light is falling - bill morrison - destruction of the image

http://www.vimeo.com/10171103http://www.offscreen.com/index.php/pages/essays/postmortem_evolution/

In The Light is Calling all that we can make out from the extreme deterioration are shots of officers on horseback riding through the woods, and a young woman with long braids who is found and aided by the officers at the end of the film. An interesting observation I had while watching the three ‘deteriorated’ films is that no matter how great or advanced the distortion and deterioration, there is one inevitable constant: the distortion is always in the foreground of the image. This leads to an equally interesting ‘formal’ and stylistic quality, because regardless of how flat the original footage may have been, the distortion introduces an element of ‘depth’ and ‘texture’ to the frame. This is especially noticeable in The Light is Calling, where the characters (the horseback officers and the woman) always appear to be ‘behind’ something. For example, in one scene we see the woman in long shot and, because of the formation of the deterioration, she appears to be peering through what looks like a fire or a cloud formation.

“Depth” in Light is Calling

“Depth” in Light is Calling

The greatly deteriorated passages where the film stock seems cindered and scorched, at times appearing like a moving Rorschach chart or Mandelbrot set, recalls Stan Brakhage’s hand painted films as well as his theory of “closed eye” vision. The visceral nature of the imagery also reminded me of a live performance piece by two German multi-media artists (Alchemie) during the 1997 FCMM, where they literally poured chemicals and compounds onto a film loop before it passed by the projector lens, throwing an unpredictable and volatile series of light and color patterns onto a wall, and culminating with the projector catching fire.

Hand-painted or deteriorated? Light is Calling

“Depth” in The Mesmerist

The extremely different music which accompanies these two films is representative of both the aesthetic range and importance of music in Morrison’s films. For The Mesmerist Morrison uses two existing Bill Frisell songs (“Tell you ma, tell your pa” and “Again”); and for The Light is Calling he uses a composition written exclusively for the film by Michael Gordon. What these two choices broadly represent are scores which have an organic relationship to the image track (The Light is Calling, Trinity, Ghost Trip, City Walk) and scores which interact with or against the image track (The Mesmerist, The Film of Her, with Decasia operating on both levels). Bill Frisell is a contemporary guitarist-composer who is no stranger to film music, having written several interpretative scores for Buster Keaton films. His musical style is an intellectual blend of jazz, blues, folk, country, and rockabilly, a postmodern eclecticism which, on the one hand, can be seen as a parallel to Morrison’s own re-appropriation of film history. But the clearly modern, contemporary feel of his music makes it feel as if it is playing to the film rather than alongside the film, and emanating from without the film rather thanwithin the film. On the other hand, the pitch and rhythm of Gordon’s haunting combination of an undulating electronic loop and high pitched violin is a perfect harmony to the The Light is Calling’s overall sense of a spiritual or transcendental rise.