decasia

At 67 minutes Decasia is Morrison’s found footage/’ruined’ cinema magnus opus. And while barely feature length, the overall experience is of such great intensity –with Michael Gordon’s incredibly loud, throbbing symphonic soundtrack threatening to melt the imagery- that one loses the sense of any objective time. As the film’s credits begin we hear what sounds like whirring Steenbeck plates. The film moves from a shot of a dervish dancer to a film lab, reflexively suggesting the birth and creation of the ‘film within a film.’ The film’s circular structure begins and ends on the same image of a dancing dervish, which links up the many recurring motifs of birth, death, and the apocalypse. In between there are images that range from ominous beauty (falling bomb-like parachutes) to painterly beauty (panoramic silhouette long shots of men on camels walking across a desert landscape).