An Evening with Bill Morrison.

A girl from the back rows begins to ask a question. Everyone turns around to see her. She asks Bill Morrison what Bill Morrison's contributions are to the films of Bill Morrison. Her phrasing is slow and awkward and she stutters a little bit. Her hesitance amplifies the tension the question creates. A multilayered tension. Bill is even kind of defensive about the question, the question of why he claims authorship over his found footage, and after he explains his involvement he asks her if she has a problem with his art. She says no, she thinks it's a creative approach, and then refers to the second of the films shown, Morrison's 2001 Ghost Trip, a live-action film that's a quasi-documentary about Morrison and some friends renting a hearse and driving it across the country. Ghost Trip plays exactly like any other Morrison film, including a hypnotic soundtrack (I'm lifting the description from Morrison's own Hypnotic Productions), repetitious sequences, sequences which literally reuse frames, and a non-verbal narrative.

She dodges a confrontation I don't think she intended to instigate. What compelled the girl to ask the question? The other films shown tonight featured archival footage that Morrison reprocessed, re-edited, had scored, and to which he applied new structure. He didn't shoot anything for them, he wasn't in contact with actors, and, except for 1997's Film of Her, he didn't write any narration. There's no dialogue anywhere. Maybe that's confusing, but I don't think so.

When Morrison says that if it wasn't for him the footage wouldn't be seen I think he's referring to the restorative aspects of his work, and he means that we literally wouldn't see these lost or damaged films if he didn't rejuvenate them. He's right, but that's not why I think his work is important, personally, except for the already mentioned Film of Her. Film of Her is explicitly about the sadness of film degradation and the voices that are lost to time and history because of improper handling or direct lack of concern. Aside from the factual, the tangible, what I wouldn't see without Morrison, and what is Morrison's true contribution, is the beauty and sadness of a woman being engulfed in flame-like filmrot in his 2004 Light is Calling. Nowhere else do I experience the airplane-like images toward the end of his 2006 The Highway Trilogy, a truly provocative moment that Morrison slowly builds, not inherent to the original footage.

It's kind of hard to tell someone that you really connected to the airplane-like images in the film you just saw. It's not usual film speak. There's a lot that's unusual about watching Morrison's films. The rot is sometimes illuminating, sometimes distracting, and sometimes confusing. Morrison relies on a portion of the emotional force to come from his famous scores, which he edits the films to, sometimes even the music coming first. As a filmmaker he uses music in a traditional sense and to great effect. If sometimes as a viewer I lose track of the film's pulse, or lose myself in the obliqueness of the image, the music guides me back in.