Beyond Zero: 1914-1918

A response in music and film to the conflict that launched a century of war, and a celebration of the power of art to keep us sane and offer us comfort. Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 brings together three of the world's most pioneering artists: the Kronos Quartet, known for decades for their trailblazing performances and collaborations; acclaimed Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov; and filmmaker Bill Morrison, respected for his work with rare and even partially destroyed archive images.

Photo Op

This is an excerpt from the 60-minute film commissioned for Conrad Cummings's opera of the same title, which was produced by Ridge Theater and staged at La Mama, NYC, in June, 1992.

The Village Detective: A Song Cycle

Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Iceland, July 9, 2016. The surprising discovery of a canister —containing four reels of The Village Detective (Деревенский детектив), a 1969 Soviet film—, caught in the nets of an Icelandic trawler, is the first step in a fascinating journey through the artistic life of film and stage actor Mikhail Ivanovich Zharov (1899-1981), icon and star of an entire era of Russian cinema.

Dawson City: Frozen Time

The true history of a collection of some 500 films dating from 1910s to 1920s, which were lost for over 50 years until being discovered buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool deep in the Yukon Territory, in Dawson City, located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

Rite of Spring

Black-and-white film projections by Bill Morrison, using archival footage of frigid Arctic scenes.

The Letter

Using the discarded, deteriorating remnants from seven silent film titles, filmmaker Bill Morrison braids a story of intertwining love triangles that pivots between the accounts of two women.

Re: Awakenings

Original Super 8 footage shot by Dr. Oliver Sacks of his patients at Beth Abraham Hospital, Bronx, NY, who were administered the drug L-Dopa in the summer of 1969 and “awakened” after decades of inactivity is featured in this cine-poem that combines archival footage with a score for solo saxophone composed by Philip Glass.

Little Orphant Annie

Little Orphant Annie is a re-edit of a silent film of the same title from 1918, directed by Colin Campbell. Two reels from an original nitrate print were scanned and re-edited to make the new film, which follows the structure of the poem written by James Whitcomb Riley in 1885. Riley is heard reciting his poem in a recording made in 1912. The poem is also heard read by Kelli Shay Hix in 2016, who additionally wrote and performs the song, “The Swimmer.”

Outerborough

In 1899, a photographer at American Mutoscope & Biograph mounted his camera on the front of a trolley traveling over the Brooklyn Bridge. The three 90-foot rolls he created were edited together to complete the journey from Manhattan to Brooklyn, entitled Across the Brooklyn Bridge. As a commission by the Museum of Modern Art for the re-opening of their facility, American avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison took this remarkable footage and recombined it with itself to form a new split-screen extrapolation.

let me come in

Bill Morrison’s experimental short features decayed film reels from the lost, German silent film Pawns of Passion (1928).

Her Violet Kiss

A woman attends a party where she is observed by and finally meets a mysterious guest.

The Unchanging Sea

The film The Unchanging Sea (2018) was inspired by the discovery of a decaying print of DW Griffith's The Unchanging Sea (1910) in the nitrate vaults of the Library of Congress. Taking this ancient title as its point of departure, a new narrative was re-assembled from a variety of similarly ancient films about going off to, and returning from, the Sea. The characters in these old films appear to be emerging from the roiling oceans of Time, having floated like messages in bottles for over one hundred years, and now having washed up on our sho...

Spark of Being

Spark of Being, a close adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein, explores the thematic interchangeability of three of the novel’s characters: the Captain, the Doctor, and the Creature. Spark of Being, which, as with all of Morrison's films, is dialogue-free, features Frank Hurley's original footage of Ernest Shackleton’s fated Antarctic expedition, along with a range of footage from other sources.