Reclining in the comfort of Village Hoyts Cinemas on a half-intoxicated Monday at noon is an event rife with depressing existential realisation and a slight sense of vertigo – little was I to know how this experience would be intensified by the sensory assault that is Bill Morrison and Michael Gordon’s Decasia. From the images of orphans moving slowly between two statuesque nuns to an on-camera birth that would be enough to make Steve Crow hard, Decasia is a picture of visual and aural dissonance, of almost attaining solidity, then, pock-marked by the stains of time, of slowly slipping away. A nauseating, disorienting experience to put the po back in mo, that brings together the in-the-nows of the last hundred years into a ravishing, destructively beautiful cinematic-symphonic pièce de résistance of experimental film-making.

Experimental? Yes, but scarcely pretentious. Morrison assembles a collage of archival footage which honestly documents the inevitable process of celluloid decay with an air of sympathy for those poor souls whose fifteen seconds of fame is being finally being brought to an end by the passage of time. The film solidifies these into a fitting memorial, an enduring obituary to the faces of the long-since-passed which warp, heave and writhe with an intensity approaching the epileptic. And yet through the chaos of the visual detritus, the just-a-bit-too-hole-filled-to-make-out images and the out of step symphonic score, a sort of order emerges. Each image comes to reflect its peers, whether it be a loomsman spinning wool or a hand-operated Ferris wheel, everything we see is destined for ruination, a theme which is finally embodied by the horrific image of war planes moving like dust and speckles across the screen, unleashing parachutists across the sky before the film finds its cyclical finish.

But far from overt moralism, Morrison restrains himself from inflicting a pointed attempt at social commentary on us, instead merely observing that all things are destined for decay. Likewise, the minimalist score is relatively unobtrusive, limiting itself to building an impending sense of menace which climaxes (kinda incongruously, to be honest) a couple of times, before fading away. Regardless of this, the cacophony resulting from the dissonant musical score truly embodies the state of decay depicted in Decasia, even if it sometimes oddly overwhelms us.

This is notwithstanding the admission that Decasia may send audiences home longing for a screening of Koyaanisqatsi. However, although the kind of experimental filmmaking being attempted on-screen is nothing new, the contrast of images of the natural and the man-made to music is far from passé, and Morrison is able to add something both innovative and distressing to that tradition of filmmaking. Decasia disorients and intensifies, it baffles and bewilders and is sure to convince you that ironically using and italicizing French expressions is ultimately une bonne chose.—TG