U.S. filmmaker Bill Morrison / Courtesy of Gene Bird for the Walker Art Center

U.S. filmmaker Bill Morrison is coming to Korea for a series of appearances at film festivals and film events in Busan, Jeonju and Seoul.

His works will be featured in the Prism section at the Busan International Short Film Festival (BISFF), and he will screen his 2023 film "Incident" at the Jeonju International Film Festival.

But first, 15 of his long and short films will be screening in Seoul as part of the FrameWorks monthly experimental film series.

The five-day retrospective on his body of work begins on Wednesday at Seoul Art Cinema in central Seoul's historic Jeong-dong neighborhood. After another short program, he will screen "Dawson City Frozen Time" (2016), which gathers a treasure trove of found footage that had been discovered in Dawson City, a remote city of Canada's northern territory of Yukon. The film is based on 530 film reels, some dating back to the Klondike gold rush of 1899, that were discovered during demolition of a building in the city in 1978.

"From this decaying footage, Bill Morrison weaves a fantastic history of cinema and the gold rush," Pip Chodorov, one of the organizers of FrameWorks, told The Korea Times.

First Avenue in Dawson City, 1898 / Photo by Ernest F. Keir, courtesy of Vancouver Public Library

Morrison will also be on hand on Wednesday to have a conversation with the audience after his film, which is 121 minutes long and begins at 6:30 p.m.

"My films run a wide gamut from associative sound and image works to rather dense documentary essay," Morrison told The Korea Times shortly before departing for Korea on Sunday NYC time. "So an audience member's impression of one program may or may not match their impression the next night. But in general they adhere to the notion that film, and filmmaking, are cultural signifiers that we leave in our wake, and that they may be re-collected and re-assembled to tell stories about us. I hope audience members have a renewed appreciation for the vastness of human thought and creative output over the past 130 years."

Morrison, who is best known for his found footage films, was invited to Korea this year to participate in BISFF, after he couldn't accept an invitation last year due to a prior commitment with a film festival in Switzerland. But this time, he not only took the BISFF organizers up on their offer to screen his films and sit on the festival jury, but also had one of his films selected for the Jeonju International Film Festival in early May.

"So it all fell into place," Chodorov said. "I hope many people come out to discover Bill's experimental films and especially 'Dawson City Frozen Time.' It is one of those rare works that speak to aficionados of underground movies but also to those who like documentaries as well as great stories."

The special exhibition will also feature his well-known 2002 film "Decasia," which screens on Thursday and Sunday. And on Saturday, the second-last day of the run, film critic Kwak Young-bin will give a talk.

Morrison got his start in visual art and animation, but his fascination with the corrosion and decomposition of old nitrate film led him down the path of experimental filmmaking. He relies on archival footage to reveal the formative and poetic characteristics of images contained in deteriorated film.

Morrisson came to Korea once before, for the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival in 2013. "I was only there for a couple of days so it was hard to form much of an impression about the country as a whole," he said. "As I recall, the area where the festival was held seemed like it has only recently been developed."

At Jeonju, he'll be screening his most recent film, 2023's "Incident," which depicts a police shooting of a citizen in Chicago in 2018. The incident is retold through surveillance and body cam footage.

A still from Bill Morrison's 2023 film "Incident" / Courtesy of Bill Morrison

"Found footage means different things to different people. For me, I am following in a tradition of re-purposing lost or forgotten archival footage. In the right hands, that can be a really exciting and sometimes radical practice," Morrison said.

He admitted that some people use others' footage indiscriminately, without regard to ownership, although he said that he avoids using any films that are still copyrighted.

"The footage I use has usually reached the public domain, meaning that I am allowed to reuse it any way I choose," he said. "I am interested in how and why a film is lost or forgotten or reaches a stage of obsolescence."

Found film / Courtesy of Kathy Jones Gates

Tickets cost between 5,000 won and 8,000 won. Visit fb.com/cinemathequeseoul for more information or cinematheque.seoul.kr for screening times.