Cinema Redivivus

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This essay involves an investigation into the work of contemporary moving image artist Bill Morrison, who resuscitates nineteenth-century visual technologies by engaging with cinematic remains, reconfiguring historic footage into evocative films where the spectral past emerges. To illustrate these issues, my investigation focuses on two films: Light is Calling (2004) and Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016). Whether it is footage found in archives, buried for decades in the frozen Canadian Yukon or preserved in film canisters deep in the ocean's waters, Morrison's work displays the striking image of photochemical disintegration over the decades, while simultaneously unpacking the buried histories imprinted on it. At a time when cinema has already transitioned to digital technologies, and when many film theorists have announced the "death" of historic cinema, I argue that Morrison continues to engage with cinema's photochemical legacy as it was invented in the nineteenth century. By using cinematic remains to revivify its historic materialities and conditions, Morrison, moreover, closely connects his contemporary work to many of the unique spectator and reception conditions witnessed at the birth of cinema in the late nineteenth century. Set against the faded decay of photochemical cinema, I argue, the apparition of historic cinema returns

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