Decasia

Year: 2002

Grade: B-

Country: USA

Director: Morrison

Review

this is the kind of film that movie snobs brag about watching (see also: “russian ark”)…and one day i’m sure i’ll drop the title to make myself look cool, but at least i’m acknowledging that upfront. the film itself is like koyaanisqatsi, only not as good, or as coherent. whereas koyaanisqatsi ends with its “message” or theme, this film is far more cryptic – leaving its meaning (if there is one) largely up to the viewer. perhaps it’s a mediation on our decaying lives or the beauty of destruction or maybe it’s just an experiment. to me, the film is the visual equivalent of someone playing with the tuning on an old radio. when you’re in the proper mood, playing with the analog tuner of a radio can be quite satisfying. you can get the radio to produce all sorts of odd noises that, in some strange way, sound kinda cool. but if you’re not the one with your hand on the control it often comes off as sort of annoying. “just find the damn station,” you might think as someone rocks the dial between stations producing nothing but noise. watching the first half hour of this 67 minute film is a lot like being that person without control of the radio dial. i struggled to make sense of it at first. the ebbs and flows of the music seemed to have no correlation to the visuals – not in terms of the amount of decay in the film or in the images that the film beared. eventually though, i resigned to film. perhaps there was some brechtian intent of the filmmaker that i am just too dull to understand, perhaps i didn’t view it properly. but i enjoyed it anyway. it does have a certain trance-like effect (not unlike “baraka” or the plastic bag in american beauty) and the music, though not as good as the philip glass brand of minimalism it was imitating, was effective.