Sunken Films

Dir: Bill Morrison

On 7 May 1915, the British passenger ship RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat, six days after it left New York. It killed nearly 1,200 passengers and crew. All the films kept in the cinema on Lusitania sunk to the ocean floor, including the lost feature The Carpet from Baghdad (1915). One of the reels of the film was salvaged in 1982, and it leads Morrison to the stories of Lusitania and other films that have been lost at sea.

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.