Watch Decasia For Free

Redundant and unnecessary.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

By 'The Accidental Postmodernist' I assume Mr. Hite is referring to himself :P This is a dreamscape of corroded images pulled from decomposing b & w nitrate film stock, set to a Bang On a Can soundtrack that's half Eno and half Steve Reich (both of whom BOAC have covered). At certain moments the two elements collude in blissful, Norman McLaren like serendipity. I'm not on top of the meanings - the main editing trick I noticed was a series of pictures of wheels; the whirling dervish inserted beginning-middle-end is a pretty lazy structure; and I'm not always sure if the Orientalism is being recontextualized or amplified. This could be a hack getting lucky for all I know. But he is very lucky. I am a sucker for the textures that age has unleashed on this 67 minutes of images. The most legendary shot - which turns out to have been the justification for the whole film - is an extended image of a boxer throwing blows from screen left at a giant pulsating blob of mildew midscreen. It's like Cronenberg if the body that was disintegrating were the film itself.

This movie is a found-footage montage of archival imagery that has rotted and degraded over time. A 55 piece orchestra plays with detuned and broken instruments in order to increase the feeling of perpetual decay. This film works in cycles, with lots of spinning objects, circular editing, and focus on the film footage in its reel form itself. Made in 2001 (?), I believe this is a comment on the impending death of film.It's also really visceral. In some shots it almost seems as if we're watching a specter world. This helps create the unnerving realization that when we watch movies, we tend to watching people who are already dead but don't know it yet, who move along their tracks and paths within the frame despite the fact that they've been buried long ago. There's another shot with a boxer, but we can't see what he's fighting because the decay has taken over the right hand frame. It literally looks as if he's fighting the decay itself (and almost winning) until it explodes across the frame and engulfs everything.It's a really good art film for anyone interested in more experimental approaches, and I'd recommend finding it on DVD.--PolarisDiB

This film is a bunch of random pieces of old, deteriorating, film being played with music. Doesn't sound too interesting - and it isn't. According to the interview section on the DVD, Morrison explains that this film is some sort of symbolic expression of the decay that all life goes through. While this sounds like a nice analogy, the film doesn't really convey anything deep or philosophical. Just watching a bunch of old damaged film doesn't really end up conveying much of anything - all we get is to watch old film! The visual effect is sort of cool for about ten minutes, then its just boring. Its all black and white and just seems monotonous. Its like I get the point about decay in the first five minutes. The music in this film is excellent however, is you like abstract and dark ambiance music. In this case, the film isn't worth much but the soundtrack is great!

I was unlucky enough to catch this film at the Boston Independent Film Festival. Upon reading the description of the movie, I was intrigued as I have always had a passionate love and fascination with old photography and films. The notion of seeing a collection of old decaying films artfully woven together sounded wonderful on paper, the actual film however leaves MUCH to be desired.The film's "score" (if it can even be called a score) is a painful melange of long drawn out sharps and flats that are akin to having a gremlin in one's head scratching a blackboard with their claws.This seemingly neverending barrage of ambient noise is the number one thing that is wrong with this film. I found myself squeezing my hands to my ears in the fashion of the "Hear no Evil" monkey and wishing that the theatre speakers would just give out.The film would have improved by 150% if the "music" had been exchanged for absolute silence, or the whir of a film projector. Aside from being beastly torturous to the ears, the score also had the unfortunate affect of changing the way you perceived what you were seeing on the screen. Because of the dreadful hopeless sound of the "music" it influenced your perception of the film dramatically and made you see all of the hopelessness in the film's subject matter.Some of the imagery used in the film was quite beautiful, the shapes and patterns created by the decaying celluloid could have been displayed separately as works of natural art on their own.There were a few noteworthy film sequences, a boxer who appears to be fighting against a pulsing column of nothingness, patrons at an amusement park who appear to be jetting out of the wavering nothingness of a black hole in roller coaster cars, a solarized man and woman going out for a stroll. However, it was the segments themselves that brought the small bit of beauty that there was to the film, there was nothing that the director did which in any way enhanced or did justice to the visuals that he collected.All in all this film seemed to me to be a selfish piece of art wherein the artist forcefully inflicts his own interpretation of his piece onto the entire audience and doesn't leave them any freedom to make their own judgments. The music told you how you were supposed to feel about the decaying films and the disintegrating characters shown in them. "Despair in the shortness of life and in the fact that death and decay is an unavoidable inevitability! Despair at the frailty of our existence!" The director got that message across within the first twenty minutes of the film, the rest could have been edited extensively and we all would have left the theatre much happier. The phrase beating a dead horse comes to mind, after twenty minutes of disintegrating celluloid and ambient noise, 50 more minutes of the same thing isn't going to do much good.And interesting side note, after the film was finished, not a single member of the audience applauded, so I imagine that I was not the only viewer who felt unimpressed by Decasia. Unless you are a rabid historical film buff with a taste for insanity-inducing musical scores, philosophizing on the futility of life and endlessly long and repetitive imagery, skip this film.