n_r_koch Apart from its sheer dullness (it's a 30-minute 1920s-Surrealist-style montage, backed with tedious atonal music and stretched to 60+ by running it at what appears to be 8 frames/sec) this is the most dishonest piece of nonsense I've seen in many years. Some of the footage is visually striking, especially the hauntingly decayed comedy sequences. But Morrison didn't shoot any original footage. Yet he credits himself, and rather prominently too, as the "author" of the film ("editor" would be more accurate). He's even got recognizable footage from some commercial comedies in there. Yes, it's badly damaged. So what? So is the inside of the Sistene Chapel. So are "Nosferatu" and "Intolerance". But no other director's name or title appears anywhere in this film, although the archives that supplied him footage surely know what they are. It's as if Morrison took "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers" and "It's a Wonderful Life"-- which are also damaged, and also in the Public Domain-- chopped off the Milestone and Capra credits and edited them into one movie, "Bill Morrison's Christmas Story", and then copyrighted and sold it. Since these source materials are in the Public Domain, it wouldn't be illegal to do so. It would just be in incredibly bad taste.

jonathan-577 By 'The Accidental Postmodernist' I assume Mr. Hite is referring to himself :P This is a dreamscape of corroded images pulled from decomposing b & w nitrate film stock, set to a Bang On a Can soundtrack that's half Eno and half Steve Reich (both of whom BOAC have covered). At certain moments the two elements collude in blissful, Norman McLaren like serendipity. I'm not on top of the meanings - the main editing trick I noticed was a series of pictures of wheels; the whirling dervish inserted beginning-middle-end is a pretty lazy structure; and I'm not always sure if the Orientalism is being recontextualized or amplified. This could be a hack getting lucky for all I know. But he is very lucky. I am a sucker for the textures that age has unleashed on this 67 minutes of images. The most legendary shot - which turns out to have been the justification for the whole film - is an extended image of a boxer throwing blows from screen left at a giant pulsating blob of mildew midscreen. It's like Cronenberg if the body that was disintegrating were the film itself.

x-princess-beci-x I was made to watch this film in film studies this morning and i was definitely not impressed! In my course, i have watched a variety of weird, out of the ordinary, alternative, world cinema films, and have enjoyed most, but this was so off the wall, and hardly bearable to watch. The best description i can give is: the video that is watched in "The Ring". Like that, but 10 times more random, 10 times more freaky, and there's 67 minutes of it. After the video is watched in The Ring, there is a phone call saying that you will die in 7 days, and we were half expecting this to happen when we finished watching this film, and we would have welcomed it! The whole class was left feeling completely bemused and just a little insane! The music! Half the orchestra was tuned half a tone down, and the other half was tuned half a tone up! As if the film wasn't bad enough! In all, I would say that this film is a complete waste of time, unless you want to torture someone, in which case it is an extremely useful tool!

syllavus I was unlucky enough to catch this film at the Boston Independent Film Festival. Upon reading the description of the movie, I was intrigued as I have always had a passionate love and fascination with old photography and films. The notion of seeing a collection of old decaying films artfully woven together sounded wonderful on paper, the actual film however leaves MUCH to be desired.The film's "score" (if it can even be called a score) is a painful melange of long drawn out sharps and flats that are akin to having a gremlin in one's head scratching a blackboard with their claws.This seemingly neverending barrage of ambient noise is the number one thing that is wrong with this film. I found myself squeezing my hands to my ears in the fashion of the "Hear no Evil" monkey and wishing that the theatre speakers would just give out.The film would have improved by 150% if the "music" had been exchanged for absolute silence, or the whir of a film projector. Aside from being beastly torturous to the ears, the score also had the unfortunate affect of changing the way you perceived what you were seeing on the screen. Because of the dreadful hopeless sound of the "music" it influenced your perception of the film dramatically and made you see all of the hopelessness in the film's subject matter.Some of the imagery used in the film was quite beautiful, the shapes and patterns created by the decaying celluloid could have been displayed separately as works of natural art on their own.There were a few noteworthy film sequences, a boxer who appears to be fighting against a pulsing column of nothingness, patrons at an amusement park who appear to be jetting out of the wavering nothingness of a black hole in roller coaster cars, a solarized man and woman going out for a stroll. However, it was the segments themselves that brought the small bit of beauty that there was to the film, there was nothing that the director did which in any way enhanced or did justice to the visuals that he collected.All in all this film seemed to me to be a selfish piece of art wherein the artist forcefully inflicts his own interpretation of his piece onto the entire audience and doesn't leave them any freedom to make their own judgments. The music told you how you were supposed to feel about the decaying films and the disintegrating characters shown in them. "Despair in the shortness of life and in the fact that death and decay is an unavoidable inevitability! Despair at the frailty of our existence!" The director got that message across within the first twenty minutes of the film, the rest could have been edited extensively and we all would have left the theatre much happier. The phrase beating a dead horse comes to mind, after twenty minutes of disintegrating celluloid and ambient noise, 50 more minutes of the same thing isn't going to do much good.And interesting side note, after the film was finished, not a single member of the audience applauded, so I imagine that I was not the only viewer who felt unimpressed by Decasia. Unless you are a rabid historical film buff with a taste for insanity-inducing musical scores, philosophizing on the futility of life and endlessly long and repetitive imagery, skip this film.