Movies: Bill Morrison

The true history of a collection of some 500 films dating from 1910s to 1920s, which were lost for over 50 years until being discovered buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool deep in the Yukon Territory, in Dawson City, located about 350 miles south of...

A meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality, constructed from decaying archival footage and set to an original symphonic score....

A scene from The Bells (1926) is optically reprinted and edited to Michael Gordon's 7 minute composition. A meditation on the fleeting nature of life and love, as seen through the roiling emulsion of a film....

Alan is a musician who leaves a busted-up band for New York, and a new musical voyage. He tries to stay focused and fends off all manner of distractions, including the attraction to his good friend's girlfriend....

Chicago, 2018. A man is killed by police on the street. Through a composite montage of images from surveillance and security footage as well as police body-cams, Incident recreates the event and its consequences, featuring vain justifications, alterc...

The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in American history. In the spring of 1927, the river broke out of its banks in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles to a depth of up to 30 feet. Part of it enduring leg...

A response in music and film to the conflict that launched a century of war, and a celebration of the power of art to keep us sane and offer us comfort. Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 brings together three of the world's most pioneering artists: the Kronos ...

Original Super 8 footage shot by Dr. Oliver Sacks of his patients at Beth Abraham Hospital, Bronx, NY, who were administered the drug L-Dopa in the summer of 1969 and “awakened” after decades of inactivity is featured in this cine-poem that combines ...

Singer-songwriter Slink Moss plays the mysterious driver of a Cadillac hearse who journeys across America to pick up and drop off a hitchhiker to his (final?) destination. The nearly-wordless film stylishly re-imagines the open road as a state of Lim...

Based on the story of Howard Walls, A clerk at the Library of Congress who saved a collection of early paper reel films from the incinerator, director Bill Morrison embellishes the tale a bit in this inspired short work. Here, the vision of a woman...

On March 17, 1930, a crowd assembled outside Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary in hopes of witnessing Al Capone's release from prison. Morrison and Vijay Iyer turn a single archival panning shot of that scene - origianally filmed in 1930 by J...

Divided into three sections, Bill Morrison's The Highwater Trilogy examines our relationship to the threat of natural disaster by combining archival footage of icebergs, hurricanes, and floods with a soundtrack by David Lang and Michael Gordon....

Shapeshifting between stardom and anonymity, an unhinged musician navigates a hyperreal combination of live action and animation daydreams in a struggle to release his first album....

In 1899, a photographer at American Mutoscope & Biograph mounted his camera on the front of a trolley traveling over the Brooklyn Bridge. The three 90-foot rolls he created were edited together to complete the journey from Manhattan to Brooklyn, enti...

A home-movie portrait of an ordinary American family, taken over many years and framed in the porch of their house....

An early Bill Morrison short, in this work he traverses an urban landscape utilizing high contrast black and white footage. The bustling nature of the setting is complimented by the energetic music by Michael Gordon....

Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Iceland, July 9, 2016. The surprising discovery of a canister —containing four reels of The Village Detective (Деревенский детектив), a 1969 Soviet film—, caught in the nets of an Icelandic trawler, is the first step ...

Bill Morrison’s experimental short features decayed film reels from the lost, German silent film Pawns of Passion (1928)....

'Just Ancient Loops' employs high resolution scans of ancient nitrate footage, as well as newly created CGI renderings of space to depict different views of heaven....

In 1924, Jewish tradesmen in the newly-formed Soviet Union relocated to the Ukraine, Belarus and Crimea to form farming colonies. The film is of a tour to survey the so-called “Agro-Joint colonies” by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,...