In decay, an eerie beauty

WHERE preservationists might shriek, Bill Morrison sees a strangely rapturous alternative cinema narrative. Degenerating archival film has long been a source of temporally bewitching beauty for the Chicago-born filmmaker -- perhaps best known among the art-house set for his 2002 feature-length study "Decasia" -- and Los Angeles is fortunate to have a pair of programs of his short work in local venues over the next two weeks, with Morrison present at both.

On Monday, REDCAT's "Bill Morrison's Theater of Decaying Memories" has an enchantingly carny-esque ring to it. It includes his frenetic ascent-of-man/birth-of-cinema 1992 treasure "Footprints," and the sepia bath reveries "The Mesmerist" and "Light Is Calling," where the organically globular distortions seem to add fascinating moral shadings to a 1926 Lionel Barrymore-Boris Karloff silent about murder and conscience called "The Bells." Receiving its L.A. premiere that night is his entrancing 2006 work "The Highwater Trilogy," which uses reedited newsreel footage of punishing storms, towering icebergs and flood damage -- coupled with the lapping soundscape of frequent music collaborator Michael Gordon -- to suggest nothing less than an aquatic battlefield that humans can do little about.

On March 11, Los Angeles Filmforum is presenting the other Morrison program at the Egyptian, and that includes his latest found-footage work, "Who by Water," a fascinating array of steamer passengers looking directly into the camera, who start to represent something inexorable and poignant as the images begin to splotch and deteriorate.

Incidentally, there's no overlap of films, so Morrison completists might want to mark both events on their calendar.

Feminist voices

REDCAT has also scheduled four days of films directed by women for next weekend, to coincide with the Museum of Contemporary Art's show "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution." Called "Where Did Our Love Go?" and posed as a gauge of where the '70s and '80s have led in terms of independent feminist film voices, the series features new work by experimental lionesses Chantal Akerman and Nina Menkes, a revival showing of the late Barbara Loden's 1970 verite masterpiece "Wanda," a remarkable feature debut by L.A. filmmaker Anna Biller, Emily Tang's post-Tiananmen Square tale "Conjugation" about the limits of ambition for Chinese youth, and Zeinabu irene Davis' documentary on a black female trumpeter, "Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant."