This programme of Bill Morrison’s films presents three decades of his work, with a particular focus on how the culture of the moving image has changed from the emergence of cinema in the 19th century to the astronomical or police body cameras and their recordings today. The programme opens with Footprints (1992), a short film elegy in which the most famous lion of cinema disappears from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer logo in the same way as unknown faces or sounds. Just Ancient Loops (2012) is a slightly ironic meditation on how the cinematic eye saw the sky when people wanted to see an eclipse, when telescopes filmed astronomical bodies, or when silent cinema saw the Ascension. Who by Water (2008) is a montage of people on a boat trip looking directly at us: their roles, their awkwardness and their perception of themselves as fit for the camera. Burried News (2021) investigates an episode in the history of racism in the USA, showing what and how cinema in the 1920s saw and recorded. Incident (2023), based on footage gathered by the Forensic Architecture team from street surveillance and police body cams, simultaneously reconstructs the 2018 incident in which Chicago cops killed a black passer-by, and reflects on our altered, multiscreen perception of moving images.
The programme is curated by Natalija Arlauskaitė, professor, visual studies and film scholar.
Bill Morrison is an American filmmaker who has been called “the poetic laureate of lost films” (The New York Times, 2021) for his films that reinterpret long-forgotten moving images. Bill Morrison is renowned and widely acclaimed for his innovative approach to filmmaking, particularly his use of disintegrated and archival footage. According to Natalia Arlauskaite, a professor of visuality and film studies, B. Morrison’s films have two poles: narrative, which seems to be growing in his work alongside his focus on the political past and present, and the poetic structures for which he has become famous. His most recent short film, Incident (2023), has won awards at international film festivals including the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, the Florida Film Festival, and the International Documentary Association’s (IDA) 2023 Best Short Documentary Award.
Duration: 92 min.
Age limit: from 16 years old.
