The Village Detective: a song cycle

(Bill Morrison, US 2021, 81 min., DCP)

During the summer of 2016, a fishing boat off the shores of Iceland made a most curious catch: four reels of 35mm film preserved at the bottom of the ocean near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where hydrogen sulfide, a volcanic gas, tends to preserve whatever is around it. Director Bill Morrison (Decasia, Dawson City: Frozen Time) turns his fascination with film decomposition to these artifacts, crafting both an elegy to the film reels themselves and a biography of Mikhail Zharov, the Russian star of the film. Alternating a transfer of the film reels with archival footage and new interviews (including our own Senior Curator Peter Bagrov), Morrison reconstructs a capsule of the film’s plot while offering another meditation on cinema’s past.