Popular reviews

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  Review by Jesse Snoddon ★★★

  "The quietude of eternity"

  Bill Morrison investigates a film canister found on the bottom of the ocean in the hopes that he has found a rare lost treasure. When it turns out to be a fairly common comedy from the Soviet Union, he dives into a discussion of the career of the barely discussed lead actor and the place of the series the film is a part of in the history of cinema. 

  Morrison brings a ghostly gravitas to a commonplace film by highlighting the imperfections of the damaged celluloid and how its flaws make it a unique piece of art on its own. There's something romantic about the thought of objects lost in one time period that are brought…

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  Review by Hutch ★★★½

  Jóhann Jóhannsson, the Icelandic composer, first alerted Bill Morrison to an unusual catch brought to the surface in the nets of a lobster trawler off the Icelandic coast. Four reels of an old Soviet film semi-preserved in a metal canister had been lying on the ocean’s floor for decades only to be liberated along with tonnes of mud, fish and crustaceans. The film turned out to be part of a 1969 film titled The Village Detective, featuring the popular actor Ivanovich Zharov. Morrison did what Morrison does and set about using this improbable discovery as the jumping off point for an imaginative investigation into the career of Zharov and through him an oblique retelling of the history of Soviet cinema,…

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  Review by Jim Mearns ★★★★

  Bill Morrison is an absolute treasure, film archaeologist and director, he does amazing work. This is equally as brilliant yet there is a disconnect here, a lack of personal investment that I couldn't get over. The footage found at the bottom on the ocean is fascinating in what it is but also by the fact it managed to survive. However it is lacking the social history element to truly captivate me. It's a hypocrisy that one of humanity's greatest art forms was discovered by ways of humanity's worse nature via way of a fishing trawler, is such death and destruction really worthy of discovering these lost artefacts? Either way Bill Morrison still manages to surprise and amaze me with his deconstructive window into the past.

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  Review by Eloise ★★½ 2

  Good amount of cats. Needs more Marxism.

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  Review by NotASexyVamp ★★★½

  Dawson City: Frozen Time remains one of my favourite films so had very high hopes for this one. It's another beautiful piece of archival exploration from Bill Morrison, but not as perfect as Dawson City. The hypnotic texture of damaged film stock is visceral, making film more tactile somehow. The physicality of film. But more than that, Morrison's work demonstrates it's persistence. Broken, beaten, scratched yet still survives. Strangely hopeful.

  Much of the background stuff is a little uninteresting, the story of Soviet cinema too wide reaching so it feels underdeveloped. And some of the sequences from the broken film, as hypnotic as they are, do go on a bit. Worth it all for the climactic moment showcasing a sequence…

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  Review by Zach Nabors ★★

  I’ve watched Morrison’s films for years and this is certainly a low point. Everything top to bottom seems uninspired and forced. Structurally it is an unfocused mess choosing the most uninteresting manners in which to tell the history of Zharov and philosophize about the history of film and its natural frailty. Even mixes in standard talking heads. Ones of the worst variety: boring. Little insight into Soviet cinema, culture, politics or history. Lacks formal imagination as well as contextualization of the subjects it seems to want to examine.

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  Review by Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸 ★★★½

  "...Morrison shapes his own movie as a mystery, holding back several crucial facts regarding the nature of Derevensky Detectiv, least of all, how it came to be resting on the bottom of the ocean on the Mid Atlantic Ridge. Taking its discovery as a jumping off point, Morrison weaves a tale not only of the film, but also its star and Soviet cinema itself..."

  Read my review at The Geek Show

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  Review by Paul Anthony Nelson ★★½ 2

  MIFF 69 Film #3

  Sparked by a random deep sea discovery of abandoned film cans, Morrison’s essayist film reflects on the continually evolving dialogue between life, art and culture, through the prism of the film’s star, Mikhail Zharov, and the various Soviet political upheavals and film movements he lived through. The smattering of interesting information here — highlights of Zharov’s life, his own reflections, his career trajectory, the shifting Soviet regimes and even a peek behind the scenes of film restoration — are almost entirely delivered via text on screen between extended clips from the film, which plays with waterlogged damage (as Morrison likes it) but inexplicably slowed down, all ceaselessly scored to a melancholy accordion score that will sorely test…

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  Review by SwedishLlama ★★★½

  There’s something so inexplicably beautiful about the look of decaying film. Bill Morrison understands that better than anybody.

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  Review by ms. rei ayanami ★★★½

  In The Village Detective: A Song Cycle, Bill Morrison, who directed one of my favorite films of the 2010s with Dawson City: Frozen Time, takes another look at the discovery of lost films, this time of the Soviet variety. The doc contains lots of interesting and rewarding information, yet lacks the careful structuring of its predecessor. There is perhaps an overuse of clips from Soviet classics, whereas I would have preferred more contextual information.

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  Review by ArthouseSchmarthouse ★★

  4
  Blu Ray (Second Run)

  Loved DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME. Did not have a good time with this. Like DAWSON CITY, the doc uses the discovery of long-thought-lost filmreel as a way into subjects on a micro and then a macro level. In this case, the story of a film restoration becomes the career of one obscure (in the West) actor becomes the tale of Soviet cinema becomes the history of the Soviet Union itself. All worthy stuff, in theory. But the film feels unfocused and scattershot, mostly because, unlike DAWSON CITY, the footage itself-- which relates to one specific movie-- is not especially enlightening in and of itself, failing to connect particularly gracefully with the wider points about the history of the USSR. Plus, Morrison insists on showing us long (and I mean long) clips from the film, which as it turns out is pretty dull. But the use of nitrate-damaged film stock was pleasingly hypnotic.

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  Review by Dmitry_Karpyuk ★★

  Вроде бы есть то, что я люблю – пленка, буквально найденная на дне моря, много отрывков из советского кино, чудесный Жаров. Но как фильм, очевидно, что-то пытающийся сказать о бренности бытия и о памяти, это не работает. Особенно "сильны" части, где показывают полуразложившуюся пленку "Деревенского детектива", а зритель может читать субтитры с репликами актеров, которых почти не разглядишь, и всё это под приятную музыку аккордеона. Лучше посмотреть док по "Культуре" про Жарова, чем такое вот.