Decasia (2002)

Having seen Lyrical Nitrate and been hypnotized by the beauty of it and of the artistry possible to be created out of found footage (even as it disintegrates), I bought DECASIA based on the reviews and in the hope that the same creative lightening would strike twice.I was much disappointed.The moments of "artistic" decay are few and far between. A previous reviewer pointed out (most poetically) the highlights of the film, but the majority of the film is endless -endless -endless clips of just poor quality footage.To make matters worse, most of the clips, which went on far too long to hold interest, were actually slowed down to make them LONGER. Case in point is the whirling dervish footage, which not only is slowed down, but also repeated several times. Then there is the procession of camels which drag across the screen in slow motion to the point that I had to fast-forward just to get past them. Neither sequence, by the way, was particularly decayed or showed any damage of note; certainly nothing to merit slowing them down to such extents.Likewise, a procession of schoolchildren through a convent garden is slowed to such an excruciating crawl that one actually misses the fact that this sequence IS damaged until you speed it up.My other complaint (and an artistic mis-step on the part of the film-maker) is the fact that black-and white film stock was used instead of color. As Lyrical Nitrate demonstrated, part of the artistic value of decayed nitrate (even if it was a "black & white" film) is the palette of color produced by the chemical reaction of the film stock.Lost are the yellows, oranges, rusts, browns and reds which might have lent some genuine visual interest to this otherwise rather bland collage.I personally would not recommend this film and would instead direct interested parties to the vastly superior Lyrical Nitrate.

By 'The Accidental Postmodernist' I assume Mr. Hite is referring to himself :P This is a dreamscape of corroded images pulled from decomposing b & w nitrate film stock, set to a Bang On a Can soundtrack that's half Eno and half Steve Reich (both of whom BOAC have covered). At certain moments the two elements collude in blissful, Norman McLaren like serendipity. I'm not on top of the meanings - the main editing trick I noticed was a series of pictures of wheels; the whirling dervish inserted beginning-middle-end is a pretty lazy structure; and I'm not always sure if the Orientalism is being recontextualized or amplified. This could be a hack getting lucky for all I know. But he is very lucky. I am a sucker for the textures that age has unleashed on this 67 minutes of images. The most legendary shot - which turns out to have been the justification for the whole film - is an extended image of a boxer throwing blows from screen left at a giant pulsating blob of mildew midscreen. It's like Cronenberg if the body that was disintegrating were the film itself.

I was made to watch this film in film studies this morning and i was definitely not impressed! In my course, i have watched a variety of weird, out of the ordinary, alternative, world cinema films, and have enjoyed most, but this was so off the wall, and hardly bearable to watch. The best description i can give is: the video that is watched in "The Ring". Like that, but 10 times more random, 10 times more freaky, and there's 67 minutes of it. After the video is watched in The Ring, there is a phone call saying that you will die in 7 days, and we were half expecting this to happen when we finished watching this film, and we would have welcomed it! The whole class was left feeling completely bemused and just a little insane! The music! Half the orchestra was tuned half a tone down, and the other half was tuned half a tone up! As if the film wasn't bad enough! In all, I would say that this film is a complete waste of time, unless you want to torture someone, in which case it is an extremely useful tool!

Much like the well-known Literary Criticism lemma of the "intentional fallacy" (not fallacy with intent, that is - but, rather, the fallacy of assuming intent upon an author), the effect "Decasia" has upon the viewer will inevitably be a co-creation. Themes of Walter Said's "Orientalism" abounded in my head as the juxtaposition of Middle-Eastern and Asian imagery was infused with the designs of film decay: was this a brilliant visual citation of deconstructionist theory? Surely, the similarity to fractals which the living "blotches" of film decomposition bore was not lost upon the orchestrators, was it? Well, to learn that the etymology of the title was derived from a play on Disney's "Fantasia" did little to support the postmodern "reading" I initially lent the film.Nonetheless, the pairing of these *entirely* unmanipulated images (save for their being slowed down) found and woven together by Bill Morrison along with Gordon's homage to Phillip Glass' "qatsi" trilogy elicited a rather visceral response from my mesmerized occipital lobe.This film continues in the trend of what I like to call "aesthetic narrative" (the genesis of which I credit to Godfrey Reggio and Phillip Glass' "Koyaanisqatsi"): a filmic genre in which the "deep structure" of film is laid bare for the experience of the audience - there is no script, no plot, and no spoken word throughout the presentation; however, the proof of film as an art form unto itself is given by dint of the multiplicity of analyses projected and digested by the viewer.Thus, while enjoying a mixed reception, the film stands as centrally important to this postmodern genre of "aesthetic narrative" (the term for which, by the way, I may likely have coined; feel free to adopt its usage whenever applicable). Certainly it bears watching.