The Dying-image: On Bill Morrison’s Decasia and Tributes-Pulse

Abstract

This article analyzes two films by Bill Morrison (Decasia and Tributes-Pulse) to demonstrate how they allow us to conceive the idea of a dying-image, that is, an image that exposes aging and death as forces directly inscribed in its own material support (the film reel). To do this, we divide the text into three parts. In the first part, we aim to situate Morrison's cinema as an aesthetic challenge to André Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image, which regards film as a “mummy of change” or as a perennial record of things and time. In fact, because Morrison's works use images extracted from highly degraded nitrate films, they ultimately reveal the perishable nature of the filmic object, thus opposing any theory that suggests its immortality. In a second stage, we will examine how Decasia constitutes an archaeological study of death, seeking to bring to the surface of the image the forces of destruction that lie at its bottom. We will argue that this film stages the constant battle between life and death, thus offering an unintended commentary on Georg Simmel’s metaphysics of death, where the two terms are defined as opposites that mutually implicate one another. This mutual intertwining of life and death is what Decasia translates into dying-images, which, as we will see, uncover death as a power that is both destructive and constructive, as it disintegrates matter while also ensuring its transformation. Finally, in the third part of the article, we will show how Tributes-Pulse puts its dying-images at the service of a vision of death that, in contrast to Decasia, emphasizes its dissolutive nature. This vision is reflected, moreover, in the film's circular narrative structure, which essentially takes the viewer from the ruin of the image to the image of ruin.