Hypnotic Pictures

A collection of films that have been found, or remain, on the Ocean's floor.

The true history of a collection of some 500 films dating from 1910s to 1920s, which were lost for over 50 years until being discovered buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool deep in the Yukon Territory, in Dawson City, located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Iceland, July 9, 2016. The surprising discovery of a canister —containing four reels of The Village Detective (Деревенский детектив), a 1969 Soviet film—, caught in the nets of an Icelandic trawler, is the first step in a fascinating journey through the artistic life of film and stage actor Mikhail Ivanovich Zharov (1899-1981), icon and star of an entire era of Russian cinema.

Chicago, 2018. A man is killed by police on the street. Through a composite montage of images from surveillance and security footage as well as police body-cams, Incident recreates the event and its consequences, featuring vain justifications, altercations and attempts to avoid blame. Bill Morrison delivers a chilling political investigation in search of the truth.

In 1899, a photographer at American Mutoscope & Biograph mounted his camera on the front of a trolley traveling over the Brooklyn Bridge. The three 90-foot rolls he created were edited together to complete the journey from Manhattan to Brooklyn, entitled Across the Brooklyn Bridge. As a commission by the Museum of Modern Art for the re-opening of their facility, American avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison took this remarkable footage and recombined it with itself to form a new split-screen extrapolation.

A woman attends a party where she is observed by and finally meets a mysterious guest.

Bill Morrison’s experimental short features decayed film reels from the lost, German silent film Pawns of Passion (1928).

A meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality, constructed from decaying archival footage and set to an original symphonic score.

Frequent Kronos collaborator Bill Morrison uses rare, early-20th century news footage to uncover ways that narratives about race have been used in the U.S. to divide people and maintain power.

Made by re-editing a deteriorated nitrate print of The Bells (1926), starring Lionel Barrymore and Boris Karloff, this work shows the fragility of the film image while foreshadowing the Holocaust.

Singer-songwriter Slink Moss plays the mysterious driver of a Cadillac hearse who journeys across America to pick up and drop off a hitchhiker to his (final?) destination. The nearly-wordless film stylishly re-imagines the open road as a state of Limbo.

Using newly discovered fragments of a French film, Morrison reconstructs the film.

Drawing from Portugal’s rich heritage of shipping, trade, and exploration, “The Dockworker's Dream” takes the viewer on a journey downriver, into port, into factories, towns, and families, and out into the great unknown. Different ports of call are framed by the solitary sojourn of a dockworker, perhaps remembering his own past, or dreaming of another's. Like the hunters in his dream, the film seeks to recover ancient and seldom viewed images from the recesses of our collective memory.