Decasia: a symphony in decay

December 31, 2002 1:38 PM

Decasia: A symphony in decay. Via a NYT article, via /. The decasia site is Flash, the NYT article is words. The images are arresting.
posted by dchase (7 comments total)

I saw this film this past March at a film festival. While the images were varied and interesting, the accompanying music wasn't. As I recall, it was a fairly short loop that replayed endlessly; no variation to match the variation in the images. It made for the longest 70 (or so) minutes in my life.

The filmmaker was at that screening. He was very cool and devoid of pretense. Almost forgave him for his lack of work on the accompanying music.
posted by xena at 1:59 PM on December 31, 2002

Sorry to hear about the music, xena. The images sound (I mean look) right up my alley.
posted by kozad at 4:31 PM on December 31, 2002

Okay, that was depressing....
posted by rushmc at 4:45 PM on December 31, 2002

That would be cool if I were fucked up.

Alas.
posted by xmutex at 5:00 PM on December 31, 2002

Almost forgave him for his lack of work on the accompanying music

I read about this and viewed this having only the concept of the music in my mind (there's no audio, even with the video snippet, anywhere that I could find on the site). I found the images amazing and just figured the music would be too. Interesting how all aspects of a piece need to be strong if the piece itself is to be strong. And thanks, Matt, for fixing the NYT link.
posted by dchase at 5:21 PM on December 31, 2002

Even more interesting, the alt.movies.silent newsgroup regulars were up in arms over the NY Times Magazine article linked above, which contained lots of inaccuracies about film preservation. And another poster pointed out that this concept has been done before.
posted by hyperizer at 11:21 PM on December 31, 2002

Thanks for that link to Lyrical Nitrate, hyperizer. I *thought* I'd heard of this before, and that's most likely what I was thinking of.

Shame to hear about the crummy music on Decasia. He should have gotten the marvelous Alloy Orchestra to do it....they do GREAT soundtracks for silent films.
posted by Vidiot at 5:08 AM on January 1, 2003