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think it's true that birth comes in manyforms, and the Film of Her is evidence to this. Each film, processing and reprocessing archived footage of turn of the century images, slowly grew into more developed, exploratory short films. Although each of the films certainly stands alone, it was very satisfying to experience the evolution of the complete body of work--each one setting up harsher juxtaposition between human emotion, and human mechanics. I suppose that, when I met Morrison, I expected to see the dream-like elements of these films made manifest in human form. Perhaps a black and white Morrison who obsesses over long-dead porn actresses while exploring the nature of his hearts mechanics. I'm glad to say that I met a more realistic man who not only elaborated on his process and path as a filmmaker, but also left me laughing over Formaldehyde jokes with the kind of humor the black and white Morrison would surely have lacked. UD: The evolution of your shorts is really interesting. It feels like thay were all leading up to the Film of Her. Bill: Exactly. It's kind of fun screening the whole program together. I started to see that the Film of Her was the composite, like the opus of what all these things [shorts] were leading to. But, intellectually, it's going back to the roots because a lot of those images are from the paper print collection. I starting using that footage out of necessity, then I got really into it. UD: Where did you get that footage? Bill: It's all from the Library of Congress, it's public domain stuff from the turn of the century. UD: So instead of buying new film you used old footage? Bill: Yeah, fifty cents a foot, you know. No, it's not that cheap but, you end up owning it. As tax payers we pay for the copyright. At any rate, [using this old footage] led me to start telling a story by using the footage over and over again to make a new story. In a way it does bolt. Like before, I used to show Footprints, and The Death Train, and The Film of Her chronologically. Now I like to show Film of Her first because it tells the story and then we can go back and see where it came from. UD: When I finished watching Film of Her, I wanted to know two things: Who is the clerk, and who is She? Bill: Okay She was a fantasy, she doesn't exist. Originally I had written sort a full feature length script using this story. I had incorporated a big romance between this on-screen character and this clerk. The stuff about him is all factual, his name is Howard. He's this forgotten player in the whole restoration process, and so he became interesting to me because he was like a roll of film that had been forgotten. In this way, the process repeated itself--in my documenting his story, it brings his story back out in the same way that him documenting these rolls would bring them out back to life. The muse part of the story is from a character I had who actually came out when nobody was around and talked to the clerk. I was in an antique shop and they had all this old pornographic footage, so I bought the box of it. There was this one with an incredibly self conscious actress with a terrible wig on who kept looking at the camera. Like looking for direction. I felt like whenever she clued in--when her eyes made contact with the lens, she jumped out of a narrative and she was a photograph. I thought she could become the muse and that tied in nicely with this whole idea of old film, forgotten film. |
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