Movie magic morrison il
“Derevenskiy detektiv” stars Soviet actor Mikhail Zharov as a vaguely Columbo-esque small-town police officer tasked with helping a musician locate his stolen accordion. Still, the rust-stained and badly distorted print holds interest for Morrison, who sees beauty in the damage, and a certain poetry in its banality. There’s no good reason to restore this copy of “Derevenskiy detektiv” -fool’s gold compared with the mother lode of “Dawson City” - considering people can easily watch the film in its undegraded entirety on YouTube. One of the perverse aspects of film preservation is that so many valuable artifacts are allowed to perish, while considerable effort and expense are spent salvaging those fragments that fall into the right hands. The recovered film print is hardly worthless, even if, I suspect, Morrison plays the scenes of an Icelandic archivist’s care in unspooling it for a kind of tongue-in-cheek absurdity. While the film may seem exotic enough to Western eyes, Russian audiences surely recognize it as a relatively uninteresting find, which could potentially spoil the effect, the way Turkish speakers can spot the twist in “The Usual Suspects” by the clues contained in Keyser Soze’s name. What Morrison doesn’t reveal until rather late - but which seems fairly obvious from the outset - is that the discovery isn’t especially precious: a partial copy of the popular Soviet film “Derevenskiy detektiv” from 1969, which had somehow fallen overboard and settled on the bottom of the sea.
“Dawson City” proved so thrilling in part because there was clearly treasure amid the detritus, and Morrison put in the effort to sift through and contextualize what had been found.īut his “Village Detective” is a different animal.
Whereas most film conservationists aspire to restoring lost and degraded films to their original glory, Morrison sees beauty in the decay - the underlying premise of his mesmerizing avant-garde super-cut “Decasia,” released in 2002, and a key attraction of his latest collage feature, “ The Village Detective: A Song Cycle,” which spends long minutes projecting what remains of four reels of celluloid recovered from the Atlantic by an Icelandic fishing trawler.Ī decade after “Decasia,” Morrison reached even wider recognition with “Dawson City: Frozen Time,” wherein a stockpile of century-old 35mm prints unearthed in northern Canada - an end-of-the-line Klondike gold rush outpost that had become a de facto graveyard for traveling films - served as the raw material for a rumination on a lost era, spotlighting both the fortune seekers who sought the frontier and the remarkable discovery of these ephemeral entertainments that had miraculously outlived them. Bill Morrison makes movies out of fragments of other movies, giving new life to ghostly scraps of an earlier time.