Decasia: The State of Decay

 

Picture: C     Sound: B     Extras: B-     Film: A-

 

 

Is it right or wrong to take someone else’s material and pass it off as your own?  Certainly!  But what about taking lost, abandoned, and decayed footage that is nearly lost forever and putting it together to form your own narrative film?  Well, perhaps, and thus the argument of Bill Morrison and his film Decasia: The State of Decay (2002). 

 

The strongest argument going for a film like this is the simple fact that if you are going to make a film about the subject matter, you must use it as your main source.  If someone where to make a film that lashes out against a particular agenda than one way to demonstrate this further is by using the subject matter as the source.  A film against technology that used technology as its medium for example would be one example of such. 

 

There is something fascinating about watching old footage like this that has not been polished and has no meaning outside of what we see.  If you were to compare this footage to a film from this same era, we understand the footage based on the narrative of the film and therefore it has a context, but various footage like this has none and therefore forebodes a certain mystery about it.  I have always been intrigued by the film format and the fact that we capture time on celluloid and we go back and study film, but the way we remember ourselves is through these documents. 

 

If someone were to name a particular actor such as Charlie Chaplin for example, the way that we acknowledge him now is by the films that have survived and more than likely we know him as The Tramp, more than we know him as Charlie Chaplin.  The point of all this is that celluloid is like a trap, it locks in our ghosts and we are forever doomed by repeating those same steps as time marches on.

 

Part of the hypnotic effect that is created from this film with its images in such an emotional frenzy is due to Michael Gordon’s 55-piece basel sinfonietta, which sounds like Philip Glass in its most primitive state and gives that same sort of transcendental effect upon the images it underlies.  The score is triumphant, yet sad, but meticulous and detailed to fit even the richest of images or even the most decayed, which give it a power and breath that is hard to capture.

 

Plexifilm has been responsible for some of the most interesting DVD’s in the past and this is a new benchmark in terms of finding a new niche audience on the format.  The film is presented in a glorious standard 1.33 X 1 transfer, which shows the footage in its most horrendous stage, which would normally be a problem, but since this is decayed footage it is exactly what was expected.  The 5.1 mix of Michael Gordon’s score is very rich and spacious, but having the option of DTS and Dolby would have been nice instead of just having the flatter Dolby option.  DTS would have provided a more involved and engulfing mix since it always gives more separation and dynamics to the material.  This is a remarkable score, somewhere between avant garde and straight Classical that has to be heard to be believed and definitely appropriate for the film materials assembled.

 

As a bonus there is an audio interview with Morrison and Gordon, which covers various aspects of the production and the relationship between the two working on this project.  There is no doubt that this is a fascinating work that sets a new genre in filmmaking and exists on its own, its own haunting world of a place that was unknown to us and has now been exposed before it was lost forever.  

 

Decasia is a reminder to us all, it is a reminder that eventually everything will fade away, if not taken care of.  If we forget about something, it will soon become a vapor in the air and will never be revisited again.  Old footage like this once meant something to someone.  It meant enough that they kept the camera rolling to capture life in motion, but since then it has been abandoned for some reason.  Now, with some ingenuity, one person has taken those concepts and pieced them together to make a statement.  That statement is not just on that footage alone, but also as a testament to the art of filmmaking and to the archives that still sit in waiting.  If we lose appreciation for the art of film and of filmmaking, we are ruining the documents that capture who and what we are.  Let’s us not forget!

 

This and other great Plexifilm titles can be ordered at www.plexifilm.com and you will find just about all of them reviewed elsewhere on this site.

 

 

-   Nate Goss