ABSTRACT

Despite its brief running time, Bill Morrison's The Film of Her is a cabinet of curiosities packed with fleeting glimpses of silent monochromatic movies, wrapped in an elliptical narrative about an unnamed library clerk's search for unnamed footage showing an unnamed woman he has desired since seeing her on screen in his boyhood. She is an avant-gardist's MacGuffin, however, a mystery that need not be solved because the film's true purpose is to revel in the oneiric qualities of early cinema artifacts. As such, The Film of Her offers an opportunity to examine how the work of Bill Morrison has intersected with the work of film preservation professionals in the digital era.

KEYWORDS

film preservation, Library of Congress, orphan films, Paper Print Collection

In 1999, near the end of its successful run at more than 50 international film festivals, The Film of Her, which Bill Morrison premiered at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence in 1996, played to a different type of audience. Rather than screening for festival-goers, Morrison presented his short cine-poem to an admixture of film preservationists, archivists, scholars, artists, curators, collectors, technical experts, librarians, researchers, stock footage vendors, critics, students, and self-selected enthusiasts. Morrison's participation in the inaugural Orphan Film Symposium at the University of South Carolina (USC) had a fortuitous and beneficial impact on both the artist and his audience. His interaction with scores of archivists proved an entrée to vast new moving image resources that enhanced one of his signature techniques (the thematic harvesting of archival film excerpts) and accelerated another (the assemblage of beautifully decaying nitrate film fragments). Further, his presentation of The Film of Her at the 1999 symposium helped to spark interactions among archivists, scholars, and artists that led to what soon came to be called an orphan film movement. As that movement has grown, Morrison remains an active part of it, becoming an unofficial cine-poet laureate.

More particularly, and beyond the artistic realm, Morrison's continuing interaction with the Library of Congress moving image archivists in the 21st century has impacted preservation and curatorial practice. More than 20 years after The Film of Her, we now know more about the historical events behind Morrison's fictive narrative and its unnamed protagonist.