“People crave being in the dark together”: Bill Morrison looks back on Decasia and the shift to digital memory

With its thematic focus on decay and rebirth, the programme at this year’s Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival showcased films urging a more critical, discerning use of archive material. In this atmosphere, some films reached outward with an otherworldly quality, revealing what is usually overlooked and charting new pathways for archival practice.

Chief among them, Guillaume Maupin and Pablo Guarise’s film The Magic City: Birmingham According to Sun Ra offers a vivid portrait of Birmingham, Alabama, during the little documented youth of the eponymous Afrofuturist and jazz visionary. Growing up in the 1920s in one of America’s most segregated cities, amid a mix of Jewish, Italian and Greek immigrant communities, he encountered a culturally rich yet divided landscape. Guided by the memories of Sun Ra’s great niece and great nephew, the documentary uses the city’s architecture to trace his early encounters with Birmingham’s complex history, rapid industrialisation, and his discovery of jazz – forces that shaped his perception of both the city and the universe itself.

Dear Future, Christiana Cheiranagnostaki’s exploration of archives in an era of hyper‑visuality, interrogates collections as extensions of Western colonial structures. Examining how images circulate, accumulate and lose meaning in a digital landscape of excess, the film questions the power dynamics embedded in collecting itself. By placing the Arctic World Archive in conversation with museum collections, environmental research, efforts to preserve Palestinian memories, and contemporary reports on climate destruction, the film reflects on identity and the ongoing erasure and reconstruction of memory. It also examines the enduring force of the colonial gaze. The documentary received the Film Forward Competition Golden Alexander award.

Two pioneering experimental filmmakers, Vouvoula Skoura and Bill Morrison, received this year’s Honorary Golden Alexander. The tribute featured 20 films by Skoura, including Etel Adnan: Words in Exile (2007), her intimate portrait of the poet through letters with Fawwaz Traboulsi and conversations on Beirut’s violence, feminism and lost innocence. The programme also presented six key early works by Morrison, the American filmmaker known for transforming rare and decaying archive footage into poetic films set to contemporary music. Among them were Decasia (2002), where deteriorating celluloid becomes part of the story itself; The Miners’ Hymns (2011), a lyrical tribute to the coal‑mining communities of northeast England; and Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016), a film built from hundreds of long‑lost nitrate reels unearthed beneath a former swimming pool in Canada’s Yukon territory, which Morrison uses to reconstruct the extraordinary history of the Gold Rush town.

After the screening of Decasia, I spoke with Morrison.

Georgia Korossi: Being honoured with the Golden Alexander at the festival marks a major moment in experimental film. Talk to me about its significance.

Bill Morrison: I guess it hasn’t gone to many experimental filmmakers, so it is a great achievement. It was a complete surprise to me because I always wanted to come to Greece but never had the chance. When Dimitris [Kerkinos, one of the festival’s programmers] wrote to me and said the theme of the festival this year is archives and documentary, I said, well, look, here are all my films. Some weeks later he wrote and said, ‘You’re actually going to receive the honorary Golden Alexander.’ So, I think there is a great virtue in writing back quickly.

What does this moment of recognition of your work reveal to you about how audiences, festivals and archives evolve over time?

All my screenings and the masterclass have sold out, which is incredibly meaningful to me; that wasn’t always the case, and people didn’t walk out this time, which makes me feel my work is finally accepted. It’s not radical anymore but part of a canon. I remember people streamed out a decade ago, covering their ears. When I showed Decasia at Sundance, the line of people trying to get out of the theatre pointed to the left mirroring the line of schoolchildren in the mission school scene that pointed to the right, and someone asked if I’d noticed that symmetry.

Today nobody has money to preserve film, but it’s encouraging that archives can now afford to scan their own materials, and that means you can see what’s in a box without destroying the film. That’s how we’re discovering things we thought were missing, which I find hopeful. I think there is a growing push to erase our histories, especially anything tied to opposition or rebellion, which makes archives more important than ever.

How do you see Decasia evolving over time, and what goes through your mind when you revisit it today?

It felt fortunate to create the work when I did, right at the turn of the millennium and at the shift from photochemical to digital memory. It arrived at an important moment in my career and has since become a marker of that transitional period, reflecting both the fading of 20th‑century forms and the emergence of new ways of preserving and experiencing film. It also coincided with William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops (2001) and the atmosphere of 9/11, which gave the work an added sense of looking back and closing a chapter. In that way, it captures a moment of transformation while continuing its own life into the 21st century.

Looking ahead, how do you see your work growing, and do you believe there will remain an audience for it in exhibition contexts?

Well, I still think there’s a great desire for people to meet in the theatre, maybe even more so. I don’t believe the movie theatre has become irrelevant; if anything, people now crave this gathering point, a passive place to experience something together and gauge reaction whether people are gasping, falling asleep, getting up and leaving, or laughing. It’s a way of saying, yes, we collectively feel this way, and people crave that, to be in the dark together. So, I’m not worried about cinema in that respect. My work has traditionally had a specialised audience, of course, but it started to change in recent years with the bodyworn camera footage I’m working with now, and by virtue it has become more political. We live in very strange times, and in some ways, I’m reacting to that.

Are you consciously looking toward the political moment we’re living in, and how does what’s happening in the world shape your work?

With Incident (2023), which was nominated [for an Academy Award] last year, I’m telling a very old story of police abuse in the South Side of Chicago, but what we’re seeing now with ICE and border patrol in America is that the same tactics and the same treatment are being applied beyond impoverished neighbourhoods. This is a shocking development that puts to mind of World War II, when fascism suddenly took over Europe. 

I’ve spent a career rescuing images people otherwise wouldn’t see, and now I’m trying to rescue images people don’t see because there are so many of them, because they’re restricted, and because the government tells us not to look or claims they mean something other than what they show. It’s a different type of archive, producing millions of images every day, and creating its own obsolescence simply because we don’t see them. 

Directors: Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak

Winner of four awards including the Silver Alexander and the FIPRESCI prize, Birds of War builds on Boulos’s work as a BBC employee who depends on Syrian activist Habak, living under siege in Lebanon, for news. The film reflects on the power of journalism, the strength of friendship and the stories that never make the headlines.

Director: Maciej Cuske 

Cucke’s film follows the director, his son and two of his friends, who each year set out to create a new episode of their amateur horror project. Through their dutiful consistency and shared imagination, they grow together in a series of carefree and tender experiences.

Director: Felipe Bustos Sierra

Shown in the Open Horizons section, and currently on UK release, Everybody to Kenmure Street is a powerful account of civic resistance, using crowd‑sourced footage from the eight‑hour hold‑up by a Glasgow community preventing the removal of their neighbours. It’s a timely reminder of the enduring need for activism that upholds human rights laws.

Thessaloniki Documentary Festival ran 5 to 15 March.