Cataclysmic Cinema: Bill Morrison's The Great Flood

Director: Bill Morrison

Seldom seen on movie screens in 2014 is avant garde director Bill Morrison's The Great Flood; a mesmerizing, moving and ultimately sobering found-footage film of the 1927 Mississippi River flood. The disaster displaced a million people and visited devastation on several states.

The words avant garde might be off-putting to many movie audiences but for want of a better term, it will have to do. Morrison is the talent behind Decasia and The Miners' Hymns; films that also re-purpose images to create something hypnotic and poetic. In Decasia, Morrison used decaying archival footage in a way that made the deterioration seem beautiful. His The Miners' Hymns is footage of a British miner's strike from the 1930s' made poignantly immediate by his careful arrangement of the images. His films lack narration and talking heads, which leaves the audience free to apprehend the imagery without a scholarly intermediary to provide a point of view.

In The Great Flood, Morrison again uses archival footage to show us not just the physical toll the flood exacted from people and communities but also the tough, practical response to the disaster from those who were affected directly. Set to a bluesy, jazz and rock score by the great, offbeat jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, Morrison's film is divided into segments, which are chronological but don't strictly adhere to a chronological structure.

That so much precious footage of the disaster exists at all is mind-boggling. The images of the flood are startling: inundated houses and businesses; drifting cars, people on horseback braving the rushing waters to get somewhere or anywhere and men working tirelessly to fill sandbags and shovel dirt on levees to stay the floodwater's relentless siege. We see one couple sitting on the roof of their car as the waters rush by them until the vehicle is also carried along.

But the word flood carries many meanings, some of which Morrison cleverly addresses. One inter-title informs us that the Sears Roebuck Catalog was circulated to 75 million people at the time of the flood. The film takes leave of the flood footage to show pages of the catalog flashing quickly by, like the waters that carry trees and cars forcefully along. Like the literal flood, this was a deluge that also made a devastating impact on Americans, which made cheap goods widely available and very affordable. This economic torrent preceded another great disaster: the stock market collapse of 1929.

The juxtaposition of images also yields subtle sociopolitical commentary. In one scene we see a crowd of wealthy, privileged white people waiting to board a train to escape the disaster while other footage shows black families stranded on a levee. Though no one was spared the devastation, we see mostly blacks handling the tough physical labor. We even see blacks in prison stripes join the ad hoc labor forces. This isn't to say whites were passive observers; only that we see mostly blacks in the footage.

Another segment includes footage of politicians, like Herbert Hoover, who were on hand to witness some of the flooding.

In the segment titled Migration, we see how many blacks were forced to relocate north, which was also a cultural migration of sorts. The blues culture of the south found new digs in places like Chicago, thereby creating a kind of counter-flood.

Morrison can mostly be described as a found footage director. In his major films, very little, if any, of his own camerawork makes its way to the screen. His mastery at editing images and arranging them in meaningful, moving ways, is his forte.

The Great Flood is an exceptional film; one whose images become more revealing and powerful by Morrison's editing. Though the footage is of a natural phenomenon wreaking havoc on human habitats, it also celebrates mankind's--and America's--capacity to overcome sweeping disasters. The segment entitled Aftermath are images of the recovery; people and communities busily restoring their homes and lives.

Morrison is a thoughtful curator of images; his passion for historical found footage enables him to breath life into film that might otherwise molder in a warehouse. From disparate pictures come a coherent vision; one stirring and absorbing.