Close-Up: Decasia
Tuesday December 13th, 20h
Bethnal Green Working Men's Club
42-44 Pollard Row London E2 6NB

Close-Up presents three films which use decaying and intensively altered footage to haunting effect, Carl E.Brown's Air Cries "Empty water" and Bill Morrison's Decasia. Using archival, found and original footage, each film produces an uncanny feeling that echoes dreamlike moods and textures, not only through the images depicted but also by the transformation of their vehicle: the surface of the film itself.

Tuesday 13 December 20h:
- Decasia: The State Of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2002, USA, 66 mins, B/W, DV)

Decasia is composed entirely of decaying, nitrate-based archival footage. But Decasia does more than merely celebrate the psychedelic beauty of decay, as Morrison has deliberately chosen images which seem to push back against their own physical disintegration. This inspiring, haunting tapestry of long lost, partially erased images – nuns leading a slow-moving cortege of schoolchildren, the rescue of a man from drowning, a boxer relentlessly targeting his mysteriously obliterated opponent – testifies not only to the fragile nature of film but to the transience of all human endeavour. Set to an eerie symphonic score by Michael Gordon, Decasia reminds us, as Morrison himself puts it, of the many dreams we forget upon waking.