Bill Morrison

Synopsis:
Dawson City: Frozen Time, pieces together the bizarre true history of a collection of some 500 films dating from 1910s – 1920s, which were lost for over 50 years until being discovered buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool deep in the Yukon Territory, in Dawson City, located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Using these permafrost protected, rare silent films and newsreels, archival footage, interviews and historical photographs to tell the story, and accompanied by an enigmatic score by Sigur Rós collaborator and composer Alex Somers (Captain Fantastic), Dawson City: Frozen Time depicts a unique history of a Canadian gold rush town by chronicling the life cycle of a singular film collection through its exile, burial, rediscovery, and salvation – and through that collection, how a First Nation hunting camp was transformed and displaced. Read More »

Synopsis:
Original Super8 footage shot by Dr. Oliver Sacks of his patients at Beth Abraham Hospital, Bronx, NY, who were administered the drug L-Dopa in the summer of 1969, and “awakened” after decades of inactivity. Read More »

Intro from CPH : DOX homepage
The 100 year old film images sparkle and crackle with an expressive fury, which almost looks like a reaction to what they depict. This year, it is 100 year since the First World War – the first ‘modern’ war, and the first to be documented in moving images – forever destroyed any notion of the (Western) world’s continued progress under the banner of reason and industrialisation. 1914 was the modern era’s absolute year zero. A landmark year, which is here marked in a cinematic collaboration between the renowned American filmmaker Bill Morrison and the string quartet Kronos Quartet, who have recorded the original score by the Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov. Read More »

synopsis

Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison created this non-narrative feature, which derives a large portion of its visual beauty from the physical nature of the film medium itself. Decasia is primarily compiled from a wealth of old and damaged footage, in which the scratches, scraped emulsion, bubbles, streaks, and decaying nitrate add an extra dimension of texture to a patchwork of images both extraordinary and mundane. Originally created as part of a multimedia environmental performance piece, with the film screened in tandem with a performance by a 55-piece ensemble, Decasia has also been screened in a version with recorded score, composed by avant garde percussionist Michael Gordon. Decasia was screened at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.—-by Mark Deming
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