Rooftop Cinema: The Village Detective: A Song Cycle at Madison Museum Of Contemporary Art

Excerpt from Maxwell Courtright‘s review: As any nonfiction filmmaker who’s working with celluloid material must acknowledge, distinctions between truth and fiction are fraught in the Russian film archive. The Village Detective: A Song Cycle director Bill Morrison notes how staged footage from the third anniversary of 1917’s October Revolution is sometimes treated as footage of the original event; earlier, Morrison details how the 1917 American film about the death of Rasputin, The Fall Of The Romanoffs, co-starred and was guided by Rasputin’s real-life rival Iliodor. This may give a clue as to why Morrison focuses even more than usual on the imperfections of this source material (the original, recovered 1969 film The Village Detective), with several stretches of his film almost Brakhage-like in their splashes of rusty waves that obscure all identifiable figures for minutes on end. This is unvarnished, a more true” presentation of a film that Morrison belatedly acknowledges exists in other, cleaner formats; history sits inescapably on the image’s surface.