Bill Morrison Shorts Program

Director: Bill Morrison

2007 / 90min / DCP

Bringing together works produced over a span of more than 15 years, this program sheds light on a lesser-known aspect of Morrison’s practice, his mastery of short-form filmmaking. Featuring The Letter, a story of overlapping love triangles told through the accounts of two women, made with the deteriorating remnants of silent film intertitles; Who by Water, a rumination on the concept of preordination made with silent archival footage of anonymous ship passengers; The Ring, a lockdown-produced film that brings together the music of Yo La Tengo and scenes from Miloš Forman’s 1965 classic of Czechoslovak cinema Loves of a Blonde; Buried News, which employs newsreel films from the early years of the previous century to ruminate on the media’s role in manipulating narratives around race in America then and today; and Incident, a cinematic inquest that uses footage from surveillance, dashboard, and body-mounted camera to reconstruct a 2018 police shooting in Chicago.

Introduction and Q&A with filmmaker Bill Morrison on Saturday, June 15th