WexCast: Bill Morrison

Transcript

Melissa Starker:
This is WexCast from the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. 

For this episode, we share a conversation between Film/Video director, David Filipi and filmmaker Bill Morrison, who received a Wex Artist Residency Award for his latest project, The Village Detective: a song cycle, a meditation on Soviet cinema and star making built around a print of a 1969 film starring Russian actor Mikhail Zharov that was found a few years ago on the ocean floor off the coast of Iceland. At the Wex for the Columbus premiere of the film, Morrison discusses his previous work, his fascination with degraded film imagery, and how the film's distinctive accordion score came together. Here's David Filipi to get things started.

David Filipi:
Good evening, everyone. I'm Dave Filipi, the director of film and video here at the Wexner Center. And it's my great pleasure to welcome everyone to tonight's screening of The Village Detective, the latest film by tonight's special guest Bill Morrison. Recently called “the Poet Laureate of lost films” by Glen Kenny of the New York Times, Bill is most associated with a practice in which he takes forgotten, sometimes presumed lost and often severely deteriorated vintage film elements and resurrects them through his own unique brand of cinematic alchemy into something wholly new, personal, and visually beautiful. Among his many shorts and features are Decasia from 2002, the first film of the century to be named to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry; The Great Flood from 2013, a collaboration with guitarist Bill Frisell, which was co-commissioned by the Wex's Performing Arts department; and Dawson City Frozen Time from 2016, which was named to scores of year's best lists, and which became famous as the film made from films buried in an old swimming pool underneath a hockey rink in the Yukon. If you remember that story, it was during his work on Dawson City when Bill discovered incredibly rare footage of the notorious 1919 Black Sox World Series, which he was kind enough to let us show in one of our Rare Baseball Films programs and which made Bill a bit of a celebrity on the national baseball scene for the rest of that summer. 

Bill's films have played all over the world, including such festivals as Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, and Venice. And it was during a retrospective of his films at the Bologna festival Il Cinema Retrovato in 2017 when we first discussed with Bill the possibility of a Wex Residency Award in Film/Video. Bill described a story behind the film on par with the story behind Dawson City. It all began with a film print, which was discovered on the ocean floor off the coast of Iceland, and we'll hear more about that later tonight. We're so thrilled and proud to be able to support what became The Village Detective, Bill's meditation on Soviet film and political history. That gives way to a dreamlike cascade of beautiful imagery that anyone familiar with his films has come to expect. The Village Detective premiered at the Moscow film festival earlier this year and debuted theatrically in New York in September. And we're so happy that bill is finally able to join us, to share his new film with our audience. Please join me in welcoming Bill Morrison.

Bill Morrison:
Thank you so much. And thanks, Dave. And it's true, the origin story of this film, really, um... Well, I got a email from Johann Johansson, the composer, uh, in 2016, just as I was trying to finish Dawson City, and he had heard the report of the discovery of these reels of film on the news while he was visiting his home country of Iceland. And in 2017, I set about trying to learn more about it. And that trip to Bologna was instrumental in so many ways. Cause I, I met Peter Bagrov, the curator at Gosfilmofond in Moscow and now at George Eastman House, who just off the top of his head could reel off the filmography of the star of these film reels. And that sort of started through a couple of coffees or lunches with him. And we made plans that I would go to Moscow later that year. And then I also arranged to go to Iceland that same year, but none of that would have been possible if I hadn't also met Dave over lunch in Bologna. And he was like, yeah, you can be our Wexner Residency Artist, and I said, great. So, I think, well, this funding has gotten off to a great start. Little did I know that they would be the one and only donor for this film, so I'm so grateful. It's because of you guys this film exists and it's such a pleasure to be able to bring it here. So, we'll talk afterwards and thank you for being here. [Audience applause]

David Filipi:
Well, first congratulations. And to set the record straight, it's not like I'm walking around Bologna offering Residency Awards. That was very much a departmental decision. I just wanted to credit my colleagues, Chris Stults and Jennifer Lange. We always make those decisions collaboratively, but that that'd be a fun thing to do, to start walking around cities like that and doing stuff like that.

Bill Morrison:
Yeah, I mean, to set the record straight is, if I gave you rare baseball films...

David Filipi:
Then that would be different. Yes, bump up the award. So this is the third time I've seen it, but the first time I've seen it big and the scenes of the damaged film are so unbelievably beautiful, seeing them big like this. I mean, just stating the obvious before we kind of get into the conversation...

Bill Morrison:
It is a wholly different experience in a theater. And until I essentially finished the film, just mixing it, I always had an inkling that would be true. Yeah, you can really get lost in those. And I think that the film does have many different tambours and those lengthy explorations of the lost films are... You're almost in a different mind state, you know?

David Filipi:
I'm wondering about the decision where the image is so far gone and you continue to subtitle it, what you were thinking about there.

Bill Morrison:
Um, well, the story somehow continues through, you know? It's not a lost film; there is a referential copy, and so in a way, it becomes its own artifact. And I think, obviously it was a slight film to begin with. It was a kind of a toothless, late Soviet crime comedy—the joke being that, of course, there wouldn't be any crime in a perfect Socialist town so there would be no job for the district police officer. He hadn't had seen a crime like that since 1948. So by sort of exploring this story, it becomes more epic by virtue of the fact that it sat in the ocean for 50 years. And I don't know, sometimes there was nice moments where they're talking about something disappearing and the image disappears, or I think he's saying, where was Dushka, you know, and at that moment at the end of the reel, the decay completely consumes the image.

David Filipi:
Talk about the moment in a little bit more detail when you learned of the discovery of this print. And I'm sure, like everyone that heard about this, you're hoping for the extra reels of Greed or London After Midnight or something like that. And when you found out it was this pretty ordinary film, that they have a camera negative (I think you said either the print from the camera negative or the camera negative) and it's not a lost film at all, when, when did you learn that?

Bill Morrison:
Oh, I learned that at the outset, because what happened was that Erlanger Svensson, the Icelandic archivist you see a couple of times in the film, he wondered what it was and posted some clips that he shot off of his Steenbeck there and a local expat—you know, there's quite a number of Russians living in Iceland—said, oh, that's Derevensky Detektiv. We see that all the time, it's on television every year, the kind of film you'd watch with your grandparents, you know, so I don't know what to liken it to in our iconography.

David Filipi:
Wizard of Oz, It's a Wonderful Life...

Bill Morrison:
Yeah, it's not that special.

David Filipi:
So not even that good - a Hallmark Christmas.

Bill Morrison:
It was a well-known film and any Russian, I guess, would know about it. To test this, or really to test Zharov's popularity, because when I was in Moscow researching for this film, I was actually a guest of the museum of contemporary art called The Garage and there was a bunch of young hip curators who had invited me there, and they were, as one does, asking what I was going to look for at Gosfilmofond. And I started to describe this film and Mikhail Zharov, and I could see their attention waning. And I realized that they'd never heard of this guy and he wasn't part of their reality. But then I noticed also that the FedEx ground guy who came to my door had a Russian accent and I said, wait, do you know who Mikhail Zharov is, and he said of course! Mikhail Zharov is our great actor. And so I knew that it was maybe a generational thing or, you know, culture. And then there was a woman who works in my community garden that one summer, and she had a Russian accent. So I tried it out on her and she said, well, yes, I'm a young person, but I have an old soul, so I know who it is. It would be like somebody who's into TCM.

David Filipi:
But what was the leap then when you know, OK, this isn't a rare film.

Bill Morrison:
Yeah, I didn't answer your question at all.

David Filipi:
Well, when you found out this is not necessarily a rare film, what, what set you on the journey?

Bill Morrison:
I found out what the title was and, um, put it into old, handy IMDB, learned of this guy's name and that he was in 70 films and they stretched more or less the length of the entire Communist regime of the Soviet Union and that he actually was in a film that predated... That was from Czars' times. And it was very exciting to be able to find that clip and the outtake that we used in here, and to find him. I guess when they shot Ivan the Terrible with Eisenstein, they all took a look at that film and he was hoping nobody would recognize him in it, but they did, and razzed him about it. But I thought that the idea was that you could find a popular telling of—I mean, here, Russia went through such incredible changes, really took down this entire centuries-old structure with this noble idea of creating a government for the people and ended up with authoritarianism that they still haven't lost and, you know, have been plagued by bad leaders. As have we, so it wasn't going to be a case of the American filmmaker wagging his finger at Russia, but I did think that there was a way of understanding, you know, this was a populist film actor. He wasn't known as a great art filmmaker. He was in popular films. And I thought there was a way of understanding all the changes that Russia went through in the 20th century, sort of as it's mapped out through this guy's career. He was in so many films and film is almost strictly a 20th century phenomena, as was the Soviet Union.

David Filipi:
Along those lines and just given his kind of special place in Soviet film and cultural history, when you played the film at the Moscow Film Festival, it's hard to imagine a more moving or more nuanced tribute to an actor. It's not the kind of thing that we would see at the Oscars or something like that. If he was alive to see it, I can't imagine what he would have thought.

Bill Morrison:
I hope he would've liked it. So it was at the Moscow film festival and it was in April, so unfortunately I couldn't be there. But I Zoomed in and they told me that people were very moved by it, and that it was on an enormous screen—like an IMAX screen or something. So that must have been pretty cool. And yeah, I think the idea that an American got interested in, not just a Russian—he was a real Muscovite, you know,? He was born and raised in Moscow and there's different parts of the town that are named after him. There's a postage stamp in honor of him—so, I think for those people, they were like, well, no, he's a great actor. They wanted me to understand that he wasn't just a populist actor, that he was great, and I think people who saw him on stage in particular were really impressed by him.

David Filipi:
Definitely want to open it up to questions quickly. But first, I don't know if this question will make sense to you, but there's a moment early in the film. I think when you're talking about the fall of the Romanovs, and I think the phrasing you use in the film is, these scenes remain, these are like three of the only scenes that—I think you used the word survive. Just given the nature of your films, you're kind of always on the hunt for footage like this and for films like this, is there a moment where it ceases to be the film anymore and it's something else for you, if that makes sense, where you could... Just like watching so much of that footage where it's not really the film anymore, or is it? What's your relationship to the film when there's almost nothing left of the film anymore and you're taking it and making it your own? Is there a line that, where it passes from one thing to something else?

Bill Morrison:
In this case, do you mean the film that was The Fall of the Romanovs?

David Filipi:
Any film, where it just loses so much of its image or there's not even enough of it there to... The word survive was really interesting to me because is it surviving?

Bill Morrison:
Oh, I see. It's a good question. I don't know, for me, that piece of footage had become my Rasputin. It was sort of this mythological piece of thing that was a shadow of something. And you're right, in itself it became something. In a way, that was a seed image for this film. I have a dear friend who's the nitrate vault manager at the Library of Congress. And part of his job description is to cut out the parts of rotting nitrate films and throw them away. And he does do that rather conscientiously—some people think too conscientiously. But I'm the beneficiary of this because he'll then stick them on a shelf in the vault with a post-it note with my name on it.

David Filipi:
Is it George?

Bill Morrison:
That's George, and I'll come down and take a look at what he has. And years ago, I think 2010, he'd sort of put that this piece of footage aside for me, which I just thought was extraordinary. Just that image of Rasputin that's kind of become kind of Medusa like in its deterioration, like snakes coming out of his head. And it's casting its own spell. It's actually vivifying what some sort of power that his name implies. So I'd always held onto that footage, hoping that I could nestle it into something where it would have some sort of contextual strength. And this film eventually became that spot for it.

David Filipi:
Questions from the audience?

Audience question:
You talked around it a little bit, but I'm struck by moving from Decasia, where you're really focused on the lyricism of the decaying image to Dawson City, where you introduced a documentary element to here, where you introduce a narrative element in addition to a documentary element. And then you said there's three different modalities the film requires and how you moved among them. Even as you slow the image, as you strip out the sound from the sound films and have the section scored, I'm just really interested in how you kind of worked balancing those things and then believing in them and how you were thinking about kind of the bigger structure as you, as you moved from mode to mode. I was really struck by especially how the narrative elements really built to that final scene, you know, with the silence and the sea and how it's a really great payoff. So yeah, just curious how you found that movement and flow.

Bill Morrison:
I mean, thanks. I hope it does flow seamlessly. The three titles you mentioned are all very different films and set out to do different things. So I guess you could make the case that Dawson City and The Village Detective are more documentary-like. I'd say all of them come from this fascination with the deterioration of the image and its materiality, and this sort of hypothesis that most of my work is built on, that you can kind of compare the human life to the film life, and that there's a dualism between its body and its spirit that reflects ours. And, so with this particular film I was given these four reels and rather early on, I was able to befriend the Icelandic archivist and convince him to actually ship them to me so I could get proper scans made, and I noticed that at the end of this one reel, it becomes almost like an animation, especially when you turn it on its side. It's like dancing figures. And that's I think one of the first things I sent to David. I said, look, what this film does. You know, I'm really amazed by this. It takes on its own life after having lived, you know, on the bottom of the sea. And then there was a compelling narrative that it was on the bottom of the sea and that it wasn't just anywhere on the bottom of the sea, it was in the very middle and the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. And that, that was a division between the east and the west. And that I had been summoned from the west by someone who was neutral in Iceland over it. So there was this materiality that was telling a story, and then there was the backstory of where that came from. And I had always hoped a backstory about how Zharov would sort of be the divining rod through that massive amount of time. And then the other element of time is the narrative that the film tells, and that that could be broken open. And so, it was a film that required a lot of editing and sort of gathering, you know, and rearranging until it finally found the form that it took. Um, so it's a rather strange film and I doubt I'll ever make one like it again, but I was sort of pleased with how it came out and watching it tonight was a joy.

David Filipi:
Other questions?

Audience question:
Bill, can you talk more about how you and David [Lang] worked together on the accordion's mournful, lost at sea quality that it had. How did you collaborate on that?

Bill Morrison:
David Lang and I are old friends and we've worked on at least half a dozen projects together. This was the first one where it was actually driven by me; they were usually his projects that I came on to provide visuals for, his live performance. And of course Johann was a great composer in his own right, and I obviously thought that he was going to write the score for this film when he suggested. And the last time I saw him, we'd had some lunch—I guess it would have been early 2017—and he agreed to do this, I think kind of begrudgingly, because there was all these big Hollywood movies that were hanging over his head. And, uh, eventually took his head. But David was a big hero of his and when we lost Johann in February of 2018, I thought that Johann would be really pleased if David wrote the piece and it was a natural question to ask David, if he'd be interested in doing it. And since I had this very compelling footage, I presented him with the idea and David, unbeknownst to me, had studied Russian in college and knew some Russian, and was looking forward to kind of flexing those dormant Russian muscles. And also thought it would be a nice way to put his own relationship with Johann to bed, too. So, um, he agreed to do it. Um, it was funny cause Johann in that meeting where he agreed to do it said, I imagine an entirely percussion score. And I was like, wow, I don't, but we'll get to that later. And David, who is one of our great writers of choral music, said, I imagine this entirely sung, a choral piece. And I said, well, that's interesting. And that sort of gave rise to the idea of a song cycle, that this libretto could be sung. But then COVID struck. We had ideas that the crossing could perform it and that it would become this oratoria in a way, but then that became wholly impractical: How we would ever get people to sing during a pandemic, or when it would be performed again. And, um, so then I suggested, I said, you know, it is about a lost accordion. One accordion. So you know anyone who plays the accordion? And he would say, oh yeah, Frodi Anderson's the guy in Copenhagen. So David wrote these pieces as many pieces, and in this case I was working with him in sort of the traditional way a director would work with a soundtrack artist. I was giving him cues and length, and basically, what what was happening during that scene. And he just started producing all this really beautiful music and I could swap it around and figure out which ones went into which spots, and it was great because we'd done a bunch of projects together. I worked on his The Difficulty of Crossing the Field and I really loved that piece a lot. And I said, if you can go into that bank of your composing, I think that would really fit with this. And he sent me some things and I said, OK, now I just want them slower. And so I took the MIDI and I slowed it down to 33 percent, and of course that brings the pitch down too, and I sent it back to him. He said, so you want it slower. and you want it pitched lower as well? And I said, yeah. And he said, I don't know if Frodi can play this, but we can try. So he wrote it that way and then sent it back to Frodi. And then we got this... It almost sounded like a pipe organ or something. It was a very different sound for the accordion. So anyway, that's how we worked together. We didn't see each other until I mixed it, maybe even later, you know. It was a year where nobody saw each other. But we sent emails and talked on Zoom and stuff.

David Filipi:
Does it feel like a COVID film?

Bill Morrison:
Totally it does, to me.

David Filipi:
But I'm assuming you got a lot of work done before COVID started.

Bill Morrison:
Yeah. I mean, I'd done a lot of the ordering of that stuff, which was helpful because then all the archives shut down. So, come March, 2020, I had a big drive filled with clips and I was like, OK, I'll just shut myself in this room for a while and see what comes out, you know?

Audience question:
In your answers, you were talking about how the decaying films kind of indicate a decaying spirit—I'm paraphrasing here—how in your life and through your work it seems like you really believe in the idea that the changes in the physical films give them new meaning and new context. And I guess looking at it in that light, through that similar lens when you've been working so closely with that idea, I'm wondering how basically you came to the idea.

Bill Morrison:
Yeah. I mean, it's just something I believe, that you can make this analogy between a film and a thought or a story or a dream, and then how that ages is how it becomes a memory, right? We can remember the way we saw something when it was perfect, but that thing is also progressing through time as we are. And when it decays—not that all films get a chance to decay or that they all decay in a beautiful way—but when they do and they decay in a visual way, you're looking at the time when it was made, maybe the time when you saw it first or somebody else saw it at first, and then you're seeing all the decades that happened since then made visual. That's the brass tacks of it. It's not that spiritualist, you know? It's just time made visible. That it also happens to have this extraordinary beauty to it, I think is a bonus. And obviously what brought me to it, probably through the work of Stan Brakhage,

David Filipi:
It's interesting just with the move from film to digital, like, a film print obviously has a life, it gets projected 20, 50, 75 times. It gets scratched and torn. And for generations, we accepted that. Now I think younger audiences, especially, are intolerant of anything but a perfect image, it's completely different.

Bill Morrison:
Or if you see [the work of] film restorers, they always like to leave a couple grains of dust or something in there, just to make it more of the filmmaker experience. But I mean, we were just up in your booth and there was a bunch of 35mm prints kicking around, probably mostly from the 20th century and…

David Filipi:
And they're nice ones.

Bill Morrison:
They're probably nice ones. They're survivors, right So, you know, this medium is so specific to the 20th century. It really goes from one turn of the century to the turn of the millennium. And now we're sort of past that and we're looking at all the films that were stacked up in there the other times I've been here, gone. So it's increasingly a rare experience as we drift away from the 20th century.

David Filipi:
Not to get too far off track, but the last artist that we had before the shutdown, the Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani, it just so happened we had the only 35 print that he knew of, of his first [film] Man Push Cart. And he couldn't believe it. It's a long story why we had it, but we gave it to MoMA, you know? And so it's just like, so precarious that we in Columbus, Ohio we would have the one 35 print.

Bill Morrison:
I don't know. There's a lot that goes down here. [Audience laughter]

David Filipi:
Last question, just 'cause so many people saw your film Dawson City, we asked you a little bit about it on the way in, but is that trove still going to yield future work?

Bill Morrison:
I think I'll always dip into it. I feel like I told the story. I don't need to do that again. But you said that you'd seen Buried News, which came out earlier this year, another pandemic essay in which I took... Well, there was four news clips from the Dawson City collection that showed the aftermath of race riots that happened a hundred years ago. And so I delved into each of those stories to connect them, culminating with the January 6 riot.

David Filipi:
Yeah. Those newsreel archives are where it's at. Well, congratulations again.

Bill Morrison:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

David Filipi:
Bill was actually in Lisbon and Paris this morning, so...

Bill Morrison:
Depending what you call this morning.

David Filipi:
Yeah. So thank you so much for putting yourself through that. [Audience applause]

Melissa Starker:
That was Bill Morrison, director of The Village Detective: a song cycle, speaking with Film/Video director,David Filipi. To learn more about Wex programs and Residency Award projects, go to Wexarts.org. For the Wexner Center for the Arts, I'm Melissa Starker. Thanks for listening.