Gareth Evans (GE) My name's Gareth Evans, and I'm very glad to have been asked by the Festival to host this conversation with Bill Morrison. It comes as the culmination of the Offscreen Symposium, and those of you who have been at the symposium all day have been through 'Found', 'Manipulated' and 'Generated' worlds, and we're now at the 'Destroyed' section of the program. What we'd like to do in this session is to find out from Bill the origins and impulses behind the making of Decasia, and try to tease out from this what a new or an extended sense of animation can be. I'm going to hand over to Bill to give a short introduction, we'll watch 15 or 20 minutes of the film, and then we'll open up the discussion.

Bill Morrison (BM) I guess I'd like to just give a running history of how the film came about. A thumbnail sketch. I began in art school as a painter, and then I was drawn into animation and found it too much work, so I wanted to find some of the same permutations between each frame that I found attractive in painting and in animation existing in found footage or in footage that I'd shot. I was drawn to the Paper Print Collection. For those of you that don't know, it's the earliest film collection from 1896-1912, which was saved on paper for copyright purposes. It's sort of outlined in my film Film of Her which we'll see on Friday. But each one of these frames was printed onto a piece of paper, and then each had its own permutations and discrepancies from frame to frame. I found that very attractive and I started using this footage a lot, as I thought it was a good idea to use footage that was in the public domain. I became aware of the Fox Movietone Newsreel Outtakes in South Carolina when I was presenting the at a conference there - the Orphan Film Symposium. I understand this has now moved to New York, but in 1999 I was rifling through their collection and found two of the key images that I was to base Decasia around.

I first became aware of how beautiful deteriorated nitrate film stock could be from Peter Delpeut's 1992 film Lyrical Nitrate, and then to see this stuff undiscovered in the archive was a real visceral thrill for me. At the same time the composer Michael Gordon - my frequent collaborator who I had the opportunity to play this very theatre with 5 months ago - he'd been commissioned to write a full length symphony. I in turn was asked to provide a visual counter-balance to his as-yet unwritten symphony. So I told him about these images I'd found - deteriorating nitrate, feature film images - and he became very excited about the possibilities of a decaying symphony.

I started showing him clips over the course of the next two years, and eventually he gave me a MIDI sketch of the symphony and I made an assemblage to that. We recorded it in November of 2001 with a live symphony orchestra at its world premiere, and I then cut the film to that recording. It's made the festival circuit since then, and it's available through the BFI on DVD. We're going to look at a few minutes of Decasia, just so people have an idea of the different variety of decay. Then we'll come back and have a little discussion.

[Decasia excerpt]

GE  As that sequence shows, the nature of the decay is extraordinarily varied. I guess that was one of the fascinating things that drew you to it in the first place. You've spoken elsewhere about how you made the selection of images and sequences. I wonder if you could give us a sense of how you came to those choices. Some of them are relatively speaking very dramatic moments, while others are the smallest human moments. I wonder what guided your initial selection?

BM  I was trying to find something to push against this formal deterioration of the material. The most ironic case being man trying to somehow supercede his own mortality, and of course you can't walk into an archive and say "Do you have images of man trying to supercede his mortality?" You need to come up with ways that this might occur in old footage. So I made a list - of daredevils and lovers and people under the influence of one thing or another, religious fervour - and set about looking for any number of images where somehow man was trying to make his mark that would go past his life on this planet. At the same time, lapping at his heels at all times is this flame of deterioration that we see, of our own mortality, and of the mortality of film. That was the idea going in. Now the great luxury of working in this manner is that it allowed me quite a degree of latitude, and I could then make categories within that and from that, and throw the whole premise out if I needed to. Make match cuts - at one point I found that I was collecting lots of columns, like a colonnaded street, and so columns became symbolic of time as manifested in space. So there's a sequence where columns are match cut, and then you return to them.

I found that if I marshalled different types of animation one scene after another, it became somewhat fragmented. Not unlike Natural Born Killers, where you see eight different styles of filters or treatment, and then you see the same eight again, and it becomes rather exhausting to see that green Super-8 thing again. I was trying to avoid that trap, and instead put sentences together that showed the same type of decay. Of course it's quite easy to edit with decay, because at some point the image evaporates and you can cut. Those were some of the thoughts that I had in collecting this stuff, and then formally and in editing it.

GE  In the final chaptering of the film, we move from creation through civilisation, conundrum to disintegration and rebirth. Was that something that came out of the process itself?

BM  I did start with the premise that decay was not necessarily something to be feared, that it was a natural process and lo and behold it's quite beautiful. It started with an idea that there's great circularity in film. Not just in the film reels, but in what allows us to see it. There's great circularity in rediscovering these clips, and re-presenting them to a new audience with a new film and new music, that in a way I have salvaged bits and reincarnated them. I did feel like this film in its essence was a reincarnation or a rebirth of a series of films that were in the process of dying, or perhaps had already died in that nobody was looking at them any more. That premise was germane to the idea.

What I found was that there was a lot of circular imagery, whether it was old laboratories, people spinning wool, or whirling dervishes going in circles. There was a quite a lot of circular imagery and that became the bookends of the piece. In the middle, sort of beginning with the segment we saw here tonight, was the linear Western birth of a baby that was shot by Eisenstein, then grows up and gets on a school bus, and the school bus becomes a frontier wagon. You have this linear plunge into Western cinema man where decay is something to be feared. It's an endgame never to be returned from. I couched that attitude or that orientation within the film, but it's not the view that the film holds.

GE  The writer Lawrence Wescher has talked about Decasia being absolutely, more than any other film perhaps, a film of the moment, because it captures the exact experience of time. Up to the moment you salvaged and sourced those images, the very nature of decay is taken right up to that moment of encounter. Presumably these films are continuing to decay, are they?

BM  It's a rather romantic notion that I saved these things from their eventual decay. In some cases that's true, but in some cases they were saved as safety intermediates. In other words, the decay was frozen some years ago as a finegrain master in a museum. Some of these films, for instance the films from the George Eastman House, they actually put white booties on me, a robe and a hat, and there was a vacuum cleaner sucking up fumes, and they directed me to a can of hazardous materials that were awaiting pick-up. They said 'take anything out of there that you want, but you have to give us a preservation copy'. This seems a very generous notion, and in that case it did become a reclamation project. It also was exceedingly expensive for me to fulfil that for them. That varies from case to case.

In Weschler's idea everything's been saved from the precipice of disaster. Like I said it's a romantic notion, but there are archives that have taken it upon themselves to make a preservation master. With a lot of the stuff from South Carolina, it's been held in an artillery bunker in a very warm and humid part of the United States. That stuff is decaying faster than I could get to it. So I would find a video reference copy that was made maybe seven or eight years before I got to it, so maybe 1992 or 1993, and when we went back to the negative it was already sticking together to the degree that we couldn't use it. So in some cases I was too late. Film varies depending on the conditions and the money that the archive has to house it.

GE  Earlier in the day, from the catalogue notes setting up the Symposium structure, already there's an interesting pitch between - and I hope I'm not misquoting either of them - Steve Reinke's idea that movement and the still image of each frame are intimately related, that movement is implicit in the nature of film; whereas in the pages referring to this session, Kubelka's quote looks at film very differently in relation to each frame. He treats the idea of the stillness of each frame as the essential quality of film, of moving image. Given that decay is a process and not a state, I wonder how you think about this sort of primal relationship between the still image of each frame and the movement of film as an experience?

BM  Clearly film does move. Part of what's so heartbreaking about film is that if you do see a beautiful frame, it's gone the moment you register that you saw it. What interests me in this type of filmmaking, and maybe this can be brought out to include the entire genre that we're calling animation, is that you are aware of the distinct frame - but it's gone instantly. I believe that that's what makes photography and cinema - and it's been well written about in many essays - that's the difference. A photograph you hold, and it has a stare, and cinema keeps moving. I would have to hear the Kubelka quote to take issue with it properly. This type of filmmaking is just that - a series of images that are going by irrevocably, or so it would seem. They're moving into something else the next time we see them - that's the conceit.

What I played with in Decasia was film speed. All these images have been slowed down to the point where they even begin to approximate a slideshow. After you stretch an image, you see it four times. At 24 frames a second you're seeing it once; if you slow that down 50% you're seeing it twice. Some of these images have been slowed down up to 4 times, so you're seeing only 6 different images within a second. The feeling has lost its kinetic cinema magic; it's become a series of images that go by. That was something that interested me a lot, because I was very captivated with these individual frames as pictures. In subsequent work that I did with this kind of material, where it was necessary to slow it down that much, I would play with double-exposing it, so even though you were able to see an image for an appreciable amount of time, meaning 1/4 of a second, it was double-exposed with a successive frame so it didn't lose the quality of a fluid movement.

GE  In terms of your own work and your own progression from painting, this stillness of the canvas through to what you call subtractive animation where you directly distressed the image, frame by frame, with solvents and bleach and so on; then moving almost to hunter-gatherer in the archives... How has that process changed - and I presume it has in certain ways - your relationship to what film is, and what the moving image is capable of doing? Because they're such significant steps that you've made, all very active and interventionist to a certain degree. How do you think about what film is now, if you have come to a new point?

BM  As far as the archive goes, I've become somewhat more reverent, more hands-off, because I guess if there was something that bothered me about watching animation as an animator, it was just how much work a person put into it, which was ultimately distracting me from the work itself. The idea of a subtractive animation was that you would get some of this idea of these individual frames or individual paintings going by, without the feeling that a human hand had constructed each one of these. You mentioned some of the subtractive animation - I would put draino on films and that sort of thing, and then move each frame. Or just any sort of work with an optical printer was isolating each frame and photographing it back into a viewable reality. When I came upon Lyrical Nitrate and my own work in the archives, I became - I hesitate to use the word 'religious' - but it was this idea that there was an organic nature that was going on, a process that was quite beyond the human hand. It was fascinating and it was achieving the same thing, so I found that my task was more research-oriented and topic-oriented, rather than interventionist.

GE  I think we should think about what the implications of this are for digital imagery and the archive in a larger sense. If I open it up now, are there any comments or questions? I know that we have curators and archivists and animation experts of all hue in the audience. Are there any initial thoughts or responses to the clips, or to anything that Bill has said?

Audience member  Was any of the original source material in a dangerous state - explosive, or flammable or tricky to handle?

BM  Certainly the stuff at the Eastman House was hazardous, sticky and had a lot of noxious fumes. Much is made of how nitrate can explode at any given moment, and certainly if it does catch on fire there's no way of putting it out. It will burn when submerged under water. But to get it on fire, you really have to have a fire. What it really becomes is just a pain to deal with. It gets sticky and it will form a donut and eventually what they call a hockey puck - this is heavy archive terminology here - and then will turn into dust. It seems like every archivist is fascinated with the idea of the fire, and there's some sort of attraction to this, so that almost anywhere I went, they would take me into a room and take a little clip and put it in the film can and light it on fire and sure enough it would burn, but I didn't feel like there was a danger of that happening.

Now, I would bring nitrate prints into labs where they weren't insured to handle nitrate, and I was treated like a pariah. I would come in with a backpack full of old films and say "I've got these six rolls of nitrate", and they would be like "LEAVE! Get out of here!!" More than anything, it's just that it's really nasty stuff. As it powders and flakes up, the little pieces of microscopic stuff can get into your eye, and that can form a stye or whatever. Whenever you deal with it, you're covered up like you're dealing with nuclear waste or something like that.

Audience member  I believe what we're seeing tonight is a video version of the film. I assume that your master was made on film film. Do you see a difference between the two? Is the film version in your view the definitive master of Decasia?

BM  Decasia as a piece obviously owes much to the music. So I would consider the definitive master to be a film projection, and it would also be with a live 55 piece orchestra. Instead of everyone being oriented to watch the film with this blaring music going by, you'd be invited to walk around the room to watch these 55 musicians playing, while the film was playing all around you. We've only had the opportunity to do that four or five times, but that would be the definitive version. That's how it was created, with that in mind. It became an edited film for theatrical after the fact. Speaking more to your point, there were these cases where we would go back to the archive, as I mentioned before, and the negative just wouldn't be available. In those cases the video reference copy became the master and I did tape to film on certain scenes, so you will see video original within the film. To me it's pretty obvious where that is.

Audience member  Right. In the film master, is there evident grain or residues or artifacts that we won't see in the video copy?

BM  No, the video copy is just a straight copy of the film. Of course the grain is much finer in film, and I invite you all to see the Friday screening, because there's another rhythm and that's the pulsing of film grain, as I'm sure we're all familiar with.

Audience member  Kevin Brownlow and several other archivists talk very reverently about nitrate that hasn't decayed, and how that looks in comparison with later film stocks. I'm curious if you've had much chance to look at undecayed nitrate, and what your response was to that.

BM  Of course within any of these frames there is part of the frame that isn't decayed, and that was a big part of my fascination, starting with Lyrical Nitrate. Because nitrate film stock holds more silver than our common safety stocks do, they do have greater definition. It's almost like seeing a glass negative or something like that. You have exquisite definition and then that's violently interrupted by this combustible medium. Nitrate film stock, for those of you who don't know, is comprised of a number of things including cotton, nitric acid, sulphur and camphor - and these are the chief ingredients of gunpowder. So it's essentially an explosive. You have this pristineness of an archival image rendered more beautifully than we can see on a piece of the most modern Kodak stock you can buy today; it looks even cleaner than that, and it's fending off the apocalyptic medium that it's been exposed onto. So that was a real fascination for me in pursuing this project.

Audience member  That's interesting - to me at some points it almost looked like a montage, reminiscent of some sort of B-movie as if there was a coming apocalypse or radiation that people weren't aware of. Like a montage scene, linking the different moments of some apocalypse that they didn't know about.

BM  We're all probably experiencing an apocalypse now that we're not aware of. That's in my view our survivalist instinct. These people didn't realise that they were going to be viewed by us years later. None of them are probably still alive - maybe some of these kids on the school bus perhaps - with the overriding notion that things are happening to us and we're oblivious.

Audience member  How much of the film is natural deterioration stock that you've found, and how much have you actually manipulated? Do you intend to let the decaying process continue with the film that you've now produced on 35mm?

BM  In all cases I didn't accentuate or interfere with the image. In these cases where the video became the master I had the option of bringing it out, making a contrast, but I didn't add decay to it. As I said earlier, that's stuff I've done before in the early 1990s in some of my titles. I've been an interventionist and destroyed films, but the premise here was looking at how that had happened organically. It's an interesting question you ask about what I will do with the prints. Obviously they're sitting in my apartment, and I imagine every time they get shown they begin to deteriorate a little bit more. I'm fairly happy with the fact that the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, and a couple of other places like the Netherlands Film Museum, own copies that have been held in 6-degree vaults and will outlive me. I'm happy with the process. I think it's been retarded to a degree that fulfils my fantasy about the film.

GE  I wonder if we could think a little bit more, Bill, about this idea you raised just a couple of minutes ago about how the film would ideally be experienced. It raises questions about the experiential nature of the image, as well as obviously the viewing of it. This idea of wandering around, picking up glimpses of it maybe through the musicians - that's quite important to you, isn't it? The idea of the experiential nature of watching paralleling the experiential image. Is that something that you are taking forward? How do you think about it now, having made the work, and whether that changes fundamentally how you want the film to be viewed?

BM  It's just hard to march around with 55 musicians. I'm trying to do it now, I'm trying to produce the show again with all these musicians positioned all around the audience in the room. No matter how much money you get, you'll always need twice that to do it. What I'm talking about there is Decasia the event. I started out making this piece together with Michael Gordon, and when it gets put into a box that you can put into a DVD player or watch on a screen, all of a sudden it becomes just a film. It's a film with a very very overbearing soundtrack, which also makes it different than other films.

In a  way, there's a forcefulness to Decasia that wasn't its original intention. It was always rigorous, but it was a rigor that existed within a room, and it was as much about the audience dealing with those 64 minutes. I went out on the festival circuit with the film fairly quickly after that initial performance. People lined up to leave on its initial performance at the Sundance Film Festival. While the film was going on they were trying to get out the door. It was rather shocking to me, but the people who stayed were the people you wanted asking questions at the end of the screening.

For them, there were these very long shots and this rather challenging music. There was nowhere for them to go. They couldn't watch a scene of camels traversing the screen for 2 and a half minutes and think only about camels. They had to think about themselves and their lives, and I don't know, whether they left their laundry in the dryer or not. Whatever it was, their mind was being forced to wander. That's been a big part of what I feel the experience of watching this film is about - a meditation, whether you're ready for it or not. There is a forcefulness to it that I recognise as challenging to a lot of audiences. That's been its calling card and also what's made it difficult for other people to get into it.

GE  On the box of the DVD, Kenneth Anger - who's appearing at the London Film Festival in a couple of weeks - describes the film as; "Compelling and disturbing. Swimming symphonies of baroque beauty emerge from corrosive nitrate disintegration as rockets of annihilation demolish cathedrals of reality". That final phrase seems to touch on a very strong quality of the film, about the idea of film as dream as well as documented experience. In an interview, you've raised the question of how we dream, given the invention of cinema, and how the nature of human dreaming has probably changed over the last hundred or so years, given the creation of these images.

BM  Pure conjecture.

GE  I think probably highly likely, perhaps. But in terms of this idea of dreaming and Decasia, there is this strange tension isn't there, because the presentation of the image, the nature of the decay, and the assemblage that you've given to it, containing as it does this very real human experience, does set up this very strange tension between of what film can do at either end of its spectrum. How conscious was that idea of this 'dreamscape'?

BM  The film is set up like an onion. The opening scene that we saw in this clip of the whirling dervish, I thought that the film was his dream. Then within that, you have a Japanese woman drifting off to sleep, who is then awoken at the end of the film. These are dreams that we have forgotten we have had, collectively. We have forgotten about a number of these films. Maybe film scholars can recognise some there, but for the most part these are clips that have gone by the wayside, but think of all the work that has gone into making these shoots. For a newspaper reporter to be out just blowing through rolls and rolls of 35mm, for nobody ever to watch them... maybe a little bit was used in a newsreel somewhere, but for the most part these might have never even been viewed by the people who shot them or paid for them.

I think about the archive then as housing these memories that are unremembered. What you're made to realise is that there's a host of these things out there. This is just a random sampling of cool ones.

GE  Animation, the word itself is etymologically centred around life, the giving of life, the breathing into of life, and this clearly is 'animation' in that sense because it's animating the dead on one level, giving them back some temporary breathing, some fleeting existence. In terms of the Festival here and the Symposium today, looking at what happens witrh found material, do you conceive of this as animation? You came yourself from a form of animation by your own description - did you think that you were an animator when you were doing this?

BM  That's a good question. I guess I didn't go around telling people I was making an animated film. I did know I was on to something good, and that it was taking what Delpeut did to - I wouldn't say another level, but another place. The treatment of the images was such that you were very much aware that you were looking at death, that you were looking at death resurrected. When these characters look through the screen at you, you realise that you're looking at ghosts. Maybe I was re-vivifying or something like that.

At the same time, we have these moments like we saw in the clip, where everything pixellates and comes together and looks very much like some kind of odd animation. When they guy shakes his foot and there's a whole cloud of disintegration behind him that's there strictly by chance... I guess that would be the operative difference. Animation to me has always seemed so intentional, and with this there is the discovery of great whimsy, of coincidence. It is if anything a collection of remarkable coincidences.

GE  The other thing it also is, is an expression of moving image right out at one of its limits, one of its furthest edges if you think of it in a cosmic sense. How do you follow such a work, if you do? If you think of the trajectory of your own work from painting through to the deliberately distressed image into this, how do you conceive of Decasia as part of your onward progress? Because you've taken one kind of image as far as it can possibly go.

BM  Oh my! So I should retire?

GE  It's more in a theoretical and practical sense I guess, this idea of testing the image to such a degree - in what it can contain, how much of the image survives both physically and thematically... It obviously raises questions for everyone practicing with the moving image, how they encounter such work, about what film is for, what it can do in a philosophical sense.

BM  Your question is a difficult one, because I'm not exactly sure what the next chapter in my career is. I'm still very fascinated with this type of footage, so I'm open to it evolving. Everything leading up to Decasia was incremental steps to get there, so I'm open to those incremental steps leading me somewhere else. What's been the luxury of my career is that I haven't ever needed to know where it's going. I have been allowed to let those steps lead me where they will.

Last week we were doing a retrospective in Cork. There were three nights, and the second night was Decasia, with the first night everything before it and the third night everything after. On the third night there was quite a bit of deteriorated footage still there, but there was also a lot of old footage that wasn't deteriorated, where I had access to the original negatives. I was dealing with dupe negative that had no positive intermediary at all. So in a way I have gained access to the archive that I didn't have before.

When I called up archives trying to make Decasia and said, "Do you have any deteriorated film?", they'd be like 'NO!!' and slam the phone down. It was almost like asking to see people's dirty laundry. I've been welcomed into certain archives more as an archaeologist, so that's given me access to explore what's there. I'm interested in shooting still; anything I can do to try to push the form. We're going into a new media now. Decasia was cut on a flatbed, but everything since then has been on Final Cut. Just like cinema affected our dreams, I think digital imagery has the potential to affect the way we see the world as well. I know that most of us through our lifetimes are given to experiencing the way media is used to communicate in a way that our parents weren't. Things that make sense to us might not make sense to our parents. I think this is an evolution - I'm not necessarily talking about quick cuts and wild and crazy stuff, just a way of juxtaposing things. Like I said, I'm not exactly sure what my next major project will be, but I'm fairly confident that it will have something to do with the form.

GE  Are you drawn to digital decay and tape decay, in the more recent past?

BM  It's not as seductive. I'm sometimes repelled by it - when something's supposed to work and it just doesn't. There seems to be very little middle ground in digital decay. It's either a one or a zero, whereas with analogue decay you can at least pass it over a head - whether it performs or not the way we expect it to. I was showing The Mesmeris, which was a short film using deteriorated film that I had transferred to DVD, and I was showing it at a lecture and it did one of those crazy DVD things where it started skipping all over the place. Of course this was in a room full of graduate students, and they said 'Aah, but this is actually taking what you've done to the next level. How can you discredit what the DVD player is doing?'
I wasn't prepared to go there.

GE  Any more comments or thoughts on the day as it has progressed?

Audience member  I was wondering if you could talk a bit about destruction, because a lot of what you've talked about with Decasia is saving material. So I wonder about the material that's been destroyed, and the ethics of what you choose to save in comparison to what's lost of this older material. Should we do that or should we allow it to disappear and disintegrate? The images of these people, these ghosts of people we don't know, maybe these images should disappear, and we shouldn't be looking at them any more.

BM  It seems to be passing some sort of moralistic idea of the sanctity of these images, I don't know.

Audience member  Well, in the same way as saying they're saved, shouldn't we then allow some things to be destroyed? I know that your project is not to restore all these works, and in some way it's an intervention in between those two states.

BM  It's maybe just delaying them from being destroyed. I don't in any way think that I've saved anything. In some cases all I've saved is a piece of film that was decaying, and was going to be thrown away because there was a sister print next to it on the shelf that was absolutely pristine. So they don't need the decaying print, that one's going to get thrown away. In those cases that print would get sent to a lab and copied so that I could use it and then return it to the archive where it was disposed of. What I've saved there is the thing that's going to be thrown away. Given the beauty of that thing, that was something to save. I'm not sure whether we can sit here and say these people should or shouldn't be seen. They are seen. If these films were all a number of coincidences that were discovered, then I'm one more coincidence, and you as a viewer are another coincidence, and we don't really have control over that. Just like we don't have control over at what point they're no longer viewable.

Audience member  What was your involvement in the production of the score?

BM  Very little. Michael Gordon and I had worked together on a theatre project. I'm part of a theatre company in New York called Ridge Theatre, and we had produced a chamber opera of his in 1998, and another one in 1999, which incidentally will be remounted in Liverpool next week. It's called The Carbon Copy Building. When we were performing The Carbon Copy Building in Turin in 1999, a young symphony manager who had been awarded the European Music Month Grant, approached Michael and said 'We want to commission you to write a full-length symphony, and we have enough money that you can also have whatever trappings you want'.

So naturally he asked us, his collaborators of the last two years, to participate with him. We had absolutely no idea what the theme would be, but like I said, the same month I came back from South Carolina having seen, for those of you who are familiar with Decasia, the scene where the boxer is boxing ostensibly the right hand side of the frame - which is a glob of mould, and then a sequence with nuns passing through this very spooky courtyard. So I said, "Look, if we can find these two images the first day out, I'm sure I can make an entire film out of decayed imagery".

Like I said earlier, Michael liked this idea. He's a very private person as am I, and we work almost in complete solitude. We would have meetings every three to six months, where I could show him clips that I had collected, but I really didn't hear any music until the spring of 2001, which was about 18 months later, where he played for me the last coda of Decasia, which I thought was very beautiful. He didn't quite know whether it was the last coda or where the piece began, but I was very moved by it and then I made him an assemblage of images I'd collected over that summer, and then he gave me this entire MIDI rendering of the symphony in I guess August of 2001. Over the course of September and October 2001 I edited to that, and re-edited once we were able to make the recording of a live symphony doing it. So I became an executive producer of that recording, in that I insisted that we bring in a recording team to record it in 5:1 surround sound, and put up a third of the money for that team to do it so in return I could use the master recording for my film. That was my involvement.

Audience member  You touched on this briefly before I think, in terms of new media. Looking at that now, nitrate film is this beautiful, poetic medium that disintegrates before your eyes. Do you think people are going to have the same strength of feeling towards new media, say some clip on your mobile phone that won't work, or some file you can't open on your computer, that has never really existed separate from the technology used to both create and exhibit it? Or are we going to start fetishizing USB sticks and SD cards and have boxes of them in the attic?

BM  It's certainly not as romantic a notion is it? To a certain extent we already do that, with whatever videotape now is defunct, or old cassettes that we had in school - they house an entire catalogue of music that we probably don't listen to any more. I think it's less about the decay than about a medium changing. The decay is germane to nitrate in that it looks interesting. My point earlier was that decay in these new media is apocalyptic. I've had the experience of having to send a drive in for surgery, and what you get back is your material returned to you, so that switch was put back on. I don't know if we can fetishize what we can longer have - we can curse it, or curse the fact that we don't have it any more.

What's happening with new media I think is that we're very young. We don't really know. It seems to be taking off in a direction where to think of it as existing on a 3 by 4 screen is quite limiting. It's now becoming quite ubiquitous, and the idea of us sitting in chairs to look at something might be in outmoded fashion. I don't know where it's going and I'm not the most forward-thinking new media guy obviously. It seems to be going away from theatrical presentation and into some sort of locality specific to the person.

GE  You can buy Decasia in the festival shop in the foyer here, but obviously it's ideal to see it on Friday at 8pm at the Puppet Theatre, where it's going to be screening with Film of Her.

BM  Film of Her takes the story of the Paper Prints and weaves a new story using old clips. Maybe more importantly, my favourite film of my own is an eight minute short called 'Light is Calling' which I made after Decasia, and it's also got Michael's music. To see that in 35mm is to me still a treat, so I urge you guys to try to check that out.

GE  We'd like to thank Adam, Kelly and James here, and everyone at the Festival for hosting the event and for the ongoing programmes in the days to come. Please do now join me in thanking Bill Morrison.

[applause]

Transcribed by Anna Lee
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