SOMETHING ABOUT BILL

Peter invited me to present Bill Morrison`s ("cinema of decay" main figure) work for our blog. First time I came into confrontation with local (Split; Croatia) academic authorities in relation with Bill`s cinema opus was years ago during "Dystopia" (2008) presentation period. Bill was stupidly ridiculed with collective Goebbelsian allusive inversion of his identity into the local religious idiot and political shithead best known for eating rotten human livers. Fifteen years later those same people are working on his visit to Croatia. (I do not care and never was). I did not pay to watch "The Village Detective: A Song Cycle" (2021) and I do not like idea that neo-chekists should seek for me around Hitlerian culture institutions for grabbing some stardust and downloading the torrent after hearing accordion sound of freedom. Let them eat what they vomit. 

This is Bill`s wwww page: 

https://billmorrisonfilm.com/ And some You Tube links:

 

So, I hope that my bill is paid... with this short tribute to Bill... and my new "decay of cinema" piece link: 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNwCl9nfTrA&feature=youtu.be

 unlike Bill, I work fast... 

 Greetings from Split; Croatia... 

 Darko Duilo ...

Thanks for that Darko, I hope others may add to this page.

You've got us off to a good start, with your personalised account of some of the difficulties you faced with local authorities...  I came to Morrison's films via "Light Is Calling" which I only stumbled across a few years ago... a film which I love deeply! So I come to his work without any baggage such as issues arising from people like the ones who gave you so much strife in your programming of avant garde and esoteric films.

Let me re-introduce "Light is Calling" to our friends. I did post a piece about it in early 2021 shortly after I fled from facebook.

What a piece of work it is! A cascading series of images arising from an old and greatly decayed movie made about 90 years ago, shot and printed on nitrate film which is an incredibly unstable medium... so the images have been disintegrating until the time when Bill Morrison got to them and treated them in the decayed form they had achieved when he found them. 

Then Bill Morrison makes this film from the remains of those images which includes fragments of storytelling underpinning the narrative of the original film. But the images and the storytelling arise out of the "ashes" like a Phoenix, from the decayed nitrate material, full of blotches and bubbles, expansions and contractions, all of which which give it new life and new texture, a seething bubbling broth from which evocative images partially emerge before subsiding again into the witches' brew, only to be reborn in some other manifestation moments later.

Completing this beautiful work a sublime music track matches the images to perfection.

Okay folks, after all that, here it is:

Don't be shy!

Don't hold back!

pt