Cinematograph

Dir: Bill Morrison

In 1895, one of the inventors of cinema, the Lumière brothers improved the shooting cum projection apparatus, and named it Cinématographe. The footage in this film was from a nitrate film of the Lumières talking about their device thirty years later, shot in the Lumière’s laboratory in Lyon, France. The film has been stored in several facilities since it was first shot in 1925, and all the degradation to the image is a result of its natural decomposition.

Bill Morrison (1965-)
Based in New York, Morrison makes films that reframe long-forgotten moving images. He made over forty works since the 1990s by using archival materials or pre-existing sources with original music. His films have premiered at the New York, Rotterdam, Sundance, and Venice film festivals. In 2014 Morrison had a midcareer retrospective at MoMA. Since his found footage opus Decasia (2002), he has shown particular interest in the motif of decomposition of film materials.