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Visionary filmmaker Bill Morrison regularly collaborates with Bang on a Can co-founder and composer Michael Gordon, and Cornell Cinema has previously shown their best known work, Decasia: The State of Decay, a feature-length avant-garde visual symphony, which sets decaying archival film footage to an original symphonic score by Gordon. Another one of their collaborations, Light is Calling, will be presented on Saturday night as part of the Light in Winter Festival's Bang on a Can All-Stars event at the State Theatre. Tonight, Cornell Cinema will present a program of some of Morrison's collaborations with Bang on a Can composers, as well as with other composer/musicians, including Bill Frisell.
Tonight's program:
Light is Calling (8 min, 35mm, 2004)
Soundtrack by Michael Gordon
"A single scene from a deteriorating print of James Young's The Bells (1926) is optically printed and re-edited to Gordon's haunting score." -Bill Morrison
The Film of Her (12 min, 35mm, 1996)
Soundtrack by Bill Frisell and Henryk Gorecki
"One of Morrison's most outstanding works, a personal, cerebral, yet
moving experimental-documentary about the forgotten legacy of the
Library of Congress clerk, Howard L. Walls, who rediscovered the paper
print collection in 1939, which enabled Kemp Niver to restore them to
safety acetate stock in the early 1950s." - Donato Totaro
The Highwater Trilogy (31 min, 35mm, 2006)
Soundtrack by David Lang and Michael Gordon. Libretto by Deborah Artman
Before I Enter
How To Pray
What We Build
"Ancient newsreel footage of storms, floods and icebergs produce a
combination of anxiety and awe when viewed in the wake of recent
meteorological disasters." -Bill Morrison
The Mesmerist (16 min, 35mm, 2003)
Soundtrack by Bill Frisell
Working from the same deteriorating print of James Young's The Bells (1926) that was the source for Light is Calling, The Mesmerist
relies more on the original's narrative, the story of an amusement park
Caligari-like mesmerist, played by a young Boris Karloff, who has the
power to hypnotize people and make them reveal things about their past.
In the crowd is Lionel Barrymore, a hotel proprietor with a dark secret.
Gotham (18 min, DVD, 2004)
Soundtrack by Michael Gordon
"New York continually rebuilds itself, reinventing and re-imagining
itself, building on top of itself, layering over the past, declaring
entire eras over and ushering in newly minted ones." -Bill Morrison
Running time: 85 mins