Ghost Trip (2001) dir. Bill Morrison

The notion of a trip, or a limbo state, is given a more dramatic/narrative shape in Morrison’s only fully representational film, Ghost Trip (2000), which uses a high contrast black and white stock with an extreme wide angle lens, slow motion cinematography, and image looping, to render the sense of a slow descent into another dimension. The film opens with a low angle shot of an old black man in a cemetery singing an ode to someone who comes back from the dead (“the man has arose…”), while planting a variety of flowers and vegetation. The film follows a hearse driver as he picks up a corpse in New Orleans and ends up back at the same cemetery (circular structure). Morrison referred to this film as reflecting an “existential limbo,” which can apply to many of his works, including The Death Train (1993).