I feel I need to douse some cold water on the spent positive nitrate here...as much as I liked Bill Morrison's doc about coal mining history in England, with a fantastic score by Johan Johanson...I must say that I had to walk out on all this decay after a good 40 minutes, I just decided I didn't have to suffer more. Conveniently, experimental films don't have to make sense (here the title says it all), they eschew narratives and they expect the spectators to bring their own way to figure out what's going on. And if they can't, they can enjoy the sights and sounds. In light of the formidably mediocre and boring "The Artist" that will reap its copious share of Oscar statuettes, courtesy of its ferocious US distributor with pit-bull attack techniques, this film is just a montage of old silent footage that barely distills anything. The figure of the spool or the wheel returns often (OK, we got it), and it's one long laborious stretch of things from the past. Since both newsreels and fiction scenes are all mixed up , it becomes pointless to try to attach much importance to what the segments show. (Again, the coal mining doc by same director really told a beautiful and powerful story, with same techniques, but sans decay). Some might enjoy this trip to nostalgia, made vaguely contemporary by the decayed look of the images, it just left me cold and bored. Another reviewer suggested to try to watch the film with another music: rightly so, this score added enormously to the difficulty to enjoy this film, for me. Obviously , it seems I'm in a minority here, but I don't mind.

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.

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.