Bill Morrison

Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Iceland, July 9, 2016. The surprising discovery of a canister —containing four reels of The Village Detective (Деревенский детектив), a 1969 Soviet film—, caught in the nets of an Icelandic trawler, is the first step in a fascinating journey through the artistic life of film and stage actor Mikhail Ivanovich Zharov (1899-1981), icon and star of an entire era of Russian cinema.

The 1st Volume of Characters in Motion introduces a new wealth of cutting edge character visuals to the established world of animation. The DVD compiles over 90 stylistically outstanding films by 60 international studios, artists and designers in curated programs such as Characters in Narration, Characters in Rhythm and Characters in Motion. Additionally, a special selection menu allows to sort the 180+ minutes of animation by creator, character or style.

A collection of films from an eclectic array of contributors commissioned to raise funds for the Bristol independent cinema The Cube.

Made by re-editing a deteriorated nitrate print of The Bells (1926), starring Lionel Barrymore and Boris Karloff, this work shows the fragility of the film image while foreshadowing the Holocaust.

Chicago, 2018. A man is killed by police on the street. Through a composite montage of images from surveillance and security footage as well as police body-cams, Incident recreates the event and its consequences, featuring vain justifications, altercations and attempts to avoid blame. Bill Morrison delivers a chilling political investigation in search of the truth.

A meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality, constructed from decaying archival footage and set to an original symphonic score.

Things fall apart, but they are also reassembled and given new life, in an enlightened form. Meet the New York based artist and filmmaker Bill Morrison in this interview about his haunting experimental collage films 'Decasia' and 'Light is Calling'.

Originally planned as part of Michael Kanieckis play, «Howard Hughes: The World Is Round», the film follows the internal monologue of billionaire Hughes as he navigates between Earth and The Screening Room. James Godwin is featured in the voice-over. The performance was presented at The Kitchen, NYC, March 1994.

The true history of a collection of some 500 films dating from 1910s to 1920s, which were lost for over 50 years until being discovered buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool deep in the Yukon Territory, in Dawson City, located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

Alan is a musician who leaves a busted-up band for New York, and a new musical voyage. He tries to stay focused and fends off all manner of distractions, including the attraction to his good friend's girlfriend.

Shapeshifting between stardom and anonymity, an unhinged musician navigates a hyperreal combination of live action and animation daydreams in a struggle to release his first album.

This documentary focuses on the artistry of director Bill Morrison, who leverages decaying film stock from years past to tell new stories that are relevant to today's audiences. The decaying film lends brilliant visuals which add to Morrison's concept of storytelling.

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 remarkable original score by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Bill Morrison’s experimental short features decayed film reels from the lost, German silent film Pawns of Passion (1928).

Drawing from a passage from the Rosh Hashana Service, “Who shall live, who shall die… who by water, who by fire,” this short film deals with that which has been preordained—a future history that will in time unfold before us as the faces of passengers on a ship forces us to contemplate our own fate.

Using the discarded, deteriorating remnants from seven silent film titles, filmmaker Bill Morrison braids a story of intertwining love triangles that pivots between the accounts of two women.

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 banks in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles to a depth of up to 30 feet. Part of it enduring legacy was the mass exodus of displaced sharecroppers. Musically, the Great Migration of rural southern blacks to Northern cities saw the Delta Blues electrified and reinterpreted as the Chicago Blues, Rhythm and Blues, and Rock and Roll. Using minimal text and no spoken dialog, filmmaker Bill Morrison and composer - guitarist Bill Frisell have created a powerful portrait of a seminal moment in American history through a collection of silent images matched to a searing original soundtrack.

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 together to complete the journey from Manhattan to Brooklyn, entitled Across the Brooklyn Bridge. As a commission by the Museum of Modern Art for the re-opening of their facility, American avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison took this remarkable footage and recombined it with itself to form a new split-screen extrapolation.

Following on from Bill Morrison's feature Dawson City: Frozen Time, a short film, Dawson City: Postscript (10 min, 2017) details the journey this collection took after it left Dawson City.

Spark of Being, a close adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein, explores the thematic interchangeability of three of the novel’s characters: the Captain, the Doctor, and the Creature. Spark of Being, which, as with all of Morrison's films, is dialogue-free, features Frank Hurley's original footage of Ernest Shackleton’s fated Antarctic expedition, along with a range of footage from other sources.