Film by Bill Morrison
Music by Michael Gordon

(2002, 67 min, 35mm)

"Bill Morrison's Decasia is that rare thing: a movie with avant-garde and universal appeal. Its flame-like, roiling black-and-white inspires trembling and gratitude."

"I popped Morrison's video into my VCR and within a few further minutes I found myself completely absorbed, transfixed, a pillow of air lodged in my stilled, open mouth.

Now, I'm no particular authority on film, but I do know one -- Errol Morris. A short time later, when I happened to be visiting him, I popped the video into his VCR and proceeded to observe as Morrison's film once again began casting its spell. Errol sat drop-jawed: at one point, about halfway through, he stammered, ''This may be the greatest movie ever made.''

"A stirring, haunting modern masterpiece...
Bill Morrison has created a unique artefact, as enigmatically authoritative as Max Ernst's collage novel Une Semaine de Bonté. It makes you think of Joseph Cornell's memory boxes, Robert Rauschenberg's time-stuffed assemblages, Anger, Hitchcock. It makes you feel that the art, as opposed to the business, of cinema does have a future - even if it has to be found deep in the past."

DECASIA press quotes:

"This radical, experimental masterwork feels like the first film, and feels like the last film." - Andrew Lewis Conn, Time Out New York

"A hallucinatory canvas of images... succeeds as a pure exercise in visual stimulus, its narcotic effect much amplified by Michael Gordon's thunderous, dissonant orchestral score." - Dennis Harvey, Variety

"Unbearably beautiful. It's a work of suggestive genius."
- Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

"Bill Morrison's extraordinarily mesmerizing 'Decasia' is a stunningly beautiful... ode to creation and decay."
- Shari Frilot, Sundance Film Festival

"A work of nihilistic energy and harsh, uncompromising beauty, capable of sustaining multiple readings and interpretations. It is, in short, a work of real art. There are precedents for this sort of thing but nothing remotely of this scale, much less power. The final coup is a genuinely transformative and unforgettable experience."
- Shane Danielsen, 56th Edinburgh International Film Festival

"Compelling and disturbing! Swimming symphonies of baroque beauty emerge from corrosive nitrate disintegration as rockets of annihilation demolish cathedrals of reality."
- Kenneth Anger, filmmaker

"A pure poetry of deliquescence. The images are at once haunting, mysterious and incredibly beautiful. A definitive work of art. And a new kind of documentary. A documentary documenting the decay of itself."
- Errol Morris, filmmaker