The Vanguard Tapes
by Yuye Shi (NYU Cinema Studies)
What are movies? They recreate a subjective experience of sight and sound. So, when we are in the theater they are experiences or stories that we share. And then when they are all reeled up and put back into a can, they are physical representations of those experiences and memories. For better or worse, they are the best we have come to a model of a memory. . . .
— Bill Morrison (2019)
A filmmaker and artist based in New York, Bill Morrison has devoted a significant part of his creative career to working with archival films and film archives. He gathers footage in varying states – decomposed, pristine, fragmentary – and transforms it into new work that creatively prompt audience contemplation. Now he also turns to video.
In his latest work, Incident (2023), Morrison confronts the topic of police accountability using surveillance video and police cameras, presenting different perspectives on a police shooting case. Scott MacDonald calls it “a breakthrough that offers the possibility of a new form of archival cine-education about aspects of American culture that have been “lost” until recently, buried within official public archives.”
Here’s the trailer.
Morrison’s commitment to preservation is evident in his meticulous techniques. His early-career approach included rephotographing sequences frame by frame using an optical printer, which preserves and revitalizes early cinema artifacts. Collaborating with institutions like the Library of Congress and the University of South Carolina, he works with deteriorating nitrate prints. When archives cannot scan these sticky materials, Morrison turns to Colorlab to salvage prints that might otherwise be lost. Notably, Morrison refrains from manipulating images, opting instead to replicate them as encountered, indicating a deliberate effort to safeguard film heritage.
At the inaugural Orphan Film Symposium in 1999, Morrison presented his short The Film of Her (1996). (Now streaming here.) Its fictionalized historical narrative, thematic montage of clips, and exploration of early cinema contributed to discussions among film archivists, scholars, and artists, leading to what soon became called an orphan film movement (Streible 2017).
Since that time, Morrison has sustained his connection to the Orphan Film Symposium. For 2024, Morrison showcases his new video work-in-progress, The Vanguard Tapes – excerpts. In 1995, Morrison was a dishwasher at the Village Vanguard, the legendary jazz club in New York City’s Greenwich Village since 1935. He began carrying a Hi8 video camera to his workplace, seeking permission from musicians to document their interactions in the kitchen during breaks. They included Cecil Taylor, Lou Donaldson, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Harold Mabern, Jamil Nasser, and others. According to Morrison, saxophonist George Coleman emerged as an especially open subject. He allowed Morrison to record the lively conversations among himself, his friends, and bandmates, drawing connections between these kitchen dialogues and their on-stage performance.
These distinctive tapes now stand as orphans, residing exclusively in the now-defunct Hi8 videotape format within Morrison’s collection. Aligning with the symposium’s theme of Work and Play, this footage documents artists engaged in both their professional roles on stage and their informal interactions in the kitchen, vividly portraying the people and scenes of Village Vanguard from the last century.
Sources:
• David Lipson, “An Interview with Documentary Filmmaker Bill Morrison.” InMedia 7.2 (2019).
• Scott MacDonald, “How Bill Morrison’s ‘Incident’ Accesses Police Body Cams to Give Voice to a Crime.” The Edge, 4 May 2023.
• Dan Streible, “The Film of Her: The Cine-Poet Laureate of Orphan Films,” in The Films of Bill Morrison, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Amsterdam University Press, 2017).
• The website billmorrisonfilm.com has extensive documentation.
Update:
See also “Final Draft: Bill Morrison on Film,” IU Cinema channel, Nov. 25, 2014, 9 min. Interview recorded at Indiana University Cinema, Bloomington. Morrison debuted All Vows and presented work with the cellist Maya Beiser. Orphans Midwest: Materiality and the Moving Image, IU Bloomington, Sep. 26-28, 2013, co-organized with NYU.