Films by Bill Morrison(RTRFH 2022)

Movie Name: Cinematograph
Language: Silent
Category: --
Duration: 3 minutes
Director: Bill Morrison
Story: In 1895, one of the inventors of cinema, the Lumière brothers improved the shooting cum projection apparatus, and named it Cinématographe. The footage in this film was from a nitrate film of the Lumières talking about their device thirty years later, shot in the Lumière’s laboratory in Lyon, France. The film has been stored in several facilities since it was first shot in 1925, and all the degradation to the image is a result of its natural decomposition.

Movie Name: Sunken Films
Language: No Dialogue (English intertitles & Chinese subtitles)
Category: --
Duration: 11 minutes
Director: Bill Morrison
Story: On 7 May 1915, the British passenger ship RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat, six days after it left New York. It killed nearly 1,200 passengers and crew. All the films kept in the cinema on Lusitania sunk to the ocean floor, including the lost feature The Carpet from Baghdad (1915). One of the reels of the film was salvaged in 1982, and it leads Morrison to the stories of Lusitania and other films that have been lost at sea.

Movie Name: The Village Detective: a song cycle
Language: English, Icelandic, Russian(English intertitles & Chinese subtitles)
Category: --
Duration: 81 minutes
Director: Bill Morrison
Story: During the summer of 2016, a fishing boat off the coast of Iceland found a surprise catch from the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean in their fishing net: four reels of 35mm film. After cleaning and examination by the National Film Archive of Iceland, the incomplete print was identified to be the Soviet film The Village Detective (1969). It was nothing like a hidden gem of remarkable significance in the history of Russian cinema, and it wasn’t even the only existing copy. For some Russians of that generation though, it was a popular and much-loved film. The director interviewed the fisherman who found the reels and representatives from the film archive, and delved into Soviet film history and Zharov’s legacy. By reediting the heavily water-damaged frames of visuals, the story of a detective investigating accordion theft is resurfaced, after resting at the bottom of the sea for nearly half a century. Morrison presents a poetic meditation on the passage of time, accompanied by a poignantly beautiful accordion music score by David Lang.

Bill Morrison (1965-)
Based in New York, Morrison makes films that reframe long-forgotten moving images. He made over forty works since the 1990s by using archival materials or pre-existing sources with original music. His films have premiered at the New York, Rotterdam, Sundance, and Venice film festivals. In 2014 Morrison had a midcareer retrospective at MoMA. Since his found footage opus Decasia (2002), he has shown particular interest in the motif of decomposition of film materials.

^Pre-screening Introduction
^Talk by Bill Morrison after the screening (In English with Cantonese interpretation)