Cinema Redivivus: Bill Morrison and Early Cinema’s Spectral Return
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This essay involves an investigation into the work of contemporary moving image artist Bill Morrison, who resuscitates nineteenth-century visual technologies by engaging with cinematic remains, reconfiguring historic footage into evocative films where the spectral past emerges. To illustrate these issues, my investigation focuses on two films: Light is Calling (2004) and Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016). Whether it is footage found in archives, buried for decades in the frozen Canadian Yukon or preserved in film canisters deep in the ocean's waters, Morrison's work displays the striking image of photochemical disintegration over the decades, while simultaneously unpacking the buried histories imprinted on it. At a time when cinema has already transitioned to digital technologies, and when many film theorists have announced the "death" of historic cinema, I argue that Morrison continues to engage with cinema's photochemical legacy as it was invented in the nineteenth century. By using cinematic remains to revivify its historic materialities and conditions, Morrison, moreover, closely connects his contemporary work to many of the unique spectator and reception conditions witnessed at the birth of cinema in the late nineteenth century. Set against the faded decay of photochemical cinema, I argue, the apparition of historic cinema returns.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".