Decasia - The State Of Decay on DVD

Star Review

This extraordinary film finds director Bill Morrison taking archive footage shot on volatile nitrate-based stock that’s partially or almost entirely decayed, splicing it together, and then setting this deliquescent ensemble to the accompaniment of a dissonant industrial score. The result plays like a warped, phantasmagoric version of one of Bruce Conner’s newsreel pageants, or what was on the videotape in the Ring films: a black-and-white fever dream that, were you to stumble across it unexpectedly in an art gallery or in the middle of a David Lynch film, would almost certainly scare you witless. To put it another way: it’s a film inhabited by ghosts, in which the scraps of narrative we see can only come to dead ends.

What makes Decasia so unsettling an artifact is that the stock is no longer in a state to offer up any clues. Certain sections seem to suggest the people on screen are in real danger – running down a street from some unseen menace; at risk from fire or flooding – and about to disappear before your very eyes. These are characters fighting to stay on the record, and who, when they vanish, leave you to fill in the blanks yourself: why is that man scraping the bark off that tree? Who or what is that boxer punching? Why are those bodies being dragged from that mine, and are they really dead or just playing that way? A film historian’s delight, a scream from the vaults, and a salutary reminder of the need to conserve what’s been left intact, if only so future generations can start to make sense of their past.

Mike McCahill on 7th May 2004

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