Decasia: The State of Decay (2002)
There is a genuinely haunting idea at the centre of Decasia: The State of Decay, and I want to be fair to it before I explain why the film itself was one of the most punishing viewing experiences I have put myself through in recent memory.
Bill Morrison builds the whole thing from archival footage, old nitrate stock in the advanced stages of decomposition. The images bubble and warp and melt and dissolve, not through any digital trickery but because the film itself is physically dying. A camel blurs into a boiling void. A parachutist drops through a sky eaten by chemical rot. Nuns walk the edge of what looks like another planet entirely. Set against a dissonant symphonic score, the whole thing is framed as a meditation on mortality, on humanity's compulsive and doomed drive to preserve itself against time. The notion that these corroding pictures are themselves a monument to everything cinema has already lost, thousands of titles crumbled to nothing through neglect and the passage of decades, is quietly, genuinely moving. I found myself mourning those lost films. I really did.
But mourning an idea and surviving a film are two very different things, and Decasia asks you to sit with seventy minutes of writhing, degraded imagery while a score that its admirers would call symphonic and which my ears registered as closer to an hour of formless, grating noise plays over the top of it. The score doesn't ease the passage of those seventy minutes. It makes them harder. I understood, intellectually, what every corroded frame was reaching for. That understanding did almost nothing to stop me quietly counting the minutes until the credits.
I have sat through experimental work that challenged me and rewarded the patience. At Sea is a film that asks a lot of the viewer and gives something genuinely worthwhile back. Decasia asked a lot and left me feeling like I had been through something rather than experienced it. There is a difference, and it matters.
The tragedy, the real one, is that the subject deserves better than this. The slow, irreversible loss of so much of our film heritage is something worth grieving over, and there are moments here, brief ones, where a decaying image achieves something that feels close to genuine, melancholy beauty. A face surfacing through chemical staining like a ghost refusing to fully disappear. A landscape warped beyond recognition into something almost abstract and lovely. Those moments exist. They are real.
They are also buried under an hour of endurance that, for me, crossed the line from challenging into simply unpleasant. I am not going to pretend that experimental documentary has no place in my watchlist, because it absolutely does, and I respect the ambition here enormously. Morrison is doing something wilfully difficult and doing it with total conviction. But conviction and watchability are not the same thing, and conviction alone is not enough to make seventy minutes of this pass with anything approaching ease.
One star, and I want to be clear about what that star is for. It is for the idea. The mournful, beautiful, genuinely poignant idea of a film about dying film, and the real grief buried inside it for all the cinema history we have already lost forever. The film itself gave me almost nothing to hold on to. As a concept, it moves me. As an experience, it was an ordeal I have no intention of repeating.
Rating: ★ | Year: 2002 | Watched: 2026-08-31
