Bill Morrison (born November 17, 1965) is an American, New York–based filmmaker and artist. His films often combine rare archival material set to contemporary music, and have been screened in theaters, cinemas, museums, galleries, and concert halls around the world.
Early life and careeredit
Morrison was born in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Reed College from 1983 to 1985, and graduated with a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 1989.
He received the President's Citation from Cooper Union[1] in 2016.
Decasia (2002), his feature-length collaboration with composer Michael Gordon, was selected by the Library of Congress to its National Film Registry in 2013,[13] becoming the first film of the 21st century selected to the list. It has been hailed by J. Hoberman as "the most widely praised American avant-garde film of the fin de siècle."[14] The director Errol Morris reportedly commented while viewing Decasia that "This may be the greatest movie ever made".[15] The film was originally commissioned by the Basel Sinfonietta to be shown on three screens surrounding the audience, behind which 55 musicians performed Michael Gordon's score.
In 2014, The Great Flood, a collaboration with composer/guitarist Bill Frisell, received the Smithsonian Magazine's American Ingenuity Award for Historical Scholarship.[17]
In 2023, Morrison's film Incident (30', 2023) won the Best Short Documentary Award of 2023 from the International Documentary Association[30] and the Best Short Film Award [31] at the first edition of the UnArchive Found Footage Festival in Rome.
Morrison's collected works through 2014 were released as a 5-disc box set from Icarus Films in September 2014,[32] and a 3-disc Blu-ray box set from the British Film Institute in May 2015.[33] In 2023 Re-Voir Video released a 15-film blu-ray set of Morrison's work entitled "Footprints".[34]
Critics have commented on the historical dimensions of Morrison's works. Writing about Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) in The New York Review of Books, Deborah Eisenberg noted, "It’s chastening to witness the pliant material of history as it’s being made and at the same time what that history has come to mean and what it has brought into being."[35] And in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Seth Fein observed that The Village Detective: A Song Cycle (2021) "clarifies how time itself has been the evolving preoccupation of Morrison’s works and, consequently, their most significant contribution, not simply to the history of film but to the practice of history."[36]