notes
Wednesday, 1 January 2003the irresistible delight of decay
One of my most memorable movie moments was when at the climactic point of a screening of Jean Cocteau's 1946 black & white version of Beauty and the Beast, just as the Jean Marais' Beast's face was filling the screen (presumably from Beauty's POV) the film got stuck in the projector's gate, and the image froze, contorted, melted and finally burnt away. It may have only taken a couple of seconds but the sequence is etched on my mind. Thanks to the Sydney University Film Group for making it possible in 1970!
"Decasia": The Beauty of Film Decay [Slashdot] points to a story in the NYT "about 'Decasia,' a film created entirely from deteriorating nitrate film footage. Ya can't beat analog for interesting disintegration." Quotes are from the NYT piece.
a still from the Decasia site"''Decasia,'' was fashioned entirely out of snippets of severely distressed and heart-rendingly decomposed nitrate film stock: decades-old footage, taken from archives all around the country -- and at the last possible moment... -- but who knew the stuff was so beautiful? Who knew that decay itself -- artfully marshaled, braided, scored and sustained -- could provoke such transports of sublime reverie amid such pangs of wistful sorrow?"
"a procession of camels making their slow way across a desert horizon. Nuns leading their young wards through a mission colonnade. A man rescued from drowning. A grown woman being dunked into a river for baptism. A crouching Central Asian man, spinning wool. A hand-driven Ferris wheel, somewhere in India. And a merry-go-round. A Luna Park rocket car exploding out of disintegrating chaos. A hag pointing a threatening finger at an appalled judge, and then turning back to us, metamorphosing into sheerest monstrosity. Lovers, melting into embraces that are themselves melting and coming undone"
''I wasn't just looking for instances of decayed film,'' Morrison recalls of his two-year excavation. ''Rather, I was seeking out instances of decay set against a narrative backdrop, for example, of valiant struggle, or thwarted love, or birth, or submersion, or rescue, or one of the other themes I was trying to interweave. And never complete decay: I was always seeking out instances where the image was still putting up a struggle, fighting off the inexorability of its demise but not yet having succumbed. And things could get very frustrating. Sometimes I'd come upon instances of spectacular decay but the underlying image was of no particular interest. Worse was when there was a great evocative image but no decay.''
The Decasia site is accessible but slow at the moment. The preview clip is very evocative and for me was well worth the trans-Pacific 56k wait. It's an elegant vision of how fragmentary and incomplete all our memories and records are - an eery visual preview of a generational amnesia.
