INTERVIEW

Orpheus of Nitrate: The Emergence

of Bill Morrison

Scott MacDonald

This interview took place between December 2015 and January 2016.

Bill Morrison has been a filmmaker since 1992; he made films before this, but
until Footprints (1992), he had not devoted himself to filmmaking. He has been
prolific: the filmography on his website currently lists thirty-nine films he calls
his own—though most of the films have been collaborations with composers/
musicians. This distinguishes Morrison from nearly all other filmmakers, both as
an artist-making-films and an artist-in-the-world. In many instances, others have
instigated what become Morrison’s filmmaking projects: the Ridge Theater group
in Manhattan, early on; the composers/musicians he has worked with; and, more
recently, programmers who commission Morrison and a composer to produce
a work for a specific occasion. In recent years, the collaborations have involved
interaction from the conception of projects through (often after) their premieres.
These collaborative works are as likely to premiere at music events as at film festivals.
The other major element of Morrison’s work that distinguishes it from nearly
all other cinema is his fascination with the process of film decay and its results and
opportunities. Morrison is of course not the first filmmaker to be interested in
decayed films; his seeing Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1991) at New York’s Film
Forum in 1992 revealed to him how decay might function as a contribution to the
production of a new kind of found-footage cinema. In general, Morrison’s films
combine the montage approach of recontextualizing earlier imagery—pioneered
by Esfir Shub, Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner, and Raphael Montañez Ortiz—
with the alteration of found images over time through chemical transformation.

Framework 57, No. 2, Fall 2016, pp. 116–137. Copyright © 2016 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

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