Decasia

Monism versus dualism: Morrison breaks the (metaphysical) dichotomy of content and form, soul and body - the destruction of film material perfectly merges with the decay of what is being portrayed. People captured on film already died before the only thing that remains of them is dissolved by time. It is not because this is old, discovered footage of people who have necessarily already passed away due to chronology, but because Morrison (in the best moments of his film) chooses completely ordinary, universally human, and typically human moments. Moments in which death is present. Hence the feeling of melancholic distress: the viewer senses that they are not watching a film, but looking into a mirror that distorts the same way as sequences of blissful lover's embraces. Human life consists only of clichés, which repeat themselves endlessly and continually rot on countless reels of randomly dug-up found footage, and therefore it doesn't matter whether it is the signifier or the signified, the film, or the person that is decaying. (06/09/2016)