ABSTRACT

Agnès Villette was invited by Bill Morrison to follow him on his search for archives for future projects. For her, it was fascinating to observe Morrison work: to witness how an evanescent frame caught while viewing archives could, years later, become part of a whole feature film, or how a line in an article could arrest Morrison's imagination so much that he would track the private collector to meet him in London. Concentrated and immersed, Villette could witness how one frame totally absorbed Bill Morrison and how, in a fraction of second, he knew exactly how that lonely child from an earlier century would reenact, through the power of cinema, the same desolation and intensity, as at the moment it was shot.

KEYWORDS

photo essay, Russian Romanov, London, Moscow archive