Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2017 • 120 minutes
This meditation on cinema’s past from Decasia director Bill Morrison pieces together the bizarre true history of a long-lost collection of 533 nitrate film prints from the early 1900s. Located just south of the Arctic Circle, Dawson Ci...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2002 • 67 minutes
Often compared to Stan Brakhage, Bill Morrison created DECASIA entirely with decaying, old found footage, melded to the music of Bang on a Can's Michael Gordon, performed by the 55 piece basel sinfonietta. The result is a delirium of de...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2013 • 80 minutes
The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in American history. In the spring of 1927, the river broke out of its earthen embankments in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles. Part of its legacy was ...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2004 • 8 minutes
"In Light Is Calling, a deteriorating scene from James Young's The Bells (1926) was optically reprinted and edited to Michael Gordon's seven-minute composition. The aesthetic of Morrison's film is inexorably intertwined with many of Mich...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2012 • 26 minutes
A short film based on research by Walter Murch, relating orbits to harmonics.
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2010 • 67 minutes
An adaptation of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" using found film footage, with an original soundtrack by Dave Douglas, performed by Keystone. It explores the thematic interchangeability of three of the novel’s characters: the Captain, th...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2005 • 9 minutes
In 1899, a photographer at American Mutoscope & Biograph mounted his camera on the front of a trolley traveling over the Brooklyn Bridge. The three 90-foot rolls he created were edited to together to complete the journey from Manhattan t...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2007 • 18 minutes
Inspired by the Jewish Rosh Hashanah prayer, “Who shall live, who shall die… who by water, who by fire,” this short film deals with that which has been preordained—a future that will unfold before us, much like the faces of passengers o...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2003 • 6 minutes
The subject of Bill Morrison’s CITY WALK is the urban landscape and the movement within it. Utilising high contrast black and white footage, Morrison records busy urban life with a camera situated in a moving vehicle. The often-blurred, ...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 1996 • 12 minutes
"Morrison's THE FILM OF HER is based on the story of a Library of Congress clerk who saved a vaultful of paper reels, documenting the earliest days of cinema, from the incinerator. A gorgeous tribute to the art form's origins, this 12-m...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2003 • 16 minutes
The film is a re-edit of a deteriorated nitrate print of "The Bells" (1926), starring Lionel Barrymore and Boris Karloff.
Bill Frisell, guitar; Tony Scherr, bass; Kenny Wollesen, drums.
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2011 • 52 minutes
The ill-fated coal mining communities in North East England are the subject of this inspired documentary by multi-media artist Bill Morrison. Their story is told entirely without words, yet the film is far from silent: it features a rem...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • With Oliver Sacks • 2013 • 18 minutes
Original Super 8 footage shot by Dr. Oliver Sacks of his patients at Beth Abraham Hospital, Bronx, NY. Made famous by the movie Awakenings, starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro, Sacks administered the drug L-Dop...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2010 • 13 minutes
On March 17, 1930, a crowd assembled outside Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary in hopes of witnessing Al Capone's release from prison. (He in fact had already been released the night before.)
Filmmaker Bill Morrison and compos...
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2014 • 40 minutes
A prismatic and cinematic a message in a bottle from a century ago and accompanied by a magnificent score by Aleksandra Vrebalov performed by the Kronos Quartet, BEYOND ZERO: 1914-1918 is a powerful record of wartime past. Out on the sa...
Exclusive to OVID, Bill Morrison interviews Dr. Oliver Sacks' biographer, Lawrence Weschler, over video chat.
