The Films of Bill Morrison: Aesthetics of the Archive

Avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison has been making films that combine archival footage and contemporary music for decades, and he has recently begun to receive substantial recognition: he was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and his 2002 film Decasia was selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. This is the first book-length study of Morrison’s work, covering the whole of his career. It gathers specialists throughout film studies to explore Morrison’s aesthetics of the archive-his creative play with archival footage and his focus on the materiality of the medium of film.

Bernd Herzogenrath is professor of American Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main. Publications include: The Films of Bill Morrison (AUP 2017), Practical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury 2020), and Concepts (Bloomsbury 2022). He is (with Patricia Pisters) the main-editor of the series thinking