ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on the nexus of film, time, and materiality. Film is, by default, seen as a representation of time – Decasia goes a decisive step further by focussing on the temporality of or in the filmic material.

Put together from found footage and archive material in various states of ‘dying’, this film reveals the ‘collaboration’ of time and matter as in itself ‘ creative’ and ultimately produces a category that one might call the matter-image and that neither Deleuze's movement-image, nor his time-image completely grasp: here, time and matter produce their own filmic image.

KEYWORDS

Gilles Deleuze, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Charles Sanders Peirce

Bill Morrison's Decasia (2002) can be located in the tradition of the American avant-garde or experimental film of the 1960s and 1970s. A main characteristic of this tradition is its focus on the filmic material and on the structure of film. Filmmakers such as Bruce Connor, Robert Breer, and Tony Conrad worked with the concept of flicker-film that undermined classic filmic temporality (and its concomitant continuity-effect) – 24 frames per second – and experimented with various tempi. Andy Warhol rediscovered early cinema's stylistic device of the ‘static camera’ and made duration the explicit topic of films such as Empire, Sleep, and Eat. Ken Jacobs, George Landow, and others utilized the concept of found footage for the experimental film, while Stan Brakhage produced films completely without a camera, by what Peirce would have called ‘indexical’ procedures – putting objects directly on the filmstrip to be processed, by painting or scratching on its surface, for example. It was Brakhage's self-expressed aim to decouple the filmic image from its hegemonic relation to memory, to deconstruct the images’ representational character and to create a ‘sense of constant present-tense’ (Brakhage 2005, 210) – not a representation of the past, but a presentation of temporalities or of durations. Common to all these experiments was the desire to make the filmic material itself – under ‘classic circumstances’ invisible due to the ideal of the transparency of the medium according to which film is ‘the material base that must be dematerialized in projection’ (Stewart 1999, 3) – visible and fruitful as a fundamental component of the filmic process.