The article "A Imagem-Morrente: Sobre Decasia e Tributes-Pulse, de Bill Morrison" ["The Dying-Image: On Bill Morrison's Decasia and Tributes-Pulse"] has just been published in the latest issue of Aniki (https://aim.org.pt/ojs/index.php/revista/article/view/1111). This essay reflects on Bill Morrison's work through the concept of the "dying-image"—an image that gives visibility to the process of degradation inscribed in its own material support, the cinematic film. The analysis focuses on two of his films, Decasia and Tributes-Pulse, exploring how both challenge André Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image, which considers cinema as a device for the mummification of things and time. By using footage from severely deteriorated nitrate films, Morrison highlights the vulnerability of the film medium, questioning the supposed permanence or immortality of the cinematic image. Divided into three parts, the article first situates Morrison's cinema within the context of this aesthetic challenge. It then discusses Decasia as the staging of an unceasing battle between the forces of life and death, relating the film to Georg Simmel’s metaphysics of death. Finally, it demonstrates how—through its circular structure—Tributes-Pulse emphasizes dissolution as the inescapable fate of images and things. In this movement, the article seeks to deepen the debate on the ontological status of the cinematic image and how the materiality of film conditions its meaning.
Read it here
📸 Decasia [2002], by Bill Morrison
