The Vanguard Tapes
USA / 2024 / 29′ / Silent
ITALIAN PREVIEW
A series of conversations and monologues captured in the kitchen of the famous Vanguard jazz club in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1994- 95 by the director, who was working at the club at the time as a dishwasher.

Must Have Meant
USA / 2024 / 4’ / Silent
ITALIAN PREVIEW
Corabelle, an orange tabby, wanders through a snowy East Village community garden, pondering the possibility of connection. With a soundtrack by Elysian Field.

Decasia
USA / 2002 / 67’ / Silent

Decasia is an experimental feature film that combines extraordinary archival images with an original symphonic score by Bang On A Can co-founder Michael Gordon. Using nitrate-based master elements with severe emulsion deterioration, Decasia depicts man’s struggle to transcend his mortality as the very fabric of his world disintegrates before our eyes.

Editing Bill Morrison
Original Music Michael Gordon
Production Hypnotic Pictures
Producer Bill Morrison
Archives A/V Geeks (Durham, NC), Cinémathèque Suisse, George Eastman House, Museum of Modern Art Dept of Film and Media, Oddball Films (San Francisco, CA), University of South Carolina Newsfilm Library, United States of America Library of Congress

In dialogue with Rossella Catanese
author of Bill Morrison, Decasia: The State of Decay. The alchemy of ruin (Mimesis, 2023)

Bill Morrison, Decasia: The State of Decay. The alchemy of ruin constitutes issue 01 of “EX Series,” a multilingual series entirely devoted to experimental cinema. Explore the film Decasia: The State of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2002), a unique cinematic work that, through old films subject to chemical and physical deterioration, elaborates a complex metaphor about the transience of human existence and the transitory dimension of all things. An exclusive interview by Sonia Colavita with director Bill Morrison concludes the volume.

Bill Morrison
Bill Morrison has been called The distinguished poet of lost films (New York Times, Sept. 22, 2021). He makes films that reframe long-forgotten moving images. He has premiered feature-length documentary films at the New York, Sundance, Telluride and Venice film festivals. Morrison had a mid-career retrospective at MoMA in 2014. His found footage film Decasia (2002) was the first film of the 21st century to be selected for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) was named among the best films of the decade (2010) by Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair and others. In 2021 Morrison became a member of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. His most recent feature film, The Village Detective: a song cycle (2021) was screened at Telluride Film Festival and distributed by Kino Lorber. Incident (2023) presented at Visions du Réel film festival, won the award for best short film in the first edition of UnArchive Found Footage Fest.

Rossella Catanese
is a researcher at the University of Tuscia and is also an adjunct lecturer at NYU Florence. Previously, she was a research fellow at the University of Udine for the European project “ViCTOR-E (Visual Culture of Trauma, Obliteration and Reconstruction in post-war II Europe).” She has taught at the University of Rome La Sapienza and has been a research fellow at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. Her publications include, in addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, the monographs Lacune binarie. Film restoration and digital technologies (Bulzoni, 2013), Bill Morrison, Decasia: The State of Decay. The alchemy of ruin (Mimesis, 2023) and curatorships Futurist Cinema. Studies in Italian Avant-garde Film (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) and From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, with Francesca Scotto Lavina and Valentina Valente). She won the 2023 Marcel Duchamp Grant held by the Duchamp Research Center of the Staatliches Museum Schwerin.