Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Aesthetics of the Archive: An Introduction
- Chapter 1 Drafts and Fragments: Reflections around Bill Morrison and the Paper Print Collection
- Chapter 2 The Film of Her: The Cine-Poet Laureate of Orphan Films
- Chapter 3 Ghost Trip: Searching for Potential Myths
- Chapter 4 Decasia: The Matter | Image: Film is also a Thing
- Chapter 5 The Mesmerist: Illustrating the Return of the Repressed
- Chapter 6 Light is Calling: Celluloid Dreams
- Chapter 7 Gotham: Zoetrope: Block by Block
- Chapter 8 Outerborough: Early Cinema Revisited
- Chapter 9 The Highwater Trilogy: Thinking the Liquid – On the Ethics of Water and the Material Ecologies of Disaster and Ruination
- Chapter 10 Porch: Archives, Collective Memory, and the Poetics of Home Movies
- Chapter 11 The Future Lasts Long: The Romanov Lost Family Archives
- Chapter 12 Who by Water: Variations on Matter, Figures, Memory, and Mythology
- Chapter 13 Every Stop on the F-Train: Beyond and within the Restless Netherworld of (Manhattan’s) Mind
- Chapter 14 Spark of Being: Bachelor Machine
- Chapter 15 The Miners’ Hymns: Acts of Resurrection
- Chapter 16 Tributes – Pulse: A Requiem for the 20th Century: Death | Drive | Image
- Chapter 17 Just Ancient Loops: The Loops of Life in Intonation
- Chapter 18 The Great Flood: Water is Transparence Derived from the Presence of Everything
- Chapter 19 Re-Awakenings: Bill Morrison in Conversation
- Index of Film Titles
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
- Already Published
Chapter 2 - The Film of Her: The Cine-Poet Laureate of Orphan Films
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Aesthetics of the Archive: An Introduction
- Chapter 1 Drafts and Fragments: Reflections around Bill Morrison and the Paper Print Collection
- Chapter 2 The Film of Her: The Cine-Poet Laureate of Orphan Films
- Chapter 3 Ghost Trip: Searching for Potential Myths
- Chapter 4 Decasia: The Matter | Image: Film is also a Thing
- Chapter 5 The Mesmerist: Illustrating the Return of the Repressed
- Chapter 6 Light is Calling: Celluloid Dreams
- Chapter 7 Gotham: Zoetrope: Block by Block
- Chapter 8 Outerborough: Early Cinema Revisited
- Chapter 9 The Highwater Trilogy: Thinking the Liquid – On the Ethics of Water and the Material Ecologies of Disaster and Ruination
- Chapter 10 Porch: Archives, Collective Memory, and the Poetics of Home Movies
- Chapter 11 The Future Lasts Long: The Romanov Lost Family Archives
- Chapter 12 Who by Water: Variations on Matter, Figures, Memory, and Mythology
- Chapter 13 Every Stop on the F-Train: Beyond and within the Restless Netherworld of (Manhattan’s) Mind
- Chapter 14 Spark of Being: Bachelor Machine
- Chapter 15 The Miners’ Hymns: Acts of Resurrection
- Chapter 16 Tributes – Pulse: A Requiem for the 20th Century: Death | Drive | Image
- Chapter 17 Just Ancient Loops: The Loops of Life in Intonation
- Chapter 18 The Great Flood: Water is Transparence Derived from the Presence of Everything
- Chapter 19 Re-Awakenings: Bill Morrison in Conversation
- Index of Film Titles
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
- Already Published
Summary
ABSTRACT
Despite its brief running time, Bill Morrison's The Film of Her is a cabinet of curiosities packed with fleeting glimpses of silent monochromatic movies, wrapped in an elliptical narrative about an unnamed library clerk's search for unnamed footage showing an unnamed woman he has desired since seeing her on screen in his boyhood. She is an avant-gardist's MacGuffin, however, a mystery that need not be solved because the film's true purpose is to revel in the oneiric qualities of early cinema artifacts. As such, The Film of Her offers an opportunity to examine how the work of Bill Morrison has intersected with the work of film preservation professionals in the digital era.
KEYWORDS
film preservation, Library of Congress, orphan films, Paper Print Collection
In 1999, near the end of its successful run at more than 50 international film festivals, The Film of Her, which Bill Morrison premiered at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence in 1996, played to a different type of audience. Rather than screening for festival-goers, Morrison presented his short cine-poem to an admixture of film preservationists, archivists, scholars, artists, curators, collectors, technical experts, librarians, researchers, stock footage vendors, critics, students, and self-selected enthusiasts. Morrison's participation in the inaugural Orphan Film Symposium at the University of South Carolina (USC) had a fortuitous and beneficial impact on both the artist and his audience. His interaction with scores of archivists proved an entrée to vast new moving image resources that enhanced one of his signature techniques (the thematic harvesting of archival film excerpts) and accelerated another (the assemblage of beautifully decaying nitrate film fragments). Further, his presentation of The Film of Her at the 1999 symposium helped to spark interactions among archivists, scholars, and artists that led to what soon came to be called an orphan film movement. As that movement has grown, Morrison remains an active part of it, becoming an unofficial cine-poet laureate.
More particularly, and beyond the artistic realm, Morrison's continuing interaction with the Library of Congress moving image archivists in the 21st century has impacted preservation and curatorial practice. More than 20 years after The Film of Her, we now know more about the historical events behind Morrison's fictive narrative and its unnamed protagonist.
- Type
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- Information
- The Films of Bill MorrisonAesthetics of the Archive, pp. 51 - 68Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017