Bill Morrison
Filmmaker Bill MORRISON (1965, USA) graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art in 1989. He has premiered films at New York, Rotterdam, Sundance and Venice film festivals, and multimedia work at major performance venues around the globe, such as BAM, the Barbican, Carnegie and Walt Disney Concert Hall. In 1990, he released the short Night Highway, which displayed the technique he has become famous for, combining contemporary music with edited archival footage in various states of decay to create experimental new narratives. His films typically source rare archival footage in which long-forgotten, and sometimes deteriorated, imagery is re-framed as part of a collective mythology. DECASIA (2002) was the first film of the 21st century to be selected for the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME (2017) was named to multiple critics’ lists of the best films of the decade (2010s). His work has been recognised by the Alpert Award, Creative Capital, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, a Guggenheim fellowship and a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Morrison has collaborated with some of the most celebrated musicians and composers of our time, including John Adams, William Basinski, Maya Beiser, Gavin Bryars, Dave Douglas, Philip Glass, Vijay Iyer, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Kronos Quartet, David Lang, Steve Reich and Julia Wolfe, among many others.
Filmography
Night Highway (1990, short), Lost Avenues (1991, short), Photo Op (1992, short), Footprints (1992, short), The Death Train (1993, short), The World is Round (1994, short), Nemo (1995, short), Moda (1996, short), The Film of Her (1996, short doc), City Walk (1999, short), Ghost Trip (2000, short), Trinity (2000, short), Decasia (2001), East River (2003, short), The Mesmerist (2003, short), Light Is Calling (2004, short), Gotham (2004, short), Outerborough (2005, short), Porch (2005, short doc), The Highwater Trilogy (2006, short doc), How to Pray (2006, short), Who by Water (2006, short doc), Fuel (2007, short), Dystopia (2008, short), Every Stop on the F Train (2008, short), Release (2010, short doc), Spark of Being (2010), The Miners’ Hymns (2010, short doc), Tributes – Pulse (2011, doc), The Miners’ Hymns (2012, short), The Great Flood (2012, doc), Koller and Freud (2012, short), Gene Takes a Drink (2012, short), Just Ancient Loops (2013, short), Re:Awakenings (2013, short doc), Rite of Spring (2013, short), All Vows (2013, short), Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 (2014, short doc), Back to the Soil (2014, short doc), The Film that Buys the Cinema (co-dir. 2014, doc), The Dockworker’s Dream (2015, short doc), Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016, doc), Little Orphant Annie (2016, short), Niver vs Walls (2016, short doc), The Letter (2018, short), Weaving (2018, short doc), The Village Detective: a song cycle (2020, doc), let me come in (2021), Her Violet Kiss (2021), Incident (2023)
More info: Bill Morrison
Wikipedia, Bill Morrison
Bill Morrison op IFFR
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Wild Girl
Bill Morrison | 6' | USA | European premiere
Wild Girl is a fierce fragment of frames portraying a dancer obscured by celluloid decay. -
The Village Detective: a song cycle
Bill Morrison | 81' | USA | None
Four cans of badly damaged film become the starting point for a gallivanting journey through Soviet history, cinema and beyond. -
Who by Water
Bill Morrison | 18' | USA | World premiere
Masterful reuse of archive material as we are familiar with from the maker of Decasia. -
Outerborough
Bill Morrison | 9' | USA | -
An amazing adaptation of original images from 1899, made with a camera mounted on the front of a train crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. -
How to Pray
Bill Morrison | 11' | USA | World premiere
A landscape of icebergs forms the backdrop for the latest film by Bill Morrison. With music by David Lang. -
Mutual Appreciation
Andrew Bujalski | 108' | USA | None
Bujalski already has a consistent over with only two films and that is fairly unique among American independent directors. Here he goes further with h -
Just Ancient Loops
Bill Morrison | 25' | USA | World premiere
High-resolution scans of nitrate footage and new CGI renderings of space depict a unique view of the heavens. With Maya Beiser on cello. -
Light Is Calling
Bill Morrison | 8' | USA | International premiere
Reflections around the volatile nature of life and love, as seen through the boiling layer of emulsion. -
Dawson City: Frozen Time
Bill Morrison | 120' | USA | None
Compelling documentary about Dawson City and the unique relationship between this little Canadian town with its cinema and the gold fever that briefly -
Decasia
Bill Morrison | 70' | USA | International premiere
Occasionally hypnotic audio-visual trip comprises a 70-minute symphonic piece by Michael ‘Bang On A Can’ Gordon and weathered black & white images fro