Called “the poet laureate of lost films” (New York Times, 9/21/2021), documentary filmmaker Bill Morrison makes films that reframe long-forgotten moving images. Unlike the historic deep dives of directors like Ken Burns or the social commentary of Frederick Wiseman, Morrison, often using found archival footage, calls attention to the materiality of film and the lost worlds recorded on it. He has premiered feature-length documentary films at the New York, Sundance, Telluride and Venice film festivals.

His 2002 film, Decasia, is constructed from deteriorating archival footage, including early 20th-century films, such as old newsreels, home movies, and documentary footage—all assembled to form a poignant meditation on mortality. Made with composer Michael Gordon, Decasia was the first film of the 21st century chosen by the Library of Congress for its National Film Registry. His subsequent films, though different in subject, used found footage as a starting point for explorations of lost communities (The Great Flood, 2012 and Dawson City: Frozen Time, 2016) and the history of Soviet film (The Village Detective: A Song Cycle, 2021).  He regularly collaborates with noted musicians such as Bill Frissell and Dave Douglas, whose scores further recontextualize the rediscovered films.

His most recent film, Incident (2023), does not mine found narrative films but builds on the ever-growing body of footage accrued via CCTV, body cameras, and other video devices. A montage of these forms of surveillance, Incident reconstructs a deadly shooting by a Chicago police officer in 2018. The movie is an investigation into how a narrative begins to take shape in the aftermath of a traumatic event. Morrison, who has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Alpert Award, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, as well as production grants from Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts and Arté - La Lucarne, recently came to The Cooper Union to discuss the film, justice, and accountability around police violence and misconduct with co-producer and journalist Jamie Kalven of the Invisible Institute and Walter Katz, director of policy at the Innocence Project.

Even though Incident does not contend with the decay of film, Morrison says it still serves as "an archival piece," as he put it an interview earlier this year. "It still talks about the archive in a different way. With decayed footage, it’s hard to get your hands on. It’s [because of] my privileged relationship with certain archives that I’ve been able to rescue it, and so in a way, it’s lost, or it certainly would be lost if I didn’t reproduce it and put it into my films, whereas this is a different kind of disappearance. These images are so common and so ubiquitous that they fall into an enormous archive that is not watched by virtue of the fact there’re just so many images like it. And if it gets rubber-stamped by the authorities as, ‘There’s nothing to look at here,’ then we tend to not go back and examine it. It’s a different kind of obsolescence, I guess you’d say, and it also obviously speaks to a decay of society, quite literally."

Incident won the Best Short Documentary Award of 2023 from the International Documentary Association and the Best Short Film Award at the first edition of the UnArchive Found Footage Festival in Rome. In December 2024, Incident was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Short Filmmaking by The Cinema Eye Honors. In January 2025, Incident was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.