A painter by training, Bill Morrison works with cinema as a sculptor models his or her material with a chisel. His films, often based on found or archive footage, exploit the textures and the poetic qualities of deteriorated film, each time bringing out unexpected plastic elements.
Morrison, alongside his personal work, has been collaborating with a theatrical group and contemporary composers since the beginning of the 1990s.
The death train was originally conceived as part of an opera by John Moran. The film is in some way a history of cinema. Archive images of pre-cinema trains and zoetrope animations are intersected with archive films from the middle of the last century and finally with a contemporary panoramic sequence. The fusion of these reworked images and the sound create a universe which is uniquely phantasmagoric and hypnotic.