I watched the seven short films of Bill Morrison in the chronological
order that they were made. I think it's true that birth comes in many
forms, and the Film of Her is evidence to this. Each film, processing
and reprocessing archived footage of turn of the century images, slowly
grew into more developed, exploratory short films. Although each of the
films certainly stands alone, it was very satisfying to experience the
evolution of the complete body of work--each one setting up harsher
juxtaposition between human emotion, and human mechanics.
I suppose
that, when I met Morrison, I expected to see the dream-like elements of
these films made manifest in human form. Perhaps a black and white
Morrison who obsesses over long-dead porn actresses while exploring the
nature of his hearts mechanics.
I'm glad to say that I met a more
realistic man who not only elaborated on his process and path as a
filmmaker, but also left me laughing over Formaldehyde jokes with the
kind of humor the black and white Morrison would surely have lacked.
INTERVIEW
UD: The evolution of your shorts is really interesting. It feels like
thay were all leading up to the Film of Her.
Bill: Exactly. It's kind of fun screening the whole program together. I
started to see that the Film of Her was the composite, like the opus of
what all these things [shorts] were leading to. But, intellectually,
it's going back to the roots because a lot of those images are from the
paper print collection. I starting using that footage out of
necessity, then I got really into it.
UD: Where did you get that footage?
Bill: It's all from the Library of Congress, it's public domain stuff
from the turn of the century.
UD: So instead of buying new film you used old footage?
Bill: Yeah, fifty cents a foot, you know. No, it's not that
cheap but, you end up owning it. As tax payers we pay for the copyright.
At any rate, [using this old footage] led me to start telling a story by
using the footage over and over again to make a new story. In a way it
does bolt. Like before, I used to show Footprints, and The Death Train,
and The Film of Her chronologically. Now I like to show Film of Her
first because it tells the story and then we can go back and see where
it came from.
UD: When I finished watching Film of Her, I wanted to know two things:
Who is the clerk, and who is She?
Bill: Okay She was a fantasy, she doesn't exist. Originally I had
written sort a full feature length script using this story. I had
incorporated a big romance between this on-screen character and this
clerk. The stuff about him is all factual, his name is Howard. He's this
forgotten player in the whole restoration process, and so he became
interesting to me because he was like a roll of film that had been
forgotten. In this way, the process repeated itself--in my documenting
his story, it brings his story back out in the same way that him
documenting these rolls would bring them out back to life.
The muse part of the story is from a character I had who actually came
out when nobody was around and talked to the clerk. I was in an antique
shop and they had all this old pornographic footage, so I bought the box
of it. There was this one with an incredibly self conscious actress with
a terrible wig on who kept looking at the camera. Like looking for
direction. I felt like whenever she clued in--when her eyes made contact
with the lens, she jumped out of a narrative and she was a photograph. I
thought she could become the muse and that tied in nicely with this
whole idea of old film, forgotten film.
UD: It started out as a feature?
Bill: The idea was to do a full length--I think the subject warrants
it. It was a strong enough topic, but I don't know if Joe audience
member could take the barrage of images at that speed for that
length of time. The length that it turned out as a twelve minute
film...it plays like a dream. You see a hundred fifty, two hundred
images in a short amount of time--you know, our dreams are very quick.
This way, it's sort of like this jolt, like, "Wow what was that?" And I
like that aspect of it--when the credits are rolling while you're still
trying to figure out what you saw.
UD: What led you to film?
Bill: I've been making these baby steps, I guess their huge, I went from
painting, to animation, to photography related film, to film with an
optical printer, and finally just started my own live action film.
UD: Your working on your first feature, right?
Bill: Yes, it's called Ghost Trip. It doesn't have a conventional
script. We bought a Hearse and traveled across country making this film.
It was shot in super 16 and we sort of did a combination of trippy
landscape stuff and documentary encounters with people we met along the
way.
UD: You went in a Hearse?
Bill: Yeah, but it was a good Hearse. It had been somebody's snow
boarding vehicle for years. It had a CD player in it and it didn't smell
like a Hearse.
UD: I don't really know what a Hearse smells like.
Bill: Formaldehyde or something. There's a certain sterility...
Interview by Kiley Bates
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