In one of her essays, film historian Jane Gaines opens with a contemplation about absence in the historical archive. She’s writing about racialized spectatorship. Documents may be lost or never have existed, and the cultural experiences of both Black and White audiences attending race films in some ways defy documentation in their ephemerality. How can we create historical narratives when such chasms of absence plague our understanding?
The found footage documentary The Great Flood (Bill Morrison, 2014) tackles absence in an interesting way by highlighting the process of loss that occurs in the historical archive. The film is comprised of archival footage from the 1920s-1960s. The only “narration” are brief title cards organizing the footage into themes — “Swollen Tributaries” or “Evacuation” — and the only sound is the musical score composed by Bill Frisell. The footage is most certainly intentionally arranged, guiding us to particular associations between natural disaster and social impact, but the historical portrait is obviously not comprehensive.
The Great Flood opens with a section on mostly Black sharecroppers toiling away at their work. We see close-ups of Black hands picking cotton, bent over fields. We see men loading bailed cotton onto boats and into storage containers. The first images of the film feature the strenuous labor of a group of people who were subject to exploitative contracts with landlords that kept them in cycles of poverty. So why begin a movie on an extreme weather event with this section? Sukhdev Sandhu points out why.
In his essay contribution to The Films of Bill Morrison, Sandhu writes, “If a black person worked as a sharecropper before the flood, he or she had to provide the name of that landowner before entering a relief camp and receiving food. Black people who did not work for a white person still had to be vouched for by a white person.” Sandhu ruminates on the connections between the 1927 Mississippi River flood and Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy (the latter of which occurred while Morrison was finalizing the edit on The Great Flood). In both cases infrastructure failure and extreme weather come face-to-face with social injustice.
Themes of loss of course pervade any retelling of a weather disaster. People lose their homes, their livelihoods, their family members and friends, and along with all this their communities. In his use of archive footage, Bill Morrison famously leaves in and even selects film deterioration. As we watch shots of houses flooded to the second story or cars almost completely submerged in water, the black, watery signs of nitrate deterioration ripple across the frames.
Morrison talks about film decay as an organic process, driven by the inevitability of time. When absence appears in the image in the form of film decay, it’s a reminder that the archive itself is definitionally incomplete. There are always pieces of history we can never recover.
Film scholar Scott MacDonald talks about Bill Morrison as “…as a cine-alchemist who transforms trash into cinematic gold, or as a mad scientist who creates new beings from the shards of past cinematic ‘bodies,’ or as a magician who reverse the process of decay, bringing what looked to be dead back to momentary life.”
But when I watch Morrison’s work, I don’t see a reversal of decay and death but an embrace of ephemerality. Our experiences are transient and most of the things we create don’t even outlast our own individual lives. We attempt to document our culture, but that documentation is incomplete from the very start and will largely fall away despite our best attempts at preservation.
Morrison ends The Great Flood with images of celebration. In the aftermath of the 1927 flood, many Black southerners moved north, one event in the larger Great Migration of Black people seeking regions with more opportunity and less social oppression. While segregation and economic exploitation certainly existed in the north, migration represented hope and there were industries (like steel work) that could provide paths for upward mobility.
The final section of the film, “Watershed,” features performance footage of blues musicians like Robert Lockwood Jr. and Big Bill Broonzy. Sukhdev Sandhu notes how the 1927 Great Flood was memorialized in countless blues songs, and Morrison’s film makes an unspoken (but presumably intentional) connection to this musical history by featuring footage of Black musicians and Black people dancing in these closing sequences.
Music is of course very important for Bill Morrison’s work. Films like The Great Flood are conceived in collaboration with the composer he’s working with (in this case Bill Frisell). It feels fitting that he end this film with these images. But the music from the found footage, the music that the blues musicians were playing and that Chicago residents were dancing to, the sounds the cameraman could hear but the camera couldn’t, those are lost. We have only a visual suggestion of the sonic reality. It’s another reminder of an absence, something that existed but we can no longer capture.
Works consulted in the writing of this piece:
“The White in the Race Movie Audience,” Jane M. Gaines, in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema edited by Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert Clyde Allen
The Films of Bill Morrison: Aesthetics of the Archive, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath
“Orpheus of Nitrate: The Emergence of Bill Morrison,” interview with Bill Morrison conducted and introduced by Scott MacDonald, in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media
IU Cinema previously screened The Great Flood in September 2014 as part of the Underground Film Series.
Laura Ivins loves stop motion, home movies, imperfect films, nature hikes, and Stephen Crane’s poetry. She has a PhD from Indiana University and an MFA from Boston University. In addition to watching and writing about movies, sometimes she also makes them.