Bill Morrison – Light is Calling (2004)
Light is Calling draw from a ‘deteriorated’ film, The Bells (James Young, 1926). It has sections where the condition of celluloid deterioration is such that the original image is barely recognizable. That being said the celluloid ‘state of decay’ impacts greatly on the overall sensorial experience of the film. In Light is Calling all that we can make out from the extreme deterioration are shots of officers on horseback riding through the woods, and a young woman with long braids who is found and aided by the officers at the end of the film. No matter how great or advanced the distortion and deterioration, there is one inevitable constant: the distortion is always in the foreground of the image. This leads to an equally interesting ‘formal’ and stylistic quality, because regardless of how flat the original footage may have been, the distortion introduces an element of ‘depth’ and ‘texture’ to the frame. This is especially noticeable in Light is Calling, where the characters (the horseback officers and the woman) always appear to be ‘behind’ something. For example, in one scene we see the woman in long shot and, because of the formation of the deterioration, she appears to be peering through what looks like a fire or a cloud formation. The greatly deteriorated passages where the film stock seems cindered and scorched, at times appearing like a moving Rorschach chart or Mandelbrot set, recalls Stan Brakhage’s hand painted films as well as his theory of “closed eye” vision. The visceral nature of the imagery also reminded me of a live performance piece by two German multi-media artists (Alchemie) during the 1997 FCMM, where they literally poured chemicals and compounds onto a film loop before it passed by the projector lens, throwing an unpredictable and volatile series of light and color patterns onto a wall, and culminating with the projector catching fire. For The Light is Calling Bill Morrison uses a composition written exclusively for the film by Michael Gordon, a score which has an organic relationship to the image track: the pitch and rhythm of Gordon’s haunting combination of an undulating electronic loop and high pitched violin is a perfect harmony to Light is Calling’s overall sense of a spiritual or transcendental rise.
bill.morrison-light.is.calling.(2004).avi 
