above) was discovering that the film's decay effects were also "found". Those effects were so wild, wooly, rich, redolent that I entertained (for the filmmaker) the conceit that they were meticulously engineered. Well, they *were* engineered, but by Loki, Eris, Kali, et.al. Which makes it all only that much more impressive, come to think of it....

Being an avid film restoration film, I was eagerly awaiting the chance to see this film. This film is made up of random bits of film, from various film archives around the world, which has been spliced together at random. The one connecting feature of this film is that all film used is rotting, decaying, faded, bubbling...in other words the film is decomposing. Kudos to the filmmaker for salvaging some of this film and letting the public see what can happen to film if it has not be stored or cared for properly. The footage is totally random, some nature films, newsreels, features...countries featured include the United States, Turkey, Japan, Morocco....scenes of stars like William S. Hart, Larry Semon, Mary Pickford....scenes of dignitaries arriving aboard ships from 1920s newsreels; 1950s educational films.....a really vast array.

However the film can be agonizing to sit through, especially because it is in incredibly slow motion, and most of the time we get only a fleeting glimpse as to what is actually in the film frame, most of the time the entire image is distorted. I watched the movie in fast forward, and even then it was too slow. The movie has very haunting music, and this film could easily be shown in October as part of a scary movie festival.

The screening I saw had a very low walkout rate for an experimental movie, although admittedly the audience were mostly students taking Berkeley's avant-garde film course, so they probably had to be there. Poor kids, you might say, but this'll probably be one of the high points of their semester. It'll take you a few minutes to flesh out the decay metaphor (even film doesn't last forever so what chance do we puny humans have, etc.) but surprisingly a large proportion of the imagery continues to be affecting beyond that point.

The game I play when viewing an unannotated found-footage work is to discover what scenes the filmmaker's way of seeing enhances, and why. I could draw up a list of (possibly false) dichotomies - human vs architectural, familiar vs exotic. The one that struck me, though, was documentary vs fiction. Bill Morrison (the same guy who worked on Futurama? Really?) uses excerpts from both categories, but all of the scenes that moved me were unscripted. When I watch a silent fiction film, the image on the screen is evidence that the characters, and thus the stars, are alive. When I watch old documentary footage, the first thought that comes to mind is "These guys must all be dead by now". Perhaps that's why I slightly prefer Gianikian's and Lucchi's all-doco "From the Pole to the Equator", even though that film makes "Decasia" seem as watchable as "Fantasia".

But probably a pertinent reason is "From the Pole to the Equator" has a more useful soundtrack. Gordon's "Decasia" symphony sounds like a parody of Glass, which of course is still better than the score to "The Hours". My favourite bit of "Decasia" is when a long take of nuns 'n' schoolgirls is accompanied by a seemingly infinite collection of continuously descending string lines. Interestingly, Gordon reverses this trick at the end, using ascending lines, and it sounds just like the Beatles' "A Day in the Life". I would've been happier if Morrison had set the film to "Sgt. Pepper", as long as I didn't have to see decaying footage of Peter Frampton.

Obscure references aside, "Decasia" is better than most avant-garde films because the pictures look nice, the same way a body lying in state looks nice, only better. Morrison is an outstanding undertaker.

I was made to watch this film in film studies this morning and i was definitely not impressed! In my course, i have watched a variety of weird, out of the ordinary, alternative, world cinema films, and have enjoyed most, but this was so off the wall, and hardly bearable to watch. The best description i can give is: the video that is watched in "The Ring". Like that, but 10 times more random, 10 times more freaky, and there's 67 minutes of it. After the video is watched in The Ring, there is a phone call saying that you will die in 7 days, and we were half expecting this to happen when we finished watching this film, and we would have welcomed it! The whole class was left feeling completely bemused and just a little insane! The music! Half the orchestra was tuned half a tone down, and the other half was tuned half a tone up! As if the film wasn't bad enough! In all, I would say that this film is a complete waste of time, unless you want to torture someone, in which case it is an extremely useful tool!

Crap. I prefer the 'Invisible Sculpture' - the lighting is better.

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!

Apart from its sheer dullness (it's a 30-minute 1920s-Surrealist-style montage, backed with tedious atonal music and stretched to 60+ by running it at what appears to be 8 frames/sec) this is the most dishonest piece of nonsense I've seen in many years. Some of the footage is visually striking, especially the hauntingly decayed comedy sequences. But Morrison didn't shoot any original footage. Yet he credits himself, and rather prominently too, as the "author" of the film ("editor" would be more accurate). He's even got recognizable footage from some commercial comedies in there. Yes, it's badly damaged. So what? So is the inside of the Sistene Chapel. So are "Nosferatu" and "Intolerance". But no other director's name or title appears anywhere in this film, although the archives that supplied him footage surely know what they are.

It's as if Morrison took "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers" and "It's a Wonderful Life"-- which are also damaged, and also in the Public Domain-- chopped off the Milestone and Capra credits and edited them into one movie, "Bill Morrison's Christmas Story", and then copyrighted and sold it. Since these source materials are in the Public Domain, it wouldn't be illegal to do so. It would just be in incredibly bad taste.

This film is a bunch of random pieces of old, deteriorating, film being played with music. Doesn't sound too interesting - and it isn't. According to the interview section on the DVD, Morrison explains that this film is some sort of symbolic expression of the decay that all life goes through. While this sounds like a nice analogy, the film doesn't really convey anything deep or philosophical. Just watching a bunch of old damaged film doesn't really end up conveying much of anything - all we get is to watch old film! The visual effect is sort of cool for about ten minutes, then its just boring. Its all black and white and just seems monotonous. Its like I get the point about decay in the first five minutes. The music in this film is excellent however, is you like abstract and dark ambiance music. In this case, the film isn't worth much but the soundtrack is great!

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.

Are you kidding? My heart goes out to those who have been duped into actually sitting through this LOAD of self-indulgent crap! A bigger waste of time I can't imagine. I don't want to be alone in a room with anyone who thinks they can derive a deeper meaning out of this mess. The strobe-like nature of the decomposed film segments is near seizure-inducing and POINTLESS! And the score!!!! I can still feel it cutting through my skull like a stryker saw. Before anyone tries to explain to me that this is not meant as entertainment, but as art, let me stop you. Clearly this is not entertainment. As art, I put it in the same category as a blank canvas with a slice through the middle of it that I once saw in a gallery; a feeble attempt at telling me what art is supposed to be. I'll bet the writer/director(!) is having a great laugh at the expense of those who think they "get it". I'm amazed that I actually sat through this mindless garbage. I felt I had to see the entire thing to comment on it. God, am I sorry. If I can save one unsuspecting person from seeing this vacuous piece of pseudo-art, my mission is complete.

Decasia isn't so much a movie, more an endurance test. It is about as far away from a mainstream blockbuster as the world of film is likely to get, composed as it is entirely of neglected film stock that has decayed over time. Bill Morrison may be classified as the director, but in truth, he's more of a collage-maker, tying all these images together and attaching a haunting score over the top then letting the results speak for themselves. It's certainly an interesting approach, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, it doesn't half make for a boring film.

Sure, you can wax lyrical about the otherworldly experience of watching long dead people going about their lives and how combined with the music, it creates a trance-inducing hypnotic effect, but sitting down to watch it and then talking about it afterwards are two completely different things. If you are a chain smoking nihilist with a beard and a beret you'll probably love it, or at the very least pretend to like it in order to look clever, but I thought it sucked. I'll stick to the Indiana Jones trilogy thanks very much.

I saw this at the Cleveland Film Festival, and the Director, Bill Morrisson, was there for a Q&A session afterwards. It was hard to sit through the film because most of it is the same; the same images, the same sounds, just a lot of decayed film.

No doubt it seemed like a good idea for an experiment, and it was, but if you're not into experimental film making, you will absolutely hate this, as you can see from other's comments.

If you are into experimental stuff like this, you might see the point or even like it. The film maker definitely put his neck on the block by creating it; you wouldn't find James Cameron or Quentin Tarantino doing something like this. Maybe Harmony Korine or Richard Kern.

In any case, what you'll see is a lot of damaged old film, of nothing particularly interesting, accompanied by a repetitive soundtrack from out of tune instruments. Most of it is very repetitive and somewhat monotonous.

Having seen Lyrical Nitrate and been hypnotized by the beauty of it and of the artistry possible to be created out of found footage (even as it disintegrates), I bought DECASIA based on the reviews and in the hope that the same creative lightening would strike twice.

I was much disappointed.

The moments of "artistic" decay are few and far between. A previous reviewer pointed out (most poetically) the highlights of the film, but the majority of the film is endless -endless -endless clips of just poor quality footage.

To make matters worse, most of the clips, which went on far too long to hold interest, were actually slowed down to make them LONGER. Case in point is the whirling dervish footage, which not only is slowed down, but also repeated several times. Then there is the procession of camels which drag across the screen in slow motion to the point that I had to fast-forward just to get past them. Neither sequence, by the way, was particularly decayed or showed any damage of note; certainly nothing to merit slowing them down to such extents.

Likewise, a procession of schoolchildren through a convent garden is slowed to such an excruciating crawl that one actually misses the fact that this sequence IS damaged until you speed it up.

My other complaint (and an artistic mis-step on the part of the film-maker) is the fact that black-and white film stock was used instead of color. As Lyrical Nitrate demonstrated, part of the artistic value of decayed nitrate (even if it was a "black & white" film) is the palette of color produced by the chemical reaction of the film stock.

Lost are the yellows, oranges, rusts, browns and reds which might have lent some genuine visual interest to this otherwise rather bland collage.

I personally would not recommend this film and would instead direct interested parties to the vastly superior Lyrical Nitrate.

The premise for this film project is deceptively simple. Take a whole bunch of decaying old film negatives, splice them together and viola: instant art film. This highly recommended film by Bill Morrison creates an effect similar to the visual kaleidoscope you'd see in the Kowaanisqatsi trio of films. Opening with shots of a whirling dervish who punctuates the beginning, middle and end of the film, Morrison sets up a series of "action" shots that when watched slowed down with their naturally occurring decay, take on an otherworldly feeling. Decaying celluloid takes on emotional meaning, reflecting the new readings that the viewer brings to the film. What were probably once quite banal scenes of nuns overseeing children walking through a courtyard, for example, take on an eerie ghostly effect and a scene where a man makes untoward advances on a woman is given heighten tension by the angry swirls the rotting film creates. Some segments were disturbing, others funny, many just beautifully impressionistic.

This 70-minute film is quite trippy to watch and your mind will try to make sense of it by finding "things" in the shapes the crackling celluloid creates. (Is that mould? Is it waves crashing on the shore? Neither?) The dramatic score for the film seems lifted off of the disintegrating film, with its odd, oft-times sinister, octaves. At some points near the end, the onslaught of music combined with the repetitiveness of the images was almost too much. Interestingly, no colour film was used. On the one hand it would be difficult to even call this a film, on the other it is actually a film made literally of film. Think Vertov's A Man with a Movie Camera meets Bunuel/Dali's Un Chien andalou. All up, this is a beautiful study in remediation and a film student's wetdream.

Much like the well-known Literary Criticism lemma of the "intentional fallacy" (not fallacy with intent, that is - but, rather, the fallacy of assuming intent upon an author), the effect "Decasia" has upon the viewer will inevitably be a co-creation. Themes of Walter Said's "Orientalism" abounded in my head as the juxtaposition of Middle-Eastern and Asian imagery was infused with the designs of film decay: was this a brilliant visual citation of deconstructionist theory? Surely, the similarity to fractals which the living "blotches" of film decomposition bore was not lost upon the orchestrators, was it? Well, to learn that the etymology of the title was derived from a play on Disney's "Fantasia" did little to support the postmodern "reading" I initially lent the film.

Nonetheless, the pairing of these *entirely* unmanipulated images (save for their being slowed down) found and woven together by Bill Morrison along with Gordon's homage to Phillip Glass' "qatsi" trilogy elicited a rather visceral response from my mesmerized occipital lobe.

This film continues in the trend of what I like to call "aesthetic narrative" (the genesis of which I credit to Godfrey Reggio and Phillip Glass' "Koyaanisqatsi"): a filmic genre in which the "deep structure" of film is laid bare for the experience of the audience - there is no script, no plot, and no spoken word throughout the presentation; however, the proof of film as an art form unto itself is given by dint of the multiplicity of analyses projected and digested by the viewer.

Thus, while enjoying a mixed reception, the film stands as centrally important to this postmodern genre of "aesthetic narrative" (the term for which, by the way, I may likely have coined; feel free to adopt its usage whenever applicable). Certainly it bears watching.